Complicity, complexity, historicism: problems of postcolonial sociology

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Causeless complicity

I argue, contrary to standard claims, that accomplice liability need not be a causal relation. One can be an accomplice to another’s crime without causally contributing to the criminal act of the principal. This is because the acts of aid and encouragement that constitute the basis for accomplice liability typically occur in contexts of underand over-determination, where causal analysis is conf...

the effect of task complexity on lexical complexity and grammatical accuracy of efl learners’ argumentative writing

بر اساس فرضیه شناخت رابینسون (2001 و 2003 و 2005) و مدل ظرفیت توجه محدود اسکهان (1998)، این تحقیق تاثیر پیچیدگی تکلیف را بر پیچیدگی واژگان و صحت گرامری نوشتار مباحثه ای 60 نفر از دانشجویان زبان انگلیسی بررسی کرد. میزان پیچیدگی تکلیف از طریق فاکتورهای پراکندگی-منابع تعیین شد. همه ی شرکت کنندگان به صورت نیمه تصادفی به یکی از سه گروه: (1) گروه موضوع، (2) گروه موضوع + اندیشه و (3) گروه موضوع + اندی...

Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements

Forty years ago, Manuel Castells asked whether urban sociology had a subject matter and whether the term urban still had meaning—and this article reopens these and related questions. It also wonders why today’s American urban sociology has concentrated on cities, especially big ones, concurrently virtually ignoring the three other types of communities—suburbs, towns, and rural areas—in which a ...

Linguistics, Historicism and the Humanities