Names as Poetic Terms of Art

This paper looks at ways in which methods used in literary analysis can contribute to higher education research. I start by describing a methodology commonly used in the analysis of literary texts, close reading or textual analysis, and outline how it can be utilised in conjunction with several theoretical approaches in the literary studies toolkit. I then demonstrate how these methodological approaches might work in higher education research through a brief analysis of two texts produced by two universities, focusing on the construction of the doctoral researcher in each. Finally, I close by briefly considering what kinds of texts could be analysed in a higher education research context and argue for a broadening of what counts as data in the field.

Here in Lithuania, it would be difficult to separate the idea of what is oral tradition, which is most commonly understood as folklore (in the sense of German Volkskunde), from its studies and research. Throughout history the role of orally transmitted folklore in our country has been especially prominent. Folklore was regarded as a unique expression of the “national soul,” and allotted special importance during the national liberation movements that were taking place in Lithuania not only in the wake of German Romanticism at the end of the nineteenth century, but also in the second half of the twentieth century. The folk singing tradition was considered especially essential for (and by) the Lithuanians; for example, the national liberation movement “Sajudis” promoted the so-called “singing revolution,” which dovetailed with Gorbatchov’s Perestroika. That is why, probably, the scholarly ideas of what is (or should be considered) oral tradition stayed petrified along the lines inherited from Romanticism—much longer than they should have, anyway. The criteria of authenticity, archaism, and ethical and aesthetic values were crucial in determining whether a particular fragment of folklore was to receive scholarly attention, that is, whether it would be recorded, archived, studied, and published. Striving to search out and rescue the folk treasures, which were conceived as disappearing or dying out, was imperative for the major part of the fieldwork conducted up to the very end of the twentieth century—perhaps understandable for a people accustomed to being on the verge of extinction for centuries, but that’s another question. Moreover, this quest for archaism defined to a considerable extent the folk’s ideas about their own traditions, and the content of those traditions as well. Yet from the 1990’s onward the situation has been visibly altering. First, the elderly people from the countryside are no longer considered the prime sources of oral folk tradition. Other social and age groups, different folklore “genres,” the role of folklore in everyday situations, and transformations and paraphrases of the tradition have also become the focus

“Oral tradition”—not a concept I’m really comfortable with, actually. It’s partly its sneaky connotations: “oral” as symbol of the primitive, the other, the marginal at the edge of the triumphant western dream; “tradition”/ “traditional” too: opposed to modern/western/literate/individual/creative, implicitly highlighting transmission and the “old,” downplaying creativity, multiple agency, politics, inventiveness. Nowadays we query those onceobvious ethnocentric universalizing assumptions, of course, and instead explore the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look not to essentialized divisions between “old” and “new” but to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms not just “traditional” ones)—but the older connotations still keep sneaking through. “Oral tradition” isn’t very transparent as an analytical concept anyhow: “oral” with its ambiguity between “voiced” and (the potentially much wider) “non-written”; “tradition” as—what exactly? what’s ruled out? In the areas I’ve worked in (around issues to do with performance, oral/performed literature, narrative, popular culture—in Africa and comparatively) the term “oral tradition” hasn’t proved particularly illuminating as such and isn’t nowadays very widely used. It has pragmatic uses, though. As in this journal, it has served to gather together questions of textuality, orality, voice, text, performance, verbal art in a way too often ignored elsewhere. It fills—and challenges—gaps left in the canons of many established academic disciplines. And its cross-cultural framework and synoptic wide-ranging vision, unfettered by discipline-imposed shibboleths, can take us constructively across language, text, literary analysis, genre, media studies, popular culture, performance, information technology, and

When Victorian critics like Margaret Oliphant and Henry Mansel reacted negatively to the popular “sensation novel” in the 1860s, chief among their concerns was that these novels “preach[ed] to the nerves” instead of engaging readers’ cultivated reflective judgment (Mansel 483). Scholarship on sensation novels has sought to identify the unique features that allowed these texts to directly engage readers’ bodies and do certain kinds of cultural or ideological work. In a brief but significant moment in chapter 3 of his ambitious book The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan asks us to rethink both the nature of Mansel's critique and the singularity of sensation novels. A lifelong idealist invested in metaphysics, Mansel bewailed specific features of these “morbid” fictions: their melodramatic subject matter, their emphasis on plot over character, their responsiveness to market demand. But Morgan reads Mansel's review as a reaction against a much broader set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects). In the compelling story Morgan tells, sensation novels come to look less like unique sites of physiological stimulation and more like popular literary instances of a new aesthetic theory that was reimagining the relationship between humans and objects in their environment. Rather than focusing on the specificity of particular aesthetic objects (artworks, music, literary texts), Morgan turns our attention to how multiple discursive fields in the nineteenth century intersected as they rethought the nature of looking, hearing, reading, or otherwise engaging with objects in the world.With thoughtful, nuanced explication of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts, Morgan advances two interconnected claims, both supplemented by encyclopedic notes and references (which comprise a quarter of the book). His first argument is that the aesthetic experience we tend to value as the “highest” human capacity—because it appears to be a spiritual or transcendental property of autonomous, deliberative, inward-turning selves—was instead imagined within a range of nineteenth-century discourses (physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, art history, literature, even interior design and color theory) as a function of bodies and the matter that comprised them. The book's second contention is that this “materialist strain” in Victorian aesthetics displaced the agency of aesthetic response from individual human persons to nonhuman matter, resulting not only in the expansion of aesthetic experience to nonhuman animals (think of Darwin's discerning birds) but also in conferring consciousness to inanimate physical objects. Whereas scholarship by Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance) and David Wayne Thomas (Cultivating Victorians) associates aesthetic experience with the cultivation of critical detachment and self-reflective individuality, Morgan reads such liberal ideals as reactionary responses to an increasingly materialist account of the self. His argument thus resonates with and broadens the scope of Nicholas Dames's approach in The Physiology of the Novel. Taking a cue from other scholars who have charted a nineteenth-century erosion of mind-body dualism (Allan Richardson, Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth), Morgan shows how this erosion took on radical forms, not just by affording material properties to minds but also by identifying the “enminded” properties of matter. The “outward turn” of Morgan's title refers to the “active and animating” properties of mind that extend to other material substances: matter itself can have properties of consciousness (19).Morgan divides his book into two sections, the first of which traces a mid-nineteenth-century empirical science of beauty that runs counter (but also parallel) to the kind of anti-industrialist and socially attuned aesthetic theories we associate with John Ruskin, who serves as the implicit antihero of Morgan's story. Chapter 1 charts a shift from natural theology to scientific materialism in accounts of beauty and harmony by examining a network of intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club in the 1850s, including interior decorator David Ramsay Hay, physician John Addington Symonds, physiologists Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, and critic E. S. Dallas. At the center of this chapter is a pair of linked paradoxes in the science of aesthetics. Aesthetic form was conceived of as both geometric (ordered, harmonious, and identifiable) and ambient (experienced by non-conscious corporeal processes). And so, while beauty and taste could supposedly be explained with mathematical precision, those thinkers who were invested in such explanations increasingly found that aestheticism's physiological mechanisms evaded rational modes of thought brought to bear upon them. Morgan's method in The Outward Mind is to take up a series of such paradoxes, oppositions between seemingly contradictory modes of thought: humanistic inquiry and scientific positivism, abstraction and materiality, phenomenology and epistemology, aesthetics and politics. He insightfully reads these as dialectics animating new Victorian ways of thinking about aesthetic experience at a time when various humanist and scientific inquiries were only just beginning to distinguish themselves as separate disciplines.Having established how medical writers and literary critics developed a neurophysiological account of aesthetic experience, Morgan turns in chapter 2 to texts by five writers—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—all of whom, despite their different idioms, “rescaled and physicalized the primary units of analysis of aesthetic thought” (88). This rescaling happens in two seemingly contradictory directions: by narrowing in on the immediate moment of response as something that disaggregates both art objects and experiencing selves into their component parts (nerve fibers, organs, colors, shapes, words) and by expanding the register of aesthetic response to encompass the deep time of evolution. In both directions this rescaling “tends to suspend or sideline the human as a unit of analysis” (124). Responses to aesthetic objects are not located within discrete human selves but in the local actions of nerves or the evolutionary development of the species. Hardy's novels feature here as literary manifestations of scientific theories. Where Pater and Allen describe scales of aesthetic response, Hardy “adapts” these theories for use in fiction: he expands moments of physiological intensity with almost lyric detail (Henry Knight clinging to the cliff in Desperate Remedies); disintegrates characters into neurological responses (brains and nerves); and locates aesthetic experience in an expanded time of evolutionary adaptation.While section 1 considers how aesthetic response spreads out across the material properties of the body and the scale of the species, section 2 (“The Outward Turn”) considers how nineteenth-century intellectuals expanded consciousness even further, beyond human observers to the objects in their environment. Environments themselves became sentient. In chapter 3 Morgan examines a cluster of writers who coalesce around Walter Pater and developed Lucretian theories of atomic agency. In a somewhat surprising association of Pater's fiction with sensation novels, Morgan argues that both produce somatic responses in readers. In his imaginary portraits and in Marius the Epicurean Pater applies the materialist theories of psychologist James Sully and Allen by imagining reading itself as a physical experience. Reading Pater's literary texts as enactments of materialist aesthetic theories, Morgan argues that Pater's writing makes language tactile and sensuous; his sentences “imprison” readers (164); his “densely accretive style returns language to bodies” (157).Scholars of the novel might wish here, and elsewhere, that Morgan would expand his literary analysis: Just how, for instance, does the accretive quality or the “semantic density” of Pater's literary language operate (157)? Morgan reads literary texts as applications of material aesthetic theories that he locates first in scientific texts. Building upon Gillian Beer and George Levine's “shared discourse” and one-culture approaches, he reads science and literature “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on” (17). His method is therefore to explicate both scientific and literary texts. While his expositions and claims are compelling and clearly articulated, I found myself wanting more extensive close readings of just how novels by Hardy, Pater, William Morris, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde anticipate and direct readers’ physiological responses. The lack of space afforded to close readings in The Outward Mind perhaps makes sense given that Morgan focuses his energy on drawing together an astonishingly diverse array of intellectual fields from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He offers novel scholars provocative new ways of thinking about both the physiological responses referenced within nineteenth-century novels and how novels might themselves act as agents of affect and somatic response. The latter point might lead us to wonder whether the relationship between science and literature is as simple as Morgan's framework of parallel “rhetorics” would suggest. When he turns to E. S. Dallas, William Morris, and Vernon Lee, he shows that these writers made literary language inherently somatic. He thus paints a picture in which literature does much more than apply or extend scientific aesthetic theories; it enacts material aesthetics. What sort of critical method is appropriate to such enactment? Morgan points out that literary texts are complicated aesthetic objects, because “[o]ne cannot see a poetic image in the same unmediated way that one sees a color or hears a sound; novels and poems are therefore less immediately or obviously available to empirical analysis” (253–54). He admits that the way literary texts prompt effects in readers’ bodies—for instance the “somatic forces” conveyed by Pater's prose—are “difficult to talk about” (157). In the case of Pater this is because his prose combines philosophical concepts with a style that is “resistan[t] to thought.” But the difficulty here is also that formalist textual analysis does not have a history of playing well with reader response or cognitive criticism.In his chapters on Pater, Morris, and Lee, Morgan poses the question, What happens to social life when empirical theories root aesthetics in universal physiological responses, making aesthetics the work of nerves and evolutionary adaptation rather than the products of specific social and political circumstances? He answers by assessing how writers imagined matter itself to have social properties. In chapter 4 Morgan takes up the case of William Morris, whose physicalist aesthetics at first glance seem at odds with his socialist politics. But unlike Herbert Spencer, for whom evolutionary theory leads to a competitive individualism, for Morris the same theory makes possible a shared corporeality. Reading Morris's essays, lectures, romances, and News from Nowhere, Morgan explores how Morris aligns aesthetic experience with the pleasure of production, self-expression, and use, experienced by laborers who engage in shared embodied practices. The antithesis of the fin de siècle decadent aesthete, Morris rejects the category of “art” as a privileged, refined domain and locates it in the everyday. When Morgan turns to News from Nowhere, he traces in Morris's construction of character an alternative to realism's reliance on introspection and individualistic sympathy. Morris renders characters physically, promoting an ethics of shared corporeal practices; his characters are distinguished by “their external markers and preferred modes of activity” (207).This expanded notion of sociality—one not based on a community of sympathetic individuals but on sensory reactions to corporeally rendered characters or even to books as material objects—has important implications for how we read. In his fifth chapter Morgan shows how Vernon Lee's theories of empathy describe readerly affect as a feeling with or feeling into objects. Indeed Morgan finds in Lee a precursor to Brian Massumi's affect theory. Empathy was not synonymous with interpersonal sympathy until the mid-twentieth century; instead it meant “unconscious physiological reaction to an object” (220). For Lee and her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, literary language itself is based on this physiological, object-oriented empathy. When we speak of a mountain as “rising,” for instance, the metaphor is not just an act of imagination; we feel our eyes moving upward and our bodies rising. Empathy, Morgan notes, “is rooted in experiences that precede the social domain” (222). I find myself wondering whether Morgan hopes to hold on to a separate, individuated notion of the social domain even as he sees material aesthetics radically expanding sociality to include all types of responsiveness between material things. What are the ethical and political functions of literature—especially in relation to gender, race, or class—in a system of universal corporeality?Despite his statement to the contrary, in many ways Morgan's book is an “intellectual history”—a complex, revisionist, sometimes presentist, and often recuperative one—of an overlooked Victorian mode of thinking (and reading, and looking) (16). His book unearths intricate intersections between a surprising range of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thought. His premise is that a reassessment of the material turn in Victorian aesthetic theory might help us overcome our own entrenchment in methodological and disciplinary divisions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and scientism, empiricism, and positivism on the other. Victorian aesthetic theory might, he says, “reveal some of the ways in which the humanities have long been ‘scientific’” (15). It is in this gesture toward the present, along with steady alignment of Victorian theories with later philosophies and approaches (affect theory, thing theory, distant reading, poststructuralism, neuroscience), that Morgan refuses to engage in a mere intellectual history. He is interested in what his epilogue calls a “nonlinear” method of engagement with the past, one that casts Victorian theories not as merely anticipatory of modern ideas but as sources of alternative, potentially invigorating, less disciplinarily entrenched modes of thinking about aesthetics, reading, and interpretation (261). This is especially apparent in his final chapter, in which he challenges a story we tell of literary critical history: that New Criticism's analytic modes of close reading made a clean break with Victorian modes of “moral-aesthetic evaluative criticism,” and that distant reading's quantitative approach was made possible by digital technologies (244). Not only is distant reading not new, he shows us; twentieth-century New Critics (following I. A. Richards) were “haunted by” the quantifiable methods of reading that preceded them, methods they sought to caricature as scientifically reductionist and naive (237). Morgan uncovers in Lee's empathetic literary criticism a distant reading avant la lettre (Lee was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable, objective methods of literary formalism. In one of his most provocative moments Morgan asks what literary studies might have looked like if, instead of rejecting the phenomenology and physiology of reading, New Criticism had followed Lee's lead and “embraced corporeality rather than cognition” (253). The critical investment of The Outward Mind is that we might benefit from revisiting nineteenth-century materialist theories of aesthetics at a time when we face our own methodological questions about how to read, how disciplines can intersect, and whether “scientific” approaches to literary analysis (cognitive criticism, digital humanities) impinge upon or invigorate traditional hermeneutic methods of inquiry. As Morgan puts it, Lee's brand of scientific humanistic inquiry, in its refusal to pit the affects of reading against statistical analysis, might help us reunite the phenomenological and the quantitative, the humanistic and the scientific.

This article represents a larger project that seeks to understand the function and implications of the use of etymologies in the writing of history in the Middle Ages. I examine the strategy of historians to etymologize within the framework of grammatical theories and historiographic methods of Latin scholarship. I conclude that, contrary to the traditional view that medieval etymologies are literary tropes and wordplay in all contexts, medieval historians used etymology as an epistemological instrument of discovery that helped them verify anecdotal information from oral tradition in order to adapt it to Christian historical discourse. This article focuses on the earliest annalistic narrative about the history of Bohemia, the Chronica Boemorum (c. 1125), and examines how its author, Cosmas of Prague, utilizes etymologies in the legendary sections of his masterpiece, and what role he ascribes to them in the mechanism of story-telling. Close reading and formal analysis of selected passages with etymological content show that etymologies are used as evidence to recover reality outside language (i.e. discover origins), and in that capacity they motivate the story itself and expand the narrative.

The notion of "oral tradition" encompasses a dynamic and diverse medium of oral-aural communication that enables the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge on cultural heritage and serves to uphold linguistic diversity and cultural identity. Modernisation and higher literacy rates have decreased younger generations’ awareness of indigenous oral traditions despite their integral role in heritage preservation. Thus, this study examines Bumiputera younger generations’ familiarity and understanding of minority ethnic oral traditions in Sarawak. One pivotal objective is to safeguard the diminishing Sarawak Kenyah oral tradition, notably Ngebuyan. This supports UNESCO's SDG 11 of Sustainable Cities and Communities, which includes cultural preservation. This study employs a mixed methodology, primarily descriptive qualitative analysis. The study engaged a total of 109 participants, who are undergraduate students from UiTM Sarawak Branch, Malaysia. The findings showed that a substantial proportion, approximately 86.2%, exhibited a degree of awareness concerning oral traditions in a general context. Notably, 89% demonstrated the ability to differentiate between diverse oral tradition modes. Regrettably, a mere 33% of the respondents were actively involved in practicing oral traditions. This observation indicates a gradual decline in the adoption of oral tradition practices as a result of limited participation among younger generations. Therefore, this research serves as a valuable addition to the existing literature, playing a pivotal role in facilitating intergenerational mechanisms for preserving cultural traditions and ensuring their continuous transmission throughout generations to come.

Orality is the exercise of human verbal communication. Orality transmutes into orature, oracy, or oral literature when either unconsciously or deliberately couched in esthetic forms rather than when deployed in perfunctory manner or primarily for content transmission. Chirograph-centered analysts such as Walter Ong (1982: 11–14) consider the term “oral literature” an oxy-moron. However, if the concept of “literature” is not indivisibly tied to language inscription, and its esthetic function foregrounded, then it equates with “verbal art.” Esthetic structures are culture-specific to the extent that they are grounded in the sound, syntax, semantic and idiomatic configurations of a particular language system, but such structures occur universally and attract hearer attention within each language community. Among these structures are syntactic and semantic parallelisms which produce rhythmic phrasing; stock attributions and idioms, and their converse–syntactic inversions and unexpected semantic manipulation; imagery, metaphor, and simile; rhyme and alliteration; irony in plot or word-choice; dialogue which advances plot and consolidates character and setting; witty verbal exchange producing humor or surprise; conflictual situations; opposed character traits; the evocation of contrasting moods. These are also the very structures employed in scribal literature.

The whole world in Ogba cosmology exists for man’s sake and the universe is divided into two: the visible and invisible parts (the heaven or sky and the earth). The sky is the invisible as well as the underworld that is below the earth, while the earth is visible part. Ogba people believe in the link between earth and heaven which they reflect in their oral traditions. This paper analyses the oral tradition of the Ogba people; their origin, religion, belief system and their functions and relevance to human experience. And to achieve this, a brief analysis of Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Devil on the Cross and Chinua Achebe’s Thing Fall Apart are used as oral traditional novels. The paper comprises the introduction, themes and languages of the oral tradition, the oral tradition of Ogba people, an overview of the oral tradition and finally conclusion. The paper discovers that oral tradition features prominently in the works of African writers; explaining in details the culture milieu as perceived in festivals, dances, funerals and songs. The paper focuses on the aesthetic values of the Ogba cosmology using ethnopoetics and historicism as a theoretical framework. The paper finds out that the oral tradition of Ogba people is a unifying force that brings the people together to live in peace, unity and love.

Philippine regional oral literature scholarship is currently navigating against the current from the preiphery to the center. Romblon's oral tradition is likewise sailing across the tibulent sea. While a number of works had been anthologized and had undergone scrutiny, apparently not much exploration has been given to the proper collection, translation, and subsequent analysis. This paper proposes a paradigm in collective Romblon's oral tradition, in particular and any regional oral tradition, in general. The collection, documentation, authetication, trasnlation and analysis used the suggested hollistic apporach. In this study, the methods and apporaches were discussed, the steps were outlined and the scholarly implications were identified. The main research question is a descriptive-analytic documentaiton of the tradition: What are the surviving kará'an oral literatures of Romblon based on primary secondary sources? The process starts from collecting the tradition secondary sources: the province's historical data found in microfilm, internet posts, email correspondences, and personal collections tracked and documented in the field. The text's provenance, singer, context of singing, audience reaction, historical, cultural, and geographical relevance - the "metadata"and filed notes - were likewise recorded with the researcher interpreting data from the informants'perspectives. The focus of investigation is proper documentation that ensures authenticity of materials that could then be subjected to trasnlation, and literary analysis.

This article investigates the sensual participation of Filipina care workers in Israel, more specifically in the urban space of Tel Aviv. By creating a rich communal life, by parading icons of the Virgin Mary through the streets, and by crafting Origami paper swans that have conquered urban spaces in all sizes, shapes and colours, migrants have fashioned modes of aesthetic and sensual belonging in the city. Their popular aesthetics, I argue, is intricately linked to the ironic Americanisation of a post-colonial nation, as well as the gendered niche of care, which Filipinos in the global economy have come to occupy. Drawing on the concept of ‘aesthetic formation’, this article foregrounds the performative aspects and centrality of objects, appearances and the senses in migrants’ making of community. Filipinos’ aesthetic formations in diaspora speak of collective struggles as well as of the emergence of new subjectivities beyond ethnic or cultural identities.

REVIEWS ROBERT R. EDWARDS. Ratio and Invention: A Study ofMedieval Lyric and Narrative. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 198 9. Pp. xxii, 193.$22.95. Robert Edwards's ambitious book attempts to overcome one of the most stubborn problems ofmedieval literary studies : the perceived gap between the era's theorizing about literature and its literary practice.As he puts it, "Despite their apparent anomalies, the medieval systems [oftheorizing about and classifying literature]offer a rich source for understanding the poetry of the age. The task ofmodern readers is to discover where that richness lies and devise the strategies that will allow us to recover some of what the age had to say about poetry" (p. 146). The heart ofEdwards's argument is that medieval literary theories "are in some important way in dialogue with the worksthey explain." This means that "we can approach medieval literary theory using the methods of analysis that we apply to the poetry" (p. 147) and, reciprocally, look at medieval texts with an eye to discovering how they adapt established systems of literary theory to the needs and concerns of literary practice. Neither ofthese perceptions is particularly new, as Edwards would surely admit; a propos the latter, one thinks of R. Howard Bloch's emphatic assertion ("New Philology and Old French," Speculum 65 [19 90]: 47) that "the most basic premise ofthe medieval creative act is not an absence of theory...but the thorough integration for medieval writers of theory and practice.... The theory ofmedieval texts is in the praxis, and there is no praxis without consciousness (and therefore intention) on the poet's part of the metatheoretical nature ofmedieval poetic practice." But in juxtaposing within one critical exercise "a literary reading of criticism and a critical reading ofliterature" (p. 148),Edwards proposes a new set ofunderstand­ ings ofboth dominant critical theories and individual lyric and narrative texts. Ratio and Invention divides its argument into two sections, according to genre. The sections begin with "interchapters" that contextualize the "dominant [theoretical]commonplaces ofthe genres...[viz.,]the musical aesthetic that Augustine applied to lyric poetry and the rhetorical pro­ cedure of invention that was used to define the controlling idea of a narrative poem" (p. xviii). The subsequent chapters ofeach section deal with particular topics and/or texts relevant to the genre. Chapters 1 to 3 explicate two lyric topoi, the ideal landscape and the dream vision, as responses to two issues raised in book 6 ofSt.Augustine's 121 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER De musica. The tension Augustine posits between the body's and the soul's respective responses-carnal and spiritual- to "the order contained in the numbers ofpoetry" finds a reflection in the "several ways in which the lyric speaker situates himself in relation to ideal nature" (p. 16). "The lyric 'I,' like the soul in relation to the body, can remove itselffrom the celebration of the senses" and gravitate toward intellectual apprehension or "self­ referential absorption" (pp. 32-33). The dream vision, on the other hand, mediates Augustine's concern that, in the soul's experience of poetry, memory produces phantasies (images based on recollection ofsensory experience) and phantasms (mere "images of images,'' lacking experiential basis) and can thus lead the soul away from its goal, the true knowledge of God, into the realms ofopinion and error. Edwards explores how Augustine's "discrimination between reproductive and constitutive images gives rise to a poetry that explores the artistic and psychological intricacies ofsubjectivity" (p. 147); the operative distinction here is between lyrics in which visionary dreams stand as metaphors for the transformation of memory into higher truth, "aesthetic apprehension" (p. 39), or "the shaping of sense experience into aesthetic form" (p. 40), and other lyrics recounting visions based not in memory but in erotic desire. In this last category Augustine's condemned phantasms become occasions celebrating poetic creation, "the insubstantial image created out of the imaginationand referring to literary tradition rather than lived expreience" (p. 67). The theoretical basis for the chapters on narrative is provided by the Parisianapoetria (ca. 1220-35) ofJohn of Garland. Edwards singles out as ofspecial importance two aspects ofJohn's theorizing: it blurs the bound­ aries between factual and...

General Background Contemporary Iraqi painting has evolved through continuous dialogue between inherited artistic traditions and modern aesthetic discourses shaped by social and cultural change. Specific Background Iraqi artists employ form, symbolism, and compositional structures to negotiate identity, modernity, and visual expression within a shifting historical context. Knowledge Gap Despite extensive discussions on Iraqi modern art, limited studies have systematically examined aesthetic form as a central interpretative axis connecting visual structure and cultural meaning. Aims This study aims to analyze aesthetic form in contemporary Iraqi painting and interpret its role in articulating modern artistic identity. Results The findings demonstrate that aesthetic form functions not merely as a visual arrangement but as a symbolic system reflecting social realities, cultural memory, and artistic adaptation. Novelty This research offers an integrated interpretative perspective that positions aesthetic form as a key mediator between tradition and modernity in Iraqi painting. Implications The study contributes theoretically to modern art discourse and provides a contextual framework for future analyses of contemporary Arab visual art. Keywords: Contemporary Iraqi Art, Aesthetic Form, Modern Painting, Visual Symbolism, Cultural Identity Key Findings Highlights: Aesthetic form represents cultural adaptation within contemporary Iraqi painting Visual structures embody dialogue between tradition and modern artistic expression Symbolic forms reflect social and historical realities in Iraqi modern art

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

The Research on Preserving Cultural Heritage through Oral Tradition is of utmost importance, as the research represents an effort to maintain the cultural identity of the Kumun Debai District in the City of Sungai Penuh. The focus of the research is the role of folklore in preserving the oral tradition in the Kumun Debai District, through an in-depth understanding of proverbs, folktales, traditional songs, and other oral practices. The research aims to document, analyze, and comprehend the role of folklore in preserving the cultural heritage through oral tradition in the Kumun Debai District. This will help maintain the local cultural identity, prevent the loss of oral traditions, and ensure the preservation of local cultural values, which will be passed on to future generations. The study employs the theory of folklore in the context of preserving cultural heritage through oral tradition. The theory focuses on the in-depth understanding of proverbs, folktales, traditional songs, and other oral practices as an integral part of the cultural identity of a community. The use of the "Gerald C. Miller" theory emphasizes the importance of understanding and preserving oral traditions as an inseparable part of a community's cultural identity. Through this approach, the primary objective of the research is to explore the meaning, values, and functions of the oral heritage within the context of the community's life, and how this heritage can be safeguarded to remain relevant in the modern era.

The authors drew on empirical data from a blogging project that brought English teachers from the United States and Lithuania together online to discuss the young adult novelBetween Shades of Grayby Ruta Sepetys. The novel tells the story of a 15‐year‐old girl, Lina, and her family, who are forcibly separated and deported to a Siberian labor camp under Stalin's occupation of the Baltic States during World WarII. The authors argue that the pedagogical context sheds light on what an empathetic reading of the state‐sponsored atrocities described in this book might entail, thus avoiding common pitfalls with difficult knowledge when readers are positioned to try on through role‐play or detach through close reading and literary analysis. Throughout, the authors define and promote one possibility of what empathetic reading can look like when pedagogies position readers as empathetic learners.