Pericles Lewis

Private Religion, Public Mourning, and Mrs. Dalloway

The experience of loss in the twilight of public religion, and the search for private kinds of spiritual consolation, is the subject of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Woolf sets her novel about the dispersion of religious idioms in a London where the traditional functions of the church—its ability to join souls in worship, its authority to offer explanations for the mysteries of existence, its administration over the major events of life—have given way to uneasy freedom. This situation is built into the terrain of the first major episode, in which the narrator, watching an airplane skim the city skyline ‘‘over the little island of grey churches, St. Paul’s and the rest,’’ lingers on a small drama on the steps of St. Paul’s:

Globalizing the Liberal Arts: Twenty-First-Century Education

Lewis argues that a liberal arts education will become increasingly important in the twenty-first century because the automation economy requires more than ever that individuals develop the cognitive flexibility and the habits of mind that allow for life-long learning. This article offers some historical context for the efforts of Yale and NUS to found a new liberal arts college in Asia. Lewis argues that liberal arts education attempts to shape students’ characters through engagement in a shared community shaped by conversations across various disciplines and points of view.

In Asia, For the World: Liberal Education and Innovation

This chapter explores the ways in which both new and old institutions might leverage the past successes and challenges of liberal education systems in order to create a form of education that emblematizes, promotes, and sustains innovation. Yale-NUS College’s common curriculum encompasses both Asian and Western influences in humanistic, social, and scientific studies. Students participate in on-campus communities of learning while expanding the scope of inquiry outwards through research trips and internships. In drawing together a highly international group of students and challenging them to create connections across time, space, and cultures, this form of liberal education teaches students to take risks and experiment so that they in turn may become innovators in the university and in the world.

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (review)

696 Levi—clearly one of his favorites—and critiques Tzvetan Todorov’s too-easy equation of the Gulag and the Nazi death camps. In a few skillful paragraphs, he provides a critique of the nowfashionable Carl Schmitt, linking his concept of the political as the need to produce enemies to the murderous, totalitarian impulses of the Nazi regime. He deftly compares the Enlightenment-inspired writings of the western, secular Jews, Levi and Jean Améry, with the east European, Orthodox and Kabbalist-influenced Elie Wiesel and Ka-tzetnik. But Bartov’s mode of writing also leaves one wanting some more careful, sustained attention to particular people and groups. Sometimes Mirrors of Destruction reads like a history without human agents, only large collectives. “Nations” remember; “Western Civilization” lies in crisis; “Total War” creates apocalyptic visions. It is part of the seamlessness of his history, from World War I to World War II and the fractured memories of the present. Yet there needs to be place in this history also for contingency and for paths not taken, for the actions of specific individuals and groups. I confess to a certain unease with the universalizing claim that “when we look in the mirror of the Holocaust, we see our own reflection” (212). What precisely does this mean? Is it that we are all potentially perpetrators of violence? Or potentially its victims? Or perhaps both? However often Levi’s comment about the “grey zone” is cited, however much the uncertainty of greyness suits modern sensibilities, we still need to remember as distinctly as possible the line that divided—and still divides—those who organize genocides and other atrocities and those who are their victims. Bartov himself is deeply attentive to this line, but his drive to render a total history that includes victims and perpetrators and his desire for large truths results, at times, in formulations that are too universal to be convincing. Bartov offers consideration of many more issues in his book. He discusses the slow, halting destruction of the Resistance myth in France and the troubled efforts to come to terms with the realities of collaboration under Vichy. He analyzes the often painful and conflicted Israeli engagements with survivors and the meaning of the Holocaust. He explores the unceasing strife over German identity and the memorialization of the Holocaust. Bartov writes knowledgeably and smoothly about the ethical and political situations in the three countries, and adds some acute side references to the United States as well. Mirrors of Destruction provokes one to think with and against it: one cannot ask for more from a book.