Человек, читающий стихи: ритуальная природа поэтического костра

Sigmund Freud haunts us, no doubt. But at a time when canons are being reexamined and intellectual genealogies (including hauntology) are being questioned, how relevant is it to excavate Freud and psychoanalysis more generally? Is it to undertake some sort of exorcism of our critical identifications, projections, and attachments vis-à-vis his work? There is a way, perhaps, to read Freud's text and our relation to it not in order to uncover Freud's truth or express loyalty to his theses and legacy. There is a way, no doubt, to enter through Freud's text not in order to find him at the end but precisely to lose him and upend in the process those readings that exclusively situate Freud within a specific genealogy of Western philosophy and theory.As a scholar of theory and literature, I grapple with these questions all the time, recognizing that the voices of the thinkers we study resonate deep within us and echo in our works. Psychoanalysis more specifically draws us to the text with the promise of illuminating the relation to the self and the other, and understanding the workings of desire, fantasy, and the relation to the past. Soon we realize that attaining this understanding is constantly deferred; what is gained instead is an appreciation for a reading practice that follows the trail of the hidden, the secret, and those wild connections that never coalesce. I point to this process in the literary theory seminar that I teach in comparative literature. Starting with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899), I ask students to pay attention to Freud as a reader of texts regardless of his final interpretation and diagnoses. I invite them to notice his attempt at vulnerability—though failing according to Jacques Lacan and others—by allowing himself to free associate as he recalls and then interprets Irma's dream. The process of Freud's associations, unfolding across various myths and hermeneutical traditions, theories and hypotheses, is what interests me as a comparatist. This process that winds and meanders is also a reading practice that identifies conversations, exposes connections, and activates comparative frameworks that were hitherto unimaginable. At the end, there must be a way to turn the work of theory into a work of imagining, which is precisely what the two scholars with whom I engage here do.Reproducing conversations and tracing associations with no promise of closure or recognition are the main characteristics of Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. These scholars enter through the psychoanalytic portal but end up encountering mysticism and literature, Ibn ‘Arabi and the Mahabharata, Hindu socialist fantasies in 1940s Punjab, and criminology and psychology journals in 1940s Egypt. Each in her own way, they identify new intellectual constellations and texts that have never been read before or not in this way. In fact, they bring in these texts and devise reading practices directed at them that could not be reduced to the imposition of or resistance to Western concepts and methods and to the hegemonic place of the modern episteme in postcolonial imaginaries. These reading and critical practices, as they are being articulated and imagined in Pinto's and El Shakry's works, construct new objects and fields of study that connect time periods and locales and rewrite in the process the history of modernity from the perspective of the global South. Specifically, the reader discovers a language of subjectivity that draws on Islamic philosophy and mysticism and on Sanskrit myth and literature. Psychoanalysis, in the end, becomes misrecognized. The portal through which these scholars enter reveals an intellectual wonderland where Freud himself becomes irretrievable or absorbed consciously and unconsciously by psychological, national, and literary projects that connect Egypt to India and beyond.In Pinto's work, there is no production of an ethical subject but rather of a fictional one, moving from the Freudian text and couch into performances from Sanskrit mythology and their popular adaptations. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Pinto tells the story of Mrs. A. and Dr. Satya Nand. She describes an encounter between analyst and analysand wherein the desire for knowledge and the proprietor of knowledge that Lacan theorized is no longer central. The analyst who recorded and anonymized his sessions with Mrs. A. is referred to as an “archivist” and “collaborator.” As their conversation opens up to a world of connections, fantasies, and political utopias, Mrs. A. and Dr. Nand engage in a form of creative imagining. The reader is brought into this conversation to listen, discover, and associate in new ways.Dr. Satya Nand, a psychanalyst trained in Britain, was trying to develop a therapeutic model that is not only adapted to the Indian context but one that is also universal. The heroine of his book The Objective Method (1947) is a patient known only as Mrs. A. An upper-class woman in her early twenties, Mrs. A. talks about her unhappy and childless marriage and household intrigues, discusses homosexuality and polyandry, and expresses admiration for Nehru and socialism. Pulling at the threads of Dr. Nand's text, Pinto reveals not so much a Dora-like case study or an attempt at “finding, naming, or fixing pathology but seeking a new way to talk about thinking and think about talking. It is a record of a conversation, and Satya Nand's translations of Mrs. A.’s words into his method are as apparent as the little, intimate performances that occurred in the room where they spoke.”1 Entering Dr. Nand's text, Pinto shifts the attention of the reader from the psychoanalytic encounter's models of talking and listening in a therapeutic context to a kind of exchange through which unfold histories of Hindu socialism and theories of a holistic self that draws on the Mahabharata and other cultural influences. The analyst-directed speech veers from revealing the truth of the subject in order to bring forth a new kind of telling, listening, and reading practice. Pinto leads her reader to hear differently, other things, and make new meaning.Mrs. A.’s daydreams and fantasies collected in Dr. Nand's book lose the Freudian subject itself, projecting it as a fiction that moves and signifies comparatively across multiple traditions: Where Hinduism and psychoanalysis are concerned, after decades and decades of what scholars like to call cross-fertilization, and given intertwined pre-histories mediated by roving ideas and narratives, does it even make sense to think of these domains as encountering each other, now, or in 1947? . . . Speaking, as Satya Nand did, from a world of literatures, places with their own canons, terminologies, and intellectual traditions, let alone myths, suggests creative ways of thinking that break through the weary line between the details of locations (ethnography) and concepts that might orient them. (127)Thus, Pinto's work breaks the stronghold of disciplinary linearity to suggest multiple and uneven ways of reading. What is revealed in the sessions allows us to imagine a different understanding of modernity that is simultaneously literary and political, performed in Dr. Nand's cabinet but also in the villages and households of 1940s Punjab.Equally breaking with a linear reading of influence and resistance vis-à-vis the Western episteme, El Shakry writes in The Arabic Freud, maps out the topography of modern selfhood and its ethical and epistemological contours in postwar Egypt. What does it mean, I ask, to think through psychoanalysis and Islam together, not as a ‘problem’ but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement? Rather than view Islamic discourses as hermetically sealed, or traffic in dichotomous juxtapositions between East and West, this book focuses on the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought, and between religious and secular ethics.2El Shakry explores how the encounter with psychoanalytic thought and writing produced a rethinking of Islamic mysticism and subject formation in postwar Egypt. Moving from the anxiety of influence to the ethics of the encounter—thinking of Édouard Glissant here—El Shakry's work allows us to sit with concepts and traditions and engage their development on their own terms.Trained as an intellectual historian, El Shakry aims at “understanding psychoanalysis ethnographically, not simply by provincializing psychoanalysis's European provenance, but rather by demonstrating the non-Western traditions and individuals who contributed to psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge that was always already hybridized with the discourse of the other” (11). Rather than applying psychoanalysis to Islam or examining the influence and reception of psychoanalysis and the work of Freud specifically, El Shakry tells instead the story of an interaction and an exchange that informed and shaped multiple traditions. Engaging with figures such as Ibn ‘Arabi and al-Taftazani, El Shakry reads psychoanalysis through Islamic mysticism and Islamic mysticism through psychoanalysis. The reader is brought into the comparative secret (Arabic, sir) of the historical and theoretical analysis. The reader is at times disoriented, creatively led to explore the division of the self in the Sufi tradition, losing sight of Freud and Lacan, coming back to them, connecting, and then diving again into an exploration that takes them on different journeys and associations. The writing is never direct; it circles and curls, rises and descends, following the rhythm of the nafs (the breath but also the self), meandering into its depths in the hope of revealing its secrets.Just like Sarah Pinto enters through the door that Dr. Nand opened in his chronicle of Mrs. A., El Shakry enters through the door of Yusuf Murad. Editor of Majallat ‘ilm al-nafs (Journal of Psychology), Murad was a key figure of psychology (Gestalttheorie, especially) and psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt. Continuing in the tradition of nahda thinkers such as Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq,3 “In his midcentury dictionary, editor Yusuf Murad noted that he often returned to classical Arabic texts in order to create new translations for words and clear, precise, and capacious meanings” (65). The translation and engagement that Murad initiated have their place in the larger history of psychoanalysis and are not merely on its receptive end. El Shakry elaborates on Murad's rigorous and multifaceted engagement with psychology and philosophy thereby precluding the kinds of foreclosure that simplistic readings assume by painting the native as a passive receptor of European thought and knowledge. She portrays someone like Murad as translator and complicator of those very theories as he contributes to and potentially displaces their genealogies in the West. El Shakry's work exposes the superficial readings of Western knowledge and its effects on local contexts in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, portraying instead interactive and critical intellectual translations and in this case therapeutic models. Engaging with questions of the social through phenomenology and gestalt, Murad draws on the rich legacy of Islamic mysticism including al-Razi and Ibn ‘Arabi to think with psychoanalysis about the self, language, love, and subjectivity.El Shakry's thesis follows the course of critical nahda studies. The nahda, or Arab renaissance, which is associated with the project of Arab cultural and political modernity starting in the nineteenth century, simultaneously engages with Western knowledge and practices and Arab-Islamic ones. In this context, Majallat ‘ilm al-nafs and its editor Yusuf Murad express through translation, engagement, and critique a model of acknowledgment involving multiple intellectual traditions and subject formations. Ultimately, El Shakry argues that “it is not about the alleged modern presence or medieval absence of interiority, nor a simple narrative of modernity's claim to individual autonomy in the face of medieval heteronomy. Rather, what one finds in the modern period is a coexistence of autonomy and heteronomy, of the traditional practice of ethical self-attunement (tahdhib al-nafs) and the modern science of psychology (‘ilm al-nafs)” (60).El Shakry's work resonates with my reading of madness as junun but also as queerness and possession in Trials of Arab Modernity,4 and my engagement with the tradition, let's say, of akhbar (news, lore), integral to the understanding of the Arab blogosphere in Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals.5 The modern is not the negation of what precedes it, nor does it constitute a historical epistemic break as Michel Foucault would have it. In effect, multiple discourses continue to operate within modernity. Both in El Shakry and Pinto's works there is a rigorous deconstruction of the epistemological formations that lend themselves to hegemonic structures and models of reading especially psychoanalysis. In their works, the Freudian subject is engendered through the nafs of Ibn ‘Arabi and that of Shakuntala from the Mahabharata.Psychoanalysis as El Shakry and elsewhere Moneera al-Ghadeer6 argue is already in dialogue with the Arab-Islamic tradition, from Lacan's turn to Ibn ‘Arabi in his first seminar, to Freud's melancholia that could be traced to Avicenna's Canon on Medicine. This comparative trajectory adopted by El Shakry as well as by scholars such as Sahar Amer,7 Yoav Di-Capua,8 and others traces encounters and conversations that lead us to rethink what theory means. This is the kind of work I did in my reading of Arab modernity as a somatic condition, bringing al-Tahtawi and Walter Benjamin in conversation, reading al-Tahtawi through Benjamin and Benjamin through al-Tahtawi. This reading revealed that the modern could also be traced to a café in Marseilles, some thirty years before Charles Baudelaire's “À une passante,” wherein an Egyptian Imam turns to poetry as a repoussoir as he experiences fragmentation.9 Decolonizing psychoanalysis or theory more generally doesn't mean to extract or remove it in a futile quest for cultural or literary authenticity, but rather to take it on a journey that makes it lose itself, misrecognize itself, in the double meaning of the term. The comparative framework in El Shakry proliferates with critical associations. This proliferation makes connections when least expected and enables the deconstructive work to become truly generative, truly decolonial. The aim is to wonder, at the end, are we in Freud or in Ibn ‘Arabi?This comparative framework that can never reduce a complex and multifaceted relation between Arab-Islamic and European traditions allows us to rethink the question of modernity. The history of the subject and its trials and collapses at the intersection of literature and politics, East and West, the classical and the modern, is present in El Shakry's and Pinto's works as well. Modernity in its Western constellation involving the subject, the novel, and the nation-state to name a few is not produced in Europe and then imported to the global South but rather emerges in between, read from the perspective of a Sudanese village and its prodigal son who has returned after a long trip.10 To engage with this legacy is to look at selfhood and its development by examining the narratives and fictions of subjectivity and the genres to which these fictions give rise.More broadly, El Shakry's and Pinto's works raise the question of theory and of its application or histories beyond the Western context. Theory has been used or applied to the non-Western object—and to the object, period—be it a literary work or a cultural context or a time period. Theory has also been understood as a hegemonic structure that neutralizes or at least permanently reshapes in its own image works that are outside of its context. Few are those critics who are able to activate the kinds of dialogue that truly intervene in theoretical genealogies, excavating connections and stakes that reverberate beyond the particular trajectories with which theory is associated in its Euro-American context. This is the work that El Shakry, Pinto, and others do. It is meant to expose, upend, and imagine new intellectual trajectories and reading practices. Specifically, these practices deconstruct and decolonize epistemological formations not by extracting the foreign and framing its presence as a hegemonizing structure from psychology to madness to sexuality, but rather by initiating dialogues and identifying new critical trajectories. More important, as these practices meander and associate, they show vulnerability, which gives Freud's attempt at vulnerability in Interpretation of Dreams a new meaning. At a time when calls for purity in all forms unleash a violent and utopian cribble that seeks to split and isolate, El Shakry's and Pinto's works lead the way toward rigorous intellectual projects and political interventions.

In this chapter, Walter Brueggemann responds to the other essays in the volume. He likens phenomenology to the methods of “close reading” and “thick description” advocated by George Lindbeck and Gilbert Ryle based on Clifford Geertz’s anthropological method. He argues that such approaches have an important political function: they resist our culture’s totalizing impulse to master and control meaning by exploring the richness of texts. Brueggemann also helpfully situates phenomenology as “readings from and in a third place.” First, there are the “canonical” readings of scripture, reflecting the church’s practices of reading. Second, there are the reading practices of the critical academy, which are often in tension with the church. Phenomenology offers a third mode of reading, drawing from both the church and the academy while in thrall to neither.

This article explores the nature and function of intersubjectivity in religious education (RE) praxis. It is very common for religious educators to prioritise forms of RE that emphasise the importance of intersubjective, dialogical praxis. It is much less common, however, that theorists devote sustained time to thick description of the practice – what exactly it is, who is involved and what its practical and empirical benefits are. This article proposes that intersubjective dialogical praxis can flourish when a ‘safe space’ is created for students, particularly with regard to teacher–student dialogue. The first half of the article is theoretical, while the second half uses empirical evidence from participatory action research to demonstrate how intersubjective place sharing and meaning-making occurred in several Episcopal Church affiliated United States high schools. The article concludes that teacher relationality is a central though under-appreciated dimension of sound RE praxis that aims towards good citizenship and a student’s personal and spiritual development.

The present review focuses on the third volume of the collective study Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia and aims at analyzing the methods of studying reading practices proposed in the aforementioned publication. The articles included in the peer-reviewed volume are studied in detail against the background of previously published scholarly literature on the history of reading, as well as in relation to archival and previously (un)published materials that have so escaped researchers’ attention. The broad historical and literary material shows that the «narratives» proposed in the reviewed volume do not present a full-fledged history of reading practices, but describe only individual disparate reading strategies of typologically different readers. The forms of institutionalization of reading in the USSR that were left out are sometimes much more important in the context of transformations in reading practices than the total collection of the «cases» offered in the volume. At the same time, the case study review offers an opportunity to talk about ‘the reader of the 20th century’ as a special institution of Soviet culture. This is why much of the review presents an attempt to find other principles and strategies of analysis on which the history of reading in the «small twentieth century» can be based. The article offers a sociological portrait of the average reader, whose main features were formed during the Stalinist era and remained unchanged throughout the previous century. These features have existed in the same form for almost a quarter of the present century. The material that has been excluded from the present research can be divided into three groups: facts that characterize the Soviet state of affairs; information about the most important forms of institutionalized reading in the USSR-specific cultural environment; information concerning aesthetic and economic aspects of the book. A detailed commentary on each of these groups is intended to supplement and elaborate on the authors' concept. Along with the analysis of archival documents, we draw on materials from the funds of various public organizations and bodies, as well as periodicals, published memoirs, diaries and other materials available to us.

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...

Reading Anna Frajlich's Latest Volume of Poetry

Book Reviews Sara Guyer. Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 131. $26. Sara Guyer’s Reading withJohn Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism is a slim but dense volume that, not unlike the writings of the poet that form the object and axis of her readings, releases a subtle and powerful light of soft-laser steadiness and intensity. It accomplishes several things. On the most evident level, it constitutes a significant contribution to scholarship on Clare, providing new readings of poems and prose and staging ways of using biographical and contextual material that, altogether, model a fresh approach to the genre of the single-author monograph. Clearly, it re­ positions Clare among the Romantics for Romanticists. More than that, though, it makes a case to students and scholars of other fields and disci­ plines for the significance of Clare—long considered minor, marginal, a vi­ olet by a mossy stone, a poet for the cognoscenti—as a writer with whom to interrogate major philosophical and theoretical questions of modernity. Addressing readers of Clare and readers who should and need to read Clare, Guyer’s study brings the poet’s writing into dialogue with—or, rather, exposes its always already having been in dialogue with—funda­ mental concepts in Romantic and Postromantic aesthetic and political thought, rearticulating in the process the contemporaneity ofRomanticism for the global present. In its practice of careful reading, it shows and argues for a renewed attentiveness to the play and questioning of language whereby Romanticism doubly participates in and promises to open up the structures of what, after Foucault and Agamben, critical discourse has termed “biopolitical modernity.” In late works spanning the History ofSexuality to his last 1975—76 lectures at the College de France, Foucault conceptualized and analyzed a new dis­ position ofpower that emerged in the long nineteenth century in Western Europe. Supplanting the older, classical definition of sovereign power, this new disposition—biopolitics—defines itself as a power over life, rather than death, as a power to “make live and let die” manifest in an array of concrete arrangements—including techniques such as vaccination and new forms of record-keeping—that allow for the administration of bodies and the calculated management oflife. With his 20-year confinement in mental asylums in High Beach, Epping, and Northamptonshire, Clare wrote from SiR, 55 (Winter 2016) 585 586 BOOK REVIEWS within the very institutional settings of biopolitical administration. As testi­ monies to the effects of the Enclosure Acts of 1809 and following, his po­ ems bear witness to the effects on land and communities of privatizing mechanisms that dismantle the commons. Guyer suggests, without making fully explicit, that an analogous logic of confinement is operative in the psychiatric incarceration ofbodies, a placement that bespeaks displacement, and the political economic arrangement of land enclosure, a production of place as property that likewise occasions displacement. In terms of historical chronology, Romanticism coincides with the emergence of biopolitics. Guyer coins the cognate term “biopoetics,” in­ troduced in the subtitle of the book in apposition with “sovereignty” and “romanticism,” to theorize and analyze this claim. What is the relationship between biopolitics and biopoetics? The two are complicit insofar as Ro­ mantic literature internalizes and shows preoccupation with the new cate­ gories of life, such as “race,” “species,” and “population,” terms wherein the human is subject to mathematization. In the Romantic troping ofliter­ ary power itself in terms of a sovereign lyric subjectivity presumed capable of animating or giving life—a feature long taken to demarcate Romanti­ cism as movement, as period, and as field—Guyer discerns a core intimacy between the biopoetic and the biopolitical. Yet, biopoetics, in her analysis, designates more than just this complicity but also a practice and process of its undoing, an undoing that one may call “dis-enclosure,” in affinity with Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous investigation in Christian theological and posttheological writing of the gesture to open up a self-enclosed world, whereby that which is called “life” would be exposed as inadequate to, performatively in excess of, its nominal and normative determination. In the book’s five chapters, framed by the chiasmically titled “Introduc­ tion: The Life...

MLRy 98.1, 2003 243 and whether in 'War beides wahr | Und beides trug' (p. 291) the last word should be 'trog'. In 'Titans Wetterleuchten' (p. 229) Jean Paul's character Roquairol is called 'Raquairol'. The strange word 'volksauspeisungswissen' (p. 231) appears to be a misprint : H. G. Adler's edition has the more plausible 'volksausspeisungswissen'. Most of these and similar puzzles can only be solved by examining the Steiner Nachlass in Marbach. Such an examination remains necessary for anyone undertaking the interpretative study of Steiner's poetry which is now desirable, and which Jeremy Adler has shown himself exceptionally qualified to write. St John's College, Oxford Ritchie Robertson Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah. By Michael Mack. (Conditio Judaica, 34) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2001. vii + 23opp. ?52. ISBN 3-484-65134-2 (pbk). Michael Mack has done a tremendous service to Canetti scholarship by comparing and contrasting Canetti's theory ofthe crowd with Franz Baermann Steiner's anthro? pology of danger. Since Mack's study is the firstdetailed examination of Steiner's relation to Canetti, it deserves to be called ground-breaking. However, Mack has made an important contribution to German-Jewish literary and cultural history in more than one respect: his study rediscovers Steiner's poetry and anthropological work in its own right. Much of it has only subsequently been published (Steiner, Selected Writings,ed. by JeremyAdler and Richard Fardon, 2 vols (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999)). The introduction, which briefly recounts Steiner's life and work as well as his friendship with Canetti, makes the case that both writers share an anthropological re? sponse to the Shoah. Turning away from purely literary writing, Steiner and Canetti engage in a social anthropology that is concerned with an ethical impact on the reader. Although the thematic concerns of the two writers appear to be quite divergent in that Canetti focuses on the phenomenon of the crowd and Steiner on a sociology of danger, Mack argues convincingly that both thinkers are ultimately concerned with analysing violence that knows no limits (p. 4). The firstpart deals with Canetti's well-known flouting of established notions of scholarship in Crowds and Power and its uneasy generic status between literature and anthropology. Applying Dominick LaCapra's use of Freudian concepts, Mack sug? gests that Canetti's literary devices such as his 'rhetoric of immediacy', his 'thinking in images', and defamiliarization techniques result in a type of 'thick description' (Clifford Geertz's term) that is an implicit acting-out of trauma. The second part moves on to a discussion of Steiner's anthropology, in particular his theory of taboo as avoidance of danger and power. Placing Steiner's thinking in the context of British anthropology and its shift from evolutionism to functionalism , Mack argues that, unlike his mentors, Steiner pinpointed the West's failure to understand Eastern concepts. There follows a comparison of Steiner's thesis on slavery with Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1977), in which Mack highlights Steiner's pre-deconstructionist critique of Western 'epistemic violence' (p. 112). This prepares the ground fora detailed analysis of Steiner's theory of taboo, at the heart of which is the idea that taboos are 'thought-out rituals that help prevent social tensions and violent divisions within society' (p. 133). The final part focuses on the notion of literature as scholarship in Steiner's and Canetti's works. Returning to Canetti's hybridization of literature and anthropology, Mack puts forward the idea that Canetti's insistence on the factuality of his argument underlines his claim to responsibility. By presenting normal behaviour as psychopathic , Canetti aims at a metamorphosis of social practice. The 'acting-out' that 244 Reviews characterizes Crowds and Power should therefore be understood as a provocation for a 'working-through' (p. 152). However, if Canetti does ontologize violence, then this raises the question how social change can be instigated at all and what the basis for his notion of metamorphosis is, a point that Mack does not address. His application of the Freudian notion of 'working-through' to Crowds and Power is, in my view, the least convincing argument of his study in that it...

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,Whereupon, lo! Up sprang the aboriginal name!I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,with tall and wonderful spires....-Mannahatta11In his 1860 poem Mannahatta, Walt Whitman hints at just how microscopic our academic practice of close reading could eventually become. Whitman's poem reads its own title word's letterscape as a skyline, with its vowels compared to saliva-storing water-bays and its consonants compared to ascending spires. The poet finds meaning burrowed inside a borough's name, but also scrolled out along the surface of its spelling. This paper is a series of aphoristic riffs following his own example off the rooftops of its most extreme implications, treating this fleeting and oblique reference as a kind of high-rise Rosetta Stone or a runic cipher into Whitman's philological concerns.Whitman, unlike thinkers from Plato to Saussure, believed in a sensual correspondence not only between objects and their names, but also between words and their component letters. The Native American word Mannahatta treated like a skyline is a case of signifier-become-signified, characters-become-content, and a horizon-made-hieroglyphic, proof indeed that These States shall stand rooted in the ground in names.2 David Carr refers to the Manhattan skyline and its hourglass undulation as a sexy colossus in Reubenesque recline,3 but Whitman sees the pre-colossal 1860 skyline as a spelling primer and a conjurer's spell at once. While my reference is anachronistic, Alphabet City here is not a specific Lower East Side enclave but, for Whitman, the elongated entirety of Manhattan itself.Clearly, Whitman's background as a printer's apprentice and a journeyman carpenter gives him a mechanical and architectural feeling for the humanly made shapes of characters and words. Whitman (who blurred between subject and object by writing his own nameless reviews for of Grass) is a word-carpenter and a self-made fetish constructed out of words at once. In Song of the Broad-Axe, one of his odes-to-tools, he uses the word to describe the jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising4 of a building, just as his assembling-together of letters on a compositor's stick was preparatory to the laying-down of words on a page, a process blueprinted by Whitman's handwritten manuscripts. By implication, the crossbars, ascenders, and serifs of letters are the beam, studs, tenons, and mortises of our words, and considering his abundant references to house-making tools (and the ways that exclamation points often cluster around those tool-references), Whitman's mere pen seems often to envy the majestic blows of hammers and chisels and mallets.2Mannahatta imagines a word made out of iron, rivets, and cement, but the letters making up the words Leaves of Grass on that book's first cover were entwined in vines, buds, and ivy-tendrils, in a biomorphic ensemble that announced its main vegetable motif, a topos that is rooted in a complex of Romance-language puns. The French word for book (livre) indeed derives (linguistically and organically) from a tree's living portion (its liber). In one anthropological model, the initial letters stamped on clay tablets were symbolic of grasses like wheat, barley and related mercantile produce-grass was among our earliest pictograms. Whitman is tapping into an organicist tradition here but also serving (by focusing on the architectonics of the alphabet) as a precursor to a more meta-discursive tradition to come, and hence serving as an inter-generational pivot and joist.In Thoreau's sandbank scene from Walden, letters and words emerge in the shapes formed by the thawing clay of a railroad embankment, as items of organic telos, but Whitman sees letters and words as humanly formed constructions, both arbitrarily iconic and yet elementally essential at once. …

Chasing Methuselah: Theology, the Body, and Slowing Human Aging

The article provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of a collective monograph devoted to various angles of the study of youth reading– both in the universal dimension and based on the materials of regional sociological research (Chelyabinsk, 2022). The author analyzes in detail the structure of the work (chapters and paragraphs of the monograph), identifies relevant issues related to the analysis of the student reading audience, the implementation of their requests and reading interests in the traditional book culture and digital reality. The author points out the originality of approaches and the novelty of the material obtained, the theoretical and practical value of the results and conclusions of the study. The author focuses on identifying key strategies used to promote reading practices and popularize books in online reading communities. The author concludes that the monograph is in demand for educational institutions, libraries, and various institutions that regulate the development of reading practices in modern Russia and the world community.

To establish points of contact between reading, theater and education, this research aims to investigate practices of reading involved in the creative processes of theater groups, specifically Cia Paidia Theatre (Young Co. Paideia ) and Cia Antropofgica (PY) . These two companies are part of the current So Paulo group stage and were contemplated by the Municipal Development Program of the Theater to the City of So Paulo over some issues . In the first stage of the research, observations and interviews with the theater groups in question (field research) were performed. Although this step was a survey in the Collection of Fomento Municipal Theatre of So Paulo Culture. Reading the projects of other theater groups contemplated by law provided greater understanding of cultural actions arising from the program as well as the theatrical panorama outlined by this policy . The search for understanding of the functioning of the program and encouraged groups , combined with studies on reading in theater groups ( in locus ) , provided subsidies underpinning of our research hypotheses : the configuration of cultural practices -among them, related to readingarising out of the Support Program to the theater . From the collection of data and the theoretical approach, the figure of the leader emerges as key in driving the collective reading practices, whose mediation , according to the analysis , is based on extensive literary , cultural and political training by theater directors . Elements such as improvisation , working with the body, with listening , and training by action and experience , among others , also have implications to the practice of reading.Finally , our study is focused on the idea that the theatrical reading practices -developed by the group holding , as members in their training centers , young people of school age -can illuminate school reading practices.

This article examines the drama Joanna the Wife of Chuza (1909) by Lesya Ukrainka, who is one of the defining figures in the history of modern Ukrainian literature. This work is considered an example of creating a new communicative model, introducing the poetics of an open work in the Ukrainian literature and establishing a new relationship between writer and audience. The incompleteness of the central image of this work, and therefore of the corresponding behavioral model and worldview, leads to the absence of a plot ending which would be the final solution to the conflict. In this way, Ukrainka establishes a new reading practice, not limited to experiencing the ‘life world’ of the author’s work. As reference to the history of thetext shows, it corresponds to the author’s conscious instruction, with which the composition of the work agrees: the events take place in a special period of time, when the previous story has already ended and the new one has not yet begun (after the crucifixion of Christ, but not after the resurrection). At the same time, the spatial organization of the work emphasizes the position of readers, turning them from interested witnesses to active searchers. The example of Joanna is all the more telling because it undermines the hegemony of the novel in twentieth-century literature and draws attention to literary forms that correspond to a particular literary situation, especially that of ‘submerged population groups’ (Frank O’Connor). The change introduced by Lesya Ukrainka at the level of a separate work is also a change within the genre as a way of communicating between an author and a reader; it is also a change in the very notion of literature as a certain type of aesthetic experience and as a culturally established way of cognitive and rhetorical response to a certain type of situation.

This study aims to dismantle the écritures of infants, toddlers, and children used in the early childhood education field and deliberately use the term ‘children(어린이)’ to discuss the contribution of cultural anthropological perspectives and children’s studies, as well as the academic intersections and roles of qualitative research and cultural anthropology, by breaking away from existing discourses. In the past, research on children was viewed from the perspective of developmental studies and psychology, and thus children were viewed as universal and general passive objects. However, many cultural anthropological studies criticized the universality of children, viewing them as socialized differently depending on the cultural context in which they are placed. This positioning has led to a conceptual reestablishment of humans as beings with subjectivity beyond the concept of ‘vulnerable beings.’ Qualitative research can be said to be an academic intersection with cultural anthropology. Qualitative research, as a philosophical implementation method for understanding humans, emphasizes understanding cultural diversity and context. To this end, qualitative researchers need to reveal children’s daily lives through ‘thick descriptions’ and look at children as social actors by adding an ‘etic’ perspective to the ‘emic’ foundation. In order for the 3Es of ‘participant observation’, ‘in-depth interviews’, and ‘fieldwork’ for children to be practiced, they must be conducted on the basis of a correct understanding of children as beings and ethical awareness. Ultimately, researching children means revealing the invisible context of children’s lives, and to do this, it is necessary to listen to children’s voices and face their lives. When this is done, children’s research will become authentic research.

The path to a market economy in Russia has been a difficult one, and there is still a long way to go. As people have discovered, it is not just a matter of changing the laws and the economic institutions; the real key to success lies in unleashing the potential of human capital. This means both a change in attitudes and modes of behavior and a change in the way productive units are managed. As Alla Chirikova puts it in "Russian Directors: Management Strategies and Behavioral Models," increasingly in recent years analysts have been saying that "internal management and the type of strategies used by the directors will largely predetermine the state of Russia's economy and the level of political harmony in society." While many of the rules have changed since the Soviet period, managers still find themselves unequipped to deal productively with the new opportunities. The problem is that they are not clear as to what guidelines they should be adopting and how they can choose the optimal models of enterprise personnel management for their particular business or organization. In order to see how directors have been responding to the changes, and to find out what the directors themselves think about the helpfulness of these changes, Chirikova analyses the data from a study conducted in 2000-2001 in six regions of Russia. One response to change has been that directors have become heavily involved in politics, a move they see as having been forced on them as a way of influencing the environment in which they must conduct business, and one described by Chirikova as a strategy of survival. Another, more recent, change has been that directors are becoming more aware of the need to adopt long-term strategies of enterprise development as a reaction against the short-term uncertainty resulting from the financial crises of the late 1990s. When it comes to relations with employees, it is clear that there is considerable continuity with the past. Thus, ten years of reforms "have enabled us to see clearly that the restructuring of mutual expectations between employees and enterprise directors is proceeding slowly, and even the intervention of ‘market forces’ is unlikely to change the situation anytime soon." At the center of this relationship is a level of paternalism that would be recognizable to any worker during the Soviet period, involving an acceptance of the hierarchy of control in exchange for some level of security and the provision of benefits extrinsic to the business itself. As the data show, this situation seems to fit well with the desires of both managers and workers, the former because it prevents transparency of actions and the latter because it provides security and material benefits. As a result, the authoritarian characteristics of the Soviet enterprise have been continued during the transition to a privately owned economy. The question, of course, is whether this is a result of cultural lag and a desire to preserve managerial power, or whether it is a rational way to protect managers and directors from the uncertainties of a chaotic economy. At the same time, the data suggest that paternalism as an ideology is giving way to paternalism as a way of widening the range of incentives that can be used. Data on gender differences tend to show that "female directors, far from losing out to men as managers, sometimes perform more successfully and provide more stable conditions necessary for their enterprise to exist." In part, Chirikova notes, this is due to the fact that "female leadership is based on a more complex mix of strategies and incorporates a broader range of ‘techniques’ than male leadership." How much involvement women have in their work role, of course, depends on the extent to which they have to juggle family life with the demands of the workplace, a topic considered by Galina Turetskaia in "The Family and Women's Business Activities." The issue, the author suggest, is not a matter of gender but rather of strategies used in combining work and family life. Thus, one such strategy is "an inclination to play down their business qualities in significant personal relationships, an inclination manifested by women of the ‘innovative’ type. In contrast, ‘forced’ [type of] women make the maximum effort to exhibit these qualities in the sphere of interpersonal interaction. At work, all the respondents try to enhance their business and feminine qualities; at the same time, the ‘innovative’ [type of] women are much more oriented toward enhancing their feminine qualities, because in their case their business qualities are sufficiently pronounced."