Manual or History? Roberto Cipriani's Sociology of Religion

Roberto Cipriani's history of the sociology of religion begins with philosophical predecessors and works its way through the major writing of numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. It places a great deal of valuable information between two covers. One can argue with the way many of the authors are grouped together, however—something that can cause problems for students. And some important personages in the field, especially women who have made contributions, are omitted.     

Populism,privilege, and democracy in Henry James’s The Bostonians: encounters with community

ABSTRACT

Unusually for Henry James, The Bostonians (1886) addresses notions of “the people,” popular movements, and socio-political reform. Foregrounding the position of women, the narrative searchingly, if ambiguously, appraises conditions in the United States of the 1870s, following the Civil War. As Olive Chancellor (a Boston feminist) and Basil Ransom (a conservative Southerner) vie for possession of the malleable orator Verena Tarrant, the text explores the failure of “union” in both its personal and political senses. The populist-feminist rally concluding the narrative highlights the prevailing challenges to democratic possibilities. Community in its traditionally cohesive guise has metamorphosed into the “inoperative community” theorized by Jean-Luc Nancy. Mutually dependent, monadic “singularities” converge in tense encounter. “Community,” according to Roberto Esposito, inevitably separates such vulnerable “singularities” from themselves and others through the play of social relationality. The novel’s democratic orientation is nonetheless sustained by its capacious form and the hospitable engagement of its readers.     

Dystopian Buenos Aires

This article explores the dystopian presence of Buenos Aires in Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos (The seven madmen) and its companion novel, Los lanzallamas (The flamethrowers). Both belong to a tradition of metropolitan narrative represented in Europe by authors such as Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin and James Joyce. Arlt's work, however, has a distinctive character, since it connects the expectations and anxieties unleashed by modernity with a dystopian imagination which has origins in nineteenth-century Argentina with its raison d'être being profoundly linked to the formation of an Argentine national identity.