The Genovese story and the 38 bystanders

Last weekend, the New York Post ran an article about the debunking of a myth that grew in the wake of Kitty Genovese's brutal 1964 murder in Queen's, New York. According to the myth, launched by the New York Times, thirty-eight New Yorkers observed the murder-in-progress but did nothing to help the victim.

The myth is the focus of a new book-length analysis by Kevin Cook (the focus of the Post's article).

Evidence against the story of the 38 inactive bystanders was presented in the Times itself in 2004 in a piece by Jim Rasenberger. Cook and Ransberger both quote the lawyer Joseph De May, who was interviewed about the case by Brooke Gladstone in 2009.

The evidence against the myth was summarized in a 2007 article in the American Psychologist by three British researchers (Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins [hereafter MLC]), who cite De May and Rasenberger. MLC examine role of the Genovese myth -- or 'parable', to use their term -- in a slew of psychology textbooks after its introduction into the lore of social psychology by Professors Bibb Latané and John M. Darley, who used the Genovese incident to illustrate the bystander effect. In their paper, MLC situate the Genovese parable in a long social-science tradition of vilifying crowds (esp. urban ones) as corrupting influences, irrational forces that whip people into a frenzy in which calamitous acts of violence are then committed. The novelty of the Genovese case, say MLC (p. 560), is its use in social psychology to present the urban mob not as leading individuals to commit evil but, instead, as promoting evil omissions. As MLC put it, 'the bystander tradition introduces the concept of the power of the collective to impose inaction on individuals' (p. 560). MLC also point out the oddity of taking the Genovese case to exemplify any sort of crowd phenomenon; after all, even if the parable were true, we would be faced with thirty-eight individuals in the privacy of their respective residences ignoring a nearby murder, and not with thirty-eight people being led specifically by crowd dynamics to ignore the crime (MLC, pp. 559-60).

Surprisingly, Latané seems still to believe the Genovese myth and has tried to cast doubt on MLC's work (not very convincingly).

While there continue to be cases of callous indifference to the suffering of crime victims, the evidence for a bystander effect is apparently mixed.

Here's a 1964 30-minute documentary about the Genovese case (presented by Harry Reasoner).

I've already linked to the De May interview from 2009, but it's worth linking to this specific observation of De May's, where he notes that the Genovese myth arose shortly after JFK's assassination, when some pundits had claimed that all Americans bore a collective guilt in connection with the President's murder.

Links on Jane Austen's moral philosophy

Thomas Rodham on Austen as a moral philosopher. (Here's Rodham's earlier post on Austen at his blog, Philosopher's Beard.)

Rose Woodhouse responds to Rodham's claim that Austen's insights as a virtue ethicist came 'at the expense of psychological insight'.

Sarah Emsley's book, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, is reviewed by Peter Graham.

Maria Comanescu on 'Aristotelian Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels'.

From Alice MacLachlan's review of E. M. Dadlez' Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume:

Many philosophers, most famously Gilbert Ryle and Alastair MacIntyre, have argued for an Aristotelian reading of Austen: in doing so, they draw on themes of moderation, the importance of habituation, the happiness that comes from practicing virtue with moderate resources, and the role granted to pleasure in the good life. Dadlez grants these Aristotelian elements in Austen, but argues that insofar as they are present in Austen, they are also present in Hume.

From Karen Stohr's 'Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility' (pay wall, via Muse): 'I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing.' Stohr's paper is in Philosophy and Literature, a search of which turns up several more papers on Austen and philosophy.

Mark Canuel focuses on the character of Fanny in Mansfield Park in 'Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong' (pay wall, via JSTOR).

Philosophy professor Theodore M. Benditt on 'Fanny's Moral Limits'.

Sticking with Mansfield Park, Lorrie Clark follows up Ryle's suggestion (in 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' [pdf]) that Austen's novels take a stance similar to Shaftesbury's moral philosophy: Shaftesbury's Art of "Soliloquy" in Mansfield Park.

In his 'Jane Austen: a Female Aristotelian' (pay wall, via Sage), John Ely says, 'Through her novels, she reforms an Aristotelian ethics. She Christianizes it-again largely following the influence of Shaftesbury.'

On Austen's religious stance, here's a review (to which I liked in an earlier post) of L. M. White's Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Siris thinks the relevance of Shaftesbury is overestimated.

In his After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre compared Austen with William Cobbett. There's an essay by MacIntyre called 'Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues' in this study guide for Mansfield Park (published by Ignatius Press). I can't identify its provenance.

Sarah Emsley on Mansfield Park.

In 2010, Joyce Kerr Tarpley published (with Catholic University of America Press) Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Eric Lindstrom in 'Austen and Austin' (pay wall, via T & F): 'Not until [J. L.] Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.'

A new collection on Austen's aesthetics from Rowman & Littlefield:

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen’s understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen’s connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art.

In 2004, Cambridge University Press published Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, which is the focus of this brief review.

Roundup on recent English translations

A shot from Carol Reed's The Third Man.

From John Gray's review of a new translation of Curzio Malaparte's The Skin:

If you want a vividly realistic picture of the state of Naples when it was liberated, you should turn to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 – another blackly comic book that is also luminously sane. If you want to enter into the delirium and cruelty of the period, it is The Skin you must read.

I like Gray's juxtaposition here of Lewis' greater accuracy with Malaparte's greater truth. An embellished account may be truer to life. This reminds me of a similar contrast between Blunden's Undertones of War and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That: Blunden stuck closer to the facts while Graves, despite his greater freedom with the truth, gave us a book that better conveys what it was like (at times) to be there.

W. W. Norton & Company has issued Susan Bernofsky's new translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here's an excerpt, and here's an essay that Bernofsky adapted from her Afterword. Rebecca Schuman reviews the new translation in Slate.

Schuman reviews two more books on Kafka (h/t LGH). And here are two reviews of Reiner Stach's Kafka biography: one by John Banville and one by Stephen Mitchelmore.

Robert Pogue Harrison reviews Zibaldone, a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's notebooks, all 2592 pages of them. The translation was produced by a team at the University of Birmingham. Joshua Cohen calls Leopardi's notebooks 'one of the greatest blogs of the nineteenth century'. Tim Parks on the translation of 'zibaldone': 'The word zibaldone comes from the same root as zabaione and originally had the disparaging sense of a hotchpotch of food, or any mixture of heterogeneous elements, then a random collection of notes....'

From Mark O'Connell's review of W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country (Jo Catling's translation of which has just been released in North America by Random House):

Sebald has a way of viewing the world whereby seemingly minor misfortunes or cruelties are made to stand for catastrophes too terrible to be directly observed.

Here's an excerpt from Sebald essay on Robert Walser. Here's an interview of Catling and Anthea Bell on translating Sebald.

Alma Books publishes Sandor Marai's poems in English: 'This collection, the first and only edition of Márai's poems in the English language, presented in John Ridland's and Peter V. Czipott's brilliant verse translation, and with an introduction by Tibor Fischer, offers a comprehensive selection spanning the author's whole career.'

Zsófia Szilágyi on a newly discovered manuscript by Sandor Márai: 'Confessions of a Bourgeois is undoubtedly one of Márai’s most significant books, with one of the most beautiful endings in Hungarian literature, narrating the news of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination that reached the writer in an idyllic summer milieu. “Princip has aimed precisely. Exactly into the middle of our lives”, as Márai wrote elsewhere.'

David van Dusen on Miklós Szentkuthy's newly translated Marginalia on Casanova, which is 'Szentkuthy’s commentary on the German edition of a French memoir written by a Venetian librarian, Giacomo Casanova, in the 1790s.' Nicholas Lezard included Marginalia in his list of the best paperbacks of 2013. The translation was published by Contra Mundum Press. Rhys Tranter liked it.

Here's Rainer Hanshe on Szentkuthy's Towards the One and Only Metaphor.

Biographer Bengt Jangfeldt on “the battle for Mayakovsky”.

Amanda Lewis on Haruki Murakami and the Nobel Prize. Several more pieces on Murakami.