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The notion of a personal self took centuries to evolve, reaching the pinnacle of autonomy with Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' in the 17th century. This 'personalisation' of identity thrived for another hundred years before it began to be questioned, subject to the emergence of broader, more inclusive forms of agency. Simulated Selves: The Undoing Personal Identity in the Modern World addresses the 'constructed' notion of personal identity in the West and how it has been eclipsed by the development of new technological, social, art historical and psychological infrastructures over the last two centuries. While the provisional nature of the self-sense has been increasingly accepted in recent years, Simulated Selves addresses it in a new way - not by challenging it directly, but by observing changes to the environments and cultural conventions that have traditionally supported it. By narrating both its dismantling and its incapacitation in this way, it records its undoing. Like The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (to which it forms a companion volume), Simulated Selves straddles cultural history and philosophy. Firstly, it identifies hitherto neglected forces that inform the course of cultural history. Secondly, it highlights how the self is not the self-authenticating abstraction, only accessible to introspection, that it seems to be; it is also a cultural and historical phenomenon. Arguing that it is by engaging in cultural conventions that we subscribe to the process of identity-formation, the book also suggests that it is in these conventions that we see our self-sense - and its transience - best reflected. By examining the traces that the trajectory of the self-sense has left in its environment, Simulated Selves offers a radically new approach to the question of personal identity, asking not only 'how and why is it under threat?' but also 'given that we understand the self-sense to be a constructed phenomenon, why do we cling to it?'.
Ruth Ross is hardly a household name, yet most New Zealanders today owe the way they understand the Treaty of Waitangi — or te Tiriti o Waitangi as Ross called it — to this remarkable woman' s path-breaking historical research.Taking us on a journey from small university classes and a lively government department in the nation' s war-time capital to an economically poor but culturally rich Maori community in the far north, and from tiny schools and cloistered university offices to parliamentary committees and a legal tribunal, Attwood enables us to grasp how and why the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand law, politics, society and culture has been transformed in the last seven decades.A frank and moving meditation on the making of history and its advantages and disadvantages for life in a democratic society, A Bloody Difficult Subject is a surprising story full of unforeseen circumstances, unexpected twists, unlikely turns and unanticipated outcomes.
Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served as Provost of Princeton University, president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a variety of roles–teacher, mentor, colleague, administrator, writer, and friend–Sheldon Hackney has been a source of wisdom, empowerment, and wise counsel during more than four decades of historical and educational achievement. His life, both inside and outside the academy, has focused on issues closely related to civil rights, social justice, and the vagaries of race, class, regional culture, and national identity. Each of the essays in this volume touches upon one or more of these important issues–themes that have animated Sheldon Hackney’s scholarly and professional life.
«In many ways», Robert J.C. Young writes, «colonization from the very first carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.» Imperial Affliction examines some ways in which Young's observation could be applied to problems of subjectivity and influence within the colonizing nations themselves, particularly eighteenth-century Britain. How might these «seeds of destruction» manifest themselves as problems of identity? How might the very selves with greatest access to self-affirmation - the idea of the empire, the idea of British citizenry, the idea of the British self - actually find themselves vulnerable, confused, or damaged? Using multiple forms of postcolonial critique, this book turns back to salient eighteenth-century British lives and work for a different kind of enlightenment. Among its central subjects are the elusive subjectivity of William Collins; the exilic religious experience of William Cowper and its multiple readings in the twentieth century by a self-fashioned exilic, Donald Davie; the «missed encounter» between Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson, and the ways in which that problem was re-inscribed in the work of W. Jackson Bate and Lionel Trilling; the problem of imperial fixity in James Cook's journals with a view to Gray's «Elegy» and Goldsmith's «Deserted Village»; and the problem of purity as a paradoxically privileged and exilic force in the work of John Newton and Christopher Smart. In these explorations, this book illustrates both an expanded view of eighteenth-century colonial liabilities and a new emphasis on postcolonial critique as a means of exploring the fissures always present in imperial ambition.
What is actually happening on college campuses in the years between admission and graduation? Not enough to keep America competitive, and not enough to provide our citizens with fulfilling lives. When A Nation at Risk called attention to the problems of our public schools in 1983, that landmark report provided a convenient "cover" for higher education, inadvertently implying that all was well on America's campuses. Declining by Degrees blows higher education's cover. It asks tough--and long overdue--questions about our colleges and universities. In candid, coherent, and ultimately provocative ways, Declining by Degrees reveals: - how students are being short-changed by lowered academic expectations and standards; -why many universities focus on research instead of teaching and spend more on recruiting and athletics than on salaries for professors; -why students are disillusioned; -how administrations are obsessed with rankings in news magazines rather than the quality of learning; -why the media ignore the often catastrophic results; and -how many professors and students have an unspoken "non-aggression pact" when it comes to academic effort. Declining by Degrees argues persuasively that the multi-billion dollar enterprise of higher education has gone astray. At the same time, these essays offer specific prescriptions for change, warning that our nation is in fact at greater risk if we do nothing.
The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species evoked a spectrum of responses, from fervent endorsement to vehement opposition, because of the theory of natural selection's implications for Western theological and cultural orthodoxy. During the 1860 Oxford gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce engaged in a riveting and widely publicized debate, dissecting the merits and drawbacks of Darwin's theory. Their clash ignited a multifaceted discourse that reverberated through the intellectual circles of Victorian Britain, culminating in the Royal Society's deliberations over whether to bestow upon Darwin the esteemed Copley Medal, its highest honor. In this second edition of Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal, and the Rise of Naturalism, 1861–1864, students engage in debates within the Royal Society that navigate the tension between natural and teleological views. The student roles delve into topics like inductive reasoning, science in industrial society, social reform, and women's rights, all centered around the Copley deliberations and the societal impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory.