Account Of Scholarship Research Articles

William Kuskin Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to ModernityRecursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity. William Kuskin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xv+278.

<i>William Kuskin</i> Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity<i>Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity</i>. William Kuskin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xv+278.

Wickedness, reflexivity, and dialogue: toward a multivalent bioenergy

Bioenergy development is intensifying and is often accompanied by contentious social issues. This article provides a reflexive account of scholarship intended to advance citizen engagement around bioenergy through the practice of deliberative dialogue. Using a case from our work in Michigan, USA, we conceptualize bioenergy as a wicked problem – one that is ill-structured, socially complex, tentative, and eschews a definitive way forward that avoids clear outcomes. Problems are made ‘tame’, however, when complexity, diversity, and indeterminancy are obscured. Simultaneously holding in tension the diversity of meanings and values held by actors can reduce the likelihood of taming wicked problems, which is central to a democratic science. Thus, we argue for a multivalent approach to bioenergy. Deliberative dialogue is one technique that can engage citizens and achieve multivalency, yet, it, like any method, requires rigorous reflexivity. This reflexive exercise demonstrates how the normative biases of researchers can obscure or stifle multivalency.

Melville's mirrors: literary criticism and America's most elusive author

elville, I think, would have appreciated the scope of Brian Yothers's recent book. With rigor and grace, Melville's Mirrors examines a topic as vast and seemingly ungraspable as Ishmael's snowy phantom: the history of Melville criticism from 1920 to 2010. That scholarly archive is so large that, as Yothers notes, the MLA International Bibliography lists a stagger- ing 5,191 hits in response to a query for critical essays, books, and dissertation abstracts that take Herman Melville as a primary subject for their work (178). That number now surpasses 6,000 and is growing steadily, a fact that puts into perspective the achievement of Melville's Mirrors, which, in my estimation, is the most comprehensive and judicious study of Melville scholarship to date. The book might have been less successful had it been designed as one might reasonably expect: as a chronological narrative about the development of Melville criticism. Instead, Yothers constructs a taxonomy for the major lines of critical inquiry, a classifi catory system based on the family resemblances of various Melville studies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct strain of Mel- ville scholarship: Biographical and Textual Criticism; Literary Aesthetics and the Visual Arts; Religion, Ethics, and Epistemology; Gender, Sexual- ity, and the Body; Democracy, Nationalism, and War; and Race, Ethnicity, Empire, and Cosmopolitanism. Across the chapters, Yothers traces the history of these approaches, and the result is an erudite, and sometimes quite sur- prising, account of scholarship's longue durees. Chapter 1, for instance, charts a prehistory for the recent Melville biographies and digital archives by going back to Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and other members of the fi rst Melville Revival. In a similar vein, Chapter 2 yokes late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst-century studies of Melville's verbal artistry to earlier—and today, rarely referenced—studies by R.P. Blackmur, Warner Ber- thoff, and William Ellery Sedgwick that examined the formal and aesthetic complexities of Melville's writing.

The development and present state of history of medicine in Britain.

This is a personal account of scholarship in the history of medicine in Britain, from the 1960s onwards, drawn from recollections and knowledge of the literature. The institutional development of the subject is reviewed, emphasizing the contributions of the Wellcome Trust; the various modes of historical research and writing are surveyed and assessed. Modest suggestions are made for renewing the historiography of medical sciences and technologies--to contribute to the politics of knowledge and to wider histories.