The Republicans’ rush to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett before the presidential election is yet another example of polarized politicians and citizens fighting over an increasingly polarized Supreme...
It’s been hard to make sense of COVID-19. At least, I have found it hard. So many deaths. So many changes to everyday life. So much political strangeness. So much uncertainty about the future. This...
Permit as a speech act addresses a future action to be undertaken by the addressee in his own interests, which almost always appears to concur with a Request for a Permit. In the context of social distancing,...
In the following, we discuss the speech act type ‘Invite’. This speech act expresses that the speaker wishes her addressee to know that she is in favour of a future action to be performed by the other,...
In this blog we discuss the speech act ‘suggest’. This speech act involves the situation where a speaker is communicating that he/she is as much in favour of the addressee performing a future action...
Of the various speech acts used in the wake of COVID-19 and the corresponding need for social distancing, ‘Apologise’ is perhaps the most important. Since the enforcement of social distancing unavoidably...
Criminal law has long served as a powerful symbol of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence. However, as the world becomes more economically, technologically, and socially interconnected,...
The discussion of privilege, especially, “white privilege” is a hot button subject that gets routinely discussed in news commentary, social media, in sociology classes, or anywhere where race is a...
The first thing to say for any reader who is not familiar with scholarly editions like this of Hardy’s fiction, is that it is different from all others and really significant. It gives, if you combine...
My daughter is taking an undergraduate course in Shakespearean theatre this semester, and one of her foundation readings is Elinor Fuchs’s influential short essay, ‘E.F.’s Visit to a Small...
My love affair with The Woodlanders began many years ago when I covered much of the groundwork for a scholarly edition while doing my MA —entitled “Materials for an edition of Thomas Hardy’s The...
In some ways producing a scholarly edition of Desperate Remedies is easier than editing other Hardy novels, first of all because there is no extant manuscript. The story is that after he completed...