Search Results

Mimesis is an activity by which one thing produces at least part of the effect that another thing would naturally produce. In art theater, mimesis is what makes a performance have an effect on its audience similar to the one that real events would have. Music may be mimetic, but in a limited way. Mimesis in all cases involves duplicity—producing the double of something—and in theater and fiction it also requires the complicity of an audience. In some cases, mimesis involves modeling, as when a child models the behavior of a parent. Plato rejected mimesis in theater because he thought that modeling would corrupt actors who present weak or bad characters, and also because he held that mimesis of virtue threatens to lead an audience astray through duplicity. Plato is wrong on the first point, but partly right on the second, which will be addressed in Chapter 12.

The chapter explores the concept of female “doubling” prevalent in sensation novels popular in the Victorian era. In these literary pieces, the predominant theme is female self-replication and transcendence of class boundaries through the institution of marriage. Conflict is manifested through subplots of adultery, female duplicity, and male oppression. These elements “empower” or force the heroine to constantly reinvent herself into different forms throughout the novel. These novels, when stripped of the veil of sensationalism, have at their base, anxieties of Victorian women regarding female duplicity and the loss or transformation of identity in marriage. Three sensation novels, Lady Audley's Secret, East Lynne, and Tess of the D' Urbervilles, are examined for their treatment of a female's power to change her identity, to manage the “otherness” within a one's self—the occurrence of which transforms the social institutions that restrict female difference—marriage and class—into another kind of fiction.

This chapter presents a debate on whether local government was a good thing or a bad thing. Local government had few detractors but many admirers, most of whom saw it as reflecting a distinctively British value of local pride and initiative. Inconsistency, duplicity, inefficiency, friction, costlines, mutual contempt and loathing, unpredictability, and changing were among the characteristics of local government that were believed by the party that was against it.

As with holy hustling, the charismatic practice is distinctively youthful, masculine, and urban. The charismatics themselves are twelve young men. Mainly in their early to mid-twenties and nearly all unemployed, they have the clairvoyance of the streetwise, of seeing clearly into a world of tricksters. Urban slang in some parts of Africa have taken over a traditional term for a seer or diviner, one who “sees clearly” into the invisible world, and associates that with street smarts. The urban slang introduces—or perhaps sharpens from past ambivalence toward the seer—what is a double edge in its sense of duplicity: the clairvoyant is able to see through the scams of tricksters but able also to con others, who don't see clearly, or at all. What “holy hustlers” signals is not a pejorative judgment, or even an obvious contradiction, but a problematic, perhaps a synergy between contraries.

This chapter looks at pre-Nazi discourses on Jews and crime to show the interplay between myth, reality, and stereotype in non-Jewish and Jewish perceptions of “Jewish criminality.” In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, debates about the so-called Kriminalstatistik, including criminal statistics on Jews, were a part of public discussions on many levels. The chapter focuses on the application of stereotypes of Jews as criminals, in which allegations of duplicity and financial impropriety loomed largest. The notion of endemic Jewish crookedness was particularly intense in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War, when a number of Jews were apparently involved in a barrage of highly publicized scandals.

This chapter reviews the tension between the union of the couple and the representation of marriage in screwball comedy. Marriage is commonly understood in the screwball world to involve misery, oppression and confinement; it is nice because it is legal and, therefore, respectable. At the same time, marriage no longer necessarily involves a lifetime commitment. There is an evident tension between the diegetic representation of marriage and the screwball narratives drive to unite the couple. Marriage is never a beautiful thing in screwball comedy; it is always a problem. No one simply falls in love, gets married and lives happily ever after. This very variation on the themes of marital duplicity and infidelity appears in screwball comedy. Indeed, there are hardly any happily married characters; it is a world peopled with widowed fathers, maiden aunts, bachelor butlers and maids.

This chapter investigates the strategy of duplicity exercised by the post-2000 government, both in its bid to join North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and to become a member of the European Union (EU). It shows how EU vigilance over child care briefly led to a crisis between the EU and Romania, and how failings in the EU's untidy system of decision making enabled the Partidul Social Democrat (PSD) (Social Democratic Party) to regain the initiative after a short time. The Partnership for Peace programme opened the possibility of future NATO membership without allowing any real participation in NATO's current decision making. The EU was surrendering to the Romanian state approach of relying on changes whose existence was confined to documents and regulations. The PSD mounted a major diplomatic offensive to change hearts and minds in the corridors of power in the Parliament, Council and at the top of the EU Commission.

James Stewart’s brief illness requires the attention of local physicians and also summons visits from some nefarious characters, white business acquaintances who have a mysterious meeting with the dying man. Nearly paralyzed with loss, Maria Stewart contemplates the meaning of this cruel abandonment.

This chapter analyzes tragic instances in which we can observe an intersection between the erotic emotion as unsettling and disruptive and the broader category of madness, in order to highlight the specifics of erotic mania in this genre. In tragedy erotic passion, whether marital love or illicit sexual desire, tends to be represented as a negative and destructive experience. This is evident in the symmetrical examples of Aeschylus' Supplices and Sophocles' Trachiniae. Conversely, in tragic presentation other monstrous drives are ‘erotized’ and conveyed through reference to a metaphorical, mad erôs, here illustrated by the representation of the bloodthirsty urge to kill in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. The chapter concludes by proposing an interpretation for this one-sided representation of erôs in tragedy in terms of the genre’s interest in a public, rather than private response to crisis and of its concern with the risks posed by strong and uncontrolled emotions.

Focusing on the semantic history of the word “Creole” in the Caribbean and New Orleans, chapter 1 investigates the connection between the notion of betrayal and the concept of Creoleness. The chapter follows the life of Anatole Broyard (1920–1990), an American writer and literary critic of Creole descent from New Orleans who became infamous after his death for having passed as a white man during his entire adult life on the East Coast. The passing story of Broyard illustrates the evasive and unreliable nature of Creoleness. Boisseron proposes a theory of racial passing as a quintessential expression of Creoleness in which the discrepancies, shifts, slippages, and alterations, which are often misconceived as calculated expressions of betrayal and duplicity, are in fact defining components of both racial passing and the history of Creoleness.

Relating three brief banal episodes of law enforcement in Seattle, Steve Herbert put to the test the notion of accountability by displacing it from the police to the ethnographer. When the latter observes unlawful or immoral acts committed by the former, they both become accountable. What attitude should the researcher adopt? If he remains silent while disapproving, is he not deceiving the officers and betraying their public? Before answering these questions, Herbert proposes three portraits of the ethnographer as a distanced professional, as an engaged public actor and as an ethical human being. Facing the dilemma of having to choose between these three positions, he explains that he opted for the duplicity of silence so as to continue his observation of the business of policing as usual and to complete his critical analysis of newly implemented policies of social control.

The introduction discusses the central claim that for Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity and presents a brief outline of the book as a whole. According to Pascal, we are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness. Pascal’s account of the noetic effects of sin has long been overlooked by theologians, but it is both traditional and innovative.

This chapter presents Pascal’s account of the duplicitous social order and the duplicitous human subject. According to Pascal, each individual person’s disordered self-love is changed into something different, the desire to deceive and be deceived, as a result of his interactions with other members of society. As a result, even our very selfhood is false and imaginary, a social figment rooted in duplicity. To help make Pascal’s ideas clearer, I offer an extended example of a false self drawn from George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

The Introduction presents the three major instruments that guide America’s activities abroad: the Treaty Power, the War Power, and the Spy Power. Within the category of Spy Power one finds the Third Option: the use of “covert action” as a means for secretly influencing world events. Each of these powers has been the subject of institutional strife within the United States, as political leaders debate the proper use of each approach to foreign policy. Specific laws have been crafted to ensure that policymakers adhere to the Constitution as they exercise these powers, but these laws have not always been honored by the executive branch. The Introduction also sets the stage for an understanding of how the philosophies of anti-communism and counterterrorism have driven the adoption of clandestine interventions overseas as a central strand of American foreign policy, as has the protection of US business interests (“dollar duplicity” to accompany “dollar diplomacy”).