Here We Go Again: Presidential Elections and the National Media

The fear of death is a major preoccupation in the West. This is not surprising given the debt we owe to Hobbes, who encourages this fear and makes it a central feature of his account of human nature. Rousseau, in contrast, wishes to reduce this fear as much as possible. Amour propre and the humanity Rousseau encourages are incompatible with excessive concern for self-preservation. This accounts for his antipathy to doctors and the medical arts. Rousseau, through his presentation of Emile and the savage, initially claims that the fear of death is unnatural and that humans should take a stoic stance toward it and all human attachments that lead to our "feeling death twice." A closer reading reveals that humans always have an awareness of death and that modern humans cannot entirely avoid these attachments. We can, however, avoid making preservation our highest goal, and this is essential to our happiness and ability to have compassion for others.     

Teaching “notre littérature”: The Place of la littérature québécoise in the Curriculum in Quebec

Recent calls for a greater emphasis on the teaching of Quebec literature from primary school to cégep once more link the teaching of Quebec literature with the survival of a language and a culture. The current debate echoes those which have taken place over the last 100 years, both under the denominational system of education and since the Révolution tranquille. Different pedagogical and ideological factors have influenced not only whether Francophone Canadian literature has been taught, but also what has been taught and how it has been taught. Anxieties about the status, history and definition of “notre littérature” have recurred throughout the century, as have concerns about the relationship between the literature of Quebec and the literature of metropolitan France. This article will discuss the teaching of literature in Quebec since 1900 to conclude with a consideration of the teaching of Francophone Canadian literature in Quebec today.     

‘Slightly Constitutional’ Politics: Fianna Fáil's Tortuous Entry to the Irish Parliament, 1926–7

Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a single-party government. Despite this impressive electoral and parliamentary history, the party's constitutional origins are fraught with ambivalence towards Irish state institutions. Fianna Fáil's early years, perhaps eclipsed by subsequent electoral successes, have received relatively little attention from historians and most general works content themselves with a couple of lines about the oath of allegiance with an underlying assumption that entry to the Irish parliament was inevitable. The aim of this article is to show how the process that brought Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics was haphazard and unpredictable. Through extensive use of party literature and parliamentary party minutes from the 1920s, this article presents a detailed account of Fianna Fáil's evolving attitude towards the oath of allegiance and how it succeeded in overcoming ideological reservations to take its seats in the Irish Free State legislature.     

Un Livre Placé Sous le Signe du Malentendu

Résumé  La Sociologie de la musique de Max Weber est un ouvrage techniquement complexe. Il est également le résultat d’une démarche difficile à retracer et qui se prête au malentendu. Weber vise à reconstituer les forces indissociables — recherche d’expression, rationalisation et, marginalement, luttes pour le prestige — qui ont conduit à l’élaboration des matériaux dont la musique se compose. Les lectures musicologiques du texte, pourtant les mieux armées pour en comprendre les subtilités, en ont simplifié l’argumentation pour ne voir dans la rationalisation qu’un simple processus fonctionnel. Elles ont échoué à saisir la démarche analytique de Weber qui garde aujourd’hui toute sa pertinence. Emmanuel Pedler, né en 1956, est directeur d’études à l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales. Ses travaux ont d’abord porté sur la sociologie de la réception des œuvres visuelles, musicales ou théatrales, puis sur l’analyse critique des premières sociologies de la musique. Il a notamment réalisé avec Jean Molino, l’édition (traduction et annotations) de la Sociologie de la musique de Max Weber (Paris, Métailié, 1998). Sa direction d’études porte sur les dynamiques de la culture (processus d’institutionnalisation de la musique savante et mésosociologie de la relation esthétique).