Algeria: Everlasting Political Drama (Algerie: Un Drame Politique Perpetuel),

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack T. Aalborg
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Clark

AbstractThis paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime.


2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-268
Author(s):  
Eva Urban

Drawing on a close reading of Theodor Adorno's essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in this article Eva Urban develops the argument that an analysis of the reification that reduces human relationships to mere business interactions has been a central concern of modern drama. The article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which this theme continues to be represented, interrogated, and challenged internationally in contemporary political plays and theatre performances across a range of genres and grounded in a variety of dramaturgical principles. It asks how drama, theatre-making, theatre-spectating, and theatre-participating can create dynamics necessary to enable a move from reified consciousness towards the development of critical autonomy and solidarity. A negotiation of the principles of critical consciousness and solidarity is problematic within economic structures that cause social, ethnic, and religious atomization and divisions. Her argument concludes with an outline for a manifesto for political drama and theatre practice to work against reification. Eva Urban is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department and an Associate of the Irish Studies Research Centre, CEI/CRBC, at the University of Rennes 2, France. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011), she has also published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and edited book collections.


Author(s):  
Doyeeta Majumder

This book examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the contemporary English stage. It will attempt to trace an evolution of the poetics of English and Scottish political drama through the early, middle, and late decades of the sixteenth-century in conjunction with developments in the political thought of the century, linking theatre and politics through the representations of the problematic figure of the usurper or, in Machiavellian terms, the ‘New Prince’. While the early Tudor morality plays are concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant, the later historical and tragic drama of the century foregrounds the figure of the illegitimate monarch who is a tyrant by default. On the one hand the sudden proliferation of usurpation plots in Elizabethan drama and the transition from the legitimate tyrant to the usurper tyrant is linked to the dramaturgical shift from the allegorical morality play tradition to later history plays and tragedies, and on the other it is reflective of a poetic turn in political thought which impelled political writers to conceive of the state and sovereignty as a product of human ‘poiesis’, independent of transcendental legitimization. The poetics of political drama and the emergence of the idea of ‘poiesis’ in the political context merge in the figure of the nuove principe: the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtu’ and through an act of law-making violence.


2017 ◽  
pp. 88-95
Author(s):  
Paul I Trensky ◽  
William E. Harkins

Scanning for argument: the argument was relatively well signalled by the introduction and the headings. What is the main argument? The following has been divided into proposition and evidence supporting it. Many readers do not differentiate the two which is a major error and leads to confusion and misunderstanding. A proposition is a statement being put forward as a point in argument construction. It can be given strength by evidence supporting it. • Proposition 1, para 2: The Maastricht Treaty was not the remarkable diplomatic achievement it was claimed to be. Evidence: street reaction apathetic, confused, hostile, fearful: (i) Danes voted against it; (ii) French approved it marginally (1%); (iii) commentators at the time said that if there had been greater scrutiny in Great Britain and Germany the outcome would have been uncertain; (iv) even those supporting it were just plain greedy. • Proposition 2, para 3: There was a ‘growing disillusionment with the European construct as a whole’. • Proposition 3, para 3: The ‘moral and political legitimacy’ of the European construct is in decline. Evidence: There is ‘a sense of disempowerment of the European citizen’ which has many roots, but three stand out: (i) democratic deficit; (ii) remoteness; (iii) competencies of union. • Conclusion: a package of three proposals (a limited ballot by citizens concerning legislation; internet access to European decision making; establishment of a constitutional council), taken from research, initiated by the European Parliament, can make a real difference to increase the power of the European citizen without creating a political drama. The argument as set out in the introduction (in paras 1–3) The Maastricht Treaty was not the diplomatic achievement it was claimed to be. The European citizen continues to be disempowered. There remains a growing disillusionment with the European construct as a whole which is suffering from a decline in its moral and political legitimacy. However, a package of three proposals (a limited ballot by citizens concerning legislation; internet access to European decision making; establishment of a constitutional council), taken from research, initiated by the European Parliament, can make a real difference to increase the power of the European citizen without creating a political drama.

2012 ◽  
pp. 197-197

J. M. Synge ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 169-202
Author(s):  
Seán Hewitt

This chapter considers Synge’s controversial, riot-inducing masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Playboy, as a form of discursive retribution against certain restrictive politics, deploys a drama of sexual selection in a degenerated landscape in order to posit ironic humour, imaginative freedom, and ‘savage’ violence as a revitalizing impulse. Beginning with a curious phonetic letter sent to Synge by his friend, this chapter explores the themes of evolutionism, degeneration, and irony discussed in previous chapters, showing how Synge’s writing interacted with contemporary eugenicist discourses but posited the case for social and economic regeneration (rather than ‘race improvement’) as an antidote. Against this background, the chapter demonstrates that The Playboy is the apotheosis of Synge’s increasingly modernist, increasingly political, drama. For him, nationalist orthodoxies and certain forms of economic and social modernization were degenerative, and The Playboy purposefully acts as a sort of ironic protest against this. The chapter concludes by showing that writers such as W. B. Yeats, and later the playwright Teresa Deevy in her The King of Spain’s Daughter (1937), recognized Synge’s literary and political radicalism before he was effectively canonized as a cultivator of a Romantic cult of the peasant. Synge’s modernism, as The Playboy of the Western World shows most clearly, is simultaneously a form of political and literary protest. Rooted in his socialism and informed by his long-standing engagement with modernization, it is the apotheosis of his tendency towards a literary experiment which works in tandem with an ever-developing political, social, and aesthetic consciousness.


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