John Edward Williams' 1965 novel "Stoner" warrants careful examination as a reflection of institutional power structures and generational transitions in American academia. The work's portrayal of academic culture and authority raises important questions about how educational institutions navigate change and difference. The text's positioning within academia deserves particular scrutiny, especially regarding its relationship to intellectual …
As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticized threshold that must …
It’s hard to explain what I saw. I love a film that does not follow the cliche of what it’s supposed to do. In the same way, I love a “novel” that tries to be anything but it. You can’t dance while you see Merzbow perform live. But you can rock your head and thrash …
Kimber’s novels share common virtues, however: they are all fast-paced, entertaining thrillers that are as intellectually stimulating as they are page-turners. Kimber’s aim is the same as that of his literary exemplar, Colin Wilson: to write with a “wide-angled vision” that does not “merely reflect the everyday” – the ordinariness of a life lived at …
Instead, based on the narrative of the movie, Napoleon only seeks to escape Elba to meet Josephine again because he is infuriated by the rumors of her contact with the Russian Tsar. It is outrageous because there is no possible way that the people producing the film did not know that Napoleon was well informed …
Sophisticated sociopolitical arguments are seeded through this book – about sex differences, elitism, the nature and purpose of universities, and freedom of conscience – but none of these viewpoints are expressed by Angel, although we infer that he generally agrees with their conservative-reactionary tenor. There are shrewd observations of today’s cry-bully tendencies, with their manic …
Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in …
For Camus, the great novelty of Christianity is not faith because faith only shields Christian beliefs from criticism but rather the Christian notion of apocalyptic history and a final redemption in the afterlife. This belief in the apocalypse expresses a tragic sensibility in which the Christian embraces his or her mortality in the hope of …
Kant’s conception of God was the author of divine commandments. Human obligation towards one’s fellow being started from these commandments, which Kant called “statutory commandments.” But the actual legislators of moral commandments were human beings themselves: God was the author of divine legislation, but moral legislation was self-created and self-directed by human conscience.
For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans …
