Free Discursive Essays and Papers

THE "DISCURSIVE DEFICIT" Moravcsik and the European Union “Sidentrop’s most fundamental error—one he shares with many in the European debate—is his assumption that the EU is a nation-state in the making,” Andrew Moravcsik writes in his “Despotism In Brussels?” However, Moravcsik makes the same error himself, if a bit more circuitously. In his articles “Despotism In Brussels?”, “Federalism in the European Union: Rhetoric and Reality,” and “In Defense of the ‘Democratic Deficit’: Reassessing

Stable Meaning, the Perversion of Nature, and Discursive Communities in Alex La Guma's "The Lemon Orchard" South African writer Alex La Guma was an active member of his country's non-white liberation movement. One of the 156 people accused in the Treason Trial of 1956, La Guma wrote his first book, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, in 1962 (Wade 15). "The Lemon Orchard," a story which appeared in this debut work, is a gripping piece about the horror and cruelty of racism. In the story, La Guma

power as a positive influence that is produced in communicative space runs contrary to Habermas’ original concept of power in his theory of communicative action where power is understood as a coercive force that has to be avoided in order for the discursive situation to prevail. As such, I believe that the introduction of communicative power and its close tie to ‘legitimate law’ and political system greatly reduces our critical ability with respect to political systems as exercised in liberal-democratic

vitality. Differently stated, nature functions as a cultural construct of anti-culture, providing an escape from the confines of culture in the sense of civilization, but does not entirely evade the conceptual framework inherent to the social, discursive formation of human ideas. This intermingling relationship between nature and culture is well illustrated in the example of urban parks. Parks are constructed as natural environments but literally and figuratively constructed by human cultural

capacities for acting morally that the agent already possesses. However, the virtuous attitude genuinely entails the obligation to strive to perfect all those capacities that enable us to sensitively understand the other's claim. A discussion of the (discursive) capacities that have to be promoted leads to the singling out of sensitivity as contrasted to immediate empathy. It is the reflexive transcendence of the agent's evaluative patterns that allows this emotion to sit well with a post-conventional

(thus, real) but absent (or buried), and which makes the dominant "reality" possible but, at the same time, continuously undermines it.  In The Way to Rainy Mountain, the patterned form brings about the two different realities: first, there is a discursive, or ideological reality, which separates legend from history and the personal from the cultural; second, there is a lived-way-of reality, in which legend, history, and the personal experience can never be separated.  Along the journey to the

Icarus and the Myth of Deconstruction In all three texts, it is the act of analysis which seems to occupy the center of the discursive stage, and the act of analysis of the act of analysis which in some way disrupts that centrality. In the resulting asymmetrical, abyssal structure, no analysis -- including this one -- can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is not a stable sequence. Barbara Johnson "The Frame of Reference" The Critical Difference 1

Interpretations of Beowulf ‘s theme vary widely. Ian Duncan in “Epitaphs for Aeglaecan: Narrative Strife in Beowulf” states his interpretation for the main theme in the poem: Arguments for any interpretation of Beowulf have therefore described discursive configurations within the poem which have then been projected outside it to map, explicitly or otherwise, such a context of tradition, genre, ethos, Weltanschauung. The trouble is that the less aware the critic that this is his procedure, the more

theological paraphrase of its argument, to explicating the system of belief or thought behind the words. Meanwhile, relatively little attention has been paid to the working of the poetry itself, to the construction of the presumed meaning, in these "discursive" or "conceptual" passages. Seduced by the desire for a systematic argument, criticism has overestimated these passages' straightforwardness and largely neglected their ambiguity and indeterminacy. The seductive voice of argument – which is already

Music, Truth, Profundity PART I 1. Theme One of my long-standing philosophical ‘worries’ is what I describe as a ‘cognitive dilemma’ in relation to musical communication. How can an art form which lacks a discursive element and addresses itself primarily and indeed immediately to the auditory sense, be discerned as conveying ‘truth’ or ‘profundity’? The power is amply attested — so much so that alone among the arts music occasionally figures as a ‘surrogate religion’. The pieces of this