Some Ideas and Reflections on Teaching 'Ideas' in Geography

This paper outlines the characteristics of a seminar on realism which forms part of the teaching of 'ideas and methods in geography' in the department concerned. The seminar requires each of about a dozen students to answer a specific question by reading a single paper, writing a summary answer to the question based on this source, and delivering an oral presentation. The questions are structured to deal with abstract theoretical issues at first, and then to consider the implications of these issues for research practice. The experience of the seminar is intended to help students prepare for an open-book examination, and to develop the research planning for their dissertations. Student feedback is reviewed, and ideas for modification of the seminar structure are discussed.     

The Lost Intermediaries: The Impact of 1870 on the European System

Abstract

Among the colourful characters that populate eighteenth-century military history, the French-born comte de Bonneval (1675–1747) has been kept alive in historical memory longer than most. His surprising conversion to Islam and contribution to Ottoman military reform long made him a popular subject for biography in his own right. Nowadays, he mainly features in biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Both were commanders in the Habsburg army, and for nineteen years they were close companions in war and peace.¹ The circumstances that turned Bonneval's friendship with Eugene to enmity also led him in 1729 to offer his services to the Ottoman Empire. For most scholars, this is the moment when his actions became of lasting historical significance. The Ottomans, who suffered in the eighteenth century a series of military defeats, employed foreigners to help them reform their army. After converting to Islam and renaming himself Ahmed Pasha, Bonneval became the first of these when the grand vizier, Topal Osman, invited him in 1731 to reform the Ottoman artillery corps. He moved to Constantinople, added the sobriquet ‘Humbaracl’ (bombardier), and became a noted figure at the court of Sultan Mahmud I. Until Bonneval's death in 1747, Europeans having dealings with the Ottoman regime looked to him for assistance in navigating its internal politics.²     

Auerbach,Madness, and the East

ABSTRACT

Erich Auerbach’s lack of interest in engaging with non-Western contexts and literatures has often led critics to identify varying degrees of Eurocentric bias in his work. This perception of bias obfuscates the depths of Auerbach’s thought regarding the non-European, who does have a central place in Auerbach’s overall vision, not only of philology and Western literature, but also of humanism and historical progress generally. This articles accounts for the centrality of the non-European in Auerbach’s notion of realism.     

The Origin of Alliances: From Sparta to the EU’s Solidarity Clause

Abstract

According to the International Relations theory known as Realism, interstate interactions, whether ancient or modern, are motivated by the pursuit of hegemony of individual states, which act as monolithic groups in articulating their foreign policy decisions. The application of Realism to the study of Spartan foreign policy in the third century BC shows the validity of this theory in explaining certain aspects of ancient interstate interactions, as illustrated by the two alliances discussed in this article. The first, earlier alliance, between King of Macedonia Antigonos Gonatas and Sparta and some Peloponnesian cities, was made in response to the threat posed by King Pyrrhus of Epirus who was set on conquering them. The later alliance, between Sparta and other states, was made to stop the ambitions of King Antigonos Gonatas who controlled many cities of the Peloponnese and sought to conquer the whole of Greece. In forging such alliances, according to the Realist view, the states acted as large monolithic groups, yet a broader assessment of the available evidence shows the presence of smaller, subtler networks of individuals, which were paramount in articulating important foreign policy decisions. The comparison of Spartan decision making with the activation in 2009 of the EU’s Solidarity Clause, included in Article 222 of The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), indicates that the activation of this clause too required the consensus of several European governing bodies. By bringing to light the critical role played by smaller networks of power in foreign policy decision making in the ancient and the current-day EU alliances, this article exposes both the merits and the limits of the Realist international relations theory.     

Hans Morgenthau and the Tragedy of the Nation-State

The cardinal role of tragedy in Morgenthau's theory of international politics has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed there is now a considerable corpus of literature that established the importance of tragedy as a central concept around which Morgenthau's theory revolved. This paper builds upon this already developed framework and employs tragedy not as an analytical category but as a metaphor employed by Morgenthau to approach the nation-state. It is claimed that the idea of tragedy underpinned his notion of the nation-state inasmuch as it did his view of individual human beings. As such the notion of tragedy informed consistently Morgenthau's analyses of national tragedies that were like the self-defeating nationalism of Germany. It also informed his efforts to avert potential national tragedies from materialising as his attempts to influence US foreign policy demonstrated. It is finally claimed, that far from a descent into despair, Morgenthau's realism signified a conscious effort to go beyond the tragedy of the nation-state.     

A Brief Exploration of Neurological Art History

The invention of realistic portraiture to reveal "inner life" is attributed by some art historians to Jan van Eyck who worked in Flanders from 1420 onwards. We show, using clinical neurological examination of the gold mask of Agamemnon dating from 1550-1500 BC and of the portraits of Henry III and his son Edward I - important English royals - painted between 1216 and 1307, that realistic portraits were made well before the 15th Century. Thus artists unwittingly used neurology as part of their realistic approach to the presentation of the face. Because neurological diagnosis is often visual, neurology, in turn, has a rich potential to unveil examples of realism in art. We consider the art pieces examined here also pertinent to art historians, as they assess the role of art in documenting history.     

Further Forms of Faithfulness

Abstract

In light of recent rehabilitations of the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo by Jean-Luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek and others, the present essay examines whether that doctrine can or cannot be a resource for the critique of capitalism. Agreeing with Nancy and Zizek that the doctrine can be of use in the critique of capitalism, the essay takes up their discussions and adds to them by analyzing the relationship between the doctrine and Marx's treatment of human agency and capitalism. By situating Marx's philosophy in relation to Aristotle's and Hegel's discussion of the infinite, I contend that, despite Marx's overt rejection of creation ex nihilo, human activity is conceived by him according to it, and that capitalism, as he presents it and as supplemented with Nancy and Zizek, can be understood to be a "decreation" of the worldhood of the world.     

Beyond the One-World Frame of Fiction: The Breakdown of Reality in Hushang Golshiri's Stories

The debate over political commitment in Iran was never limited to adjudicating content: it was frequently a debate over form as well. In the realm of fiction, this debate fixated on realism, the nature of mimesis, and the autonomy of art and the literary text. Within a few short years after forming the iconoclastic journal Jong-e Esfahan in 1965 with a group of likeminded colleagues, the writer Hushang Golshiri had become the preeminent modernist fiction writer in Iran. His critical essays represented a passionate defense of aesthetic autonomy at a time when realism and, particularly, socialist and “engaged” literature were powerful shibboleths in the Tehran literary scene. This paper begins with a look at Golshiri's critical interventions in this debate and then moves on to show how the short stories he produced in the Jong era were an even more integral part of his response to the mimesis question. By reading his stories with a methodology drawn from “possible worlds” theories of narratology, Todorov's fantastic, and Golshiri's own theories, we see how these works break down the “one-world” frame of reality that realism takes for granted, and require the reader to grapple with multiple, often contradictory, possible realities in its stead.