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An Analysis of Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author

An Analysis of Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay The Death of the Author argues against the traditional practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author into textual interpretation because of the resultant limitations imposed on a text. Hailing the birth of the reader Barthes posits a new abstract notion of the reader as the conceptual space containing all the text’s possible meanings. The essay has become one of the most cited works in literary criticism and is a key text for any reader approaching reader response theory. | An Analysis of Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author

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An Analysis of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

An Analysis of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The end of the Cold War which occurred early in the 1990s brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how would world order be remade in an age no longer dominated by the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism? Samuel P. Huntington was one of the many political scientists who responded to this challenge by conceiving works that attempted to predict the ways in which conflict might play out in the 21st century and in The Clash of Civilizations he suggested that a new kind of conflict one centred on cultural identity would become the new focus of international relations. Huntington's theories greeted with scepticism when his book first appeared in the 1990s acquired new resonance after 9/11. The Clash of Civilizations is now one of the most widely-set and read works of political theory in US universities; Huntington's theories have also had a measurable impact on American policy. In large part this is a product of his problem-solving skills. Clash is a monument to its author's ability to generate and evaluate alternative possibilities and to make sound decisions between them. Huntington's view that international politics after the Cold War would be neither peaceful nor liberal nor cooperative ran counter to the predictions of almost all of his peers yet his position – the product of an unusual ability to redefine an issue so as to see it in new ways – has been largely vindicated by events ever since. | An Analysis of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

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An Analysis of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

An Analysis of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Historians of the American Revolution had always seen the struggle for independence either as a conflict sparked by heavyweight ideology or as a war between opposing social groups acting out of self-interest. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn begged to differ re-examining familiar evidence to establish new connections that in turn allowed him to generate fresh explanations. His influential reconceptualizing of the underlying reasons for America's independence drive focused instead on pamphleteering – and specifically on the actions of an influential group of ‘conspirators’ who identified and were determined to protect a particularly American set of values. For Bailyn these ideas could indeed be traced back to the ferment of the English Civil War – stemming from radical pamphleteers whose anti-authoritarian ideas crossed the Atlantic and embedded themselves in colonial ideology. Bailyn's thesis helps to explain the Revolution's success by pointing out how deep-rooted its founding ideas were; the Founding Fathers may have been reading Locke but the men they led were inspired by shorter pithier and altogether far more radical works. Only by understanding this Bailyn argues can we understand the passion and determination that allowed the rebel American states to defeat a global superpower. | An Analysis of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

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An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History

An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on the history of the United States remains one of the most famous and influential works in the American canon. That is a testament to Turner's powers of creative synthesis; in a few short pages he succeeded in redefining the way in which whole generations of Americans understood the manner in which their country was shaped and their own character moulded by the frontier experience. It is largely thanks to Turner's influence that the idea of America as the home of a sturdily independent people – one prepared ultimately to obtain justice for themselves if they could not find it elsewhere – was born. The impact of these ideas can still be felt today: in many Americans' suspicion of big government in their attachment to guns – even in Star Trek's vision of space as the final frontier. Turner's thesis may now be criticised as limited (in its exclusion of women) and over-stated (in its focus on the western frontier). That it redefined an issue in a highly impactful way – and that it did so exceptionally eloquently – cannot be doubted. | An Analysis of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History

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An Analysis of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

An Analysis of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is one of the most widely read works of social psychology written in the 20th-century. It exemplifies the powers of creative thinking and critical analysis at their best providing an insight into two crucial elements of critical thinking. Hoffer is likely to go down in history as one of America’s great creative thinkers – a writer not bound by standard frameworks of thinking or academic conventions willing to beat his own path in framing the best possible answers to the questions he investigated. An impoverished largely unschooled manual laborer who had survived the worst effects of the Great Depression in the United States Hoffer was a passionate autodidact whose philosophical and psychological education came from omnivorous reading. Working without the help of any mentors he forged the fearsomely creative and individual approach to problems demonstrated in The True Believer. The book which earned him his reputation examines the different phenomena of fanaticism – religious or political – and applies Hoffer’s analytical skills to reveal that deep down all ‘true believers’ display the same needs and tendencies whatever their final choice of belief. Incisive and persuasive it remains a classic. | An Analysis of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

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An Analysis of Griselda Pollock's Vision and Difference Feminism Femininity and the Histories of Art

An Analysis of Griselda Pollock's Vision and Difference Feminism Femininity and the Histories of Art

Vision and Difference published in 1988 is one of the most significant works in feminist visual culture arguing that feminist art history of is a political as well as academic endeavour. Pollock expresses how images are key to the construction of sexual difference both in visual culture and in broader societal experiences. Her argument places feminist theory at the centre of art history proffering the idea that a feminist understanding of art history is an analysis of art history itself. This text remains key not only to understand feminine art historically but to grasp strategies for representation in the future and adding to its contemporary value. | An Analysis of Griselda Pollock's Vision and Difference Feminism Femininity and the Histories of Art

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An Analysis of Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death

An Analysis of Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death

Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential works of Christian philosophy written in the nineteenth century. One of the cornerstones of Kierkegaard’s reputation as a writer and thinker the book is also a masterclass in the art of interpretation. In critical thinking interpretation is all about defining and clarifying terms – making sure that everyone is on the same page. But it can also be about redefining terms: showing old concepts in a new light by interpreting them in a certain way. This skill is at the heart of The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard’s book focuses on the meaning of “despair” – the sickness named in the title. For Kierkegaard the key problem of existence was an individual’s relationship with God and he defines true despair as equating to the idea of sin – something that separates people from God or from the idea of a higher standard beyond ourselves. Kierkegaard’s interpretative journey into the ideas of despair sin and death is a Christian exploration of the place of the individual in the world. But its interpretative skills inspired generations of philosophers of all stripes – including notorious atheists like Jean-Paul Sartre. | An Analysis of Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death

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An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon is one of the most important figures in the history of what is now known as postcolonial studies – the field that examines the meaning and impacts of European colonialism across the world. Born in the French colony of Martinique Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria another French colony that saw brutal violence during its revolution against French rule. His experiences power the searing indictment of colonialism that is his final book 1961’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s account of the physical and psychological violence of colonialism forms the basis of a passionate closely reasoned call to arms – a call for violent revolution. Incendiary even today it was more so in its time; the book first being published during the brutal conflict caused by the Algerian Revolution. Viewed as a profoundly dangerous work by the colonial powers of the world Fanon’s book helped to inspire liberation struggles across the globe. Though it has flaws The Wretched of the Earth is above all a testament to the power of passionately sustained and closely reasoned argument: Fanon’s presentation of his evidence combines with his passion to produce an argument that it is almost impossible not to be swayed by. | An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

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An Analysis of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

An Analysis of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction combats traditional art criticism’s treatment of artworks as fixed unchanging mystical objects. For Walter Benjamin the consequences of addressing a work of art in this manner have a wider resonance: closed off from any active visual or tactile engagement the work of art becomes an object of passive contemplation and a potential tool of oppression. Benjamin argues that technology has fundamentally altered the way art is experienced. Potentially open to interpretation and accessible to many art in the age of mechanical reproduction has the potential to be mobilized for radical purposes. While ostensibly addressing the artistic consequences of technical reproducibility on art Benjamin also addresses the wider political consequences of this shift. | An Analysis of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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An Analysis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable

An Analysis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable

One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box. Good creative thinkers resist orthodox ideas take new lines of enquiry and generally come at problems from the kinds of angles almost no one else could. And what is more when the ideas of creative thinkers are convincing they can reshape an entire topic and change the orthodoxy for good. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 bestseller The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is precisely such a book: an entertaining polemical creative attack on how people in general and economic experts in particular view the possibility of catastrophic events. Taleb writes with rare creative verve for someone who is also an expert in mathematics finance and epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and he martials all his skills to turn standard reasoning inside out. His central point is that far from being unimportant extremely rare events are frequently the most important ones of all: it is highly improbable but highly consequential occurrences – what he calls Black Swans – that have shaped history most. As a result Taleb concludes improbability is not a reason to act as if a possible event does not matter. Rather it should inspire the opposite reaction. | An Analysis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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An Analysis of N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God

An Analysis of N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God

Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God is the first volume of his acclaimed series ‘Christian Origins and the Question of God’ comprehensively addressing the historical and theological questions surrounding the origins of Christianity. The text outlines Wright's hermeneutical theory and discusses the history of the Jews stressing the close connection with Judaism and developing this to examine the treatment of early Christians. Wright’s work has played a significant role in challenging prevailing assumptions relating to the religious thought of first-century Jews. On a more technical level Wright provides a reappraisal of literary and historical readings of the New Testament. | An Analysis of N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God

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An Analysis of St. Augustine's The City of God Against the Pagans

An Analysis of St. Augustine's The City of God Against the Pagans

The City of God against the Pagans is a central text in the Western intellectual tradition. Made up of twenty-two lengthy books Augustine wrote his masterpiece over a thirteen-year period during which the Western Roman Empire began to unravel. The first ten books are a critique of pagan religion and philosophy while books eleven to twenty-two treat the relationship between the City of God and the Earthly City. Throughout Augustine conveys his mature vision of what it means for a Christian to live in a world with evil. Its arguments and ideas have provoked debate for nearly 1600 years and remains a central text in the disciplines of theology historiography and political theory. | An Analysis of St. Augustine's The City of God Against the Pagans

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An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

A critical analysis of Spivak's classic 1988 postcolonial studies essay in which she argues that a core problem for the poorest and most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no platform to express their concerns and no voice to affect policy debates or demand a fairer share of society’s goods. A key theme of Gayatri Spivak's work is agency: the ability of the individual to make their own decisions. While Spivak's main aim is to consider ways in which subalterns – her term for the indigenous dispossessed in colonial societies – were able to achieve agency this paper concentrates specifically on describing the ways in which western scholars inadvertently reproduce hegemonic structures in their work. Spivak is herself a scholar and she remains acutely aware of the difficulty and dangers of presuming to speak for the subalterns she writes about. As such her work can be seen as predominantly a delicate exercise in the critical thinking skill of interpretation; she looks in detail at issues of meaning specifically at the real meaning of the available evidence and her paper is an attempt not only to highlight problems of definition but to clarify them. What makes this one of the key works of interpretation in the Macat library is of course the underlying significance of this work. Interpretation in this case is a matter of the difference between allowing subalterns to speak for themselves and of imposing a mode of speaking on them that – however well-intentioned – can be as damaging in the postcolonial world as the agency-stifling political structures of the colonial world itself. By clearing away the detritus of scholarly attempts at interpretation Spivak takes a stand against a specifically intellectual form of oppression and marginalization. | An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

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An Analysis of David Graeber's Debt The First 5 000 Years

An Analysis of David Graeber's Debt The First 5 000 Years

Debt is one of the great subjects of our day and understanding the way that it not only fuels economic growth but can also be used as a means of generating profit and exerting control is central to grasping the way in which our society really works. David Graeber's contribution to this debate is to apply his anthropologists' training to the understanding of a phenomenon often considered purely from an economic point of view. In this respect the book can be considered a fine example of the critical thinking skill of problem-solving. Graeber's main aim is to undermine the dominant narrative which sees debt as the natural – and broadly healthy – outcome of the development of a modern economic system. He marshals evidence that supports alternative possibilities and suggests that the phenomenon of debt emerged not as a result of the introduction of money but at precisely the same time. This in turn allows Graeber to argue against the prevailing notion that economy and state are fundamentally separate entities. Rather he says the two were born together and have always been intertwined – with debt being a means of enforcing elite and state power. For Graeber this evaluation of the evidence points to a strong potential solution: there should be more readiness to write off debt and more public involvement in the debate over debt and its moral implications. | An Analysis of David Graeber's Debt The First 5 000 Years

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An Analysis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

An Analysis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The German sociologist Max Weber is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology and ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th-century. His most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a masterpiece of sociological analysis whose power is based on the construction of a rigorous and intricately interlinked piece of argumentation. Weber’s object was to examine the relationship between the development of capitalism and the different religious ideologies of Europe. While many other scholars focused on the material and instrumental causes of capitalism’s emergence Weber sought to demonstrate that different religious beliefs in fact played a significant role. In order to do this he employed his analytical skills to understand the relationship between capitalism and religious ideology carefully considering how far Protestant and secular capitalist ethics overlapped and to what extent they mirrored each other. One crucial element of Weber’s work was his consideration the degree to which cultural values acted as implicit or hidden reasons reinforcing capitalist ethics and behavior – an investigation that he based on teasing out the ‘arguments’ that underpin capitalism. Incisive and insightful Weber’s analysis continues to resonate with scholars today. | An Analysis of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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An Analysis of Henry Kissinger's World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

An Analysis of Henry Kissinger's World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

Henry Kissinger’s 2014 book World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History not only offers a summary of thinking developed throughout a long and highly influential career–it is also an intervention in international relations theory by one of the most famous statesmen of the twentieth century. Kissinger initially trained as a university professor before becoming Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon in 1973 – a position in which he both won the Nobel Peace Prize and was accused of war crimes by protesters against American military actions in Vietnam. While a controversial figure Kissinger is widely agreed to have a unique level of practical and theoretical expertise in politics and international relations – and World Order is the culmination of a lifetime’s experience of work in those fields. The product of a master of the critical thinking skill of interpretation World Order takes on the challenge of defining the worldviews at play in global politics today. Clarifying precisely what is meant by the different notions of ‘order’ imagined by nations across the world as Kissinger does highlights the challenges of world politics and sharpens the focus on efforts to make surmounting these divisions possible. While Kissinger’s own reputation will likely remain equivocal there is no doubting the interpretative skills he displays in this engaging and illuminating text. | An Analysis of Henry Kissinger's World Order Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

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An Analysis of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

An Analysis of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action. Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing secular political values – wanted to understand why women should become such active participants in a movement that seemingly promoted their subjugation. As Mahmood observed women’s active participation in the conservative Islamic revival presented (and presents) a difficult question for Western feminists: how to balance cultural sensitivity and promotion of religious freedom and pluralism with the feminist project of women’s liberation? Mahmood’s response was to conduct a detailed evaluation of the arguments made by both sides examining in particular the reasoning of female Muslims themselves. In a key moment of evaluation Mahmood suggests that Western feminist notions of agency are inadequate to arguments about female Muslim piety. Where Western feminists often restrict definitions of women’s agency to acts that undermine the normal male-dominated order of things Mahmood suggests instead that agency can encompass female acts that uphold apparently patriarchal values. Ultimately the Western feminist framework is in her evaluation inadequate and insufficient for discussing women’s groups in the Islamic revival. | An Analysis of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

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An Analysis of Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq

An Analysis of Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq

How do you solve a problem like understanding Iraq? For Hanna Batatu the solution to this conundrum lay in generating alternative possibilities that effectively side-stepped the conventional wisdom of the time. Historians had long held that Iraq – like other artificial creations of ex-colonial European powers who drew lines onto the world map that ignored longstanding tribal ethnic and religious ties – was best understood by delving into its political and religious history. Batatu used the problem solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities to argue that Iraq’s history was better understood through the lens of a Marxist analysis focused on socio-economic history. The Old Social Classes concludes that the divisions present in Iraq – and exposed by the revolutionary movements of the 1950s – are those characterized by the struggle for control over property and the means of production. Additionally Batatu sought to establish that the most important political movements of the time notably the nationalist Ba'athists and the pan-Arab Free Officers Movement had their origins in a homegrown communist ideology inspired by local conditions and local inequality. By posing new questions – and by undertaking a vast amount of research in primary sources a rarity in the history of this region – Batatu was able to produce a strong new solution to a longstanding historiographical puzzle. | An Analysis of Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq

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An Analysis of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind

An Analysis of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind

Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind is now famous above all as the origin of the phrase “the ghost in the machine” – a phrase Ryle used to attack the popular idea that our bodies and minds are separate. His own position was that mental acts are not at all distinct from bodily actions. Indeed they are the same thing merely described in different ways – and if one cuts through the confusing language of the old philosophical debates he suggests that becomes clear. While in many ways modern philosophers of mind have moved on from or discarded Ryle’s actual arguments The Concept of Mind remains a classic example of two central critical thinking skills: interpretation and reasoning. Ryle was what is known as an “ordinary language” philosopher – a school who considered many philosophical problems to exist purely because of philosophical language. He therefore considered his task as a philosopher to be one of cutting through confusing language and clarifying matters – exemplifying the critical thinking skill of interpretation at its best. Rather than adding to philosophical knowledge as such moreover he saw his role as one of mapping it – giving it what he called a “logical geography. ” As such The Concept of Mind is also all about reasoning: laying out organizing and systematizing clear arguments. | An Analysis of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind

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An Analysis of Chris Argyris's Integrating the Individual and the Organization

An Analysis of Chris Argyris's Integrating the Individual and the Organization

A critical analysis of Argyris’s Integrating The Individual and the Organization which forms part of a series of essays and books considering how organisations should be run. The essay explores the lack of congruence between the needs and expectations of individual employees and the organisations that employ them. The impact of the work depends heavily on reasoning skills. Chris Argyris used strong well-structured arguments to make his point. His reasoning has strong implications for solving a problem that many organizations experience: disengaged and disloyal employees. Grounding his argument in studies on human nature Argyris highlighted that demands of greater independence an expansion of interests and re-orientation of goals usually accompany maturation which is at odds with higher control stemming from formal organisations. This frustration he contends is detrimental to productivity increases the chance of failure and causes conflict. | An Analysis of Chris Argyris's Integrating the Individual and the Organization

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An Analysis of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet

An Analysis of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet

In this book Sedgwick examines texts from Europe and America such as Wilde Nietzsche and Proust and considers the historical moment when sexual orientation came to be as important a signifier of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In doing this Sedgwick provides a history of sexuality that contends that the dualistic homo/heterosexual model is as much a basis for modern culture as it is an outcome of it. Thus Sedgwick laid the foundations of Queer Theory contributing to the contemporary debates regarding the relationship between desire and normative structures of power the question of empirical sexuality and the intricacies of the relationship between sexuality and gender. | An Analysis of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet

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An Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture

An Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture

Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands at its heart lies the question of interpreting and understanding encounters between the western colonial powers and the nations across the globe that they colonized. Colonization was not just an economic military or political process but one that radically affected culture and identity across the world. It is a field in which interpretation comes to the fore and much of its force depends on addressing the complex legacy of colonial encounters by careful sustained attention to the meaning of the traces that they left on colonized cultures. What Bhabha’s writing like so much postcolonial thought shows is that the arts of clarification and definition that underpin good interpretation are rarely the same as simplification. Indeed good interpretative clarification is often about pointing out and dividing the different kinds of complexity at play in a single process or term. For Bhabha the object is identity itself as expressed in the ideas colonial powers had about themselves. In his interpretation what at first seems to be the coherent set of ideas behind colonialism soon breaks down into a complex mass of shifting stances – yielding something much closer to postcolonial thought than a first glance at his sometimes dauntingly complex suggests. | An Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture

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An Analysis of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

An Analysis of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be seen without exaggeration as a landmark text in intellectual history. In his analysis of shifts in scientific thinking Kuhn questioned the prevailing view that science was an unbroken progression towards the truth. Progress was actually made he argued via paradigm shifts meaning that evidence that existing scientific models are flawed slowly accumulates – in the face at first of opposition and doubt – until it finally results in a crisis that forces the development of a new model. This development in turn produces a period of rapid change – extraordinary science Kuhn terms it – before an eventual return to normal science begins the process whereby the whole cycle eventually repeats itself. This portrayal of science as the product of successive revolutions was the product of rigorous but imaginative critical thinking. It was at odds with science’s self-image as a set of disciplines that constantly evolve and progress via the process of building on existing knowledge. Kuhn’s highly creative re-imagining of that image has proved enduringly influential – and is the direct product of the author’s ability to produce a novel explanation for existing evidence and to redefine issues so as to see them in new ways. | An Analysis of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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An Analysis of Jacques Derrida's Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

An Analysis of Jacques Derrida's Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

Jacques Derrida’s Structure Sign and Play is one of the most controversial and influential philosophical texts of the 20th century. Delivered at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins the lecture took aim at the critical and philosophical fashions of the time and radically proposing a world in which meaning cannot be pinned down or traced to an origin but instead is continuously shifting fleeting and open to play. Hailed by many as a watershed in philosophy and literary theory Derrida’s lecture has shaped both disciplines. At once dense brilliant and humorous it is a crucial read for anyone interested in questioning our natural assumptions about meaning in the world. | An Analysis of Jacques Derrida's Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

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An Analysis of Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre

An Analysis of Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre

Few stories are more captivating than the one told by Natalie Zemon Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre. Basing her research on records of a bizarre court case that occurred in 16th-century France she uses the tale of a missing soldier – whose disappearance threatens the livelihood of his peasant wife – to explore complex social issues. Davis takes rich material – dramatic enough to have been the basis of two major films – and uses it to explore issues of identity women's role in peasant society the interior lives of the poor and the structure of village society all of them topics that had previously proved difficult for historians to grapple with. Davis displays fine qualities of reasoning throughout – not only in constructing her own narrative but also in persuading her readers of her point of view. Her work is also a fine example of good interpretation – practically every document in the case needs to be assessed for issues of meaning. | An Analysis of Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre

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