Reviews and News:
The real Robinson Crusoe and the island he visited: “Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth of the Orinoco, Juan Fernández was where the real Crusoe, the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, spent four years and four months in the company only of goats.
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Napoleon’s novella: “Before he ruled France and was exiled to Elba, Napoleon wrote a novella. Now a portion of the manuscript is expected to fetch $250,000.”
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Jane Eyre in America: “Like a disembodied spirit, the dress stands at the entrance to ‘Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will,’ which opens at the Morgan Library & Museum on Friday and runs through Jan. 2. Timed to the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, the exhibition offers a compact, sensitively arranged and surprisingly comprehensive tour of the life and work of one of the Victorian era’s most beloved writers.”
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Kim Jong-un bans sarcasm. “Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as ‘This is all America’s fault’ would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime.”
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In last week’s magazine, I suggest students who see oppression everywhere read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. “For Stegner, without any sense of the past we are unable to be either wise or just, because without it, we have no sense of ‘what real injustice’ looks like.”
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Rescuing the other Schlegel: “Roger Paulin’s monumental biography of August Wilhelm Schlegel is a rescue mission. Now one might not think that Schlegel needed rescuing. His name is familiar in the English-speaking world from the Schlegel–Tieck translation of Shakespeare (1825–33). Schlegel himself translated seventeen of the plays, with help from his then wife Caroline; the rest were translated by Dorothea Tieck (daughter of the Romantic author Ludwig Tieck) and the diplomat Wolf Graf von Baudissin. The translation has given its name to the Schlegel–Tieck Prize, which is awarded annually by the Society of Authors (in partnership with the TLS) for the best translation from German published in Britain…So why the need for rescue? The audience for Schlegel’s lectures at Bonn included Heinrich Heine, who at the time intensely admired Schlegel and dedicated three sonnets to him. Schlegel, for his part, had gone out of his way to advise the young, unknown Heine on his poetry. Later, however, in his polemical essay The Romantic School, Heine wrote a cruel, malicious, but memorable caricature of Schlegel, and many readers of German literature first encounter Schlegel in Heine’s sketch. Schlegel appears here as a fop, as a critic narrowly obsessed with metrics, as the submissive companion of Germaine de Staël, and as someone whose second marriage was ruined by his physical deficiencies.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The American Interest, James Van de Velde explains the constant war that is being waged in cyberspace:
“What if warfare—the kind we see in World War II movies—never occurs again? The two great wars of Europe were total, unambiguous, and definitive. There was a beginning (a declaration), a prosecution of conflict, and a clear and declared end, including a postwar occupation and recovery. Histories of such conflict have made great books, and no end to them is in sight.
Warfare today, however, seems almost always ambiguous, murky, confusing, ongoing, and politically complicated—especially for the very legalistic United States. Warfare today is a combination of low-intensity (military) conflict and a fight over information via cyberspace—especially over “narratives” that sway public opinion. And usually this warfare does not involve much violence, certainly not compared to the wholesale slaughters of the 20th century.
“This isn’t exactly new—warfare has always consisted of competing narratives and had periods of low intensity. What is new is that our adversaries now specifically stay in the early stage of cyberspace operations, information operations, and very limited or no kinetic conflict, careful never to escalate to state-on-state conventional war. In short, our adversaries and competitors have embraced cyber warfare precisely to avoid kinetic hostilities with the United States, but in so doing they can at least from time to time still achieve their political objectives.
“Traditionally, the United States sees itself as either at peace or at war. Today, this divide is at best blurred and perhaps forever outdated. Today, we seem always in some sort of confrontation. ‘Steady state’ operations imply a status quo—when little needs to be done, and relationships are static. This may be an unhelpful legacy of the great wars in Europe and the Pacific. (It may also have to do with our habit of Manichaean thinking, an artifact of religion.
“It is precisely because the United States enjoys dominance in many military domains that its adversaries plan and struggle against U.S. interests short of declared mass kinetic warfare, especially in the cyberspace domain. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and the Islamic State/al-Qaeda maneuver forces, conduct cyberspace operations, influence media, and pay for information all to shape a new environment without resorting to direct kinetic conflict with the world’s sole superpower. U.S. adversaries today see the world in a constant state of conflict and competition; the U.S. political elite sees the world in a state of peace, with ‘war’ a deviation to be quickly corrected.”
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Image of the Day: Yangshuo
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Poem: Rachel Boast, “Shattered”
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