24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Alex M. Feldman, CIS University, Madrid
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- The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 25 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp xviii-xx
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Frontispiece
- Christopher McDonough, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
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- Pontius Pilate on Screen
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp xi-xii
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List of Figures
- Alex M. Feldman, CIS University, Madrid
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- The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 25 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp vii-vii
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Chapter 5 - Gender Trouble at the Cinema
- Jennifer Coates, University of Sheffield
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- Film Viewing in Postwar Japan, 1945-1968
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 21 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 120-137
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Summary
We can think of the cinema as gendered in a number of ways: as a gendered physical space, as gendered in its appeal or content and as gendered in its modes of production, to name just a few. As the preceding chapters have suggested, the question of gender arose often in my ethnographic study during interviews, questionnaire surveys and participant observation. Gender in Japanese cinema history has been explored in relation to particular film genres (Standish 2005; Zahlten 2017) and Hollywood imports (H. Kitamura 2004; Terasawa 2010; Kitamura and Sasagawa 2017), and as a factor in the crafting of star persona (Fujiki 2013). A smaller number of studies have queried the gender demographics of the Japanese cinema audience at particular historical moments (Laird 2012; Hori 2018; Fujiki 2019). This chapter takes an ethnographic approach to the examination of gender-related factors troubling Japanese cinema in the period 1945 to 1968, beginning from the expectations about cinema’s role in changing public attitudes to gender documented by the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP GHQ) during the Occupation of Japan (1945–52). During this period, audiences responded to censored cinema content, and the provision of cinema theatres, in a number of unpredictable ways that countered SCAP expectations. Applying a similar logic to the common narrative that a lack of interest in the cinema on the part of female viewers led to shrinking audience numbers after 1958, the second part of this chapter explores various gendered factors in cinema access and enjoyment in the late 1950s and 1960s that complicate this picture.
In the early years after defeat, when film was imagined as a means to change viewers’ attitudes towards Occupation-mandated social reforms, the cinema was enlisted in the push towards democracy and gender equality, at least as far as those states were imagined in 1945. Female audiences were imagined as the recipients of narratives and performances showcasing proactive women availing themselves of the new rights for female citizens included in the 1947 Constitution of Japan. Yet as the cinema audience began to decline after 1958, film critics in the popular press blamed women for turning their backs on the cinema.
Epistula 9
- Judith Hindermann, Universität Basel, Switzerland
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- Book:
- Sidonius Apollinaris' Letters, Book 2
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 246-289
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Summary
Introduction
Summary
While in Ep. 2.2 Sidonius describes his own villa, in Ep. 2.9 he describes two adjoining villas: Prusianum, owned by Tonantius Ferreolus, and Vorocingus, owned by Apollinaris. Whereas in Ep. 2.2 Sidonius concentrated on the architecture of his villa and the surrounding landscape, here he focuses on the different activities in the countryside and the question of how to spend one's otium with friends. Like Pliny, Sidonius thus integrates various villa letters in his collection to highlight the different aspects of otium in the countryside. Sidonius frames his second villa letter in response to Donidius’ question as to why it took him so long to travel to Nemausus, present-day Nîmes. The reason is that he had a pleasant stay at the estates of his uncles Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris, who outbid each other to entertain him and to make him feel at home. Not only did they have messengers ambush him on the road to lead him to their homes, but they also arranged a contest every morning to see who could feed him. Sidonius describes a series of activities that fill his day: ball games, dice games, reading books, scholarly conversations and an excursion to the well stocked library at one of the villas. These activities are interrupted only by the cook, who calls for lunch, during which entertaining and educational stories are told. Lunch is followed by a siesta and then a bath together. As Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris, unlike Sidonius, do not have functioning baths, Sidonius devotes two sections to the makeshift facilities in which he bathes with his hosts. At the end of the letter, as in his first long letter, 2.2, about his own villa, he apologises for the length of the letter and announces to Donidius that he will tell him about the dinners he enjoyed with Tonantius Ferreolus and Apollinaris at the meal he and Donidius will have together as soon as they finally meet.
Addressee
As Giannotti (2016) 37 shows, there are many parallels between Books 2 and 3, including the addressees of the letters; see the introductions to Ep. 2.1 and 2.3. The addressee of Ep. 2.9, Donidius, is also subject in Ep. 3.5.1 and mentioned as a vir spectabilis there (and as venerabilis in Ep. 6.5.1); on the honorary titles, see the commentary on Ep. 2.4.1 Vir clarissimus Proiectus….
27 - Why the (Animal) Essay Matters
- Edited by Mario Aquilina, University of Malta, Bob Cowser, Jr, Columbia University, New York, Nicole B. Wallack, St Lawrence University, New York
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- The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 448-462
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Summary
Many people, I have found, are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is ‘good for’ – a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none.
— Flannery O’ConnorWhat, If Anything, Is an Animal Essay?
Literary animals are peculiarly unstable and iridescent, unabashedly uninterested in settling down so that writers may take their pictures, let alone make their faithfully scripted portraits of them. As far as literary nonfiction is concerned, their appearances possess what we might call a biological vividness, a sort of zoological residue rendered particularly interesting by the peculiar status of literary nonfiction, being a borderline realm between fiction and faithfulness to facts.
To call a literary item an ‘animal essay’ does not need particular explanation other than to point out, of course, that it is not mere animal presence that distinguishes an essay as such. Since the essay configured itself, in its secular history, as the genre through which a writer can ‘[say] almost everything about almost anything’, the choice of talking about an animal must in a certain sense harness tightly to the essay’s constituent features in order to be so categorized. It is this sort of essay that will be explored in the first segment of this chapter.
Human–animal encounters provide a suitable terrain for the essay since they appeal to the genre’s constitutive in-betweennessand hybrid nature, loitering at the crossroads between Kunst and Wissenschaft. As a form benefiting (in theory) from critical approaches proper to both poles, the essay can uncover the substantial consonance between human and nonhuman which (in practice) could cease to be considered two dichotomic entities but enjoy instead a relationship more akin to a superimposition of ‘tectonic plates with multiple, variable, unpredictable, even seismic movements between – and within – them’.
When facing an animal, essayists are interested in a Baconian advancement of learning that, although starting from ascertainable facts, relies primarily on a particular human involvement with (and within) the natural world. Rather than the pile of quantifiable findings, they are keener on retracing the threads of their own experience during their natural raids into the foreign.
2 - Politics in Edinburgh
- David McCrone, University of Edinburgh
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- Who Runs Edinburgh?
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 25 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 24-50
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Summary
Let us begin our exploration of the question ‘who runs Edinburgh’ by focusing on formal political power. The point is not that this will provide an easy answer our question, but that it is the obvious place to begin. It is, as it were, necessary in finding an answer, but not sufficient. After all, power may be veiled; formal politics may (or may not) be a front for other, and deeper, interests. It is, however, one of the key games to explore in Norton Long's ecology of games.
We have three ways of assessing formal political power in Edinburgh: who runs the council (our main focus here); who gets elected as MSPs for city seats in the Scottish parliament; and who gets elected as MPs for Edinburgh constituencies at Westminster. At council level, which uses the single transferable vote system (STV), the Scottish National Party shares power with Labour in coalition, and is the senior partner with nineteen council seats following the 2017 election, to Labour's twelve. This is just short of an overall majority in a council of sixty-three members. In fact, the SNP took 27.1 per cent of the popular vote, about half a per cent behind the Conservatives, but the SNP were in a much better position to form a coalition, having been the junior partner with Labour in the previous 2012–17 administration (with eighteen seats to Labour's twenty). The Tories are less attractive coalition partners for any other party with the possible exception of the Liberal Democrats with whom they shared power back in the early 1980s in Edinburgh District.
What of ‘national’ politics? There are two levels to consider: Scottish and British. In terms of the Scottish parliament, elected by another system of proportional representation, the additional member system (AMS), the Nationalists are dominant, holding four of the six Edinburgh constituency seats in 2021, three in 2017, and five of the six in 2012. As far as Westminster seats are concerned, elected by traditional first-past- the- post, there are five Edinburgh seats; in the 2019 UK general election, three were held by the SNP, Edinburgh East, Edinburgh North and Leith, and Edinburgh South-West, all with five-figure majorities, one by Labour (Edinburgh South, also with a five-figure majority), and one by the Liberal Democrats, Edinburgh West, with a 3000 plus majority. In the latter two, non-SNP, seats, the Nationalists are the main challengers.
Introduction: Roman and Late Antique Palestine
- Megan Nutzman, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- Contested Cures
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 1-12
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Summary
Imagine, if you will, a woman living in Caesarea in the early fourth century ce. Caesarea is a bustling metropolis, the provincial capital. It is home to a cross section of Palestine’s inhabitants: Roman officials, Greek-speaking polytheists, Jews, Samaritans, and Christians. This woman has a young son who regularly gets sick. One day he will be shivering uncontrollably, and the next his body will be consumed with fever. Bad headaches and vomiting complicate the child’s situation. The woman’s husband is a skilled artisan, and so they have a little money to spend on physicians, but none of the prescribed remedies have had any lasting effect. He seems to get better, only to have the symptoms return with a vengeance sometime later. Our mother is desperate. She fears that her son does not have the strength to survive another episode. Only divine intervention will save him.
This woman’s son has malaria, a disease that was endemic throughout the region. Illnesses and injuries of all sorts were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world. Manual labor resulted in traumatic injuries. Poor hygiene and sanitation led to outbreaks, and contagious diseases spread rapidly. Put simply, physical infirmities of one sort or another were inescapable. People lived under continuous threat of severe bodily harm and were well acquainted with death from a young age. The same impulse that drives people to the Internet today to research symptoms and find possible treatments would have also motivated those in the ancient world to look for answers. Casual conversations at wells, along roads, and in markets would have inevitably turned to the health and well-being of one’s family. One woman might be tired because she had been up all night caring for an elderly relative, while another might question a friend as to why they had not seen a particular neighbor recently. And we can imagine that our woman from Caesarea would talk about little but her fears for her ailing son. In each of these situations, responses would have contained a mixture of sympathy and advice: Have you tried this herb? My cousin visited a holy man who cured him. Did you hear about my brother’s son who was healed after wearing an amulet? I know a poultice that will work. You should bathe in the hot springs.
Epistula 3
- Judith Hindermann, Universität Basel, Switzerland
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- Sidonius Apollinaris' Letters, Book 2
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 178-188
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Summary
Introduction
Summary
Sidonius congratulates his friend Magnus Felix, who was awarded the title of patricius, and who despite this great honour still acts as a loyal friend. In the second part of the letter, Sidonius adds three famous historical examples of men who were also promoted or otherwise successful yet still acted humbly and were therefore loved and esteemed (Quintus Fabius Maximus, Pompeius and Germanicus). Whereas the republican dictator Papirius and the emperor Tiberius were envious of the success of their rivals Quintus Fabius Maximus and Germanicus, Sidonius claims to be happy about his friend's luck.
Addressee
The addressee, Felix, is the son of Magnus, who was consul in 460. Felix was made praetorian prefect of Gaul (praefectus praetorio Galliarum) and became a patricius (the title of a person in a high office at court or in an important military function) around 469 by the emperor Anthemius. He was a friend of Sidonius from their school days (Carm. 9.330). Like Sidonius, he is a relative of the emperor Avitus; see Carm. 7.156, Anderson (1936) 130 n. 2 and the commentary on Ep. 2.2.3 nomen hoc praedio…. Felix is also the addressee of Ep. 3.4, 3.7, 4.5, 4.10 and Carm. 9, and is mentioned in Carm. 24.91. For the programmatic Carm. 9, see Condorelli (2008) 81–116. Felix is one of four addressees who receive as many as four letters (two addressees even get five letters each), and he is among the indivdiuals metioned most in Sidonius’ texts (six times); Mathisen (2020a) 41. Like Ecdicius, he is an addressee in Book 2 and Book 3; Giannotti (2016) 37. In Ep. 4.5 and 4.10.1 Sidonius complains about Felix’ long silence and attempts to resume contact with his old friend in Ep. 4.10.2. Harries (1994) 15–16, Delaplace (2014) 23–4 and Delaplace (2015) 236, 241–6 suggest that Sidonius fell out with Magnus’ family because of the Arvandus affair (see the introductions to Ep. 2.1 and 2.5) as they did not react to his pleas for help as bishop of the Auvergne later on, in 471; Mathisen (2020a) 82, Mratschek (2020a) 230, van Waarden (2020a) 22–4. Felix probably succeded Arvandus in office as praetorian prefect in 469; Stevens (1933) App. D (196–7), PLRE 2, 463–4, Harries (1994) 15, Kelly (2020a) 173–4.
List of Abbreviations
- Christopher J. Joyce
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- Amnesty and Reconciliation in Late Fifth-Century Athens
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp x-xii
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5 - In the Name of Jesus of Nazareth the Crucified: Ritual Practitioners Who Offered Cures
- Megan Nutzman, Old Dominion University, Virginia
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- Contested Cures
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 117-148
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Summary
Throughout this book, the phrase “ritual healing” has been used to refer collectively to options for seeking divine intervention to relieve physical ailments. People visited sacred sites, often associated with water, in the expectation of a dream or vision that would heal them. Others affixed amulets with powerful texts and images on their body to heal infirmities or to ward off diseases. In many situations, there would have been ceremonies or rituals that accompanied these forms of healing, such as preliminary sacrifices at local healing shrines or prayers recited when an amulet was first put on. In other cases, the process associated with these cures was informal, personal, and supplemented by no special rites. In this chapter, we turn to the words and actions believed to bring about a cure without the need for an inscribed amulet or a sacred site. In other words, the ceremonies themselves were the cures.
Some of the rituals discussed in this chapter may have been conducted by the individual in need of healing him- or herself, but more frequently we can imagine that the words and actions were performed by another. Although these rituals required someone to perform them, the identity of that person was somewhat irrelevant as long as they possessed the necessary knowledge and skills. This is in contrast to Chapter 6, which also considers people as agents of healing, but whose healers were understood to possess some sort of special quality that enabled them to work miracles. Among the healers of Chapter 5, two broad categories can be identified. The first are ritual practitioners who performed healing rites within Jewish and Christian communities. Typically, these individuals held some sort of an official role that gave them the requisite knowledge and authority. The second category of ritual practitioners are those whom we can call freelancers. While some of these freelancers may have held positions within the hierarchy of cults or religious communities, the healing rituals that they performed were not officially sanctioned. These practitioners used their specialized knowledge to work with clients in need of healing and were likely paid for their services. These two broad categories of practitioners relate to the context in which each worked and can be mapped onto the responses to their cures found among elite authors.
Bibliography
- Aina Martí-Balcells, University of Kent, Canterbury
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- Domestic Architecture, Literature and the Sexual Imaginary in Europe, 1850-1930
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 02 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 179-191
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Epistula 8
- Judith Hindermann, Universität Basel, Switzerland
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- Sidonius Apollinaris' Letters, Book 2
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 14 July 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 217-245
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Summary
Introduction
Summary
With letter 2.8 Sidonius informs his friend Desideratus that the lady Filimatia died three days ago. Sidonius praises Filimatia's qualities as a wife, mother of five children and daughter of a father who, for love of her, did not remarry after his wife died. At Filimatia's funeral, relatives, friends and strangers mourn greatly and Sidonius expresses his grief with a funeral poem which he wrote at the request of Filimatia's father, Filimatius. Sidonius asks Desideratus to evaluate the poem, which he inserts in section 3 of the letter, and he considers including it in a collection of poems. At the end of the letter he begs the addressee, Desideratus, to join the mourning family members of the late Filimatia to console them.
Addressee
Desideratus is otherwise unknown; see Kaufmann (1995) 295, PLRE 2, 355, PCBE 4, 556, Mathisen (2020a) 90.
Date
Indications for the dating are given by the mention of Filimatia's father, Filimatius, who is also mentioned in two other letters, Ep. 1.3 and 5.17. There is a general forward movement in the letters but Ep. 5.17 is surely before Sidonius’ ordination to bishop. Loyen (1970a) 61, 247 n. 8, dates Ep. 2.8 to the end of the year 469 and justifies this with Sidonius’ reference to his existing collection of epigrams (see the commentary below on Ep. 2.8.2), to which his bookseller can add new poems. Kelly (2020a) 175 n. 50 rejects Loyen's dating of Ep. 1.3 to the year 467 and instead dates Ep. 1.3 in 455 and Ep. 2.8 and 5.17 in the early 460s. Because Eriphius is presented in 5.17 as the son-in-law, Kelly (2020a) 178 also dates the epitaph of Filimatia inserted in Ep. 2.8.3 after the elegiacs on Filimatius’ face towel in Ep. 5.17.10. Eriphius could still be called the son-in-law, although his wife was dead, but it seems more natural to assume that Filimatia is still alive. On the general difficulty of dating Sidonius’ letters, see the Introduction, ‘2. The date and order of letters in Book 2’.
Major themes and further reading
Structure After a series of short letters (2.3 to 2.7) Sidonius adds a longer text combined with an inserted epigram, the first of Book 2. Like the letters before, Ep. 2.8 is also dedicated to the duty of friendship.
Series Editor’s Foreword
- Johanna Sellman, Ohio State University
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- Arabic Exile Literature in Europe
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 06 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp vi-viii
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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a unique series that aims to fill a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period (that is, from the nineteenth century onwards) is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/ Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader, has never been stronger. Among activities and events heightening public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature, are the significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the academic publishers of the past; and the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, popularly referred to in the Arab world as the Arabic Booker, run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages.
9 - On Reading and the Essay
- Edited by Mario Aquilina, University of Malta, Bob Cowser, Jr, Columbia University, New York, Nicole B. Wallack, St Lawrence University, New York
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- The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 167-179
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Summary
To hear some essayists characterize their relationship with reading, one could be forgiven for believing that they were describing a fraught connection with a best friend, lover, mentor, terrible bully … or maybe God. While essayists avail themselves of an infinite variety of materials to read, with a few notable exceptions, they are more likely to enact or demonstrate the power of their reading practice than to theorize it, even though theorizing and reading are inherently essayistic activities. Turn the onionskin pages of an old dictionary to reveal that the word ‘theory’ draws from the Ancient Greek θεωρός (theōros), ‘spectator’, while the word ‘read’ has etymological filaments that reach to Old Frisian (rēda) ‘to advise, to deliberate, to help’, Early Irish (ráidid) ‘says, speaks’, and Old Church Slavonic (raditi) ‘to attend to, to take care of (a thing)’. Reading in an essay can take on all of these dispositions, and many others, of course.
This chapter argues that the act of reading animates essays, regardless of their subject matter. Essayists exemplify the practices and principles of what Ralph Waldo Emerson has called ‘creative reading’. Creative reading is not a singular activity, but the term describes the reciprocal nature of reading and writing in essays, a dynamic theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Graham Good. Literacy scholars such as Louise Rosenblatt highlight how readers in essays and readers of essays are responsible for and capable of creative experiences when reading, but trouble how reading expectations in school often obstruct students’ paths to those experiences. Virginia Woolf describes the conditions most fruitful for how readers can have the aesthetic, creative encounters that Rosenblatt, Good and Adorno envision. When readers and writers frame their ideas, values, discourse and style to resist injustices they encounter in a dominant view they participate in (and sometimes instantiate) a ‘counterpublic’, in Nancy Fraser’s and Michael Warner’s terms. The political essay in all of its guises – from Frederick Douglass’s speech ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ (1852) to Rebecca Solnit’s ‘The Slow Road to Sudden Change’ (2020) – is an act of reading in which writers accept their responsibility to address injustice, however imperfectly, and give others the means and reasons to do so.
Appendix 3 - The Khazar-Ashkenazi Descent Theory
- Alex M. Feldman, CIS University, Madrid
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- The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 25 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 193-205
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Summary
Plato introduces his Myth of Blood and Soil with the blunt admission that it is a fraud. ‘Well then’, says the Socrates of the Republic, ‘could we perhaps fabricate one of those very handy lies which indeed we mentioned just recently? With the help of one single lordly lie we may, if we are lucky, persuade even the rulers themselves – but at any rate the rest of the city.’
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.
L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la formation d’une nation.
There are many strands, subcategories and highly debated taxonomies within Judaism – governed by theology, doxology, jurisprudence, language and descent. The differences between the two main branches of Judaic communities, Sephardim (and Mizrahim) and Ashkenazim, are well known: they emerged from Judaic communities in the Islamic ummah and Christian oikoumene, respectively – with attendant geographical subcategories. Judaic communities also survived for centuries further south, east and beyond the Abrahamic worlds, such as Beta Israel and the Teimanim (Eastern Africa and Southern Arabia), Kaifeng Jews (western China) and Kochinim (southern India). All these communities date back centuries and their origins remain the subject of many discussions. However, one of the most contentious debates is about the origin of the Ashkenazim – or as typically described, the Jewish populations of Central and Eastern Europe.
There are two schematic theories about the origin of the Ashkenazim: that they settled in Central and Eastern Europe via a western route through Western Europe and/or via an eastern route through Caucasia and Khazaria. The former, termed the ‘Rhineland hypothesis’, is the most commonly accepted theory for Ashkenazi origins: according to this theory, following the diaspora in the wake of the Roman suppression of the second-century Bar Kokhba Revolt, Jewish communities emerged in second- to fifth-century Western Roman imperial provinces like Hispania, Gaul, Britannia and Italy, which remained until various thirteenth- to fourteenth-century anti-Jewish expulsions and Crusader violence, leading to eastward migrations towards Piast-ruled lands due to simultaneous legal protections granted by Piast kings.
1 - Expectations from Estimative Intelligence and Anticipatory Foreign Policy: A Realistic Appraisal
- Edited by Christoph Meyer, King’s College London, Eva Michaels, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Nikki Ikani, Universiteit Leiden, Aviva Guttmann, Aberystwyth University, Michael S. Goodman, King's College London
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- Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 21 October 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 27-68
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Summary
Introduction
What can we realistically expect from estimative intelligence and anticipatory foreign policy? What are appropriate yardsticks to use when retrospectively assessing the performance of governmental and external analysts, policy planners and decision-makers? To what extent and when is being surprised to be expected and excused? When do performance shortcomings point to underlying issues that might be avoided or addressed through learning the right lessons without creating great problems elsewhere? And how can obstacles to lesson learning and remembering in intelligence and foreign policy be overcome? This chapter will try to engage with these questions as it sets out a common conceptual and theoretical framework for the post-mortems analysis and identification of lessons to be learned in this volume.
Even though the intelligence studies literature has engaged with some of these questions, there is no suitable framework to take off the shelf that provides a persuasive normative grounding and one that works for the three European polities at the heart of our study – rather than the frequently studied US context. This chapter draws not only on the relevant literature in the core areas of strategic surprise and post-mortems in intelligence studies and foreign policy, but also considers insights from foresight and forecasting studies, crisis, risks and emergency management, and public administration about the role of experts, expertise and learning. We first develop a normative model of evidence-sensitive anticipatory foreign policy within which we situate intelligence and political receptivity to it. A second section looks at the specific challenges for estimative intelligence when seeking to minimise surprise in foreign affairs. We provide a taxonomy of different degrees and types of surprise and discuss when being surprised might be condonable or expected. Thirdly, we investigate how to identify the most important causes of any performance problems in intelligence-policy nexus. Finally, we look at the specific challenge of identifying and learning the right lessons and how to prioritise among recommendations for change and reform.
Normative Expectations towards Intelligence in Anticipatory Foreign Policy
It is helpful to reflect on whether and to what extent we can learn from the role of experts and expertise in fields beyond foreign policy, such as migration policy or public health.
Epilogue: A Time of Handwashing
- Christopher McDonough, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
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- Pontius Pilate on Screen
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 31 October 2022, pp 257-263
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Summary
‘Pilate needed to scrub his hands with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds to avoid taking any responsibility for the crucifixion’, said one researcher. ‘He should have sung “Happy Birthday” twice or the “Full House” theme song. Then, a good thorough drying with a paper towel or Dyson Airblade would have sealed the deal. As it stands, just running a little water over his hands wasn’t near enough to help him avoid judgment from God’.
Pontius Pilate responded to whether or not the allegations are true from the afterlife, saying, ‘What is truth?’
– ‘Scholars Now Agree Pontius Pilate Didn’t Wash His Hands Long Enough To Avoid Responsibility For Crucifixion’, Babylon Bee (30 March 2020)The prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, was looking out at an angry mob below, and I have been watching him again and again now for several years, as he assesses the situation in the streets and is deciding how he must respond. In the end, Pilate will talk to those to whom he is predetermined to talk (to the crowd, to the high priests, to his wife, to Jesus) and do that which he is predetermined to do (to display the beaten Jesus, to release Barabbas, to dispatch Jesus to the cross, to wash his hands). It has been a chore, at times, to watch Jesus condemned to the cross again and again, and to watch prefect after prefect come to terms with the decision he has made, from tortured indecision to malicious self-justification to casual dismissal of another person’s life. There are times I have suffered under Pontius Pilate, to be sure. Each time he speaks and acts, however, although I have known how it would all turn out, I have been fascinated to see how it would unfold. What expression would there be in his face, what catch in his voice, what unexpected glance or gesture? There is a constancy from production to production in the portrayal of Jesus that verges on monotony – there he is, as always, in his robe and sandals, with beard and hair of a certain length and a steadfast look in his eye. Pilate, however, has always been allowed a far wider range of appearances on stage and screen.
Robert Atwan
- Edited by Mario Aquilina, University of Malta, Bob Cowser, Jr, Columbia University, New York, Nicole B. Wallack, St Lawrence University, New York
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 316-321
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Summary
On Writing Three Decades of ‘Forewords’ for
The Best American Essays
When I began the series in 1986, I decided to contribute a ‘Foreword’ to each edition but I did so hesitantly. For one thing the publisher’s companion volume, The Best American Short Stories, did not include one, and so none was expected for the essays. For another, I was worried that – should the series be successful and continue – I would run out of things to say within a few years. So I decided to write forewords of just seven paragraphs and I stuck with that model, though with each new annual edition the paragraphs grew longer. Then with the 2002 volume I gradually began slightly expanding the forewords. The foreword to the 2020 book, which focuses on Gertrude Stein, is the longest in the series.
Although I may at times comment on some of the volume’s contents, I try in each foreword to say something about the essay as a literary genre – its forms, major practitioners, history, criticism, relevance, and so forth. I can’t recall ever knowing – that is, in an outline sense – what I was going to write until I was about to get started. I don’t possess an especially disciplined mind. My thoughts tend to wander and will sometimes cluster into an idea provoked by a serendipitous event. Here are two examples: in the 1993 foreword I was struck by a letter I received from Pakistan in an envelope covered front and back with postage stamps. The writer thanked me for the editions of Best American Essays he had discovered in a Lahore library that offered him the ‘best introduction of America, ever’. The remark – very appreciated, by the way – prompted me to write about the ways essays can offer readers a close acquaintance with a unfamiliar culture.
A second example: the April morning I sat down to begin the foreword to the 2017 edition, I had just come across a message in my inbox reminding me that this day marked the one hundredth anniversary of our entry into World War I. As I reflected on that moment, I thought of an essayist who powerfully opposed our participation in that conflict, Randolph Bourne.
8 - The Essay and the Advertisement
- Edited by Mario Aquilina, University of Malta, Bob Cowser, Jr, Columbia University, New York, Nicole B. Wallack, St Lawrence University, New York
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2022, pp 130-142
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The history of modern advertising is a history of deceit, or at least the suspicion of deceit. Advertising as it is now understood began to take shape in the seventeenth century, and almost immediately it was censured by literary observers for its untruths. Daniel Defoe, looking back on 1665–6 in his Journal of the Plague Year, registers his disgust at seeing ‘Posts of Houses, and Corners of Streets … plaster’d over with Doctor’s Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows’ selling ‘INFALIBLE preventive Pills against the Plague’ and ‘NEVER-FAILING Preservatives against the infection’. John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Progress, uses the metaphor of advertising to condemn what he considers the excesses and idolatrous deceits of Roman Catholicism: ‘the ware of Rome and her merchandise is greatly promoted in [Vanity] [F]air’. In the eighteenth century, as advertising flowered not only in public spaces but in periodicals, Richard Sheridan introduced his character Puff (a verb, by then, commonly used to describe the lies-by-exaggeration of advertising), who embodied the public distrust in the veracity and authenticity of periodical advertisements. Puff boasts, ‘I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor.’
In the nineteenth century, with the concurrent growth of periodicals, of literacy and of public taste for new books, Thomas Macaulay decried what he called the ‘new trickery’ of book advertisements:
The puffing of books is now so shamefully and so successfully carried on that it is the duty of all who are anxious for the purity of the national taste, or for the honour of the literary character, to join in discountenancing the practice.
Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present, added his own denunciation of that ‘all-deafening blast of Puffery’, perhaps missing the irony of his metaphor from loud noises. Many twentieth-century critiques, following Marx and taking into account the possibility of psychological lies, adjusted ‘puffery’ into ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘kitsch’, both of which retain the basic metaphor of disproportion found in ‘puffery’.