Showing papers on "Lust published in 2009"

Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas

Abstract: When does the pursuit of self-interest go too far, lapsing into morally unacceptable behaviour? Until the unprecedented events of the recent global financial crisis economists often seemed unconcerned with this question, even suggesting that "greed is good." A closer look, however, suggests that greed and lust are generally considered good only for men, and then only outside the realm of family life. The history of Western economic ideas shows that men have given themselves more cultural permission than women for the pursuit of both economic and sexual self-interest. Feminists have long contested the boundaries of this permission, demanding more than mere freedom to act more like men. Women have gradually gained the power to revise our conceptual and moral maps and to insist on a better-and less gendered-balance between self interest and care for others. This book brings women's work, their sexuality, and their ideas into the center of the dialectic between economic history and the history of economic ideas. It describes a spiralling process of economic and cultural change in Great Britain, France, and the United States since the 18th century that shaped the evolution of patriarchal capitalism and the larger relationship between production and reproduction. This feminist reinterpretation of our past holds profound implications for today's efforts to develop a more humane and sustainable form of capitalism.

Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics with Culture as a Method

Abstract: International Relations (IR) needs democratising. Currently, IR theorising remains under the hegemony of a singular worldview (`warre of all against all') with a singular logic (`conversion or discipline') for all actors and activities. This top-down, state-centric and exclusivist approach is fundamentally anti-democratic for a field of inquiry and practice crowded with multiple worlds. The Humanities, we propose, will help to mitigate these totalitarian tendencies by expressing and examining what hegemonic IR cannot but must: that is, a richness of being in global life. We present Ang Lee's Lust/ Caution (2007) as an example. If seen as an allegory for Taiwan—China relations, this film shifts attention from the national security state, a defining concern for hegemonic IR, to the transnational solidarities that bind peoples and societies despite inter-state conflicts, thereby offering a way out of the statist impasse that incarcerates the region. This approach extends beyond recent calls for a `linguistic...

Greed, lust & gender : a history of economic ideas

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Eye of the Needle 2. The Springs of Desire 3. Defining Virtues 4. Free Trade but Not Free Love 5. The Limits of Affection 6. The Perfectibility of Man 7. The Greatest Happiness 8. Self-Love Triumphant 9. Production and Reproduction 10. Whose Wealth? 11. The Social Family 12. Equal Opportunities 13. The Subjection of Women 14. Declaring Independence 15. The Icy Waters 16. The Sacred Sphere 17. The Unproductive Housewife 18. The Nanny State 19. Human Capitalism 20. Beyond Economic Man Conclusion

Exhibitionism: Lust, Caution

Abstract: The term ‘exhibitionism’ collects together a range of concepts and issues, enabling us to go beyond readings of an individual film as an ideological text. The term highlights contextual conditions that shape films. It also shows how films as artefacts invite contestations not just among different readings but among different kinds of social practices altogether. The exhibitionism of the film Lust, Caution/Se, jie (Ang Lee, 2007) reveals one of the most significant processes of contemporary Chinese cinema: the differential remapping of practices like production, exhibition and consumption.

Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination

Abstract: The demonic female, an object of male anxiety and desire, has long been a stock character in Japanese Buddhist literature. This article examines two female realms in the Japanese literary and visual imagination: Rasetsukoku, a dreaded island of female cannibals, and Nyogogashima, a fabled isle of erotic fantasy. I trace the persistence and transformation of these sites in tale literature, sutra illustration, popular fiction, and Japanese cartography from the twelfth through the nineteenth century to show how the construction of Japanese identity relies on the mapping of the marginal. In doing so, I argue for the centrality of Buddhism to Japan's cartographic tradition and the importance of cartography in Japanese Buddhist literary and visual culture. keywords: Rasetsukoku-Nyogogashima-Japanese cartography-Buddhist narrative-visual culture (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) For the male authors of medieval Japanese Buddhist literature, the female body was an endless source of fear and fascination. "Women," according to the oft-quoted sutra passage, "are the emissaries of hell; they cut off forever the seed of buddhahood. On the outside they have the faces of bodhisattvas, but on the inside they have the hearts of demons."1 The popular genres of medieval literature, such as setsuwa, kana hogo, honjimono, and otogizoshi, are full of deceptive, duplicitous, and dangerous women. Attractive and alluring in appearance, they are invariably devils in disguise: ferocious figures of insatiable passion. Conjured by the fantasies and frustrations of celibate ideals, the demonic female, an object of displaced desire and one of the oldest figments of the Buddhist imagination, remained an obsessive presence in the visual and literary culture of the age. Buddhist demonology includes many ferocious females but perhaps few more terrifying than the rasetsu ... (Skt. raksasi), orectic shape-shifting cannibals who seduce men and then literally eat them alive.2 Rasetsukoku ..., the land of these horrific man-eaters, is an isolated realm: an island to the south of the world continent on which we dwell, known in Sanskrit as Jambudvipa and in Japanese as Nansenbush. ... or Enbudaishu ... In Japan, this isle of demonic women appeared first in the literary and visual culture of the late Heian period and for centuries thereafter occupied an enduring and evolving place in the Buddhist imagination. Rasetsukoku represented a conflicted site of desire and denial, of anxiety and alterity: a realm where the boundaries of religion and sexuality were encountered and explored. It lay forever at the margins of the known world, marking the furthest edge of cultural identity. Yet, like a floating island, it remained unfixed. It drifted, both geographically and semantically, until what was once a land of demons south of India was rediscovered as an erotic paradise south of Japan. In this article I examine the inscription and transition of Rasetsukoku in texts, images, and maps in order to locate the demonic feminine in one region of Japanese Buddhist culture. In doing so, I hope to suggest not only how Buddhist views of the world provided maps of meaning for literature and art in medieval Japan, but also how cartography might be understood as a form of fiction. Textual Grounds and Visual Fields Rasetsukoku is first found in Japanese literature among the stories of India collected in the Tenjiku ... section of the twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari shu ... (Konno 1999, 388-94).3 "How Sokara and Five Hundred Merchants Went to the Land of the Rasetsu" tells of a group of merchants who set sail from Jambudvipa to the southern seas in search of treasure. They are shipwrecked on an island of beautiful women, and "lust and passion immediately arise in their hearts" (388). They ask the women to take them in and more than willingly follow them back to their compound, an expansive, and exclusively female, gated community where each man takes a wife and enjoys a life of bliss. …

The Logic of Excuses and the Rationality of Emotions

Abstract: Sometimes emotions excuse. Fear and anger, for example, sometimes excuse under the headings of, respectively, duress and provocation. Although most legal systems draw the line at this point, the list of potentially excusatory emotions outside the law seems to be longer. We can readily imagine cases in which, for example, grief or despair could be cited as part of a case for relaxing or even eliminating our negative verdicts on people who performed admittedly unjustified wrongs. The availability of such excuses depends on what wrong we are trying to excuse. No excuse is available in respect of all wrongs. Some wrongs, indeed, are inexcusable. This throws up the interesting question of what makes a particular emotion apt to excuse a particular wrong. Why is fear, for example, more apt to excuse more serious wrongs than, say, pride or shame? This question leads naturally to another. Why are some emotions, such as lust, greed, and envy, apparently not apt to furnish any excuses at all? One possibility is that we cannot be overcome by them, that they cannot drive us to wrongdoing as readily as fear and grief. Another possibility is that, although lust, greed, and envy are no less powerful than their potentially excusatory counterparts, they are less defensible. Here we already encounter a divide between two competing ways of thinking about emotions. On one view, there is nothing to be said about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of our emotions, but only about their power to overwhelm us, and thereby partly or wholly to exempt us from the expectation of reasonableness that would aptly apply to us in their absence. On a rival view, emotions are

On lust and rage–prostate cancer, vasectomy and virility in the aging male

Abstract: The SpurYou think it horrible that lust and rageShould dance attention upon my old age;They were not such a plague when I was young;What else have I to spur me into song?W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)Yeats...

Guiding Lights: Feminine Judgment and Wisdom in Malory's Morte Darthur

Abstract: From minor figures to the Morte's most important female characters, women assess and judge in matters of social and courtly behavior, chivalry, love, and morality. Furthermore, Malory opens and closes his work with a female model of noble action who influences other characters and his readers while underscoring his major themes. Malory's treatment of these female characters demonstrates the importance of the feminine in the Morte. (JJ) Malory's Morte Darthur is a work driven by male desire, will, and action, from its dramatic opening where Uther is willing to sacrifice everything for his lust for Igraine to Arthur's death where the king chooses vengeance on Mordred over preserving his kingdom and his own life. Yet feminine influence also pervades the work. As Dorsey Armstrong argues, 'The ubiquitous and seemingly necessary presence of female characters who ask favors, bestow gifts, intercede for, and pass judgment on knights, points to the importance of the feminine in establishing, shaping, and confirming masculine knightly identity.'1 This wise, sometimes prescient, voice of judgment, evident from the first book, resonates thematically and even morally in the text. From minor figures to the Morte's most important female characters, women assess and judge in matters of social and courtly behavior, chivalry, love, and morality. Furthermore, Malory opens and closes his work with a female model of noble action who influences other characters and his readers while underscoring his major themes. A look at a few of Malory's minor characters, his anonymous female guides, will lay the groundwork for a longer analysis of Igraine and Guinevere, two characters who demonstrate the importance of the feminine in the Morte. These female figures reveal the key role women play in Malory's narrative. Female guides, recurrent in medieval romance, are usually unnamed and generally do not play a leading role in a love plot. These minor characters lead knights to adventure, judge their behavior, and give them instruction. Malory often expands their action and dialogue in order to develop his views on knightly conduct. Eugene Vinaver has noted that chivalry, Malory's High Order of Knighthood, is a rule of conduct which concerns itself not only with the 'technique of fighting' but also with matters of 'good breeding, gentleness, and loyalty.'2 Although knights assess the masculine code of martial excellence, it is the women who often comment on matters of behavior, breeding, and gentleness. As Armstrong observes, 'The awareness of the code, in combination with the lack of a parallel code designed to regulate feminine behavior, opens up a space of feminine influence at the very heart of the masculine chivalric enterprise.'3 A few examples will illustrate. In 'The Tale of King Arthur,' Gawain, Ywain, and Marholt ride into a forest grove and meet three damsels-aged 60, 30, and 15-sitting by a fountain. They explain their function: 'We be here...for this cause: if we may se ony of arraunte knyghtes to teche hem unto stronge aventures' (1:163). Yvain and Marholt both benefit from their guides' instruction, but Gawain 'loste' his damsel (1:179). He quickly proves himself unworthy in her eyes by failing to defend Sir Pelleas when he is attacked by ten knights. Although just fifteen, the damsel shows she knows what is required of a knight worthy of the name: '"Sir," seyde the damesell unto sir Gawayne, "mesemyth hit were your worshyp to helpe that dolerouse knyght, for methynkes he is one of the beste knyghtes that ever I sawe." "I wolde do for hym," seyde sir Gawayne, "but hit semyth he wolde have no helpe." "No," seyde the damesell, "methynkes ye have no lyste to helpe hym"' (1:164). Dissatisfied with his conduct, the damsel almost immediately leaves Gawain for another knight: 'for I may nat fynde in my herte to be with hym...And therefore let us two go whyle they fyght' (1:165). When they all meet again at the fountain a year later, she makes public Gawain's failure. …

Precept and Practice

Abstract: The pernicious cliches about widows (but not widowers) found in polemics, proverbs, household manuals, and plays of the early modern period demonstrate how perplexing widowhood was for patriarchal theory. In The Merchant of Venice, Solanio’s quip about a hypocritical widow who “made her neighbors believe she wept for the death of a third husband” (3.1.9–10) reminds us that widowhood is problematic. First of all, the weaker vessel survives the stronger. Second, she may remarry, thus, some would say, cuckolding her former husband(s), however belatedly (Carlton 125). Third, she may not remarry, thereby revealing that “unheaded” women can get along quite nicely, thank you. Moreover, having been sexually awakened—some believed inflamed— the widow is no less threatening if she remains single, since she can be expected to take multiple lovers. Explicating Plato’s assertion in the “Timaeus” that the womb is a creature ever seeking to bear children and afflicting the entire body if it does not do so, the sixteenth-century misogynist Giovanni Della Casa writes, Do not imagine that Etna burns with more violence than the soul of woman burns with lust. And her husband is so far from being able to stop it by extinguishing it or appeasing such a fire that his labor ends by exciting it further, just as the intensity of the fire is usually increased by the addition of a small quantity of water.

Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas

Abstract: The Author combines the history of economic thought with feminist discourse in a thought-provoking study of when self-interest becomes a vice and where moral boundaries should be drawn.

The Forgiveness of Sins

Abstract: It is about time that we ask ourselves how we have contributed to the environment of sin. Sin in the form of greed, lust, deceit, pride, resentment, envy, gluttony, and laziness is becoming a way of life. Personal sin becomes structural sin.

Psychopathy, Perversion, and Lust Homicide: Recognizing the Mental Disorders That Power Serial Killers

Abstract: Definition and description of lust homicide -- Clinical definition and description of psychopathy -- Clinical definition and descriptino of sexual paraphilias and disorders -- Herman Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes (1860-1896) -- Peter Kurten (1883-1931) -- Earle Leonard Nelson (1897-1928) -- Ed Gein (1906-1984) -- Henry Lee Lucas (1936-2001) -- Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) -- Carroll Edward Cole (1938-1985) -- Robert Hansen (1939-) -- Jerome Brudos (1939-2006) -- John Wayne Gacy (1942-1994) -- Dennis Nilsen (1945-) -- Ted Bundy (1946-1989) -- John Norman Collins (1947-) -- Edmund Kemper (1948-) -- The Hillside Stranglers : Angelo Buono (1934-2002) and Kenneth Bianchi (1951-) -- Bobby Joe Long (1953-) -- Dayton Leroy Rogers (1953-) -- Aileen "Lee" Wuornos (1956-2002) -- Joel Rifkin (1959-) -- Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994) -- Richard Ramirez (1960-) -- Lessons for future prevention.

The Female Philosophe in the Closet: The Cabinet and the Senses in French Erotic Novels, 1740–1800

Abstract: L'architecture, jadis majestueuse et qui ne derogeait pas, s'est ployee a la licence de nos moeurs et de nos idees. Elle a prevu et satisfait toutes les intentions de la debauche et du libertinage; les issues secretes et les escaliers derobes sont au ton des romans du jour. L'architecture enfin, complice de nos desordres, est non moins licencieuse que notre poesie erotique.- Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1781)1Architecture, once majestic and unyielding, has succumbed to the licentiousness of our lifestyle and ideas. It anticipates and fulfills all the aims of debauchery and libertinage; secret passages and hidden stairways are in the same vein as novels of the day. Architecture, complicit in our disorders, is no less licentious than our erotic poetry.Louis-Sebastien Mercier, assessing Paris in the late eighteenth century, indicted Parisian architecture for its complicity in societal disorders. The architecture of the day, quipped Mercier, was as dissolute as the obscene books sold in a thriving underground print network. In this characterization of eighteenth-century Paris, Mercier does not criticize architects or authors, per se, but their creations: it was buildings and books that signaled the debauchery looming in the social imaginary. What architecture and erotic books shared was the isolated, private experience each could provide. Eighteenth-century interiors, characterized by divided, subdivided, and specialized space, complicated the demarcations between the private and the public, creating what one might think of as three spheres: the public, the private, and the secret. The fragmentation of the interior landscape into boudoirs, cabinets, alcoves, niches, and other small spaces that were then partitioned by screens (cloisons) and curtains is frequently represented in French novels of the time, from the sentimental to the erotic, as literary lovers began to abandon the outdoor encounters of the seventeenth-century pastoral in favor of the intimacy of the cabinet or the boudoir.2 These interior spaces offered the illusion of total seclusion and the potential for unbounded pleasure. In a literary context, the assumption of absolute privacy allowed for the eavesdroppers and voyeurs whose observations are a recurrent thread in erotic and libertine literature.Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain (1777; "No Tomorrow") exemplifies the lure of interior space, the erotic sensibilities it engenders, and the literary stakes in its exploration. The narrator's account of his one-night tryst with an older woman allows us to trace the migration from the public to the domestic sphere and, finally, to a secret, exotically appointed cabinet. Seduction and its spatial context become inseparable as Madame T... lures the young narrator from the archetypical site of sociability-an opera loge, where one sees and is seen-through a series of progressively more secluded spaces: the interior of a carriage (where the jostling motion "forces" their first touch), a country home, a private garden, a pavilion within the garden, and finally, the cabinet. Anticipating the ultimate destination, the young narrator confesses that his lust has migrated from woman to architecture: "[C]e n'etait plus madame de T... que je desirais, c'etait le cabinet" ("[I]t was no longer Madame de T... whom I desired, it was the cabinet"; 34).3This displaced desire in which a room inflames arousal illustrates only one of the many roles of interior spaces in eighteenth-century seduction novels. When the cabinet supplants the body as the object of desire, the penetration of an inner sanctum is a figure for sexual penetration. The most famous contemporary example of this analogy is no doubt Laclos's double entendre in Les Liaisons dangereuses wherein Valmont insists that Cecile oil the lock and hinges of her bedroom door so that he can enter with ease. Architectural seduction is also the central conceit of Bastide's La Petite maison (1758; "The Little House"), in which the Marquis de Tremicour, Bastide's libertine hero, rightly presumes that if the sumptuous architectural intricacies of his "petite maison" can seduce the young Melite, she will, in turn, yield to the Marquis's sexual desires. …

Lust, Greed, Torture, and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern Renegade

Abstract: The motives behind an individual's conversion to another religion are complex and frequently contested. The moment of conversion for the convert symbolizes the beginning of a new life and new opportunities; yet for the community he or she leaves, it is often interpreted as an act of religious and political betrayal, therefore prompting different, and often opposing, narratives of conversion. A number of tropes predominant in early modern English narratives dealing with conversion to Islam are of interest in this regard: the immoral deviant “renegade” motivated by excessive lust or greed who is worse than the “natural Turks,” and the practice of violent, involuntary, forced conversion. These tropes, through their rhetorical construction of the renegade, attempt to fashion both individual and communal selves that act to relieve the psychological threat to the collective identity of the English community presented by the renegade's translocation of political, cultural and religious loyalties. It is therefore problematic to uncritically read these narratives as accurate depictions of the reality of conversion in North Africa as some previous studies have done: other contextual evidence and the use of alternative narrative frames portray converts and conversion from a significantly different perspective. In this article, primarily through the study of captivity narratives, I explore how and why these tropes of conversion were employed, the functions they fulfilled, and the contexts in which they were produced and consumed. [AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT]

Side Dishes: Latina American Women, Sex, and Cultural Production

Abstract: Moving beyond the 'main dishes' of traditional literary works, "Side Dishes" offers a provocative and delicious new understanding of Latin American women's authorship and activism. The book illuminates a wealth of creative and intellectual work by Latin American women - editors, directors, cartoonists, academics, performance artists, and comedians - and explores them in light of their treatment of women's sexuality. "Side Dishes" considers feminist pornography and literary representations of masturbation, bisexuality, lesbianism, and sexual fantasies; the treatment of lust in stand-up comedy and science fiction; critical issues in leading feminist journals; and portrayals of sexuality in four contemporary Latin American films. Melissa A. Fitch concludes with a look at the rise of women's and gender studies programs in Latin America.

Britten's opera about rape

Abstract: Lucretia's principal virtue is her undoing. Her chastity is vaunted as the guarantor of Collatinus's honour and standing, as the trigger for Tarquinius's lust, and its brutal loss as the symbol of the corruption of the Etruscans and thus the catalyst for Junius's ascent to power. She is established in a patriarchal system as a desexed woman, as innocent as a child, who can only exist as a chaste wife. When her virtue is polluted by rape, she has no choice but to kill herself in an attempt to restore her function as chaste wife.Britten's opera encodes the naming of Lucretia in terms redolent of the oppressive ‘speech-acts’ of Peter Grimes. Through tonal and motivic association the projection of her innocence and the ‘stain’ introduced by her rape are worked into the opera's design at the level of long-range musical structure. Through analysis of the thematic implications of musical process in the work, this article opens to view the complex and at times conflicting moral hermeneutics of the work.

Transnational Affect: Cold Anger, Hot Tears, and Lust, Caution

Abstract: This paper takes the 2007 film Lust, Caution by Ang Lee as its primary example to explore the ambivalent productivity of the ”trans” in the current discourse on transnational cinema and global culture. The paper is divided into three parts. Part I takes the highly biased and provocative diatribes against Lust, Caution on the mainland Chinese internet as an intriguing cultural symptom for analysis, and finds in these angry reactions to the film not only an undisguised hostility toward collaboration framed in a paranoid rhetoric of nationalism, but also a new affective assemblage of ”hanjian” (national traitor) and ”the global man.” Part II shifts the focus to the cultural reception of the film in Taiwan and foregrounds the public shedding tears of Ang Lee and Ma Ying-jeou, the newly elected President of Taiwan, before and after the film's world premiere: their emotional reactions are seen as being triggered by a new affective assemblage that seems to combine patriotic feeling with diasporic sentiment. A trans-historical linkage of two separate historical eras, those of World War II and the (post-)Cold War, is thus created to make ”trans” less a border-crossing than a dynamic force of affective becoming. Part III further explores this affective becoming in light of the film's major setting, Shanghai, in order to theorize a new concept of ”homeland” that could be less a ”single” spatial center than a ”singular” temporal multiplicity. Therefore, the 1949 separation of Taiwan and China and subsequent cross-Strait geopolitical divisions can no longer be taken for granted for disparate responses; it is rather the trans as a new bloc of sensation variously affecting the audience members of Lust, Caution, creates lines of incongruity and incompatibility which form a new blockage of difference and differentiation across the Strait.

I Wanted Black Skates: Gender, Cash, Pleasure, And The Politics Of Criticism

Abstract: One of my favorite models for critical writing is the 1994 book Her Tongue on My Theory: Images, Essays, Fantasies by members of the dyke art collective Kiss and Tell. In the book, they set out to address a situation they encoun tered as writers that many people also encounter as readers: the frequently vexed relation between pleasure and analytic writing, even when pleasure is an ingredient of the subject under consideration. As they explain in their introduction, their art revels in taking sexual analysis and sexual pleasure and "mix[ing] them up." Yet even so, they discovered, lust increasingly dis appeared from their discussions as they worked on the book, which began as a series of critical essays about sex, representation, and politics. "The essay format," they write, "didn't seem to leave much room for indulging in un redeemed pleasure." In response, they wrote sex stories that run across the bottom of the essay pages. The book also features images that "do not illus trate the stories or the essays, but run parallel to them, questioning the same issues of erotic representation, narrative, literal meaning, and censorship."1 I love this book partly just for naming what the authors term "unre deemed pleasure" as a valued component of critical work and the lives of people who pursue it. For reasons too numerous and too contingent on context to elaborate here, embracing pleasures—especially but not only bodily pleasures—that do not readily appear to advance a higher pur pose is often considered suspect, both outside and within academic circles. It comes across as shallow, lazy, duped, dangerous, and/or merely insuffi cient in theorizations ranging from Dear Abby, which counseled recently that "when something feels good, it is easy to become addicted ... and then you'll be in for a world of pain," to academic classics like Roland Barthes's Pleasure of the Text, in which satisfaction makes pleasure, which, for him, "comes from culture and does not break with it," a rather super ficial penultimate of the loss-imposing bliss.2

Hobbes and Sex

Abstract: Hobbes could not have written Paradise Lost: the longest of his few references to the story of Adam and Eve drains their relationship of drama and complexity; most aspects of human sexuality he addresses only in classifying them as off limits because of their indecency, neglecting topics in some respects germane to the clarification of his philosophy; and his original English verse amounts to one line for each of that epic's twelve books. This short poem nonetheless represents an intriguing persuasion to love written in his extreme old age. Moreover, his treatment of “LUST” in The Elements of Law takes a significantly non-judgmental form by the standards of his time, though not marking so substantial an innovation as Simon Blackburn takes it to be. Most importantly, the anti-puritanical thrust of Hobbes's attack on Presbyterian preachers in Behemoth again illustrates his capacity for entertaining—however briefly—an essentially uncensorious view of human sexuality, this time in conjunction with a critique of sexual repression, as imposed by those clergymen in their role as spiritual advisers, that sheds invaluable light on the self-consciously scandalous libertinism of younger contemporaries often identified in his own day and since as “Hobbists”.

Collectible centric educational game system

Abstract: Children exhibit curiosity and desire to acquire things of interest from their earliest stages. This eventually evolves into their lust for toys, dolls, stickers, books, clothing, having books read to them, being allowed to watch TV, and more. Things of a child's interest are generically referred to as ‘collectibles’ hereafter. A game system that overlays educational content with in-game collectibles is presented. The more in-game collectibles the player has the more fun they have. This paradigm converts the lust for in-game collectibles into a lust to learn. A virtuous cycle emerges where (i) anticipation to acquire the next educational content builds up, and then (ii) this anticipation is gratified when the educational content is finally acquired, and (iii) the educational content is naturally appreciated until the child moves onto the next collectible.

The Narrative of Consumption: Greed and Literature

Abstract: In Dante’s Inferno, the greedy throng together, each pushing a great weight with his chest, condemned to ‘dance and counter-dance’ as they ‘bump together, wheel right/Round and return, trundling their loads again’. Their futile circling illustrates the pointless competition of the greedy. At the point of rebound, the misers and the wasteful rich go separate ways, crying respectively: ‘Why chuck away? Why grab so tight?’ Doomed to return again, these rival crews share a common failing and therefore a common punishment. Virgil (Dante’s guide through Hell) explains that, in life, ‘these were so squint of mind/As in the handling of their wealth to use/No moderation — none in either kind.’1 Like gluttony and lust, therefore, greed, whether miserly or decadent, is a sin of excess.

PROFESSOR DAVID COX LECTURE ON INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL WORK The entropy of developmentalism: modernity's challenge to human dignity 1

Abstract: It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarefied for us to breathe ... The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. (Pressfield, 2002, p. 37) ‘‘The whole history teaches that oligarchy conceals the lust for tyranny; every oligarchy constantly trembles with the tension each member feels in maintaining control over this lust,’’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1989, p. 136). The history of human society is a perpetual search for meanings and interpretations that explain the dynamics of this lust. We stand at the crossroads of history. We heard the rumors of history’s end; we learned about the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall; we knew about the end of ideology; and we now witness the meltdown of capitalism in its own backyard. Social transmutation through this intriguing trajectory has been interrupted many times. Each epoch marks a new chapter in human and social development. The twenty-first century challenges involve some of these gyrations from Wall Street to Waziristan. This article deals with developmentalism beyond its vicissitudes, rise and fall. Humankind’s greatest challenges are still confounded by a hydra of ‘‘inconvenient’’ truths that threaten essential conditions of life: security (terrorism), economy (fiscal insecurity), environment (global warming), human development (bigotry, disease, and poverty). Developmental perspective has failed to liberate humanity from the scourges of age-old evils. The United States, after World War II, wanted to see the Third World countries free from the colonial yoke. However, paranoid reaction against communism impelled the US leadership to defer to Winston Churchill against countries like India and Iran. India’s partition was mainly a colonial design to contain Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East (Sarila, 2006). Mohammad Reza was restored

The Rise of Wisdom Moon

Abstract: The Rise of Wisdom Moon was composed during the mid-eleventh century by Krishna mishra, an otherwise unknown poet in the service of the Chandella dynasty, whose cultural and religious capital was Khajuraho. The early popularity of Krishna mishra's work led to its frequent translation into the vernaculars of both North and South India, and even Persian as well. Famed as providing the enduring model of the allegorical play for all subsequent Sanskrit literature, The Rise of Wisdom Moon offers a satirical account of the conquest of the holy city of Benares by Nescience, of the war of liberation waged by the forces of Intuition, and of the freedom of the Inner Man that then follows the rise of Wisdom. But at the outset, when Nescience still has the upper hand, with minions like Lord Lust, such developments seem unlikely.

The Carpe Diem Topos and the 'Geriatric Gaze' in Early Modern Verse

Abstract: 1. It is surprising how rarely literary critics comment on representations of age in early modern literature, given our deep interest in other sets for identity (principally gender, ethnicity, faith, desire, and class). What comment there is tends to fade into how the old disengage with life, and is, moreover, rarely historically contextualized. Literature of the early modern period sees age as a period of some opportunity. As Mike Hepworth points out, 'images of old age are essentially moral categories of the body created within specific historical contexts to enable societies and individuals to make sense of the biological changes that are taking place in and on their bodies'.1 Literary critics appear to have developed a 'geriatric gaze' (Hepworth's phrase) which produces an object of study which is some way away from the early modern period's own depictions. If we are properly wary of the sonneteer's gaze, which dominates and dismembers his mistress, the sovereign's gaze, which creates the value of the masque he views, and the colonial gaze, which others its counterpart; we should be equally suspicious of our own view of the elderly..2. The following argument will demonstrate the gap between the stance taken on age by today's literary critics and that of theologians, doctors, and commentators in the period, and suggest why it has developed. It will then exemplify how taking up the latter changes the sense of a topos which deals specifically with age (carpe diem or 'seize the day') when it deals with a man who is getting older. While the carpe diem is always also a memento mori for the woman, writing a poem about male aging should demonstrate that the faculties for which he is valued are still there - or that's the theory, anyway.3. Many of today's readers view the aged in early modern literature in a persistently unbalanced fashion. For instance, for every ballad, of the 'old man and his wife, who in their great want and misery sought to children for succour, by whom they were disdained' there are two celebrating men such as the 'twelve morris-dancers in Herefordshire, of twelve hundred years old', with 'hearts of Oake at forrescore yeares: [and] backes of steele at fourescore and ten', or cheering on 'The old, old, very old man', a 'merry' adulterer at 105.2 Yet Alice Tobriner, the primary commentator on age in popular literature, recognizes only tales of rejection, impotent lust, and decay in these ballads. Similarly, Steven Marx focuses only on the limited desires, humble circumstances, and laborious life of the old shepherds of Renaissance pastoral.3 When dealing with age in Shakespeare, the figures of Lear and Prospero in particular cast a long shadow because they conform to the current cultural expectation of disempowerment. Conversely, Antony and Cleopatra are seen as lovers, Henry IV as a politician, Falstaff as a jovial leader. All these talk openly about their age, but, because they are engaged with action, we pass over it. Not so with Lear and Propsero, who are 'retired' under the present day model. Francelia Butler considers that a lack of physical strength in the old in Shakespeare's histories means that their moral convictions cannot be carried into action. They lack the forceful 'vir' of 'virtue'.4 Herbert Covey also sees the old in Shakespeare as irrelevant at best.5 Hallett Smith, spends treble the time on Shakespeare's aged fools and second childhoods as he does on ripe plants and wise leaders.6 Indeed, the few readers who deal optimistically with the subject of age stand out. Laurel Porter argues Lear is not inherently weak but made to seem so by his daughters' insistence that he is impotent (a tactic to avoid open disobedience).7 William Kerrigan celebrates the creative potential of anger and obstinacy associated with Lear and Prospero's old age, and Sara M. Deats argues that both men learn the wisdom to disengage from social roles. Yet given Lear succumbs to his daughters' view, he is weak, Kerrigan's reading- original and welcome though it is - stereotypes age even as it makes the two rulers heroes again, and Deats's essay is shadowed by the gloomy aside that such disengagement comes too late to change the heroes' characters really. …

The National Theatre's the Revenger's Tragedy and the Royal Shakespeare Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2008)

Abstract: Central to both Melly Still's 2008 production of The Revenger's Tragedy for London's National Theatre and Gregory Doran's 2008 A Midsummer Night's Dream, a revival of his 2005 production, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, were the mixed energies of audience complicity Both of these productions required something from the audience Gregory Doran asked us to use our imaginations to create a world of magic and metamorphosis, a green world from an urban trash heap Melly Still asked us to create a world of simultaneous guilt and pleasure Finally, both productions created a frame within which to take the measure of the magic and the guilt that the audience experienced One of the first details audience members might have noticed on taking their seats at the National's Olivier Theatre for The Revenger's Tragedy was a Caravaggio painting, upstage right, of St Jerome at work This bookish scholar, the translator of the Bible, framed by massive and untidy piles of well-worn and presumably well-read books, seemed to concentrate on two texts: the sacred book on the desk before him and the memento mori at the edge of his desk, two texts that collectively frame a good life, circumscribing our understanding of life and death But in the plays, these structures of faith and moral coherence were inadequate to the surges of desire and violence they sought to contain Even the waiting stage gave hints of this failure The scattered collection of scholarly books seemed more significant for its disarray than the power of their ideas Many paintings had apparently been taken down from the walls, sold or stripped of their frames, leaving behind ghostly reminders of now absent forms Indeed, even St Jerome's text became a disturbing emblem for this play, serving to license the violent misogyny that is at the heart of female suffering Suddenly there was a deafening blast The revolving stage lurched into motion as the space darkened, nervous spotlights searching for something in random areas of the whirling circular space Behind the dancing, we glimpsed sexual acts and violence as what sounded like castrati sang offstage Some of the male dancers wore antlers Other revelers were dressed in early twenty-first century fashions, just as we were All was motion, the accelerated heartbeats of revenge and desire The fiercely bright spotlights moved with increasing speed to one violent or sexual scene after another Because the circular stage was divided into sections separated by corridors, those sudden illuminations also implicated us We were teased by glimpses of sexuality and violence as we voyeuristically strained to see Amid this sexual theater, one moment stood out The dance culminated in a rape, after which, almost obscured by the frenetic actions around her, a figure (later identified as Antonio's wife) moved awkwardly across the stage, repeatedly losing her balance as she attempted to dress herself, unnoticed by the revelers and, perhaps, by some of the audience The revolving stage thus became the means for our uneasy participation in the world of the play We were invited to judge The induction scene Still had invented provided a sharp portrait of a world marked by overwhelming lust, characterized not so much by sexual attraction as sexual violence Later, the court procedure--at which Junior Brother was tried for rape--had its own ceremony and theater as the dual narratives of evidence and titillation became increasingly difficult to distinguish As Vindice put it, "[t]here's juggling of all sides" (22137) (1) The turning stage offered the audience momentary opportunities to spy into the resources of the staging, implicating us in those same voyeuristic glimpses afforded Vindice and others, whose moral disgust was framed by sexual desire As a result, this production implied an odd interanimation of performances that grew increasingly compulsive, as the stage kept turning, the interior walls moving like pages in a book …

Mary And The Marquise: Reading The Annunciation In The Romantic Rape Tradition

Abstract: This chapter argues that reading from a literary perspective while still taking the historical context seriously, one can construe the relationship between the Holy Spirit and Mary in Luke 1 as participating in the assumptions of romantic rape, a motif which stretches from Ovid's "The Rape of Callisto" to Heinrich Kleist's "The Marquise of O -," and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. The interaction between Mary and the angel Gabriel in the annunciation scene in Luke 1 joins in the romantic rape tradition because the penetration of the woman's sexual organ occurs in a situation of inequality. In the case of the conception of Christ, the penetration of a womb for reproductive purposes necessarily makes this passage sexual, regardless of the lack of lust on the part of the penetrator. The most notorious of all rape elisions, is the "dash" in "The Marquise of O - ", originally published in 1810.Keywords: angel Gabriel; conception of Christ; Heinrich von Kleist; Luke's annunciation scene; Mary; Ovid's "The Rape of Callisto"; romantic rape tradition; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; The Marquise of O -

Academic Freedom: How Odd Is That?

Abstract: Academic Freedom: How Odd Is That? FOR THE COMMON GOOD: PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN ACADEMIC FREEDOM. By Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post. New Haven, Connecticut and London, United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2009. 263 pages. $27.50. I. The first meeting I attended as a member of the Duke Law School faculty was dominated by a discussion of the ways in which the Law School held itself aloof from the rest of the university (budget, calendar, graduation, promotion procedures, the selection of chaired professors, admission policies) and the importance of maintaining those ways. As we were walking out I said to a colleague, "I understand perfectly why we would want this independence from the protocols and procedures everyone else adheres to; what I don't understand is the assumption (never voiced, but deeply controlling) that it is ours by right." I feel the same way about academic freedom. Who wouldn't like it to be the case that his or her profession was exempt from the spheres of authority and discipline to which other professions were subject? The desire needs no explanation. That anyone would grant the desire defies credulity. Matthew Finkin and Robert Post's new book For the Common Good: Principles of Academic Freedom1 is an effort to explain why academics should be allowed a latitude not enjoyed by others. Their method is first to air the arguments of those who want to limit or even to eliminate academic freedom and then to present the counterarguments as they have emerged in tandem with the growth in strength and influence of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). These counterarguments are not so much elaborated as simply plunked down; the implied message is twofold: (1) the pro-academic-freedom position is so superior that merely to announce it is to win the polemical day and (2) any reader of this book will be on the right side. There is a whiggish historical narrative in which the dark ages give way first to the Enlightenment and then to the triumph in the twentieth century of liberal rationalism. Statements from the New York Times, from the writings of prominent judges, and from the Church fathers are introduced and then quickly left behind, as if to suggest that they neither need nor deserve a hearing or a reasoned refutation: the implication is that they refute themselves. Here is an example early on in the book. Finkin and Post have been discussing the case of Noel Journet who was burned to death in 1582 for questioning the authenticity of the Bible and asserting that Christianity is a fraud.2 (Nowadays such publications land you on the New York Times Best Sellers list and garner you invitations to appear on Bill Maher's TV show.) They comment: "The medieval church had been critical not only of the pride of knowledge but also of the desire to know things not useful to salvation, of curiositas."3 First of all the disjunctive "not only . . . but" is off the mark: the pride of knowledge and the warning against seeking knowledge not useful to salvation are one and the same. Useful knowledge, according to Augustine (whose strictures against the "vice" of curiosity are canonical), is knowledge that leads you to a heightened awareness of God's bounty;4 prideful knowledge is knowledge you accumulate in order to display your dominion - not God's - over nature.5 "Curiosity for Augustine," writes Duke Professor of Divinity Paul Griffiths, "is appetite for nothing other than the ownership of new knowledge."6 The man who is curious accumulates knowledge for the sake of collecting it; the man who acquires knowledge, as we might say, "for its own sake," has given himself over to a form of lust, to an acquisitiveness, which because it is without a purpose beyond itself can never satisfy. Like Edward G. Robinson's insatiable gangster in Key Largo, he always wants more.7 The curious man, says Griffiths, "is always a fornicator: he perverts study and investigation in much the same way that having sex with those to whom you are not married perverts the gift of sexual appetite. …

Metaphors for Metamorphosis: Mary Daly Meets Gertrud the Great of Helfta1

Abstract: he moment of change is the only poem." This verse, written by Adrienne Rich, encapsulates the interrelatedness of language and ontology. Indeed, in the last couple of decades, a number of women writers have demonstrated the indispensability of women's words for women's transcendence. To process their processes, the essential thing is that women speak and hear their own words, giving priority to their own experiences. Contemporary feminists, eminently Anne Carr, Rebecca Chopp, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Johnson, Sallie McFague, and Dorothee Solle make the claim particularly plausible and urgent in their chilling critique of Christianity's almost exclusive use of male symbols to name God. The women charge hegemonic male imagery for God on two accounts: idolatry and the oppression of women. In assigning finite maleness infinite significance, women's inferiority and subordination are reinforced.4 According to them, the hegemony renders patriarchal culture sacred and stabilizes it as such by stultifying women's growth. Over against such images, the new words and symbols of women "not only . . . call for change, but . . . invoke it."5 Yet, the modern era is not the first time that women urged upon the dominantly male theological symbols a commitment to the necessity of women's words for women's transcendence. Indeed, the theme is evident within the writings of a number of high medieval women religious and visionaries (e.g., Hadewijch of Antwerp, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and the nuns of Helfta). Fruitful consonance between this trend of contemporary feminist and medieval women writers comes from two immensely creative female authors who emerge from the Roman Catholic context: Mary Daly (b. 1928), a feminist philosopher, "Nag-gnostic," and post-Christian prophet of modern-day North America, and Gertrud the Great of Helfta (c. 1256-1302), a spiritual author, visionary, and Benedictine-Cistercian nun of thirteenth- century Saxony. By specifically comparing the literary projects of Daly and Gertrud, this study highlights a linguistic tool used by both authors: metaphors for metamorphosis. The paper first explores the metaphorical strategy of Daly, and then discusses that of Gertrud. Special attention is given to the ways in which Gertrud' s method diverges from and aligns with Daly's. This illumines new facets of Gertrud' s rhetorical strategy. The study, therefore, ultimately adds depth and complexity to our understanding of the linguistic tools medieval women religious writers employed in order to transform the lives of their readers. Mary Daly on the Metaphor Mary Daly is, of course, famously known for reading the Christian tradition in terms of its patriarchal protectors, and then reading those terms to their logical conclusion from a feminist stance. To be sure, the revision of theological vocabulary is the mainspring of her method in all of her works: Beyond God the Father, Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust, Quintessence, and not the least in Webster s ' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. In her first groundbreaking book, Beyond God the Father (1973), Daly works to expose patriarchal language, particularly within her own Roman Catholic, Christian tradition. She writes of how the hegemonic Father God symbol has been rooted in persons' imaginations as the patriarch in heaven who rules "his" people and ordains the male rule of society as "his" divine plan. Further, Daly says that women have been identified with evil in the symbol of Eve, a symbol constructed by patriarchy's projection of evil onto the other. As scapegoats in the prognosis, women receive the negative qualities of sin's victimization: "the propensity for being temptresses, the evil and matter-bound nature of the female, the alleged shallowness of mind, weakness of will, and hyperemotionality." According to Daly, the unique male savior, Jesus, fixated upon in "Christolatry," does not liberate women, but rather encourages their further victimization. …