In the prologue of Euripides’ Trojan Women (first performed in Athens in 415 BCE), the gods Poseidon and Athene predict that the victorious Greeks, as a result of their sacrilegious act of raping the priestess Kassandra, will suffer and, like their prisoners, the Trojan women themselves, become victims of war.

In 2004, over 2400 years after the first production of Euripides’ play, considered by many to be the greatest anti-war play ever written, we have no Olympic gods to warn us that the destruction of cities and holy places will lead to our own ruin. And no Olympic gods to predict that that cycle of violence and war, though ages old, will continue. It has been over three years since the pillaging of the Twin Towers and already several revolutions of this cycle have occurred. Who is there to remind those behind the World Trade Center attacks of their hubris? To remind the aggressors in Afghanistan and, now, in Iraq, of theirs?

In the ancient world, it was the artists, writers, and dramatists who took the responsibility of responding to political catastrophes and subsequent acts of retribution and opened the public eye to the nature and context of these atrocities. Over two millennia later, it is largely still the artists, the writers, the dramatists, and now also the filmmakers, who take on this role.

As the Oxonian Review of Books goes to print the world has witnessed further violence and upheaval: the killing of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Sudanese armed forces blockading refugee camps in Darfur despite UN condemnation, the quelling of uprisings in Fallujiah and Mosul, not to mention the news of the stockpiling of nuclear material in Iran and atrocities uncovered in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Undoubtedly, the most worrying development, however, is the re-election of George W. Bush as President of the United States and the subsequent resignation of his Secretary of State, Colin Powell; events which seem to have secured the influence of an increasingly right-wing conservatism.

This issue - the last Oxonian Review of 2004 - reflects a range of reactions to the death of the left, symbolised by the passing of the father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, and the subsequent move to the right orchestrated by George W. Bush’s administration, the after shocks of which have reverberated around the world. To this end, this edition features reviews of Michael Moore’s oeuvre; David Hare’s new play, Stuff Happens, chronicling the lead up to the Iraq war recently produced at the National Theatre; Philip Roth’s new book, The Plot Against America; and The Right Nation: Why America is Different by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, which examines the newly dominant conservative coalition in the United States.

The Oxonian Review also welcomes the new Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, an Oxford alumnus, and highlights Crossing the Carpathians, a first book of poetry by the up-and-coming poet, Carmen Bugan, who recently completed her DPhil in English Literature. Other reviews address the concerns of fringe cultures that rarely receive public attention, such as the mixed-language community of the Tornedalen area near the northern Sweden-Finnish border featured in Mikael Niemi’s best-selling novel, Popular Music. By contrast, Alan Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty, also reviewed, depicts with new insight and vivid language a now well-documented fringe group, the homosexual community of Thatcher’s 1980s. In addition, reviews of four international films from the 2004 London Film Festival exemplify the broad range of topics that appeal to filmmakers and audiences today. Finally, we end - we feel fittingly - with an obituary of Jacques Derrida, who died on 8th October 2004.

The weekend before the Presidential election, Osama bin Laden addressed Americans on al-Jazeera, saying: “Just as you lay waste our nation, so shall we lay waste yours.” It seems that the world has indeed come to this. The cycle will continue, but at least we are forewarned and shall have our say.

Avery T. Willis
Editor-in-Chief