Thresholds of Western Culture

John Burt Foster, Jr is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Wayne J. Froman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies and former Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at George Mason University.

• General introduction, John B. Foster Jr and Wayne J. Froman Part One: The Crisis of Modern Subjectivity Introduction 1. Interiority, Identity Knowledge: Unravelling the Cartesian Cogito, Robert Strozier (Wayne State University, Detroit) 2. Subject, Self, Person: Marcel Mauss and the Limites of Poststructural Critique, Anthony J. Harding (University of Saskatchewan) Part Two: Wester Culture in the Shadow of Fascism Introduction 3. Aesthetic Fascism and Modern Tragedy: D'Annunzio's Fedra, Mary Ann Frese Witt (North Carolina State University) 4. Musical Headings: Toscanini's and Furtwangler's Fifth Symphonies, 1939-54, Herman Rapaport (University of Southampton) 5. Holocaust Testimony and Post-Holocaust Fiction: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm, James Berger (Hofstra University) Part Three: Africa at the Passing of White Supremacy Introduction 6. Revisiting the Amistad Revolt in Sierra Leone, Iyunolu Osagie (Pennsylvania State University) 7. An Ethical Universal in the Postcolonial Novel? - "A Certain Simple Respect", Michiel Heyns (University of Stellenbosch, SA and Cambridge University) 8. Western Classics in the South African State of Emergency: Coetzee's Age of Iron and Gordimer's My Son's Story, Lars Engle (University of Tulsa, Oklahoma) Part Four: Eastern Europe After Communism 9. Creator versus Conspirator in the Postcommunist Revolutions, Marcel Cornis-Pope (Virginia Commonwealth University) 10. Yugoslavism and its Discontents: A Cultural Post-Mortem, Tomislav Z. Longinovi (University of Wisconsin, Madison) 11. Bosnia and the Ethical Limits of Cultural Relativism: Re-auditing Lyotard, Caroline Bayard (McMaster University, Ontario) 12. Cultural Coordinates of a Bulgarian Art Hoax: "Drafts" by Virginia, A Tragedia dell'Arte, Nikita Nankov (Indiana University, Bloomington) Part Five: Far East/Far West 13. Cultural Hermeneutics and Orientalist Discourse: Loti's Self-Reflexive Japonisme, Rolf Goebel (Kiel University, Germany) 14. Western Agon/Eastern Ritual: Confrontations and Co-optations in World Views, Eugene Eoyang (Indiana University, Bloomington)