The tragedian as critic: Euripides and early Greek poetics

Reviewed by: The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz William Allan . The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 310 pp. Cloth, $70. This is a workmanlike study of Euripides' Andromache, with a good and up-to-date bibliography. Allan's monograph successfully takes on most of the (many) significant criticisms of the play, in particular those concerning its alleged disunity, and argues that the play is more interesting than it has been taken to be. Allan sets out to show that the play merits more attention than it has received, and he succeeds, at least with this reviewer; a classicist reviewer who has written on the play is, however, hardly a test case. Moreover, the assertion of interest is not a strong claim, and, given the constraints of academic writing, scholarly arguments for a quirky play like the Andromache are often less compelling than the literary work itself. [End Page 126] Allan's thesis, that "every play represents a distinct thematic and dramatic complex which merits individual attention" (267), is undeniably true. He further asserts that the play is calculated to surprise and that the noticeable dissonances in it are purposeful as well. The book is divided into chapters on myth, structure, characterization, rhetoric, the spread of Attic tragedy, gender, the chorus, and the gods, in that order. Allan highlights Euripides' creative use of myth, drawing attention to the elevation of Andromache and the simultaneous way in which Euripides turns Neoptolemus, who was the center of epic treatments of the myth, into a corpse. There are connections between Allan's argument about the structure of the unexpected and Euripides' handling of myth. In part, Euripides builds the structure of surprise that Allan detects through his use of novel mythic variations. The elements of flexibility and surprise that Allan emphasizes also appear in a different guise in his considerations of gender (chap. 6) and the gods (chap. 8). According to Allan, female characters are useful for exposing the tensions that emerge when heroic society encounters crisis (162), while he uses Euripides' treatment of the gods to contribute to the overall argument about the multiplicity of Euripidean tragedy. Allan sounds a similar note in discussing characterization. Here he emphasizes dissonance, the contrast of traditional and invented story, and warns against expecting the depth of characterization typical of narrative from later centuries. This is a salutary reminder of the aesthetic conventions of tragedy too often overlooked by readers of the modern era. Characterization not only grows out of structure, as Allan argues, but is developed by rhetoric. His goal in the chapter on rhetoric is "to reappraise the functions and importance of Euripidean rhetoric (defined more broadly than the mere use of forensic topoi) by placing it within the larger dramatic context of the plays, and by viewing them within the wider rhetorical context of fifth-century Athenian culture" (119). Allan's contention is that Euripidean tragedy shows the failure of persuasion because of the intervention of political power. He argues that Euripides uses the Sophistic arsenal for his own dramatic ends, never for its own sake; as he notes, rhetoric is closely related to characterization through the characters' self-presentation. As he also shows, in the Andromache and other plays of Euripides, the rhetoric cannot be separated from the fictional world of the play. Ultimately, according to Allan, rhetoric reveals the feature of adaptability, sharing it with his other analytic categories of structure, myth and characterization. Allan asserts that there is a philosophical aspect to a plot based on surprise, but here I was disappointed and would have liked to hear more. The claim seems to boil down to the statement that the play is about the fragility of fortune (41), and this seems little more than a restatement of the commonplace moralizing tag line--that we can't know what will happen. What is the philosophical significance of the flexibility and surprise? The chapters on the chorus and the gods underline Allan's point about flexibility in Euripides. His chapter on the chorus, he says, "aspires to indicate [End Page 127] how choral contributions function much more provocatively than is often appreciated, not...

Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third Renaissance Filipp Sapienza Although Mikhail Bakhtin figures centrally in multiculturalism, community, pedagogy, and rhetoric (Bruffee 1986; Welch 1993; Zebroski 1994; Zappen, Gurak, and Doheney-Farina 1997; Mutnick 1996; Halasek 2001, 182; see also Bialostosky 1986) many of his major ideas remain enigmatic and controversial. The elusive aspects of Bakhtin's theories exist in part because rhetoricians know little about Bakhtin's own rhetorical culture. Theorists recognize this problem and call for a reworking of Bakhtin more on his own terms. This call has been made to resolve concerns about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric. Since Bakhtin disliked rhetoric, any use of Bakhtin in rhetorical theory is largely a hybrid synthesis of his distinct ideas on poetics, prose, satire, the epic, the novel, and so forth. John Murphy proposes a reconception of Bakhtin closely built around his ambivalence and guided by the question, "what do we [rhetoricians] mean by the concept of a rhetorical tradition?" (2001, 259). The suggestion encourages rhetoricians to take Bakhtin more on his own terms than has been done in the past. Unfortunately, as the word "we" indicates, Murphy reworks Bakhtin primarily in terms of Western ideas about rhetoric. Slavists and "Bakhtinologists" in Russia argue that when talking about Bakhtin, "we" has often meant Western, obscuring the Russian cultural roots of his theories (Kozhinov 1993; Miller and Platter 1993, 118). The privileging of Western perspectives has also been criticized by scholars of other discourse cultures. Discussing American Indian rhetoric, Malea Powell argues that "we" means a Rhetorical Tradition that begins "with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in" (2002, 397). Differences in interpreting Bakhtin also proceed from translation difficulties between Russian and English. The Russian reader views Bakhtin in more essentialist ways as opposed to the "post-modern give-and-take" theorist of many Western [End Page 123] interpretations (Emerson 1990, 113). Read in the Russian language and from that cultural context, Bakhtin's vocabulary contains "conspicuous" elements of Orthodox Christianity and Slavic nationalist ideas (Kozhinov 1993; Mihailovic 1997) that reveal a Russian theological subtext to his ideas about community and dialogue. In this essay, I provide a reading of Bakhtin against the background of his own rhetorical culture. More specifically, I offer an analysis of an intertextual dialogue about language and community between Bakhtin and the symbolist writer Vyacheslav Ivanov. Scholars identify Ivanov as a poet, philosopher, and teacher who profoundly impacted Bakhtin (Mal'chukova 1992, 55). The Russian symbolists upheld strong nationalist ideals and a linguistic theory rooted in metaphysics (Mirsky 1972, 188). Many Slavists and Russian readers of Bakhtin suspect that Ivanov strongly influenced Bakhtin's rhetoric even though, for reasons unknown but that are suspected to be political, Bakhtin understates his debt to him (Ivanov 2001, 3). Bakhtin was not unlike his contemporaries in sharing an interest and vocabulary that addressed the major threads of symbolism. Read side by side with Ivanov's essays in Russian, Bakhtin's rhetoric displays a mixture of the European, Slavic, and Christian ideals that were in parlance among many Russian theorists in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin and Ivanov give us a glimpse of this rhetorical culture. More specifically, they help us to better understand our appropriations of Bakhtin based on an elucidation of the meaning of specific terms as they existed among Bakhtin's contemporaries. The method that I use requires translation of specific Russian passages into English. Terms and phrases are interpreted against the usage background of others in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin's Slavic-theological connections become evident through the elucidation of these intertextual references. Through this method, a common and accepted practice in Slavic literary studies, the use of key words and phrases are traced in and among texts to identify a discourse among authors and explicate its meaning.1 As Steven Mailloux points out, a "rhetorical hermeneutics" focuses on "the historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth" that give meaning to rhetoric (1988, 15-16). The approach is necessary due to the unique political and artistic circumstances during the early...

The article deals with structural compounds of lecturer's rhetorical culture, its role in forming of professionaly oriented person. Lecturer's cultural and language literacy forms a style of pedagogical communication, a culture of his speaking behavior, and that exerts influence on learning process, on forming students' skills, on their personalities.
 The theoretical bases of diagnostics and determination of the results of the formation of professional competencies of language training lecturer`s for foreign citizens as the actual pedagogical problem in universities of technical profile were investigated and substantiated. In the conditions of socio-economic changes in Ukraine, the improvement of higher professional education system, in the process of introducing new requirements and standards of education, there are significant transformations in the system "lecturer-to-student". Changes in the first place concern perception of lecturer, the system of role expectations regarding the leading qualities of the lecturer changes.
 Strengthening the attention to the issues of diagnosing the level of proficiency of language training lecturers of professional competences, as a modern trend requires not only scientifically based tools for continuous measurement, analysis and improvement of evaluation of educational results of students' professional training, but also a new look at the system of pedagogical diagnostics. System diagnostics based on a competent approach should become a key and crosscutting component of monitoring the quality of vocational training of language training specialists in universities of technical profile.

Moderata Fonte was the pseudonym of Modesta Pozzo (b. 1555–d. 1592), a gifted poet and proto-feminist who championed equal access to education for women. Her pen name (Moderate Fountain or Spring) suggests flowing water, an image often associated with eloquence, and it functions as a clever recasting of the still, unassuming waters suggested by her given name (Modest Well). Celebrated by her contemporaries for her poetic skill, today Fonte stands alongside other Venetian women writers, including Veronica Franco, Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti, as a seminal voice of European feminism. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles in Renaissance and Reformation “Lucrezia Marinella” and “Arcangela Tarabotti.”) Orphaned at a young age, Fonte received her earliest education at the Venetian convent of Santa Marta and then through her maternal grandmother’s second husband, Prospero Saraceni, who granted her access to books and encouraged her literary endeavors. Sometime after 1576, Fonte joined the household of her step-grandfather’s daughter Saracena Saraceni and her husband Niccolò Doglioni, an active member in Venetian literary circles who promoted Fonte’s career. In 1581, Fonte published I Tredici canti di Floridoro (The Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro), a chivalric romance in the Ariostan tradition. Projected to be fifty cantos but never finished, Fonte’s poem foregrounds the actions and adventures of the female protagonists, whose depictions challenge both literary and gender norms. The same year her banquet play, Le feste (The Feast Days), was published and performed before the Doge Niccolò da Ponte, testifying to her status in Venice’s literary culture. Fonte’s most productive literary period coincided with the years she spent in Doglioni’s household before marrying the lawyer Filippo Zorzi in 1583, though she continued to write and publish throughout her life, including two religious poems, La passione di Christo (The passion of Christ) (1582) and La resurrettione di Giesu Christo nostro Signore (The resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord) (1592). Today, Fonte is best known as the author of the witty dialogue Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women), which she completed in 1592 shortly before dying from complications of the birth of her fourth child. The controversy sparked by Giuseppe Passi’s virulently misogynist treatise I difetti donneschi (The defects of women) (1599) provided Doglioni and Fonte’s children the perfect opportunity to publish her dialogue in 1600, which features seven women engaged in a dialogic game in which one group denounces all the vices and evil of men, while the other side seeks to defend them. During the second day of the dialogue, the discussion broadens to cover a vast array of subjects, as the women instruct each other in topics typically excluded from female education. Since the 1980s, interest in Fonte’s life and writings on the part of artists and scholars of literature, history, and philosophy has grown.

Effects of projected near-future carbon dioxide levels on cephalopod physiology and behaviour

As major sources of discourse and debate on theological topics such as the resurrection of body and soul, justification by faith, and predestination, the New Testament epistles of Saint Paul played a central role in the development of religious thought and practice across Reformation Europe. But in a period when Christian belief and biblical knowledge permeated every aspect of human life, how did Paul’s epistles inform Europe’s literary and rhetorical cultures? Pauline Style and Renaissance Literary Culture is the first critical history of Saint Paul’s rhetorical style in the Renaissance, 1500–1700. It explores critical and creative responses to Paul’s style across a range of mediums and genres at a time when two powerful and confluent cultural forces—humanism and Protestantism—profoundly altered conceptions of biblical writing. The book argues that Paul’s style developed into one of the most theoretically productive and artistically provocative of the Renaissance, primarily because of its controversial reception among European biblical humanists, who struggled to consistently define and favorably assess its volatile features, qualities, and expressive functions. This theoretical discourse directly impacted literary activity in England, shaping how and why authors such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton imitated Paul’s style in their texts. By thus tracing the reception of Paul’s style in Renaissance literary culture, the book reveals how and why English writers drew on biblical models to develop their literary practices, while also revealing how issues of style and rhetoric shaped biblical interpretation and theological discourse in the contentious religious culture of Reformation Europe.

The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing

Reviewed by: Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins Kathleen Rooney Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. By Jim Collins. Durham: Duke University Press. 2010. An alternate subtitle for Jim Collins’ Bring on the Books for Everybody—less concise, but perhaps more accurate—might be “How Literary Culture Has Been Affected by the Same Market Forces that Every Other Aspect of Consumer Culture Has Been Affected by.” [End Page 179] In this engaging study of how literary reading has been incorporated into visual and electronic media, Collins considers how, through pervasive consumerism, an impulse toward self-improvement, and a widespread desire to use literature (like virtually all other purchases) as a lifestyle signifier, the formerly solitary activity has been reborn as a social expression of value and taste. Collins examines how books are consumed, concluding that “the love of literature can now be fully experienced only outside the academy and the New York literary scene” (3), and observing that “The most profound change in literary America after the rise of postmodern fiction [. . .] was the complete redefinition of what literary reading means within the heart of electronic culture.” He analyzes online book retailers, chain superstores, literary adaptation films and Oprah’s Book Club, delivering rich case studies of how such relatively new institutions—which affect how books are distributed and valued—have profoundly altered when and where “literary” experience takes place. Readers seeking arguments about these developments may be disappointed. Collins’ stated aim is to remain in the realm of the descriptive, and he adheres to this objective almost without fail. In his introduction, he explains: “My goal in this book is to trace the contours of a particular ‘media ecology’ shaped by the increasing convergence of literary, visual and material cultures” (8); although he expresses hope that it will not, the account sometimes comes across as detachedly observational. Mostly, though, Collins’ writing is personable and accessible, and he draws on his expertise as a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame to maintain appropriate ambivalence and to avoid speciously pitting various media against one another in a zero-sum game. For instance, he does good service to his subject by permitting himself to argue that notions like those espoused in the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk—which asserted “that reading books and viewing electronic media are mutually antagonistic experiences”—are “troubling” conclusions based on a “highly debatable interpretation of data” (14). Collins is best when most argumentative, as when, in the final chapter, he critiques “the relationship between the type of beauty offered by reading literary fiction and other sorts of aesthetic beauty, specifically those offered by material culture” (226). Here he notes that “Literary critics have theorized about the pleasure of the text for the past three decades,” and “In much the same way, the pleasures furnished by material objects have also been theorized [. . .] by sociologists eager to identify the underlying desires that animate consumer culture,” and concludes that “I know of no attempt to situate the two in reference to each other” (226). Though critical at times of “the academy,” Collins comes across as a passionate teacher, often invoking student reactions in his analyses, and the book seems to reflect his commitment to fostering discussion; because it refuses—sometimes frustratingly, other times wisely—to offer a unified argument, Collins’ project stands as an invitation for readers to draw their own conclusions based on a wealth of curated evidence. [End Page 180] Kathleen Rooney DePaul University Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

The writing of any history of criticism such as the present one can only reveal the discourse under consideration to be one of several possible created and contentiously authorized languages. But such a narrative will at the same time not be entirely arbitrary, inasmuch as any number of ideologies, assumptions, and prior histories of literary criticism will be its subtexts, whether taken up more explicitly or not. My subtexts have been the idea of ancient criticism as constituted in part by material from antiquity and in part by the scholarship which has characterized it as ‘ancient literary criticism’. The project has not been to abandon altogether the body of writing we conventionally recognize as ‘ancient literary criticism’ nor the body of commentary on this material; furthermore, my intention has not been to suggest that we abandon the phrase ‘ancient literary criticism’ as a description of the discourses that ancient authors set out regarding the production and reception of literary texts. Yet by beginning from an understanding of criticism as a socio-political process, this study has offered a somewhat different discourse regarding the production and reception of literary texts in Greek and Roman antiquity.

This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

Leonie Kramer has noted that 'literary commentary . . . is a powerful influence on notions of what constitutes a particular reality.' But literary commentary does not act alone: it also intersects with other discursive acts that together produce a dominant ideology, participating with them in the construction of 'a particular reality'. This thesis demonstrates, for the period since 1940, how arguments about the nature of Canadian and Australian Literatures in English are part of that ideological process. It therefore interrogates the kinds of 'national interests' which the discussions of the national literatures serve. Acknowledging that such debates are conducted as being 'in the interest' of the nation but are in fact in the domain of particular institutions, it enquires into the sources and relations of power within those institutions (and other cultural formations), and the ways in which that power is enhanced by the discussions of the national literatures. While it is true that the question, 'Is there any?' continued to be used as a dismissive topos in some polemics well into the period covered, this thesis argues that in the significant debates about Australian and Canadian Literatures, and in most of the public use of them, the issues that are engaged are rather 'What is it?' and, implicitly at least, 'What may be done with/to it?' That last question discloses that the debate is about authority. The thesis argues that the attempts to define national literatures have been attempts to privilege the position of the definer. It proposes that the visibility of national literatures, the general acknowledgement of their 'presence', depends not on the adventitious .pn iv production of particular literary works -- the epic, a 'masterpiece', the Great Canadian/Australian Novel -- or on the 'mastery' of particular literary material -- the vernacular, indigenous peoples, the natural environment -- but rather on the establishment of the institutions of literary culture. It further argues that, despite the considerable achievements of individuals, this is not a history of individual heroism any more than it is a matter of reaching a quota of quality, quantity, or content. The 'actions' of those notable individuals are subject to, and are often precipitated by, institutional, political, and economic forces such as those examined in Chapters Five and Six. One premise of this thesis is that in Post-Colonial cultures, the 'presence' of history, ideology, and discourse is especially 'marked', and that, for an understanding of the development of literary culture, an examination of the economies of public/ation, of the relation to public policy, is not only necessary but inevitable. The proof of the existence of a national literature is, indeed, the existence of its infrastructure -- the institutions of writing, teaching, scholarship, and publishing. But a crucial cause seems to be the precipitation of a polemic -- a 'timely' debate about the literature. Equally, the maintenance of a cultural nationalism depends not on the 'existence' of a national culture but upon the promotion of a problematic -- a rhetoric of crisis. In this, Canada has been more prominent than Australia. It is worth noting that the 'crisis' in Canadian culture in the nineteen seventies was especially closely tied to the focussing upon the national in 1967 (the Centennial), upon internal threats to its survival (the 'Quebec crisis'), and the external threats to its survival (American economic domination of Canadian industry and consequently of Canadian culture): the debate about Canadian culture was a metaphor and a metonymy for each of these. While it has become axiomatic to observe that Canadian society is pluralist (the mosaic) and Australian society is assimilationist (the monolith), this thesis nevertheless shows that the coherence of Canadian society is in many ways more apparent. This is especially true of the cultural articulations of that society, its concern for principles (rather than Australian pragmatism), its impetus towards defining issues (rather than the Australian dealing with problems), and its concern with self- knowledge. However, in working comparatively with Canadian and Australian literatures this thesis departs from the customary Australian-Canadian strategy of distinguishing between the two literatures with the implied object of judging the two cultures. Its aim, rather, is to pursue an understanding of the development and workings of national literary cultures. It therefore considers not only the particular histories of literary criticism and literary history, and those of the various cultural institutions, but also endeavours to analyse their sociologies as well. The effects, then, of the particular modes of operation of the institutions (and even individuals) in Canadian and Australian literary culture upon the representation and recognition of those 'Literatures' are considered in some detail in the process of examining the range of social and cultural domains that must be analysed if the stories of national literary cultures are to be made intelligible.

I would venture to suggest that the most sensitive critic, the one with the keenest appreciation of the Caribbean woman's story, is inevitably the one who comes to Caribbean literature intent not only in an artistic analysis of the signifying word, or in assessing how much the word conforms to labels constructed outside of its existence, but on developing an understanding of the society that has produced the literature. --Merle Collins, Framing the Word: Caribbean Women's Writing (9) Approaching contemporary Caribbean women's literature from a theoretical space in which food studies and literary studies intersect offers a framework to understand the multivalent, cultural politics of identity reclamation in postcolonial literature. This framework grounds the strategies that Caribbean women employ to assert their identities in the local, cultural context. One trait common to both Caribbean food culture and literary culture is the philosophy of making do, an act of creation using any available resources. (1) As a theory of postcolonial literature, this philosophy reveals the economic enterprise that challenges both agricultural production in postcolonial areas and postcolonial literary production: the strategies by which a positive cultural identity can be reclaimed after colonization, given scarce cultural, economic, and literary resources. To express local identities, instead of those imposed by colonial forces, postcolonial authors often employ images from their everyday material culture. As a phenomenon of material culture, making do speaks to the unique cultural and agricultural context of the Caribbean. Making do also draws attention to the parallel between movements of agricultural products in an export economy (i.e. exportation, in the sense of goods leaving the country) and the movement of authors as cultural products (i.e. emigration or exile, in the sense of authors leaving the country). This cultural and gastronomic philosophy suggests alternative approaches to concepts of literary genealogy and to the nature of the category of author. In addition, by focusing on practices that emerge from a scarcity of resources, making do lays bare the workings of the export economies of the Caribbean as they impact both agricultural and cultural production. Finally, the cultural politics involved with literary representation of agricultural products and practices, as well as practices of food preparation, reveal the necessity for ethical reading--for new ways of interpreting postcolonial literature so that it is not judged by standards imposed by literary or philosophical traditions of the colonizing culture. Making do, as a theory of postcolonial literature, offers a method of analysis responsive to new and inventive forms of literariness situated outside of (or in tension with) Western models and paradigms. As a theory of Caribbean women's literature informed by a study of foodways, it takes into account all of the following contexts for Caribbean literature: its material culture, the way Caribbean authors come to writing, and the details of Caribbean economies and the economics of literary production. As an approach to postcolonial literature, making do places the study of foodways in dialogue with the politics of literary production to produce a liberated critical discourse capable of articulating the complexity of the postcolonial condition. The History of Export Economy in the Caribbean In a 1998 interview, Guadeloupian writer Maryse Conde identifies the major problem inherent to agricultural production throughout the Caribbean islands. She states: There is a strike going on right now, a dockers' strike, and right now there is no milk, nor onions on this island. Part of the colonial pact is that Guadeloupians don't grow these things themselves. These are things we need to change. Caribbean people find themselves at a disadvantage in the world economy because of past reliance on exporting goods for the use of other countries and on importing goods for their own use. …

With a central focus on the cultural contexts of Pacific island societies, this essay examines the entanglement of colonial power relations in local recordkeeping practices. These cultural contexts include the on-going exchange between oral and literate cultures, the aftermath of colonial disempowerment and reassertion of indigenous rights and identities, the difficulty of maintaining full archival systems in isolated, resource-poor “micro-states,” and the driving influence of development theory. The essay opens with a discussion of concepts of exploration and evangelism in cross-cultural analysis as metaphors for archival endeavor. It then explores the cultural exchanges between oral memory and written records, orality, and literacy, as means of keeping evidence and remembering. After discussing the relation of records to processes of political and economic disempowerment, and the reclaiming of rights and identities, it returns to the patterns of archival development in the Pacific region to consider how archives can better integrate into their cultural and political contexts, with the aim of becoming more valued parts of their communities.

With a central focus on the cultural contexts of Pacific island societies, this essay examines the entanglement of colonial power relations in local recordkeeping practices. These cultural contexts include the on-going exchange between oral and literate cultures, the aftermath of colonial disempowerment and reassertion of indigenous rights and identities, the difficulty of maintaining full archival systems in isolated, resource-poor “micro-states,” and the driving influence of development theory. The essay opens with a discussion of concepts of exploration and evangelism in cross-cultural analysis as metaphors for archival endeavor. It then explores the cultural exchanges between oral memory and written records, orality, and literacy, as means of keeping evidence and remembering. After discussing the relation of records to processes of political and economic disempowerment, and the reclaiming of rights and identities, it returns to the patterns of archival development in the Pacific region to consider how archives can better integrate into their cultural and political contexts, with the aim of becoming more valued parts of their communities.

Modern North American Criticism and Theory presents the reader with a comprehensive and critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first. Focusing on the growth and expansion of critical trends and methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts, the book offers a narrative of change, transformation, and the continuous quest for and affirmation of multiple cultural voices and identities. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of whiteness studies and the cultural study of masculinity, this book provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of questioning, debate, and exploration. A further reading list accompanies each chapter. Key Features: Breadth of coverage from Northrop Frye to Fredric Jameson and from The New Criticism and the Chicago School to New Historicism, African-American Studies and Canadian Literary Studies. Focus on the history of modern criticism. Accessibly written. Theoretical debates are set in full historical, cultural and philosophical contexts.