Activity

I am trying to find a cause of Amanda's actions that I can believe in. To believe in her immediate partisan excitement ("instinctive" is the word she will use about Adam's male brutality) upon reading that a woman shot her husband ("Kill him?" Adam inquires; "Nope. Condition critical, though."), I …

The fullest description of what I take him to have in mind is given in, of all things, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, in which Mill's praise of liberty is contested and from which, I suppose, Veblen got his characterization of the leisure class as the Barbarians (distinguishing these from th…

No work of serious social criticism was more on the minds of thinking Americans in the period preceding and during the thirties than Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. One can take The Philadelphia Story as a head-on attempt to discredit Veblen's assessment of aristocratic culture as characteriz…

[...] such comedies invite us to think again, what it is Nietzsche sees when he speaks of our coming to doubt our right to happiness, to the pursuits of happiness. In the Genealogy of Morals, he draws a consequence of this repressed right as the construction of the ascetic ideal, our form of the th…

[...] In comedies of remarriage the fact of virginity is evidently not what is at stake. Yet all the more, it seems to me, is the concept of virginity still at stake, or what the fact meant is at stake something about the possession of chasteness or innocence, whatever one's physically determin…