(Download) "Honor-Bound: Self and Other in the Honor Culture of Robin Hobb's Soldier son Series (Critical Essay)" by Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

📘 Read Now     📥 Download

eBook details

• Title: Honor-Bound: Self and Other in the Honor Culture of Robin Hobb's Soldier son Series (Critical Essay)
• Author : Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 80 KB

Description

AS AMERICAN TROOPS INVADED BAGHDAD IN 2003, WESTERN TELEVISION viewers were alternatively amused and bewildered by the televised reports of the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, who insisted on the success of Iraqi war efforts even as American tanks patrolled a few hundred yards from the area where his press conference was being held. Al-Sahaf quickly became a cult figure in the West, where the absurdity of his reports was represented as a comical symbol of all that was wrong with Hussein's dictatorship. In Honor (2006), James Bowman revisits the popular ridicule of AlSahaf's reports, arguing that the West's reaction to the Iraqi Information Minister highlights a serious gulf between Western and Middle-Eastern experience. According to Bowman, Al-Sahaf's rhetoric was not a bizarre manifestation of a particular Arab's insanity, but the natural--and indeed only--honorable response for a man in his position to make. In Middle Eastern honor systems, public performance takes precedence over private experience: what mattered was not whether Al-Sahaf knew American troops were in Baghdad but the fact that he insisted publicly on the martial capability of his country. To do otherwise, Bowman claims, would have marked Al-Sahaf and the Iraqis he spoke for as disgraced cowards. The fact that Western television viewers were unable to comprehend the cultural logic underlying AlSahaf's proclamations demonstrates, in Bowman's view, the degree to which Western nations have lost touch with the honor systems that once informed their social structure. In a world where most developing countries still feel the effects of honor systems, Americans' failure to instantly comprehend the rationale behind Al-Sahaf's reports marks them, rather than him, as outsiders. Bowman's timely argument has captured the imagination of readers and earned him a positive reception in media outlets like The New York Times and The Times. (1) Honor is, after all, a powerful, if nebulous, term in contemporary politics, and the concept of needing to defend or maintain one's honor appears in the rhetoric of liberal and conservative thinkers alike. (2) But despite the increased attention being paid to honor's appearance in political fields, little critical attention has been paid to its deployment in the fantasy genre, the field of popular media that has done more than any other to preserve the concept in contemporary culture. (3) References to honor, honorable men and honorable actions appear frequently in the pages of sword-and-sorcery novels, but fantasy readers rarely encounter a definition of honor or an explanation of how it functions within a fantasy world's specific cultural context. Fantasy readers are expected to know what honor is and how it functions, even though the actions described as honorable in the average fantasy novel bear little resemblance to, say, the frequently brutal practices of living honor cultures. Rarely do we encounter depictions of honor killing in fantasy, even though honor killings--incidents in which the male head of a household kills a female relative whose reputation for chastity has been slighted--are, unfortunately, a practice associated with contemporary honor systems. (4)

Ebook Free Online "Honor-Bound: Self and Other in the Honor Culture of Robin Hobb's Soldier son Series (Critical Essay)" PDF ePub Kindle