Aesthetic Tendencies Research Articles

Taunay viajante: uma contribuição para a historiografia literária brasileira

Neste texto proponho analisar a obra de Alfredo D'Escragnolle Taunay, o Visconde de Taunay, especificamente a imagética de Mato Grosso nas descrições da viagem feita durante a Campanha da Laguna, na Guerra da Tríplice Aliança contra o Paraguai (1864-1870). Procuro, nesta investigação, penetrar no universo particular do escritor, focando a idéia de identidade nacional no século XIX e de como as noções de Natureza/Paisagem/Viagem/Imagens literárias entram nas abrangentes discussões de um Romantismo de transição, cujo legado teve fecunda influência na formação intelectual de Taunay e nos rumos das tendências estéticas brasileiras.

Musical and film time

Comparative analysis of linear, non-linear and multiple temporal dimensions in music and film reveals that the understanding and utilisation of time in these two arts reflect not only the aesthetic inclinations of its creators and their subjective experiences of temporality but also their philosophical views and, sometimes, spiritual beliefs. Viewed in the context of contemporary theories about Time, particularly Shallis' interpretation of different temporalities as symbolic of various levels of reality and J. T. Fraser's concept of time as a hierarchical nest of different temporalities or Umwelts, the results of this comparison lead to the conclusion that the time in which music and film unfold belongs to a separate, artificial Umwelt of its own - art-temporality.

Under the Sign of a Projective Nostalgia: Agostinho Neto and Angolan Postcolonial Poetry

Under the Sign of a Projective Nostalgia: Agostinho Neto and Angolan Inocência Mata Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, Portugal trans. by Vicky Hartnack It is in fact well known that during the colonial-fascist period, which saw the emergence of a nationalist aesthetic, literary production entered into dialogue with liberation ideology. For this reason, the literary aesthetic of the time called for a rhetoric seeking to share imagined social and historical memories and to collectivize anguishes and aspirations, redirecting them along thematic and stylistic landscapes which, upon seeing the erasures, looming conflicts and divergent tugs-of-war going on within the "imagined community," strove to build a unified, cohesive body within the guidelines of nationalism—which, according to Ernest Gellner, may be defined as "a political principle defending the reciprocity between national unity and political unity" (11). In reinforcing the widespread diffusion of writing during the period in which the literary system was being defined, another way out was grounded in cultural imagination that lay in phenomena to do with nature and socioculture (people, the signs of everyday life, the physical and social environment), which were transformed into symbols. Using such symbols and drawing upon the power which the word had, what writers wanted was to forge the social, psychological and affective-sentimental link among individuals, thus satisfying an extratextual function of an ideological intent. Through these cultural places, or culturalized places, of signs taken out of geography and nature, of values and attributes that were (re)invented socioculturally and (re)elaborated intellectually, they sang of the motherland—a community of very centralized and united laws and institutions with a political aim (see Smith ch.1): a motherland that, although lacking in human justice, was prodigious in nature. In the words of António Candido, this prodigiousness of nature and the harmony between man and nature worked "as an ideological construction transformed into a compensating illusion" (149).1 This is the idea behind Agostinho Neto's poems such as "Havemos de voltar" ("We shall return"), "O içar da bandeira" ("The hoisting of the flag"), "Adeus à hora da largada" ("Farewell at the hour of departing"), "Não me peças sorrisos" ("Don't ask me for smiles"), "O caminho das estrelas" ("The pathway to the stars"), "Campos verdes" ("Green fields"), "Sangrantes e germinantes" ("Bleeding and germinating"), or "Caminho do mato" ("The bush path"). In these poems, as in many other [End Page 54] poems in Sagrada Esperaça (Sacred Hope), bushpaths, enforced labor, suffering and pain, human exploitation and the plundering of the earth's wealth by using the local labour force—this is what colonialism is about—became "the pathway of flowers / flowers of love" ("Caminho do mato"). Following the period of end-seeking ideological agencies of a nationalist hue, however, there are other things moving writers nowadays, thus making the Angolan literary panorama a diversified, eclectic space. Although it would be foolhardy to characterize the present era by merely taking into consideration one aesthetic tendency, it may be ventured that the ideological nature of new writing emerging from the body of the nation and from identity issues, still tends to be nostalgic, since it harps back to the past as if it were a characteristic of the utopian imagination that still exists. Be that as it may, it feeds on itself in a cannibalistic process in the sense that it devours, like a metaphor that critically assimilates the elements of a founding aesthetic, on the condition that these elements are re-worked according to the historical context, urgently needed to handle the various tensions splintering present-day Angolan society. In the new view of Angola, the contingencies of historical-cultural and socio-economic undertakings are on the basis of the symbolic links needed to rebuild the country, only this time by resorting to "subjective consciousness." It is by means of this individual consciousness that historical memory still persist as do the...

Advertising tower: Japanese modernism and modernity in the 1920s

On a December morning in 1925, a newspaper journalist reported receiving 25 different handbills in an hour's walk in downtown Tokyo, advertising everything from Western-style clothing and furniture to sweet shops, charity organisations, phonograph recordings, plays, and films. The activities of advertisers, and the new entertainment culture and patterns of consumption that they promoted, helped to define a new urban aesthetic emerging in the 1920s. This book examines some of the responses of Japanese authors to the transformation of Tokyo in the early decades of the 20th Century. In particular, it explores the themes and formal strategies of the modernist literature that flourished in the 1920s, focusing on the work of Hagiwara Kyojiro (1899 - 1938) and Hayashi Fumiko (1903 - 1951). William Gardner shows how modernist works offer new constructions of individual subjectivity amid the social and technological changes that provided the ground for the appearance of 'mass media'. Hagiwara's conception of the poem and poet as an electric-radio 'advertising tower' provides an emblem for the aesthetic tensions and multiple discourses of technology, media, urbanism, commerce and propaganda that were circulating through the urban environment at the time; while Hayashi's work, with its references to popular songs, plays and movies, suggests an understanding of 'everyday life' as the interface between individual subjectivity and a highly mediated environment.

BOOK REVIEW:Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, by Constance W. Hassett

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style Julie Melnyk (bio) Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, by Constance W. Hassett; pp. xiii + 278. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005, $39.50, £27.95. Constance W. Hassett has written a first-rate book on Christina Rossetti that treats her not as a woman poet, nor a religious poet, nor even a Pre-Raphaelite poet—though Hassett remains alert to the implications of all these contexts; instead, Hassett discusses Rossetti as, fundamentally, a poet, an artist whose medium is the word and whose style is characterized by "patience." This approach leads the author both to insightful analyses of the influence of other poets on Rossetti's work, and to exciting and illuminating close readings of Rossetti poems both familiar and unfamiliar. Hassett's discussions of unfamiliar works provide the pleasure of rediscovering Rossetti's artistry in little-regarded poems, even as she offers original insights into poems critics discuss most often. Her nuanced reading of "Goblin Market" (1862) provides a good example of such an approach. Hassett focuses (patiently) on style, examining how narrative and lyric strands of the poem intertwine to complicate its treatment of "questions of desire" (15). Through careful attention to the sounds, textures, connotations, and histories of the words Rossetti uses to weave her poem, as well as to the effects she achieves through meter, Hassett offers us a fresh, non-reductive perspective on this often-treated work. Occasionally, a reading that depends on obscure word derivations may strike the reader as fanciful, but even these points are suggestive. Hassett also moves beyond discussion of the single poem to demonstrate how similar issues of reticence and volubility appear in other Rossetti poems, so that the poet's works become mutually illuminating. As part of the "Goblin Market" chapter, for instance, she includes a reading of "Up-Hill" (1862) that simultaneously opens up the apparently simple allegory by focusing [End Page 122] on its treatment of "reticence that masquerades as its opposite" (57) and enhances our understanding of the longer poem's uses of silence. This aesthetic approach to Rossetti's poetry provides fascinating local insights, but it is most valuable and original in the way it reveals the unity of Rossetti's work, early and late, bringing together the playfully oblique "Winter: My Secret" (1862) with the haunting absences of "Remember" (1862); the lyrical nonsense of Sing-Song (1872) with the high seriousness of the late religious verse. Brilliant chapters on Sing-Song and Verses (1893) establish their continuities with and significance within the rest of the Rossetti canon, as well as their artistic merits—though Hassett also demonstrates specific ways in which some of Rossetti's late religious verse no longer seems to have the "patience" for details of "style," sacrificing an "enlivening aesthetic tension" (204) in favor of a preordained ending. But in her discussion of how poems from devotional volumes published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge are transformed when released from their original prose contexts, Hassett provides convincing evidence of Rossetti's continued commitment to aesthetic value and the possibilities of form in her later work. In addition to contextualized close readings of Rossetti's poems, Hassett offers fascinating analyses of Rossetti's relationships with other poets and poetic styles. She reads Monna Innominata (1881) through its interrelations not just with the obvious precursors by Dante and Petrarch but also with the other major nineteenth-century sonnet sequences by D. G. Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, enhancing understanding of how Rossetti transforms the genre. Hassett also reads Rossetti's second sonnet sequence Later Life (1881) in relation to her brother's House of Life (1881), but her discussion of Later Life understates its unity and underlying psychological chronology, treating it as a collection of lyrics rather than a true sequence. Nevertheless, she provides a suggestive account of its relation to Monna Innominata and illuminating readings of several sonnets. Hassett's discussion of the influence of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (L. E. L.) also offers important insights, particularly in readings of "L. E. L." (1866) and "The Lowest Room" (1875), and she argues convincingly that L. E. L. had the...

Muscles, Motorcycles and Tattoos

Elaborating on previous work on Poor Chic, this article opens new empirical terrain for gentrification theory by demonstrating how gentrification processes are applicable to ‘symbolic neighborhoods’ in popular culture. Challenging postmodernist-spirited lifestyle consumption theory that asserts the breakdown of stratification systems through consumer habits, the article delineates how three important ‘symbolic neighborhoods of lower class masculinity’ - muscles, motorcycles, and tattoos - have been transformed from lower- to middle-class distinction. Framing these recent changes as investment, invasion, transformation and displacement, the article illustrates how apparent tolerance and fluidity among consumer lifestyles is less reflective of the obliteration of stratification systems than a new strategic means of reconstructing them. Particular attention is focused on Bourdieu’s multi-faceted conceptualization of ‘cultural capital’ and the victorious application of ‘aesthetic disposition’.

Un demi-siècle d'activités lyriques en région toulousaine (1760-1810): Diffusion et appropriation

Lyrical activities in the Toulouse area between 1760 and 1810 are closely related to the historical contemporary events which so deeply transformed French society. They also illustrate the aesthetical tendencies of the time. While the French traditions of baroque tragedie lyrique and opera-ballet still appear important, the more realistic, popular and sentimental style of opera-comique progressively develops. Those different musical tastes can be heard in two precise kinds of places: castles' and palaces' private halls vs. urban public theaters of major cities (Toulouse, of course, but also smaller ones, such as Albi and Cahors). In both cases, the ways in which the region appropriates repertoires mostly imported from Paris lead one to reconsider some preconceptions about Parisian musical supremacy in 19th-century France.

When appearances are not deceptive: A Comparative History of school uniforms in Argentina and the United States (nineteenth–twentieth centuries)

Appearances are deceptive, the saying goes. However, we devote much time to the presentation of ourselves, and ties and necklaces can take up more energy than other ‘substantial’ matters. This article analyzes the history of the presentation of selves in schools through the study of school uniforms. It will be claimed that modernity configured a ‘regime of appearances’ that had powerful effects on the ways that people relate to themselves and to others, and that schooling played a significant role in shaping it. The article will deal particularly with school uniforms as part of this regime of appearances, focusing on the development of vestimentary codes in Argentina and the United States of America. In Argentina, white smocks, which were adopted as the mandatory dress code around 1910 on the basis of an egalitarian rhetorics, were part of a politics of the body closely tied to Hygienism and linked to ideals of moral and racial purity. White smocks established a homogeneous and austere, monochromatic aesthetics of the school space that quickly identified transgression and indiscipline. In the US, uniforms were used for the schooling of minorities (Native Americans, women) as a way of rigorously training unruly bodies and of learning other aesthetic and bodily dispositions. Recently, urban public schools have adopted uniforms to counter‐balance gangs' and rappers' dress codes. I believe that both cases show the fertility of analyzing school appearances for the history of school daily life and for understanding the effects that schooling produces in our societies.

Essays in Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: Essays in Aesthetics Matei Calinescu Gérard Genette . Essays in Aesthetics. Trans. Dorrit Cohn. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. 236 pp. Essays in Aesthetics is a partial rendering of Figures IV (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999). Genette's interest in philosophical aesthetics, as illustrated in such books as The Aesthetic Relation and The Work of Art, dates from the 1990s and represents the latest stage in the career of this very prolific French theorist, [End Page 342] known to Anglo-American scholars mostly as a founder of "narratology" (through his widely influential Narrative Discourse) and, more generally, as a proponent of structuralist poetics and textual studies (as, for instance, in such books as The Architext, or Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, or Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree). In these areas, Genette has offered us a whole array of fine terminological tools for discourse analysis and a wealth of subtle individual observations on such writers as Proust, Stendhal, Flaubert, Henry James, Borges, and many others. "From Text to Work," the opening piece of the new volume, is an intellectual autobiography of sorts or, as the author of the older Fiction and Diction prefers to put it, somewhat ponderously, "an exercise in pre-posthumous self-diction." The essay is meant to reconstruct "the true diachronic movement that led me from one object to another." Genette, we learn, started out in the early 1950s as an ordinary "literary critic," passing quickly to "poetics" (under the influence of Roland Barthes) and thus abandoning, in his own words, along with "less than exciting studies . . . , an absolutely disastruous political and ideological engagement" (2). His later structuralist or relativist "disposition" has preserved, however, something from his early Marxism, namely his desire for rationality. One can infer the disillusionment with Marxism of today's French intelligentsia from Genette's exceedingly cautious formulations. He writes: "In fact, if I must go to my prehistory, I think I kept from Marxism as I understood it—or, rather, from what, no doubt wrongly, attracted me to it—at the end of the 1940s a desire for rationality, a wish to see clearly and a refusal of fine words. This desire I found answered again later on, and I hope (which is not difficult) more advisedly, in structuralism and then in analytic philosophy" (27). Essays in Aesthetics, after the initial account of the author's career, features articles on general aesthetics ("What Aesthetic Values?," "Axiological Relations"), on painting ("The Two Kinds of Abstraction," a discussion of Canaletto's The Stonemason's Yard, an analysis of Zola's portrait by Manet in "The Gaze of Olympia," "Pissaro at L'Hermitage"), on music ("Songs without Words," "The Other of the Same," about musical variations), and on literature. The latter cover approximately the second half of the book and range from more theoretical disquisitions ("A Logic of Literature," about Käte Hamburger's treatise of poetics by the same title, "The Diary, the Anti-Diary," commenting a statement by Roland Barthes) to considerations on specific texts by writers in different genres dealing mostly with visual and musical matters ("Fantasy Landscape," "Egotism and Aesthetic Disposition," focusing on Stendhal's "Italian works," etc.). Of the last three essays, devoted to Proust by one of the great Proustians, I would single out "One of My Favorite Authors," which concludes the book. Constructed as an erudite and charming guessing game, this meditation on "genetic" criticism starts from a short passage in Combray, in which Proust's narrator says that the Guermantes landscape reminds him of "a description by one of my favorite authors." Who is this unnamed author? Michael Riffaterre, in his book Fictional Truth, identifies him (quite wrongly) with Virgil, on the basis of the Latin-derived adjective fluviatile, which occurs in the passage. A Proustian critic whom Genette admires, Jean Milly, sees the passage in question as suggesting, by certain details, the name of Flaubert. Reading through the variants published in the latest Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu (1987-89), Genette finds several similar descriptive passages in which Marcel [End Page 343] reads a book by Bergotte, the imaginary writer who is a major character in the novel. But...

The timbre space of the Chinese membrane flute (dizi): Physical basis and psychoacoustical effects

The Chinese membrane flute (dizi) has a membrane covering a hole in the wall of the instrument between the mouth hole and the uppermost finger-hole. The membrane is driven by the acoustic pressure in the pipe, producing rich harmonics through its nonlinearity. The dizi timbre is multidimensional and varies with pitch. Inhomogeneity of the dizi timbre is well known by musicians. It reflects a general aesthetic tendency in traditional Chinese music that a skillful musician should produce a variety of timbre with a solo instrument. The major spectral features of dizi tones, i.e., (1) formants, (2) the predominance of odd harmonics, and (3) harmonic-to-subharmonics ratio at high frequencies, can be explained by a Duffing oscillator model of the membrane. They constitute the three dimensions of the dizi timbre space, where the ‘‘trajectory’’ of the changing timbre of a dizi melody is embedded. Psychoacoustical effects associated with them are discussed, including (1) spatial effects due to abrupt brightness changes, (2) multi-pitch effect due to the predominance of upper odd harmonics, and (3) roughness induced by subharmonics.

La traza de los antiguos retablos mayores clasicistas de dos iglesias parroquiales de Lalín: Santiago de Catasós y San Xoán de Vilanova

The sculptor Juan de Villoldo, presumably linked to an active family of artists in Castille in the last third of the 16 th Century, undertook the construction of the high altarpieces of the parish churches of Santiago de Catasos and San Xoan de Vilanova in 1586, situated in Lalin (Pontevedra). In order to do this he uses a design requested by the parishioners of the first curacy. The plan shows the elevation of an altarpiece that brings together most of the typical features of the classicist trend. Through it, there is evidence of his lack of skill at drawing and of his failure to adapt to new aesthetic tendencies, since he uses architectural elements (such as the balaustrade-style column) that had fallen into disuse in the last decades of the aforementioned century.

Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification

Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighbourhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their afford ability and mundane, off-centre status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieu's conceptualisation of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by market forces. Bourdieu's thinking is extended to the field of gentrification in an account that interprets the enhanced valuation of cultural capital since the 1960s, encouraging spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist. This approach offers some reconciliation to theoretical debates in the gentrification literature about the roles of structure and agency and economic and cultural explanations. It also casts a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city.

A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia (review)

Laurence Porter and a hard-working team of Flaubert scholars have accomplished the daunting task of assembling an encyclopedia devoted to Flaubert's life and literary works. The book will be a valuable resource for Flaubert specialists as well as for students and nonspecialists. Entries treat not only Flaubert's major works but also his unpublished projects and juvenilia. Historical and biographical information features prominently, and includes places (e.g., Rouen, Croisset, Paris, Trouville), events (e.g., the Franco-Prussian War), nineteenth-century critics (e.g., Sainte-Beuve), family and acquaintances, cultural and aesthetic tendencies (e.g., roman-ticism, classicism, orientalism, postmodernism), as well as relevant physiological and psychological phenomena such as disease, neurosis, sadism, androgyny, fetishism, and the œdipus complex. One also finds entries for writers and philosophers who influenced Flaubert or were influenced by him (e.g., Nabokov, Faulkner, and Tolstoy; Sartre, Spinoza, and Hegel). A number of essays deal deftly with such hallmarks of Flaubert's style as irony, free indirect style, indeterminacy, and focalization.

Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (review)

Toward the end of the introduction to her encyclopedic survey of the urban visual culture of Weimar Germany, Janet Ward makes a provocative observation that transcends the historical objects of her investigation. Citing criticisms by figures such as Terry Eagleton and Bill Readings that postmodernists are simply "selling out to consumerism even as they dare to step out of the ivory tower of Geist" (41) or engage in work that "amounts in fact to nothing more than a servile reproduction of consumerist dictates" (42), Ward takes up Pierre Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital to suggest a corrective. She claims that the "'aesthetic disposition' that presupposes a 'sort of withdrawal from economic necessity'" has itself become something of a necessary surface-illusion for academics like Eagleton and Readings, an illusion that fails to acknowledge the "current commodification of intellectual life" (42). Indeed, according to Ward, contemporary scholars are not able to pursue their work outside of political-economic considerations, or, as she puts it, "today's intellectuals are cultural capitalists: this is how intellectual-aesthetic expression is actually valorized" (42).

Der verhuhnte Falke. Anmerkungen zu einer möglichen ästhetik der spätmittelalterlichen Liebeslyrik

This essay focuses upon the basic poetological processes within late medieval German love poetry. An analysis of Falkenlieder ("falcon-songs") demonstrates how the texts combine models from different genres. This technique of combination results in a phenomenon which may be termed "textual hybridity". The dominant role played by grotesque motifs is compared with the analogous dominance of marginal motifs in late medieval book art. It is possible to see this "aesthetic of the marginal" as an aesthetic tendency prevalent in the period, which has its own specific cultural significance. Finally the essay considers the position of late medieval German love poetry in the context of the European lyric as a whole.

Short Fiction with Attitude: The Lives of Boys and Men in the 'Lives of Girls and Women'

Abstract This article considers Munro's use of specific generic conventions pertaining to the short story form to tell the lives of boys and men whilst manipulating such conventions to support the overarching narrative of the Lives of Girls and Women. An examination of the structural principles of the text lies at the heart of the discussion, in particular: the role and function of breaks in the narrative chronology, the aesthetic tensions generated between past and present perspectives, and an analysis of the techniques Munro employs to express the dislocations of accepted structures of authority and modes of organization, both social and artistic. There have been many discussions of Alice Munro's 1971 volume of interlinked stories, Lives of Girls and Women, in the context of its generic identity.[1] Andrew Gurr in his essay 'Short Fictions and Whole-Books' sees 'inherently novelistic impulses'[2] in the organization of the text and Coral Ann Howells, in a capacious discussion of its form, describes it as, amongst other things, a 'Bildungsroman with a decentralised narrative structure'.[3] The story of Del Jordan's progression from childhood into adolescence into young womanhood becomes our intimate possession as Munro draws her readers into the smell and taste of the vulnerability, ignorance, and venality that is girlhood in the confused and confusing years of the 1940s and 1950s through a series of narratives linked not chronologically but topographically. What I intend to focus on in this essay, however, is not the sweep of the whole but the detail of the individual narratives and, in particular, the way in which Munro writes about men; in other words I will be privileging the autonomy of the individual stories over the unifying factors in the volume. I would argue that it is in the telling of the tales of the men who variously feature in this text that the most powerful generic affiliations to the short story form are demonstrated; in the stories contained within Del Jordan's overarching narrative the lives of boys and men can be read. Alice Munro has talked about her fictions being fundamentally concerned with looking at 'what people don't understand. What we don't understand. What we think is happening and what we understand later on'.[4] Whilst this is actually a subtle description of the fruitful tensions generated by the retrospective cast of the narrative style, which combines the insights of the mature writer with the adolescent subject, it is also an accurate assessment of the manner in which the text is engaged in the portrayal of the disaggregation of white male identity from the centre of the action. Story after story delineates the end of male exclusivity, whether in the role of pioneer, breadwinner, intellectual, or suitor; and this is so imminent a phenomenon that no one is quite alert to the reverberations and implications. The complications that arise from the use of the retrospective view (into which obsolescence is built) highlight, with the greatest clarity, the fact that the status quo, the world of 'Masculine self-centredness' (p. 30)is in the process of being superseded. As Munro describes it in a prefatory note, this is a text which is 'autobiographical in form but not in fact' and women are shown throughout to be emerging from contingency, no longer peripheral to the central thrust of a certain, seamless narrative or forced to speak lines already scripted for them. The men are the bit-players, featuring in single episodes rather than informing the whole, and reduced in status by being made subject to judgement. Uncle Craig, in common with Uncle Benny, Jerry Storey, Mr Chamberlain, Garnet French, Naomi's father, Del's own father and brother, is shown at peace in complacency, misguidedly secure in a value system which is rapidly becoming obsolete. The rapidity of social change is reflected in the accumulated detail of people's lives in Munro's fictional small town -- shifts of allegiance both large and small, inter-generational conflicts, alterations in the balance of power between the sexes -- but these are not to be found in Uncle Craig's meticulous recording of births, deaths, and marriages: 'He did not ask for anybody in the family to have done anything more interesting, or scandalous, than to marry a Roman Catholic (the woman's religion noted in red ink below her name)' (p. …

The 'nature dispositions' of visitors to animal encounter sites in Australia and New Zealand

This paper analyses the results of a survey of visitors to nine animal encounter sites in Australia and New Zealand to assess whether visitors' orientations to nature are related to the extent of 'naturalness' or 'authenticity' of the animal encounter A concept of 'nature dispositions' was adapted from Bourdieu's (1984) notion of aesthetic dispositions for this purpose. Visitors' nature dispositions are not simply related to the extent to which the animal encounter is authentic or wild. Rather, tourists' attitudes also reflect the messages of the sites visited, messages embedded either in the site operators' programs or in wider social constructions of animals found there. Visitors to Antarctica and Warrawong have the highest conservation orientation, reflecting the ecotourist orientation of these sites' operators. Visitors to Monkey Mia have the highest moralistic orientation, possibly reflecting the social construction of dolphins as animals with which humans have a close affinity and Monkey Mia as a site which promotes communion with dolphins.

Seven Faces; Brazilian Poetry since Modernism

Brazil, perhaps more than any other nation of the Americas, has placed poetry at the forefront of dialogue and debate about the limits and uses of art, the social duties of artists, and the nature of nationalism and national identity. In Seven Faces, Charles A. Perrone charts the course of Brazilian poetry in the contemporary period through the principal currents, multiple tendencies, and aesthetic tensions that have made the Brazilian lyric so creatively diverse. Perrone introduces the most important poetic themes of the second half of this century with a look back at Brazilian modernism and the avant-garde legacy of poets of the 1920s and 30s. Brazilian poets, the author reveals, have long drawn inspiration from the other arts, experimenting with the inclusion of music, graphic arts, and other non-traditional elements within lyric forms. Relating aesthetic concerns to cultural issues, Perrone elucidates the major poetic movements in Brazil since modernismo: concretism and vanguard poetry, politically committed verse of the 60s, youth poetry of the 70s, the lyricism of Brazil's renowned popular music, and the rethinking of poetry through postmodernism in the final decades of this century. Providing a window on the ways in which poetry reflects a national spirit and offers a measure of the status of culture in a consumer society, Seven Faces is the only book-length study in English of contemporary Brazilian poetry. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of Latin American literature, as well as by general readers interested in poetry and its influence on culture and society.

Balthasar and Eckhart: Theological Principles and Catholicity

BALTHASAR AND ECKHART: THEOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES AND CATHOLICITY CYRIL O'REGAN Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Or pleas'd to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a Fault, and hesitate Dislike; Alike reserv'd to blame or to commend, A tim'rous Foe and a suspitious Friend 1 THE TENDENCY to avoid exclusion is a mark of the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It represents an identifying habit, an incorrigible feature of style and sensibility . His texts in which theologians, philosophers, poets, dramatists, and saints are christianly praised give testimony to a catholicity that barely brooks limits. Not only in true Gospel fashion are a multitude invited to the eschatological banquet, they constitute the vast medium of tradition, in which Maximus the Confessor rubs shoulders with Plato, in the company of Claudel, Calderon, and Therese of Lisieux. At different times Balthasar thinks of the tradition as one huge symphony in which notes sound only to be transcended and as a conversation between particular perspectives on the great mystery of redemption , no one of which is final and which meet only in the infinity of their object. The decision for plurality and variety in the tradition certainly validates difference and counts against its reduction .2 Yet at the same time tradition, precisely as a matter of variety , exhibits a measure of coherence or concordance that pro1 These couplets are from Alexander Pope's poem Atticus. See Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault, completed by John Butt (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 143. 2 See, for example, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), pp. 39, 187, 251. 203 204 CYRIL O'REGAN hibits difference from becoming truly excessive. It is this prohibition of excessive difference in Balthasar's reading of tradition that I would like to examine here. I take as my case study of Balthasar's rhetoric of reading his conflicted response to Meister Eckhart, about whose inclusion in the Christian tradition Balthasar expresses no doubts, yet whose theological message is such as to cause anxiety. We shall occupy ourselves in this paper with the way in which Eckhart's nonnegotiable inclusion within the tradition serves to repress the account of those features that present a fundamental challenge, that represent difference that would make the Christian field radically heterogeneous. In the first two sections, focusing mainly on the fifth volume of The Glory of the Lord (=GL),3 I shall offer outlines of both the positive and negative contributions Eckhart is deemed to have made to the theological tradition. Though I do not wish to give the impression of Scholastic pro and contra, Balthasar's positive remarks being imbricated with the negative and vice versa, it will be suggested that the elements adduced in both cases constitute mirror images of each other. Balthasar takes a bifocal, though not stereoscopic, view of a group of five elements: aesthetic disposition, the sameness of Being and God, the whylessness of the divine, Gelassenheit, and Gottesgeburt. This group is in effect read twice, once in a way that affirms and confirms Eckhart's unproblematic inclusion in the tradition (section 1), and again in a way that, in the light of basic Christian principles, raises serious questions about such inclusion (section 2). In a final section the question is raised whether the conflict in interpretation suggests a deeper underlying conflict between Balthasarian commitment to Catholic theological principles and catholicity. I. BALTHASAR'S AFFIRMATIVE RENDERING OF ECKHART On the surface there is little reservation about the approbation Eckhart receives in the fifth volume of The Glory of the 3 The Glory ofthe Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. S, The Realm ofMetaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, C.R.V., John Saward, and Rowan Williams, ed. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991). BALTHASAR AND ECKHART 205 Lord. If the depths of Balthasar's analyses of the medievals in his volumes on metaphysics (vols. 4 & 5) never reach the level of his account of Anselm and Bonaventure in volume two, it would be caviling to suggest that his intention at the...

Nietzsche and the Jewish Question

One of the most striking features about the reception of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is that he is so rarely viewed in the context of Germany and Europe in the nineteenth century. Perhaps because of his self-proclaimed untimeliness1 he has been regarded almost exclusively as a harbinger of political, aesthetic, and philosophical tendencies of a later era. On the political front, he has been considered a proponent of such widely divergent tendencies as fascism, anarchism, libertarianism, liberal democracy, and socialism. In the realm of culture, he has been viewed as an inspiration for aestheticism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, dadaism, surrealism, and postmodernism. In philosophical circles, he has allegedly influenced phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. Occasionally we do find him situated in a larger philosophical or cultural tradition. But in these studies he is usually placed in relationship usually an antagonistic one to the great thinkers of the Western heritage. What is thus unusual about the vast majority of secondary work on Nietzsche is that it has remained so resolutely ahistorical, even though there is a wealth of material available that would connect Nietzsche with his times. Indeed, if we read Nietzsche's notes and letters, examine his