Aesthetic Failure Research Articles

Single Implant Treatment in Healing Versus Healed Sites of the Anterior Maxilla: An Aesthetic Evaluation

The aim was to compare and document in detail the aesthetic outcome of single implant treatment in healing sites (early implant placement) with fully healed sites (conventional implant placement) of the anterior maxilla. A cross-sectional study in patients who had been treated by two periodontists and two prosthodontists in 2006 and 2007 was conducted. Surgical treatment involved standard flap elevation without releasing incisions and restorative procedures included cemented crowns in all patients. Only straightforward single implant treatments using Nobelreplace tapered TiUnite® implants (Nobel Biocare, Göteborg, Sweden) in healing sites (6-8 weeks following tooth extraction) and fully healed sites (≥6 months following tooth extraction) were considered with both neighboring teeth present and without the need for hard and/or soft tissue grafting. The aesthetic outcome was objectively rated using the pink esthetic score (PES) and white esthetic scrore (WES) by a blinded clinician who had not been involved in the treatment. Patients rated aesthetics by means of visual analogue scales. Twenty-one out of 22 early and 25/27 conventional implant treatments were available for aesthetic evaluation after on average two and a half years of function (range 17-41 months). There were no significant differences for any of the criteria between the treatment concepts. Overall, papillae were most easy to satisfy, whereas alveolar process and tooth color most difficult. A thin-scalloped biotype was associated with low distal papillae (p=.041) and alveolar process deficiency (p=.039). Twenty-six percent of the cases were aesthetic failures (PES<8 and/or WES<6) and 13% showed an (almost) perfect outcome (PES≥12 and WES≥9). The remainder (61%) demonstrated acceptable aesthetics. There was no significant correlation between objective and subjective ratings. Early and conventional single implant treatment yielded comparable aesthetic outcome. Albeit all treatments had been performed by experienced clinicians and only straightforward cases had been selected, 1 out of 4 cases were aesthetic failures and only a strict minority showed perfection. Research is required on the aesthetic outcome of alternative surgical procedures especially in high-risk patients with a thin-scalloped biotype.

A Retrospective Analysis of Implants Immediately Placed in Sites With and Without Periapical Pathology in Sixty‐Four Patients

Many patients requiring implant therapy present with hopeless teeth exhibiting periapical pathology. The advisability of implant placement in such situations has not been conclusively determined. Sixty-four patients underwent therapy in their maxillary incisor region. Treatment consisted of immediate implant placement in a site demonstrating periapical pathology, and immediate implant placement in a "pristine" site, either during the same visit or during separate visits. The implants placed in the sites demonstrating periapical pathology were followed in function for ≤117 months, with a mean time in function of 64 months. The implants placed in pristine sites were followed in function for ≤120 months, with a mean time in function of 62 months. Two implants in the central incisor positions of one patient demonstrated 2 mm of buccal recession after ≈46 months in function. These implants were deemed esthetic failures, despite the absence of inflammation and continued clinical implant immobility, yielding cumulative survival rates of 98.1 and 98.2 for implants placed in sites with periapical pathology and implants placed in sites without periapical pathology, respectively, according to published criteria. Implants immediately placed in sites demonstrating periapical pathology yielded results comparable to those immediately placed in pristine sites. The difference in survival rates was not statistically significant.

Episodic or Novelistic?: Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack

Like other fictions by Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, Commonly Call’d Col. Jack , draws together various literary genres. Until recently, this heterogeneity has been studied through a mode of ideological critique that privileges novelistic coherence, and Colonel Jack has long been dismissed as an ideological and aesthetic failure. Taking a different approach, this article examines how Defoe’s ostensibly broken novel uses a mixture of genres and analogous rather than progressive plot lines to capture and resolve a contemporary problem: the stretching of British legal authority from internal struggles (with criminals, slaves, and Jacobites) to the permeable interimperial boundaries of the Atlantic. Historicized in the development of the illicit trade between Britain and Spanish America, Colonel Jack ’s famously problematic conclusion—a remorseless smuggler’s adventure—does not offer a negative example for mercantile morality, but rather serves to theorize a legal regime based on negotiation.

Episodic or Novelistic? Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack

Like other fictions by Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque, Commonly Call'd Col. Jack, draws together various literary genres. Until recently, this heterogeneity has been studied through a mode of ideological critique that privileges novelistic coherence, and Colonel Jack has long been dismissed as an ideological and aesthetic failure. Taking a different approach, this article examines how Defoe's ostensibly broken novel uses a mixture of genres and analogous rather than progressive plot lines to capture and resolve a contemporary problem: the stretching of British legal authority from internal struggles (with criminals, slaves, and Jacobites) to the permeable interimperial boundaries of the Atlantic. Historicized in the development of the illicit trade between Britain and Spanish America, Colonel Jack's famously problematic conclusion—a remorseless smuggler's adventure—does not offer a negative example for mercantile morality, but rather serves to theorize a legal regime based on negotiation.

Immediate single-tooth implants in the anterior maxilla: 3-year results of a case series on hard and soft tissue response and aesthetics

The objective of this prospective study was to assess the overall outcome of immediate single implant treatment in the anterior maxilla after a 3-year observation period. Thirty consecutively treated patients with a thick gingival biotype, ideal gingival level/contour and intact socket walls at the time of tooth extraction were treated for single-tooth replacement in the aesthetic zone by two experienced clinicians. Treatment included minimal mucoperiosteal flap elevation, immediate implant placement (NobelReplace TiUnite(®)), insertion of a grafting material between the implant and the socket wall and connection of a screw-retained provisional restoration. The latter was replaced by a cemented crown 6 months thereafter. Patients were clinically and radiographically re-examined after 3 years to assess implant survival, complications and hard and soft tissue conditions. The aesthetic outcome was objectively rated using the Pink Esthetic Score (PES) and White Esthetic Score (WES) by a blinded clinician who had not been involved in the treatment. Twenty-five patients could be re-evaluated after 3 years. One early implant failure had occurred resulting in an implant survival rate of 96%. Radiographic examination yielded on average 1.13 mm mesial, respectively 0.86 mm distal bone loss. The clinical conditions showed fairly low peri-implant plaque (18%) and bleeding (24%) and mean probing depth was 3.17 mm. Mean mesial/distal papilla shrinkage and midfacial soft tissue recession in reference to the pre-operative status accounted for 0.05, 0.08 and 0.34 mm, respectively. Between the 1- and 3-year reassessment mesial papillae showed significant re-growth (0.36 mm; p=0.015). Advanced midfacial recession (>1 mm) was found in 2/25 (8%) cases. Five (21%) cases were aesthetic failures (PES<8 and/or WES<6) and 5/24 (21%) showed an (almost) perfect outcome (PES≥12 and WES≥9). The remainder (14/24 or 58%) demonstrated acceptable aesthetics. The proposed strategy seems a valuable and predictable treatment option for well-selected patients in the mid-long term as shown by almost full papillary re-growth and a low risk for advanced midfacial recession.

Immediate and conventional single implant treatment in the anterior maxilla: 1-year results of a case series on hard and soft tissue response and aesthetics

The main objective of this clinical study was to document midfacial soft tissue dynamics following single immediate implant treatment (IIT) and conventional implant treatment (CIT) in the anterior maxilla when performed by experienced clinicians in well-selected patients. Appropriate bone volume and ideal soft tissue levels were considered requirements for implant therapy. Additional prerequisites for IIT were intact socket walls and a thick gingival biotype. CIT included standard flap elevation whereas IIT was either performed with a flap or flapless procedure. All implants were provisionally restored using cemented acrylic crowns. Bone levels, papillae and midfacial soft tissue levels were monitored at regular intervals. The aesthetic outcome was assessed after 1 year using the pink aesthetic score (PES) and white aesthetic score (WES). Sixteen patients (10 men, six women; mean age 45) received an immediate implant and 23 patients (12 men, 11 women; mean age 40) had conventional implant surgery. One immediate implant failed in the early healing phase. The mean bone level from the implant-abutment interface was 0.85mm for IIT and 0.65mm for CIT after 1 year (p=0.144). Mesial papillae remained stable over time. Minute loss of distal papillae occurred following IIT (-0.38mm) and a tendency for re-growth was found following CIT (0.60mm). Midfacial soft tissues remained stable over time following IIT with only 7% showing advanced recession (>1mm). Flapless surgery induced less midfacial recession than flap surgery (p=0.023). Significant midfacial recession occurred following CIT (-1mm). Overall, 24% were aesthetic failures (PES<8 and/or WES<6) and 8% showed an (almost) perfect outcome (PES12 and WES9). The remainder (68%) demonstrated acceptable aesthetics. Immediate implants demonstrated fairly stable midfacial soft tissue levels with only a minority of cases showing advanced recession. Irrespective of the timing of implant placement, aesthetic failures seem to be rather common and only a strict minority may show perfection.

New Left in Victorian Drag: &lt;i&gt;The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus&lt;/i&gt;

The Rolling Stones' first television program was mostly, but not only, an at- tempt to capitalize on the blunder that the band's friendly rivals, the Beatles, had made with their home movie, Magical Mystery Tour. The Beatles' movie aired on the BBC on Boxing Day in 1967, bewildering fans and irritating crit- ics. The Stones' television program, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in December 1968, aimed to one-up the Beatles in capturing rock performance on film. Unlike the Beatles' music movie, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Cir- cus was never aired, and a quasi-consensus has formed that has dismissed the project accordingly and stigmatized it as an aesthetic failure. However, as a cultural text, the Rock and Roll Circus program remains a key document of the era. The mise-en-scene for the Rolling Stones' performance, the rock show as circus act, a subject chosen by the band and followed through on by the program's director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was, I will argue, chosen with deliberate care. The Stones' movie was meant to build a pow- erful link between the new rock music and the British working-class past, an attempt to consolidate two different political movements, traditional working-class struggles with current youth politics. This chapter sets the Rock and Roll Circus project in the specific historical contexts of British popular music and the emerging cultural un- derground. I hope to explain how the scheme, aimed at building a bridge between rock music and radical politics, reveals broader transformations in what constituted aesthetics and politics at the time. 1 Historicizing the Stones' film allows us to grasp the changing definitions of art and politics in the British '60s. The Rock and Roll Circus project originated in an effort to make rock political by explicitly aligning the music and musicians with working-class struggles against capitalism. I argue that the final product discloses Jagger and his band's commitment to a self-conscious work ethic that sidesteps the question of rock politics; instead, the guiding assump- tion is that the politics of rock music is a consequence of how audiences

The peri-implant esthetics: An unforgettable entity.

Esthetic demands in today's world of dentistry are scaling new heights, and are driven by the zest to look beautiful. The soft tissue esthetics around implants is the foci of attention, which, if failed to meet, leads to unacceptable esthetic failure. The aim of this article is to give a brief overview of the various vital parameters influencing the esthetics governing the peri-implant area.

Rhinoplasty for the Asian Nose

When compared with Caucasian noses, the typical Asian nose appears to be relatively small and flat and has poor tip definition. Therefore, the main concept of rhinoplasty for Asians is augmentation rather than reduction. In selecting the dorsal implant material, skin thickness should be considered. Although autologous cartilage has the lowest risk of infection among graft materials, autologous cartilage including costal cartilage is associated with a significant risk of revision surgery due to aesthetic failure. Alloplastic implants, including silicone and Gore-Tex, are easy to use and can reduce operation time. But they carry significant risks of complications including infection, deviation, extrusion, and delayed inflammation, which must be seriously considered by rhinoplasty surgeons. Cartilage grafting procedures, including shield graft, onlay graft, modified vertical dome division, and septal extension graft, are mainstays in proper projection and better refinement of the Asian tip, which is intrinsically round and underdeveloped in its appearance. In placing a shield graft, it is important to place an additional supporting graft at the cephalic border and additional tip grafts at the caudal aspect, so that the final tip graft complex has an antero-caudal projection on the profile view.

Das Spiel mit der Überlieferung. Baudelaires spätes Bekenntnis

Baudelaire's reflections on his impact on posterity constitute part of his modernity. However, his Journaux intimes indicate that he did not think he could surpass the impact of his predecessor: his “grand livre” entitled Mon cœur mis à nu, with which Baudelaire intended to pass beyond Rousseau's Confessions, disintegrates into fragments, loose notes that aesthetic acts could not sublimate. Precisely this aesthetic failure demands a new evaluation of Baudelaire's relation to his predecessor. In the Paradis artfificiels, the intertextual relationship with the Confessions reveals a quintessential method of modernist writing. Although the title does not refer to the genre of confessional writing, the text itself exhibits it. Through the transparency of metonymical relations to the predecessor, performed as an “exercice de la fraternité”, and by way of pharmakon, Baudelaire develops a playful interaction with tradition and with his own “confessions”.

Restoration, Metanostalgia, and Critical Memory: Forms of Nostalgia in Contemporary Southern Poetry

White southerners and their literature traditionally have been known for nostalgia (sometimes even defined by it), and contemporary southern poetry does not escape its influence. In fact, nostalgia is arguably most prevalent paradigm of current southern poetics, even as much post-World War II verse works in contrast pathos-laden view of past. A collection of recent southern poets--including those under analysis in this article, George Scarbrough, Donald Justice, and Henry Taylor--make use of inheritance of southern nostalgia, though not necessarily in traditional ways. They demonstrate nostalgia remains driving force in poetry of postwar era even or especially as U.S. South begins operate under shifting conditions of trans-southernism: increased (sub)urbanization, influence of late capitalism, pressures of racial conflict manifested in civil rights movement and continuing efforts at desegregation, as well as claims of current identity politics. Though at times their poetic measures can become reactionary measures, preserving mummified past from such cultural transitions, these poets also show signs of more jagged nostalgia, one struggles come terms with this changing South: old times there are not forgotten, hut re-viewed with different, even distrustful eye. Southern nostalgia can take seemingly innocuous form of moonlight-and-magnolias yearning for more peaceful and reassuring past, often centered on wish return homestead, physical and symbolic space merges southern staples of ties family and place, perhaps intensifying into shrine for ancestor worship. Such pining for more organic time and place may seem harmless enough, but it can also take on ideological import; for retreating into past can elide pressing social realities of present. This is apparent in ongoing conflicts over politics of nostalgia for Lost Cause, seen most vividly in continuing battle over flying of Confederate flag on South Carolina State House grounds. Waxing nostalgic can be racially inflected and politically weighted act. Nostalgia's backward-glancing would seem run counter continuously shifting identifications of increasingly transregional and global world, forming conservative defense mechanism against contemporary culture's overflow of meanings by positing singular meaningfulness of sturdy, unified past. A starting point in defining nostalgia might be Michael Kammen's understanding of it as essentially history without guilt, sense of heritage that suffuses us with pride rather than with shame (688). Although nostalgia can function as sentimental balm salve wounds of more divisive historical conflict, we should use this definition press beyond out-of-hand neo-Marxist condemnation of nostalgia, as seems at best incomplete. Current theorists offer range of perspectives on nostalgia as both method of cultural retreat and critique. From Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, a sorrowful or distressing condition or illness, nostalgia is literally state of homesickness. (1) By twentieth century, concept had been gradually stripped of its medical associations and took on more pejorative meaning as the useless yearning for world or for way of life from which one has been irrevocably severed (Starobinski 101). Whereas there is undoubtedly good deal of truth involved in this typical definition, nostalgia is not univocal phenomenon, but contains multiple, even contradictory levels. Svetlana Boym proposes two contrasting impulses of nostalgic desire: restorative versus reflective nostalgia. In its uncritical restorative sense, nostalgia can become an abdication of personal responsibility, guilt-free homecoming, ethical and aesthetic failure (xiv). Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts transhistorical reconstruction of lost home (xviii), while reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, longing itself, and delays homecoming--wistfully, ironically, desperately. …

Neutering Addison and Steele: Aesthetic Failure and the Spectatorial Public Sphere

More than four decades after its initial publication, Jiirgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere remains an unavoidable starting point for studies of early eighteenth-century print culture. For Habermas, of course, the development of English coffee-house culture and its periodical press marked the emergence of a potentially egalitarian discursive space, a realm governed more by the rational force of the better argument than by the institutional force of existing power relations.' Extending Habermas's argument, historian Lawrence Klein has recently argued that figures like Anthony Ashley Cooper (Third Earl of Shaftesbury), Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele promoted an urbane ethos of sociability through their ideal of polite conversation, a form of dialogue that offered a normative framework for human relations since its conventions implied the values of freedom, equality, activity, pleasure, and restraint.2 For Habermas's critics, on the other hand, this interpretation of the postRestoration public sphere is compromised: either by the blind spots in Habermas's theory itself-especially regarding issues of gender and class-or by the fact that Habermas's Enlightenment publicness was managed by precisely those empowered Englishmen whose interests it was supposed to scrutinize.3 But both Habermasians and their opponents leave unquestioned the claim that post-Restoration English writers imagined their public sphere as a form of dialogic, conversational sociability focused on rational-critical public debate.4 Addison and Steele, however, insisted that their paradigmatic periodical The Spectator (1711-1714), despite its print dissemination, should be thought of as a vehicle for privately consumed, surrogate visuality-a spectatorial model of publicness.5 Addison and Steele's shift from a conversational to a spectatorial model of print culture undermines recent scholarly consensus about what these periodicalists hoped to achieve.6 As a representative reading, we can take Terry Eagleton's view that Addison and Steele embody the earliest examples of criticism's substantive social function, promoting social consolidation through their periodicals by codifying

Clinical Quality Assurance Surveillance and Targeted Interventions: Managing Unfavorable Trends in a Dental School Clinic

Dental schools establish quality assurance (QA) programs that are intended to improve patient care, comply with requirements of liability carriers and regulatory agencies, and maintain accreditation. Data collection, trend analysis, and interventions are typically used in QA programs to monitor and improve compliance. The purpose of this article is to discuss unfavorable trends and examine the effect of targeted interventions in three clinical operations: infection control, removable prosthodontics, and case reviews of students' patient care in progress (interim case reviews) at a U.S. dental school. Infection control compliance was evaluated and interventions were implemented beginning in 2002 to correct unfavorable trends in two protocols: placement of students' mobile supply cart and the use of overgloves. A predelivery esthetic consent was introduced in spring 2004 to decrease esthetic failures in removable prosthodontics. For interim case reviews, two areas received interventions going back to 2003: reevaluation following initial periodontal therapy and orthodontic screening. The data presented are not meant to show conclusive success of particular interventions, but to display broad trends and suggest methods to manage quality assurance parameters. These trends suggest we had better success with the interventions that were simple, valuable, measurable, and repeatable than with interventions that less fit these criteria.

Orientalism as Aesthetic Failure

Orientalism as Aesthetic Failure

The Novel in a Time of Terror: Middlesex, History, and Contemporary American Fiction

Jeffrey Eugenides's 2002 Middlesex, a critically acclaimed historical novel, has been praised as an expansive, epic portrait of the American twentieth century from its immigrant roots to the present. (1) It takes its readers from a Turkish village in the 1920s to the race riots of the late 1960s, following a Greek and then Greek American family across time and the world, spinning an interestingly twisted yarn in the voice of the family's latest product, whose gender identity, complicated by a genetically inherited hermaphroditism, is at the center of his story. The novel displays a particular historical imagination, as all historical novels do; it depends on a set of notions about the relationship between past, present, and future, about cause and effect, and about the possibilities and problems that attempts to understand and represent the past entail. And, as is also the case with all historical novels, its historical imagination can tell us something about the historical imagination of its times. While it is no longer common in current critical discourse to discuss works in terms of aesthetic failure or success, I believe that Middlesex fails aesthetically and that it is important to talk about it in these terms because how it fails says something about its historical imagination and the historical imagination of its times. At the root of its failure, I'll argue, is the way it imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character's gender crisis. This closure represents something other than a poor aesthetic choice. Rather, its falseness--the unearned, unwarranted character of the novel's ending--is unintended, and so it represents a failure that is especially indicative of the unconscious effect of its historical imagination. The way Middlesex ends is in part due to, and thus can tell us something about, the way history felt in America in 2002. The formal phenomenon of closure is closely linked in the literature and thought of the second half of the twentieth century to the existential phenomenon of contingency. The felt relation of a time, a writer, or a particular kind of historical imagination to the fact of contingency informs the way stories are told, in particular the nature of their endings (and not just in the recent past, as Frank Kermode has shown). Postmodernism, though, has been especially invested in the connection between closure and contingency. In an early (1972) statement of postmodern doctrine made in the first issue of boundary 2, the postmodern journal he cofounded, William Spanos describes the relationship between closure and contingency after midcentury: Only after the existentialist philosophers revealed that the perception of the universe as a well-made fiction, obsessive to the Western consciousness, is in reality a self-deceptive effort to evade the anxiety of contingent existence by objectifying and taking hold of it, did it become clear to the modern writer that the ending-as-solution is the literary agency of this evasive objectification. (152) The distrust of closure is widely articulated in postmodern thought, early (as in statements by Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan, John Barth, et al.) and late (Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, et al.). The story that I will tell through my reading of Middlesex, however, is that of the changing nature of that distrust in recent years. What endings mean, and why writers embrace them or avoid them, depends in part on how contingent existence feels and how public discourse and constructions of history deal with that feeling. As a result, events that reawaken a sense of contingency and challenge already constructed narratives--in particular, historical traumas--can affect the shape of literary endings. This is especially the case, I will argue, for historical literature, work whose focus is explicitly on the past and always implicitly, as a result, on the way that history ends--on the way the past leads to the precarious present and, ultimately, the future. …

Achieving Optimal Esthetics in a Patient with Severe Trauma: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach and an All-Ceramic Fixed Partial Denture

The treatment of traumatic injuries can be difficult, especially when the patient's expectations are too high or unreasonable. Such cases require extremely clear communication with the patient before beginning the case, including an explanation of the final results, based on the patient's goals. Taking over a case from another colleague adds more complications and requires that close attention is paid to the reason for the original dissatisfaction between the former dentist and patient to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Clinically, patients with thin, fragile gingiva are extremely challenging if they require a fixed partial denture in the esthetic zone since the most common material, a ceramometal bridge, requires infragingival margins; if any recession occurs, a catastrophic esthetic failure will result. The case presented here underscores all these special issues. Proper multidisciplinary management, good patient communication, and the use of an all-ceramic fixed partial denture system can provide an excellent final result. Replacing teeth in the esthetic zone is complicated, especially when trauma has caused severe damage to the surrounding bone and gingiva. Satisfying a demanding patient requires a multidisciplinary approach and psychological management, as are exemplified in this article.

Joyce's Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation (review)

Reviewed by: Joyce’s Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation Thomas Dilworth (bio) Tim Conley. Joyce’s Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation University of Toronto Press. xii, 192. $50.00 This is a celebration of error as indicative of authenticity, a corrective to 'false' ideals of totality and completion. Its subtitle should be its title, since the book is a dissertation-style engagement with theory and criticism, liberally quoted, and uses Joyce as little more than a primary example. For three dubious reasons, Tim Conley attributes an 'aesthetic of error' to Joyce. The first reason is that Joyce was aware of and interested in errors, since his characters make them - although these are not, of course, Joyce's errors. Conley sees these fictional errors as paradigmatic for Ulyssess but fails to indicate how, since he does not address textual instances of irreducible ambiguity or aesthetic misjudgment. The second reason is that there are editorial problems with Ulysses that are difficult or impossible to resolve - none, as far as we know, intended by Joyce. The third reason is [End Page 555] that Finnegans Wake consists mostly of puns, which Conley sees, for reasons that elude me, as 'erroneous' and necessitating reader-error. With characteristic hyperbole he writes, 'the Wake is ... all of Joyce's writings, or all literature everywhere, grossly misspelled, mistranslated, thoroughly botched.' Literalizing metaphor - any truth in what he says can only be metaphorical - he affects naïveté about multiple punning and ignores the other languages involved in Joyce's multilingual puns. The fundamental mistake in this book is a pervasive confusion between ontological and aesthetic categories. Nothing in nature is whole or perfect, including human knowledge, but art can and does achieve unity or wholeness and beauty. Conley prefers art to be 'erroneous,' since it then corresponds to our inability to know well or fully. In this he seems to advocate New Critical 'imitative fallacy.' Confusion between art and life also underlies his misreading of Pound's words 'I cannot make it cohere' as a declaration of admirable aesthetic 'sabotage' that challenges assumptions about correctness. Isn't it true, rather, that the disunity of the Cantos is an aesthetic failure which indicates nothing about our limited ability to know what is real or true? Keats's urn, or its viewer, is wrong about beauty and truth. Neither is the other. That is why notions of correctness and accuracy may apply to content and never to form. Conley makes other silly claims: that all figures and voices in the Wake 'are writers as much as they themselves are written'; that Joyce is not the author of Ulysses but merely a disunified centre where authorial voices or influences converge; that the writing writes itself; that the places and dates in the postmark in Ulysses are 'akin to apologies for the erroneous nature of the text'; that 'the events of those years' (1914-1921) 'in those places' (Trieste-Zurich-Paris) 'shaped the work' to such an extent that 'Joyce is incidental, or accidental, a vehicle.' In a daring four-page epiphany of self-indulgence, Conley immerses himself in 'how errors occur' by writing largely about his own writing, while ignoring his spellcheck - an exercise possibly instructive for someone who has never made a mistake. He writes sometimes with engaging cleverness, sometimes clumsily. I reread the first sentence on page 82 five times before locating its main verb. He has the immature habit of indulging frequently in statements in parentheses, which interrupt flow of expression. He also habitually enlists Joyce to write for him by quoting the Wake - a mistake because such quotations are out of context and go off in two or more directions, seldom making a single clear point. There is little here for anyone interested in Joyce. Convinced that 'all interpretations can be thought of as errors,' Conley seldom attempts literary analysis. He regards the Wake as his primary vindication: to read it 'is to make mistakes, and to enjoy' it 'is to cherish what the mistakes reveal.' Despite considerable verbal pizzazz, this book is intellectually [End Page 556] timid in its basic contention that all writing and reading is erroneous - an exaggeration as near to...

'Weil Die Geschichte Nicht Aufhort': Gunter Grass's Im Krebsgang

W.G. Sebald's 1997 lectures, Luftkrieg und Literatur, sparked intense debate in the German media over the supposed taboo surrounding the literary depiction of German civilian victims of Allied attacks and the potential blurring of the already problematic ‘Tater’/‘Opfer’ complex. On its publication, Grass's most recent work Im Krebsgang either fuelled or became embroiled in this dispute and became front- page news. It is contended that such a media frenzy led to literary reviews at the time ignoring the aesthetic merits and failures of the novella and thus overlooking the complexities of its narratological structure, giving rise to over-simplistic interpretations of Grass's contribution to the ‘Tater’/‘Opfer’ debate. The following article attempts to redress the journalistic imbalance by undertaking a detailed analysis of the various narrative strategies employed within the work and relating this to the generational and familial framework with which Grass addresses the issue of German suffering. This serves to illuminate further the topic of memory and memorialising the past which lies at the heart of Sebald's essay and of Grass's novella.

Anglicanism and the Poetry of John Betjeman

The critical fate of John Betjeman is a sharply divided one. His work endures the dubious distinction of being enjoyed by millions of readers, many of whom would never read poetry. spite of his popularity, which earned him the laureateship in 1972, Betjeman has been for the most part either ignored or disdained by critics, although this neglect is palliated by praise for Betjeman from many of his fellow poets, including W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin. (1) The astonishing paucity of scholarly attention to Betjeman is attributable in part to his popularity. It is an ugly truth, and one most critics prefer to hide, that there is an innate prejudice against a successful poet, and even more so against one who used the medium of television so adroitly to advance his favorite causes. (2) If the masses approve, the poetry must be inferior, or so goes a way of thinking since T. S. Eliot. Prejudice also exists against modern poets who so openly eschew the tenets of modernism, and Betjeman's verse is certainly traditional. Instead of innovating with meter and form, he preferred to cast his poems in molds successfully employed by Victorian poets and hymnodists. Although in structure Betjeman was an avowed anti-modernist, he was clearly engaged with his culture, and his language is informed by the sensibility of modernism. tone Betjeman is frequently a prophet of doom. Like many of his fellow poets, Betjeman rejected the popular fantasy of endless progress and advancement, using poetry as a vehicle to excoriate society for its cultural, spiritual, political, and aesthetic failures. A further explanation for his rejection by critics is that Betjeman was a religious man. Critics have little trouble coping with the religious poems of seventeenth-century writers, poets who lived in what was still an age of faith, but what should we do with a troublesome twentieth-century poet who persisted in believing the tenets of Christianity despite the overwhelming counter-claims of science and philosophy? Betjeman's faith was public knowledge, and he often spoke fervently of his beliefs, as in this letter written on Christmas Day, 1947, acknowledging his philosophical and theological distinction from other poets: Also my view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes of his Creator i.e. to Praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him and to dread Him. this way I differ from most modern poets, who are agnostics and have an idea that Man is the centre of the Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces. (qtd. in Hillier, John Betjeman 400) Indeed, Betjeman was committed not just to Christianity but to the Church of England. His poems describe the perils of faith and the struggle to believe; they celebrate the social and cultural significance of the Church of England; they reveal the intersection of architecture and faith, of aesthetics and the spirit; and they also demonstrate the social and spiritual failure of the Church, particularly the snobbery and hypocrisy of its clergy and parishioners. Betjeman could be a brilliant ironist, but he could also be sentimental about the Church of England; and even though he was never an unabashed apologist for his church, his rejection of skepticism may be perceived by critics as an intellectual weakness. However, it is the remarkable fact of Betjeman's studied faith in an age of skepticism that makes him interesting and worthy of critical attention. To appreciate Betjeman's complex and contrasting stances toward religion, let us consider In Westminster Abbey and Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge. (3) These poems are set in two of the most aesthetically and socially important centers of Christian worship in England, though the former has political and the latter academic significance. Together the two poems epitomize the tonal are between outrage and affection that typifies his verse about the English Church. …

Olive Schreiner in the New South Africa

In a bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, I saw Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) and remembered that somebody in South Africa had told me to read this important book. The edition was a Penguin Classic (197 1), the one you can also find at bookstores in South African international airports. Many do consider the story to be a classic, the beginning of the country's important literature, but this may be largely because Schreiner was alone among the Southern Africa-born (South Africa itself did not yet exist as a unified nation) in producing anything like those nineteenth-century British and French novels we still read: each a mixture of Bildungsroman, romance, domestic comedy, and social commentary. The large, not excessively critical market this form made available at the time of Schreiner's writing renders her choice of the form and its success understandable. I kept reminding myself of this while puzzling my way through the book on a flight to Cape Town. I could not find much attraction in the writing beyond several striking scenes and some interesting historical detail. But after a few weeks back in my adopted country, I was ready to say that Schreiner, whatever her aesthetic failures, is an excellent author through whom to gain an understanding of the white South African experience, now as well as in the past.