In short, Virginia Woolf suggests that time exists in different forms. It exists in the external world, but also — and perhaps more importantly — in our internal world. Her description of the loud and rushing civilization suggests that we push ahead in the name of progress, without fully appreciating the moment. Through the character of Clarissa, Woolf challenges the usual definition of success. Perhaps we need not leave some magnificent gift behind in the form of a building or a concrete art piece. Instead, maybe it is how we live our lives and our appreciation for the present that are truly more powerful and eternal. The small gifts we offer others, like bringing people together through a party, can touch people differently than a monument.

  Woolf’s message about time should be heeded. Our rush to leave a dramatic mark in the world leads to further destruction. Tension abounds in our modern world as we create technology to increase our efficiency. Our civilization tends to see scientific and monumental achievements as the most valid measures of an individual’s success. However, in the process, our communities disintegrate. More and more people complain of feeling alienated. The evidence surrounds us. The internal time that allows us to slow down and be involved with people finds itself dominated by external societal time. Some might find Clarissa Dalloway’s gift to the world to be trivial. However, we need individuals with the ability to pull people together — people with the ability to create community where it no longer exists.

Internet: <prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu> (adapted).

The text conveys the idea that

Men Adrift
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, William Morrow & Co., 1999 662 pp. $27.50

    Scores of men, their wives and partners, friends and kin, and the sharks that have exploited them come alive through Faludi’s keen reporting. The men she writes about are presented as prototypes of the generation of baby-boomer men who have experienced layoffs, broken promises of upard mobility, the Vietnam War, meaningless work, and new definitions of “what it means to be a man” in contemporary America. A further “cause” of their plight, she writes, is the emphasis on celebrity in American culture. The narratives in Faludi’s book are woven through with themes of loss and the substitution of superficial values for the “real” values of meaningful work.

     Faludi asserts that many men today feel “shipwrecked” in a service economy, but that this is only the start of their troubles. Victims of downsizing and de-skilling, they no longer play breadwinner roles in their families and develop difficulties in their marriages. In some cases, wives they once supported now support them.

     Through this book she hopes to make men conscious of their condition and to encourage them to mobilize in ways approximating the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a commendable task, but it is doubtful whether men will either accept its premises or identify with the individuals Faludi refers to in making her case.

(Adapted from https://www.dissentmagazine.org)

Leia o título da resenha crítica sobre o filme Once Upon a Time in Hollywood para responder à questão

Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie star in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival – but is it any good?
By Nicholas Barber

Disponível em: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190522-cannes-2019-reviewonce-upon-a-time-in hollywood. Acesso em: 22 maio 2019.

ANYTHING CAN BE RESCINDED

By Isabel Hull

[1]     The Paris Peace Pact of 1928 is a treaty few remember and which is ridiculed by many of those who do. Otherwise known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact –
after its authors, the US secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, and his French counterpart, Aristide Briand – its signatories agreed specifically to ‘condemn
recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another’.
Lacking any means of enforcement, and seemingly swept aside by the Second World War only 11 years later, Kellogg-Briand has been seen as hopelessly
utopian, as evanescent and dated as the Charleston (a popular dance of that period). But Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, in their book The
Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War, argue that it was revolutionary. By outlawing war, it laid the legal foundations for a ‘New World Order’
which still prevails, but which we fail to appreciate.
[2]     The book begins with a bleak description of the ‘Old World Order’, which rested on the right of states, in the absence of a world court, to resort to war
to redress grievances or solve disputes. War was a legal mechanism. Hathaway and Shapiro’s study of more than four hundred declarations of war from
the late 16th century to 1939 reveals that self-defence and the enforcement of treaty, international or succession laws were the reasons cited most often
by states. In addition to permitting frequent armed conflict, the lawful status of war had other consequences for international relations. Since force could
be used to resolve conflicts, the system rewarded the powerful, sanctifying the principle of ‘might is right’. It also legitimated conquest, both as
compensation for injury and as the outcome of a contest of force in which the weaker side lost. It permitted the threat of force (gunboat diplomacy). It
protected the decision makers who waged war and the soldiers who fought it, because both were engaged in a legal activity. Killing in war wasn’t murder.
And, finally, lawful war required absolute impartiality from neutrals (for example, in their trade or commerce with belligerents), since they were not parties
to the dispute. Economic sanctions were therefore illegal. This state of affairs lasted into the 20th century, and Hathaway and Shapiro see the First World
War as its ‘terrible culmination’. Even the League of Nations ‘did not herald’ [anunciar] its end because its covenant still permitted member states to resort
to war over serious, non-judiciable disputes after a three-month cooling-off period.
[3]     Hathaway and Shapiro’s premise is that since states seemed incapable of weaning themselves off [se desacostumar de] warfare, civil society had to
intervene.
[4]     Among the ‘internationalists’ who helped broker, institutionalize and interpret the Kellogg-Briand Pact, one of the most significant was Hersch
Lauterpacht, the Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge University. In the late 1930s, he rigorously and successfully argued that the Kellogg-

Briand Pact had overturned the basic structures of the international order. Neutrals were no longer bound [amarrados, obrigados] to impartiality,
permitting policies that helped victims of aggression. And because it resulted from a criminal act, conquest was now illegal. Individual leaders could be
held responsible for waging [fazer, proseguir] illegal wars (the principle behind the Nuremberg Trials). And treaties extorted by coercion were invalid.
Lauterpacht’s briefs [pareceres] to the US and British governments in the 1940s helped establish these principles, making him ‘the father of the New World
Order’, which since 1945 has been characterized by remarkably few inter-state wars or annexations.
[5]     Hathaway and Shapiro’s point, then, is that ‘for all its problems, the New World Order is better than the Old.’

Adapted from the London Review of Books, 26 April 2018.