Mitschrift revisited: Hans Joachim Schädlichs »Papier und Bleistift« (1971)

Editor’s Note

Discussion of Dupont's “Statistical inference from clinical trials: Choosing the right P value”

The editors and editorial board of MLQ invite submissions of topical, short-form essays on literary history and the crises, clarities, and opportunities of the present moment for an ongoing special series, “Present Tense: Literary History in Our Time.”The series’ scope is open-ended: literary history is construed broadly in accord with journal tradition; crises, clarities, and opportunities can point to the precariousness or promise (or both) of our collective now. We are keen to solicit commentary from scholars representing a variety of career stages and institutional affiliations and to incorporate perspectives on teaching and other aspects of professional life that are not normally considered in published literary research. Topics under discussion might include literary history in conjunction withThis list is partial and variable; the direction of the series will follow largely from submissions. Essays for consideration should be 3,000 to 5,000 words in length. Email for submissions and questions: mlq@uw.edu.

The habit of speaking for pictures, bringing them to life, is as old as writing, maybe older. Ekphrasis, the Greeks called it. Ekphrastic poems, beginning with Homer's account of the shield of Achilles--which tells the story of creation, and everything under the sun--(re)create artworks in writing, including some that may not exist elsewhere. More recent poets have written from paintings and photographs, using them as jumping-off points to create their own worlds in words. The novelist Peter Rock has long practiced the art of ekphrasis, though he would not call it by that name. A word he uses to describe his habit of turning to pictures for inspiration is provocation. His most recent project, Spells (2015), was provoked by the work of five photographers he invited to be his collaborators: Sophia Borazanian, Sara Lafleur-Vetter, Shaena Mallett, Peter Earl McCollough, and Colleen Plumb. Each supplied him with photographs, and he wrote stories in return. Rock calls it a novel-within-photographs, suggesting that the stories, some of them linked, were waiting to be found--that his job was as much archaeology as invention. A Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded in 2014, helped to finance the project, and an exhibition last fall at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon (at the nonprofit Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts), included all forty-three photos, as well as video sequences of images with many of the thirty-one stories in voiceover narration. Blue Sky's website and The Peter Rock Project website continue to host Spells online. Several of the stories and accompanying photographs have appeared in literary journals (Illuminations in ZYZZYVA, Go-Between in Ploughshares, and To Begin to Start in Oregon Humanities), and Rock hopes to publish the project in book form. Can attach myself to a story, project myself into a picture? asks the speaker in Hello, one of the first stories in Spells. Is there a difference if believe it? It is easy to imagine Rock asking himself these questions. This is not the only time his stories have been sparked by rubbing up against real worlds outside his own. Rock's last two novels were inspired by actual events. The Shelter Cycle (2013) is set against the background of the millennialist faith of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which Rock encountered while working on a ranch in Montana in the early 1990s. Adherents prepared for the end of the world by digging vast underground shelters; years later, Rock met a young woman who grew up in the church at Reed College in Portland, where he teaches creative writing and she had been a student. My Abandonment (2009) was his response to a news story announcing the discovery by a backcountry jogger, in Portland's wild Forest Park, of a father and daughter living in a remote camp where they had gone undetected for years, complete with a garden, library, and septic system. They were moved to a farm outside the city, where the father, a veteran, was given work and the girl sent to school, but they soon disappeared, and haven't surfaced since outside the novel. I've always found that a little bit of information is a good thing, Rock says in an online video interview about My Abandonment, which follows him as he looks for the site of the camp. I just started to wonder what became of them. He could be describing the way he turned for inspiration to photographs made by people he barely knew--or to the way photographs suggest whole worlds to him. In the five novels and two collections of stories Rock has published since 1997, outsiders and unsuspected lives and forces are often his subjects. Phis spring, his first young adult novel, Klickitat, will be published by Abrams Books. This exchange occurred by email in December 2015. The participants once lived down the hall from each other, on a ranch in a remote corner of the California desert, but they hadn't spoken for years. Stephen Longmire: You've said you first wrote from pictures when you worked as a guard at an art museum years ago, keeping yourself amused by making up stories about the pieces on display, remembering what you could until you could write them down on breaks. …

The ancestral territory of the Yavapai amounted to over 20,000 square miles, or over one-sixth of the present state of Arizona. Some limited horticulture was practiced as well, especially by the northeastern Yavapai. The western Yavapai, living in a low lying desert area where temperatures were hot and rainfall rare would gather cacti, agave, mescal, and creosote brush while hunting mountain sheep in the Castle Dome and Kofa Mountains. The historical literature designated the Yavapai as Apaches, Yuma Apaches, and Mojave Apaches. Pai separation and creation stories do suggest that a children's quarrel led to hostilities that resulted in the Yavapai breaking away from the Havasupai. The Yavapai, like the Mojave, had fewer contacts with Europeans and lived in relatively isolated zones in scattered rancher'as. By the early 1900s the Apache Wars were over and the federal government no longer wanted to fund the concentration of American Indians.

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

QR Codes and Traditional Beadwork: Augmented Communities Improvising Together

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Brian Nelson, The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Reading this engagingly written volume, I was reminded of my twenty-one year old self, approaching a service desk in the old Sorbonne in the early nineteen fifties. In those days you couldn't write a dissertation on an author who was already the subject of another candidate's research. Bonjour Madame, I said to the motherly woman behind the counter, je voudrais faire une these sur Laclos, s'il vous plait. Un instant, Monsieur, said she, disappearing into a space behind the desk and returning almost immediately, with a regretful shake of the head. Je suis desolee, Monsieur, she said, mais Laclos est pris. Then, brightening, she added helpfully: Mais il y a Lamartine qui est libre. I thanked her and retired to reflect on the alphabetically ordered card-file and its amusing juxtaposition of Laclos and Lamartine, but also on the assumption that one author is as good as any other when you are writing a Sorbonne dissertation.I was reminded of this personal episode while reading Brian Nelson's admirable Cambridge Introduction, which too is largely author-oriented, although chronologically rather than alphabetically ordered, so that uncomfortable couplings like that of Voltaire and Rousseau or Proust and Jarry can readily occur. For, like the history of painting and sculpture and the history of music, but unlike social, political and economic history, literary history still takes as its object those individual figures in the past whose writing (which may or may not have been celebrated or influential in its own day) stands out in the perspective of the present and continues therefore to be read. That there is, or may be, a history of readability itself - we do not read Baudelaire, hear Stravinsky or appreciate Goya as their contemporaries did - so that literary history is, or may be, an account of the ongoing and ever-renewable readability of particular authors, is the paradox that grounds what is called history. But it is also a condition of literary history itself.So it is not entirely accidental, perhaps, that the first chapter of Brian Nelson's volume is centred on Villon's Ballade des Pendus, which in its opening line enacts a move that defines every literary tradition, the work's address in the present to posterity, a future fraternity that is specified (by the present tense) as always already active in the moment of address: Freres humains qui apres nous vivez. Similarly the following chapter, on Rabelais, centres on the episode from Gargantua, in which the frozen words that figure writing meet and become accessible, in the spring, to readers who find them new and engaging. If the Diderot of Jacques le Fataliste (chapter 11) frequently addresses himself to his supposed reader, however, it is as much to flaunt the artificiality of literary fiction and its modes, the absolute malleability of writing within a given genre, and hence the unpredictability of the literary enterprise itself and its history, as it is to predetermine the novel's future reception history in any way. …

The purpose of this paper is to compare the creation in the Bible and The Magician’s Nephew. This dissertation suggests that the biblical world can be shown in much abundance and gives readers pleasure through literature and allusion. This thesis suggests that the Biblical world can be delineated in much abundance and pleasure through literature technique such as allusion by comparing the creation stories revealed in Lewis’s work with those in the Bible. Despite of the fact that there are undeniable substantial differences between the creation stories of the Bible and those in The Magician’s Nephew, this study shows an imaginary world of literary portrayal and essential concepts of the Bible are effectively conceived through allusions in the work. The possibilities of more pleasant and vivid way of understanding of the real world created by God through literary works are also discussed.

Response:Reading Outward Talia Schaffer (bio) The 2018 NAVSA conference was called "Looking Outward," but I heard so many talks about forms of reading that I decided to take the opportunity to think about how we read and what we read for. By "reading outward," I mean to designate a restlessness with received wisdom, a desire to strike out into fresh ideas about literary forms and histories. We are rethinking reading, I believe, because two critical trends are converging. For the past several years Victorianists have been debating how we read: by way of surface reading, symptomatic reading, suspicious reading, distant reading, close reading, reparative reading, paranoid reading, and digital reading. The reading wars often tacitly have constructed the text itself as a vulnerable, inert, mute entity, and the reader as an active agent. We could be hurting or helping it, consolidating similar items in bulk or zooming in on one, skimming over its surface or digging into its depths. But this vision collides with a different model of textuality that I find implicit in recent work on temporality, wherein texts are somewhat more interactive, influencing one another, carrying residual marks of previous contact, prefiguring and recasting inherited techniques. In reassessing literary history, we accept a more modest and hopefully less invasive kind of agency, the stance of the careful observer assessing changed forms over time. Theorists of queer temporality have been exploring the political affordances of finding oneself outside of conventional linear (re)productive time, and the ways in which this subject position might orient one toward suspension, looking backward, or a utopian futurity.1 This work stresses the subjective experience of temporal duration, in which time [End Page 248] can feel suspended, slowed, frozen, simultaneous. This suggests a new model of understanding literary history beyond a simple linear chronology in which predecessors influence inheritors. In other words, considering time itself might provide a more generous and nuanced way of thinking about reading. The three preceding articles bring historical interest to bear on the reading wars. Sara L. Maurer, Maia McAleavey, and Lech Harris each offer a radical proposition based on the surprising longevity of an early-Victorian textual structure. Their work models the ways in which a sensitive alertness to textual elements can reshape conventional literary history by steering between the Scylla of intrusive critical agency and the Charybdis of simplistic models of influence. They trace the long afterlife of 1810s-1830s readerly expectations, a richly residual presence that a careful reader can sense permeating subsequent work. Sara L. Maurer's study of the evangelical religious tracts of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that they discouraged sympathetic affiliation. Rather, in Maurer's words, they "encouraged the individual reader to experience his or her own unlimited personal responsibility for developing an inner conscience in response to these texts. This weakened the tracts' potential for creating fellow feeling among transnational communities" (224). Thus the Religious Tract Society produced stories featuring someone unlike the reader, not to encourage identification, feel community, or develop sympathy, but rather in order to "foreground … reading as re-experience" (226). Tract readers used the text to move back into their own memories. In the early Victorian period, people practiced a form of reading that was a kind of closed loop, a solipsistic self-reference that explicitly eschewed affiliative outreach. Maurer's study shows that "embedded within the most social space of the Victorian social problem novel is a style of deeply asocial reading" (229). Maurer accurately points out that this work problematizes Benedict Anderson's imagined community, because evangelical readers were exhorted to stop reading newspapers lest they diffuse their moral attention in imagined far-off situations instead of focusing on their own souls. These findings also challenge the study of sympathy. Today, critics debate whether readerly sympathy extends into the real world: does weeping over Tiny Tim really make one more likely to help living children in need?2 Maurer, however, blocks the automatic equation of sympathy and ethical feeling. It is all the more surprising to find this asocial, solipsistic stance in the heyday of the sentimental novel, although it makes sense in terms of the history of Protestant emphasis on the formation of...

The decision to trust an engineering system—whether to fly in an aircraft, to drive a car - can have real world, societal, environmental and economic consequences. Engineering arguments are multidisciplinary and have a number of characteristics. A significant component of these decisions is science-based and may deploy sophisticated engineering calculations, mathematical models, simulations of the world and the engineered systems. However, this does not mean the judgments are purely deductive or logical. The framing of the problems, the validation of the assumptions, the application of “stopping rules” to decide when there is sufficient confidence is often an exercise in expert judgement. The overall process is socio-technical with challenge necessary to build confidence, and seeking dissent and counter-evidence important. One contribution to achieving confidence in engineering decisions is assurance cases: “a documented body of evidence that provides a convincing and valid argument that a system is adequately dependable for a given application in a given environment”. Our approach is based on the key concepts of claims, arguments and evidence (CAE): Claims—statements about a property of the system, Evidence that is used as the basis of the justification of the claim, Arguments link the evidence to the claim. Engineering justifications are too complex to express in terms of a simple CAE triple. If we are developing a top down justification, the claims need to be expanded into subclaims until we can identify evidence that can directly support the subclaims. Engineering assurance arguments tend to be some 10 s to 100 s of nodes and have considerable supporting narrative. We have developed an approach to structuring such arguments based on a set of archetypal CAE fragments that we have termed CAE building blocks. The identification of the blocks was supported by an empirical analysis of the types of engineering arguments that are made about safety and dependability from defence, finance and medical applications. Our approach factors out the argument into parts that can be addressed deductively and the side-warrant, which highlights the properties assumed of the world and have an inductive component. In this way we hope to get the benefits of deductive reasoning without losing the important argument that justifies why, in the real world, such deduction is appropriate and valid. These two aspects: the use of CAE fragments and the factorisation of deductive and inductive allow us to speculate how we can best exploit a variety of automated reasoning approaches.

MLR, .,   field of expertise with the third quarter of the book being devoted solely to Goethe. is is hardly inappropriate, given Goethe’s status as one of the very few writers in world literature to have an entire epoch named aer them (‘Goethezeit’). As Reed also remarks, there is less of a gap between modern German writers and the texts of antiquity and early modernity treated in the first half of his book: even Bertolt Brecht named the Bible as an inspirational text for his style (p. ). Covering Faust, the lyric poetry, and Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister respectively, Reed explores Goethe’s lifelong habit of reworking, revising, and developing some of his most famous works, paying detailed attention to the entanglements of his personal and professional writing life. e final part of Genesis considers nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature, specifically works by Georg Büchner, omas Mann, Franz Kaa, Brecht, Paul Celan, and Christa Wolf, neatly dramatizing the struggles and successes of their (sometimes foreshortened) literary careers. As Reed admits in his Preface, Genesis ‘casts a wide net for a limited haul—the studies are small in number when set against the infinite corpus of literary works whose every genesis might be reconstructed ’ (p. xi). Nevertheless, Reed’s selection is representative of many authors, many epochs, many genres, and many locations. And, as he rightly observes, ‘even if we can only get to know a few works in genetic detail, we can see in these the embodiment of a constant principle that alters our feeling for whatever we read. Every text will come to life in a fresh way’ (p. ). Reed’s essays—for this book could easily and profitably be dipped into as an essay collection—offer refreshing, invigorating readings; they are consistently pithy, insightful, and deeply rooted in rigorous scholarship lightly worn. M  N I E A Little History of Poetry. By J C. New Haven: Yale University Press. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. John Carey’s Little History of Poetry, which is just over  pages, is an immensely ambitious project that seeks to tell us about all significant poetry in the history of literacy. An ancient narrative, e Epic of Gilgamesh, is Carey’s starting point. It is a strange story which is possibly a kind of founding epic (but that point is not insisted on). Carey brings out its parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. is light touch contrasts with the systematic aesthetic and cultural history displayed in Stephen Greenblatt’s e Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (London: Bodley Head, ; reviewed in MLR,  (), –), which compares Gilgamesh with the biblical creation story and links them with Milton’s Paradise Lost and with Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel. Gilgamesh is a text for the learned. William Empson was a fan of Gilgamesh, and Empson’s own poetry is very learned indeed. Sadly, he is not mentioned in this history. e wit and playfulness of ‘Sleeping out in a College Cloister’, the tenderness of ‘To an Old Lady’, and the intellectual density of ‘Bacchus’, ‘High  Reviews Dive’, and ‘Legal Fiction’ could well have earned him a place in this book. e strength of his poetry is not in doubt. Christopher Ricks’s big chapter on Empson in e Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), pp. –, is especially persuasive. e literary history as presented in this book is clear and direct. e ancient classical epic poets, Homer and Virgil, underpinned and defined Greek and Roman culture. In later cultures, poetry found new roles. Following the achievement of the Anglo-Saxon poets (especially the Beowulf poet), Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton each reinvented the nature of poetry. Subsequent giants in the English language, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Dylan omas, continued the process of enlarging our understanding of what poetry is and what it can do. e more recent the poet the more biographical information is available. is lends depth to the sketches of poets who were women, or working-class, or homosexual, as well as those who were addicted, disempowered, or mentally or physically ill. Coleridge, Keats, Emily Brontë, Wilde, Hopkins, Hardy, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Auden, Bishop...

Even relatively early in his career critics compared Pynchon to writers like Rabelais, Swift and Melville. Like Cervantes or Sterne or Joyce (who died only four years after Pynchon's birth), Pynchon takes naturally to grand, comedic visions of the culture that has shaped his imagination and sensibility. He has affinities with the great epic poets as well. His catalogues – of disasters, of trash in a used car, of stamp anomalies, of pre-war British candies – link him to Homer, to Spenser, to his countryman Walt Whitman. Like Milton, he can recount a creation story fraught with sexual politics (Eve, Lilith and Adam become, in Vineland [1990], Frenesi, DL and Brock Vond) or imagine history's omega (the descending Rocket in the closing pages of Gravity's Rainbow [1973]). In Mason & Dixon (1997), like Virgil chronicling the mythic genesis of the fatherland, Pynchon imagines the moment at which the disparate ingredients of the American nation first came together. Like Swift, Pynchon can imagine a flying island (the tumescent airship of the Chums of Chance in Against the Day [2006]). Like Dante, he can evoke hellish abjection (Brigadier Pudding) and even conduct readers on a tour of the infernal regions, as announced by an epigraph purporting to come from the doubly apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (“Oxyrhynchus papyrus number classified”): “Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in hell today.”

Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x [Please note: the three articles referred to in this editorial (Segal, Shuxian and van Binsbergen) are published in Volume 3, Issue 2]. Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK RECO eligion Compass 1749-8171 © 200 The Aut or Journal Compil tion © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 30 0.111 /j. 749-8171.20 8.00130.x D cember 2008 0??? 6 rigi l A ticle EDIT RI L aniela Merolla and Mineke Schipper