Details

Written by Hank Berger

Published: 29 April 2013

On Wednesday, in the second half of an extensive interview about his new book (and film) Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, author Jeremy Scahill said that President Barack Obama is "a very hawkish, hard-hitting president when it comes to counterterrorism policies, when it comes to assassination, when it comes to the U.S. reserving the right to bomb countries that it’s not at war with, and, most importantly, when it comes to convincing the American people that these things are all lawful and right and are smarter than the Bush-era big wars."[1]  --  He emphasized the importance of the role that Admiral William McRaven, the commander of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) is playing as "one of most powerful military figures in -- certainly in modern U.S. history." ...

Read more ...

Details

Written by Fran Lucientes

Published: 20 April 2013

Did Dostoevsky really meet Dickens in 1862?  --  And, as a number of scholars have asserted, did the author of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield really tell Dostoevsky that all his good characters were based on "what he wanted to have been," and that all his villains were based on "what he was"?  --  Eric Naiman revealed this week that the supposed Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting, which had been accepted by Dickens scholars like Claire Tomalin and Michael Slater, never took place.  --  The meeting was really a clever literary hoax perpetrated by a writer named A.D. Harvey, an imposture at once crazy, fascinating, outrageous, and... Nabokovian.[1]  --  Harvey, as described by Naiman, is a literary and historical scholar who is frustrated never to have been rewarded with stable academic employment, despite some 700 job applications.  --  His hoaxes (for there are others) appear to be intended as an indictment of the corrupting influence of careerism and productivist interestedness in literary criticism, where, according to Harvey, there is to be found more "hatred of art" and "hatred of literature" than esteem for it.  --  "In our day," Harvey has written under his own name, "many of the supposedly responsible organs of criticism are involved in the imposture, frequently as criminal accessories, and the faking has become more elaborate, more sophisticated, almost to the point of becoming a type of High Art in itself."  --  A disgusted (and often disgusting) Harvey seems, then, to have decided to devote himself to subverting the values of its practices, becoming a sort of critical outlaw, "a vigilante, punishing scholars who casually appropriate the labor of others."  --  Harvey's violation of the canons of scholarship, considered in this light, are a protest in the name of other, higher values.  --  But Naiman rejects such a charitable interpretation.  --  Instead, he indicts Harvey for "a violation of the trust that remains a constitutive element of the humanities. . . . [P]lacing [partisan, anonymous] reviews or hoaxing articles in academic journals . . . may be the closest a secular scholar can come to desecration." ...

Read more ...