Ambiguous Title Research Articles

Car(Ry)Ing the Past, Present, and Future—A Deep Dive Into Danish Dance Stories

Abstract Danish Dance Stories is an artistic initiative manifested through a series of collegial encounters in 2018 and 2021, which revolves around the sharing of personal (hi)stories across generations and geographic affiliations. Documentation from the events and contributions from participants have been organized as stories on the website danskedansehistorier.dk. By revisiting and through the writing process engaging in conversations with the content of the stories, the text is an attempt to articulate and reflect on issues and potentials of the initiative. The conversations raise questions about hegemony, hierarchy and access, discussed through the lens of the terminology that constitute the ambiguous title of the initiative; Danish, Dance and History. By leaning onto the knowledge and experience of colleagues, complexity, multiplicity and repetition are proposed as a possible direction for a future local dance community.

The Lord of Angel Armies and the Centurion of Capernaum in Matthew 8:5–13

Abstract This study of Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5–13) draws attention to some neglected Christological details. This study offers a fresh explanation of how Matthew uses ambiguity and clarity about who Jesus is in various levels of narrative context. Specifically, Matthew’s characterization of the centurion uses the ambiguous title of ‘Lord’ alongside clear actions of faith to reveal Jesus’ identity. This study concludes that Jesus participates in the identity of Yahweh, who has absolute and divine power to command his army of angels to heal people and remove demons, even without his presence.

Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel

Reviewed by: Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier by Naama Harel Carsten Strathausen Kafka's Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier. By Naama Harel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Pp. 204. Cloth $55.00. ISBN 978-0472131792. The premise of Naama Harel's insightful study of Kafka's animals is deceptively simple. What happens, she asks, if we refuse to interpret these figures allegorically—a critical tradition that has reigned supreme for most of the twentieth century and was due, in part, to Max Brod's heavy-handed editorial interventions into the unpublished manuscripts he inherited after Kafka's death—and instead read them straightforward, and literally, as stories about animals? What if the speaking ape Red Peter (from "A Report to an Academy") is not considered an allegory about Jewish assimilation or [End Page 611] about the human history of slavery, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, transcendence, etc., but rather considered a living being that, like all beings, stands for itself and not for something else? The idea is not as far-fetched as it might appear. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, exhibitions and performances of "learned apes" dressed like people and imitating basic human behavior (drinking, smoking, shaking hands) became increasingly popular in Western Europe and the US, which prompted well-known psychologists and anthropologists like Wolfgang Köhler and Lightner Witmer to test apes' cognitive abilities and signs of language use. Roland Reuß, the editor of the ongoing facsimile edition of Kafka's works, even found an advertisement for a learned ape show in the Prager Tagblatt (which Kafka read diligently) from March 1917, right around the time he wrote and published "A Report to an Academy." There is little doubt that Kafka, an avid reader of journals and magazines, was familiar with the subject and had heard of the most famous cases like the chimpanzees "Sultan" and "Consul Peter," both of whom are considered possible prototypes for Kafka's "Red Peter." As Harel points out, "the only difference between these performing apes and Red Peter is that the latter also learned to speak" (52). Harel is certainly not the first scholar to suggest nonallegorical readings of Kafka's animal stories. She herself notes that "the allegorical conception of nonhuman animals in fiction has been replaced in recent scholarship by a zoopoetic approach" (5). Still, with regard to Kafka, Harel is the first scholar to pursue this zoopoetic approach in a comprehensive and systematic manner across the board, with individual chapters dedicated to close readings of "The Metamorphosis," "A Report to an Academy," "Jackals and Arabs," "Researches of a Dog," and "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse Folk." Her focus throughout remains on the myriad ways in which Kafka succeeds in undermining "the species barrier, creating a liminal human-animal space" that Harel refers to as "humanimality" (13) or "aspecies being" (133). The "gigantic vermin" identified as Gregor Samsa, for example, exhibits so many contradictory biological traits that its being cannot possibly be identified in scientific-entomological terms (as Nabokov and others have demonstrated). Instead, "it becomes clear that his verminous existence is not forced on Gregor from outside, by nature, but from his immediate human environment, namely his parents and sister" (46). Another example is Kafka "drawing attention to the anthropocentric premise of ordinary language" (138) by speaking of "hands" rather than "paws" to describe the aspecies protagonist in "The Burrow." This word choice prompts readers to assume that the protagonist is human until that fiction becomes increasingly untenable as the story progresses. A similar hermeneutic process occurs when Kafka prompts his readers to think of the protagonist Josefine as a mouse when, in fact, the only support for that reading is the ambiguous title of the story, "Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People," and the equally ambiguous reference to people's "fur" that seems to designate mice [End Page 612] yet might also function as "a synecdoche for a fur coat" worn by humans (150). In both cases, Kafka simultaneously invites and frustrates our efforts to maintain the species boundaries we are used to, implicitly making the point that species identity is neither biological nor objective but based on cultural...

„Ich werde eingetaucht / in vás“? Peter Waterhouses 'Prosperos Land' als Dynamisierung von T.S. Eliots 'The Waste Land'

’Ich werde eingetaucht/in vás’? Peter Waterhouse’s Prosperos Land as Dynamisation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The assumption of the existence of well discernible national languages is at odds with the dynamic nature of language. It is part of the so-called “monolingual paradigm” and therefore implies inextricably linking people to their mother tongue, which is in turn tied to one respective ethnicity, culture and nation. However, languages are not always clearly discernible from one another and do not always appear in fixed, static forms. Instead, language is subject to dynamic changes, which are at the same time subject to political interests and language policies. The poems presented in this article exemplify how modern and contemporary poetry can use the conjuncture of multilingualism and ambiguity to create a sense of language dynamics themselves. Their poetics simultaneously question and make use of the assumption of static multilingualism. They unfold political problems from it and awaken in their readers a desire for proactive reading and (language) change. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land already problematizes the coexistence of the European languages as a challenge for understanding, suggesting that languages as well as their speakers might be untranslatably shut-off from each other. However, the poem also creates surprising synergistic effects from its multilingualism and ambiguity. This way, it invites its readers to connect and cross over (language) borders in an adaptive and poetic manner, stressing the importance and capability of poetry and learning for intercultural understanding. Prosperos Land by Peter Waterhouse perpetuates and even surpasses this movement. As the ambivalent bilingual, intertextual and ambiguous title suggests, the poem challenges the possibility of linguistic as well as national demarcation from the start. Moving away from strict language borders and rules, the poem highlights the transformative magic of an almost childish exploration of language itself.

Malczewski and Vienna: New Facts

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 4 (2017).
 The article presents, apart from the well-known facts concerning Malczewski’s connections with Viennese institutions and art circles, unknown archive materials, including: 1. letters exchanged between the artist and Juliusz Twardowski (a ministerial official) regarding the lease of a workshop at the Prater district of Vienna (letters were written between 1900–1913 and in 1925); 2. photographic documentation (19 items from the years 1890–1911) of the XXXIX. Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession in Vienna that featured 40 paintings by Malczewski and the sculpture Procession to Wawel by Wacław Szymanowski. The manuscripts indicate that Malczewski kept a secret atelier abroad and he most definitely worked there (it was either during one prolonged period, or two periods each lasting a few years). It contradicts the naïve opinions that Malczewski, being a patriot, could not stand separation from his homeland.
 Photographs with dates and signatures complete the information from the catalogue; they allow for the matching of the ambiguous titles with photographs, and consequently help to identify the paintings shown at the exhibition. Some paintings presented in the photos are not known today, therefore the photographs constitute valuable iconographic material. The documents prove, for instance, that Spring. Landscape with Tobias (1904) was presented in Vienna. It is startling that the painting’s synthetic form was not acknowledged by the critics in Vienna. Just after the World War I, Malczewski wrote a letter to the President of the Wiener Secession in which he stated that the war had not been beneficial to any of the martyred and agitated nations and he had hoped for cooperation between the artists in the time of peace that would not be shaped by national interests or politics.

Brokers or Investment Advisers? The US Public Perception

We find that individuals are confused by the titles used by investment professionals and cannot distinguish between investment advisers and brokers. This confusion persists even among those with investment industry experience, a college degree, or a high level of perceived knowledge (one’s self-assessment or feeling of knowing the information). Surveyed individuals better identified the brokerage responsibilities of “an investment sales representative” (an alternate title for broker) than the more ambiguous titles brokers often use, such as “financial advisor.”

Editorial

Editorial Edward Finegan This issue of Dictionaries opens with the third installment of Michael Adams’s history of the Dictionary Society of North America, the journal’s publisher. Relying on abundant archival material, the story Adams tells constitutes “a chapter in the history of the language sciences,” he says, and the first three installments of the story do that and more. They tell the story of a group who, from the start, aimed to create a community of men and women interested in sharing their interest in and knowledge of dictionaries and in creating forums for propagating that knowledge. Part I dealt principally with DSNA’s founding circumstances and Part II with its founding leaders. Part III focuses on DSNA membership patterns and on members themselves during the early years, 1977 to 1989. As an example, Adams describes correspondence between Ed Gates, DSNA’s founder, and New York Times columnist William Safire. Safire had provided readers of his “On Language” column a broad description of DSNA, with its benefits and low membership fee, and the society’s rolls exploded, testing its office capacity and prompting consternation among support staff charged with meeting the expectations of the new “Safire members.” Other unexpected and sometimes delightful reports appear in this installment, and one’s appetite for the final installment is whetted. Elizabeth Knowles relies on archival and other material to focus her examination of the wartime backdrop to the initial publication of The Oxford Book of Quotations. The first edition of ODQ appeared in the fall of 1941 in British and American versions, identical but for their introductions, the American Carl van Doren writing one for North American readers, the Englishman Bernard Darwin another for British readers. The contents of ODQ were compiled before the outbreak of World War [End Page vii] II, and Knowles addresses the challenge Oxford University Press faced in offering a book of quotations devoid of obvious reference to wartime in Britain and impending war in the US. She describes the “ingenious” way in which Darwin played on tropes familiar to those following Churchill and Roosevelt and their citation of poems to give the volume a sense of timeliness. As a chapter on the history of publishing and on the complex interplay between a reference book, its times, and the imagined expectations of its audiences, “One Dictionary, Two Introductions” touches not only on the exigencies of wartime publishing such as paper rationing but also on the balancing act required of publishers seeking contributions from distinguished, if overly busy, contributors. Stephen Turton likewise addresses the relevance of cultural and social circumstances to reference works, in particular to hard-word and general dictionaries of the early modern period. “Unlawful Entries” is a richly ambiguous title for Turton’s discussion of dictionary treatments of buggery and sodomy in the 150 years preceding publication of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary in 1755. Despite the incoherence that Turton finds in definitions of those two and related words in early modern English dictionaries, he concludes that “the silences and paradoxes embedded in these early definitions allow them to be read from perspectives that are more radical than their writers likely intended.” One perspective through which Turton’s discussion of entries on buggery and sodomy might be viewed relates to the difference between words and things. It is just that difference between a dictionary entry and an encyclopedia article that Michael Hancher explores in “Dictionary vs. Encyclopedia.” Hancher begins his analysis before the OED and focuses on Trench, Murray, and Gove among subsequent lexicographers, while also discussing philosophers of language, including Paul Grice. Balancing a dictionary entry’s defining a word and its describing the thing the word names has been a perennial challenge for lexicographers and, despite commitments particularly to definitions of the word as opposed to description of the thing, honoring the commitment has proven challenging, if not impossible, in practice. Observers have long noted the challenge, and Hancher cites Allen Walker Read’s observation that “it is difficult to construct a dictionary without considerable attention to the objects and abstractions designated.” Quite different in focus from the other four articles in this issue, Caroline Myrick argues for “The Value of Local Dictionaries in...

CONCEPTS OF RELIGION IN MODERN AMERICAN RAP LYRICS

The article studies verbalization mean of religious concepts in Kendrick Lamar’s songs of his 2017 album DAMN. After introducing the inventory of lexemes representing themes of religion, the authors argue for correlations with basic concepts and explain the structure of the thematic field, representing religion in all fourteen songs of the album. The album structure and each song of it include over a hundred tokens referring to various religious concepts – mainly GOD, SIN, and PRAY, each of them being verbalized by a group of lexemes, fifteen total, which share certain semantic components. The micro-contexts with biblical quotes will be regarded as convergence points of the album’s text and analyzed individually for their stylistic value, but in general contributing to the general view of the album as a spiritual challenge. Through each next song a new aspect of religious concepts adds to the existing inventory, certain repetitions and cross-contextual allusions confirm and support them, adding coherence and continuity to the album’s structure. Out of fourteen songs of the album seven directly verbalize basic religious concepts through the notions of God, pride, humility, lust, love, loyalty, fear. This explicit structural feature together with the ambiguous title offer a series of logical steps in evaluating the sinful vs virtuous choices. This contrast is identified and sustained through such stylistic devices as repetitions, allusions, rhetorical questions and others.

After Marx, the Deluge

Abstract ‘After Marx’ or ‘According to Marx’. Thus translates the intentionally ambiguous title of ‘Nach Marx’, an international collection of twenty diverse essays in German on Marx and social philosophy today. ‘Nach Marx’ contains over five hundred pages of contributions from twelve prominent German philosophers and sociologists (Hauke Brunkhorst, Alex Demirović, Rainer Forst, Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Daniel Loick, Andrea Maihofer, Oliver Marchart, Christoph Menke, Hartmut Rosa, Michael Quante, Titus Stahl), six American political philosophers, German idealists, and historians (Wendy Brown, Daniel Brudney, Raymond Geuss, Frederick Neuhouser, Terry Pinkard, Moishe Postone), along with a British Hegelian philosopher (Andrew Chitty) and a French political thinker (Étienne Balibar). Although the book is divided into six themed parts (I. Freedom and Community, II. Normativity and Critique, III. Truth and Ideology, IV. Right and Subjectivity, V. Critique of Capitalism and Class Struggle, VI. Political Praxis), the essays are mostly individual excurses in Marx scholarship.

Ambiguous title deeds: contesting values of land and documents in Eldoret, Kenya

This paper explores changing values of land and title deeds through a case study of the Langas land dispute in Eldoret, a secondary city of about 300,000 people in Kenya's Rift Valley. Spanning Kenya's postcolonial history and taking place in the context of rapid urbanization, the Langas land dispute is emblematic of the complexity and persistence of land matters in the country. Based on ethnographic data collected between 2014 and 2016, this paper traces actors in the conflict, showing how the disputed area developed from a farm in the so-called White Highlands to Eldoret's largest informal settlement. The case study suggests that legal documents have gained significance in the past few decades, but it also shows that title deeds are deeply ambiguous. Sometimes respected for their ‘sanctity’, sometimes contested because of alleged forgery, title deeds have become the object of popular fantasy, conveying hopes and dreams of a better future. While land titles are assumed to enhance security of tenure and eradicate multiple ownership claims, I argue that they add layers of complexity to the repertoires actors mobilize to support or contest claims and that they thus expand the ways in which land can be valued.

Review: Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon, by Kimberly A. Francis

Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon , by Kimberly A. Francis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xxiii, 266 pp. The teasingly ambiguous title of Kimberly Francis's book gives us some clues as to the part played by Nadia Boulanger in Stravinsky's career. Boulanger was a champion of Stravinsky's music, both as the teacher of her own students and in what would now be termed public engagement, and she taught his younger son Soulima from 1929. But Francis also makes the bolder claim that “For all intents and purposes, [Boulanger] taught [Igor Stravinsky] how to view his own music; her analysis opened his eyes to his work. She helped him articulate his voice and the mechanisms underlying his ‘technique.’ She also taught him about presentation, the direct relationship between the score's appearance and its legacy” (p. 248). While Robert Craft considered Boulanger simply to be “a prodigious proof-reader” (quoted p. 9), Francis instead provides “a feminist account of Boulanger's professional interactions with Stravinsky, his family, and his music” (p. 9). She follows Suzanne Cusick and others in her wish to shed light on “woman's work and the culturally feminine so that they cease to be marginalized and devalued, but might be re-interpreted as important elements of musical culture” (quoted p. 9). Francis chooses to view the Boulanger-Stravinsky relationship through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's theory, referencing particularly the concepts of cultural capital, consecration, and agency. Yet the theoretical framework is handled with a light touch after the introduction: Boulanger's …

Cameron, Averil. Byzantine Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv+164 pp. $22.95 (cloth).

Cameron, Averil. <i>Byzantine Matters</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv+164 pp. $22.95 (cloth).

Production, Consumption, Power, and Humor in the Films of Marek Piwowski

IT IS DIFFICULT TO LOCATE MAREK PIWOWSKI in any distinctive school of Polish cinema. His artistic output is quantitatively modest; he has made only three full-length fiction films and over ten documentaries, mainly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Being born in 1935, he was too young to belong to the Polish School, created by filmmakers born in the 1920s, and too old to be part of the Cinema of Moral Concern, which was created mostly by those born in the 1940s and '50s. Moreover, unlike the works of Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Krzysztof Zanussi, his films come across as unserious. However, despite the sense of his not belonging to any cinematic movement, he is among the best-loved filmmakers by domestic audiences. His Rejs [Cruise, a.k.a. A Trip Down the River] (1970) is described in various surveys as the ultimate Polish cult film and has its own fan club. Piwowski's other productions, such as Uwertura [The Overture] (1965) and Przepraszam, czy tu bija? [Excuse Me, Is It Here They Beat Up People?] (1976), also have a significant following, adding to Piwowski's status as the ultimate Polish cult director. This status is confirmed by frequent rereleases of his films by Polish state and private television and on DVD. It is also worth mentioning that photos from Cruise adorn covers of books devoted to wider phenomena than his films, such as a book on Polish comedy (Talarczyk-Gubala) and an edited volume devoted to the leading Polish film auteurs (Stachowna and Zmudzinski).There are many reasons that Piwowski's films gained such a position, but the most important is his talent for capturing on camera ordinary life in Poland and heightening its most absurd features. His films combine minute, subtle observation pertaining to realistic filmmaking with an affinity for creating (often unintentionally, as the director claims) metaphors-a feature conveyed by the short, general, and sometimes ambiguous titles of his films, such as The Overture, Hair, Success, and Cruise.1 However, despite the important place of Piwowski in the history of Polish cinema, there is little academic research devoted to his work, perhaps reflecting a perception that his films, being unserious, do not merit serious investigation,2 and the bulk of this is devoted to his Cruise. Moreover, although authors admit that there is continuity between Piwowski's short documentary films and his Cruise, which is a hybrid between documentary and fiction film, as well as his subsequent fiction films, they rarely investigate his documentary films in detail, typically limiting themselves to mentioning that the director remained faithful to his unique, quasi-documentary style.This article discusses the way Piwowski represents understood as production and consumption of various nondurable and even immaterial goods, such as popular music, leisure, and alcohol. My argument is that the director shuns what is regarded as the typical Eastern European setting of films about work- namely, a factory-and instead privileges places of immaterial production.3 In this way he draws attention to the fact that work has a much wider meaning than socialist economists assumed, traditionally being preoccupied with heavy industry and hence production divorced from consumption. Instead, Piwowski is interested in such issues as production of leisure and pleasure, which appeared in Polish political and social debates only in the 1960s and gained in speed in the 1970s. He thus chronicles the attempts to modernize Poland. To account for the specificity of Piwowski's style, I will focus on his use of montage as a means to produce laughter. First, however, I shall briefly sketch the period when he made his most successful films.Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s4Piwowski started his career in the late 1960s, and he made the majority of his films, including his most successful productions, in the 1970s. By the 1960s, World War II still loomed large in Polish cinema and culture at large, as demonstrated by films such as Andrzej Wajda's Samson (1961) and Wojciech Has's Jak byc kochana (How To Be Loved, 1962). …

A Systematic Literature Review of Nutrition-related Mobile Apps

To determine by systematic review if, for adults without disease, nutrition mobile apps result in improved outcomes, including knowledge and behavior as compared to other educational interventions or control group. Question developed per PICOS (Participants, Interventions, Comparators, Outcomes, Study design) guidelines. Preliminary PubMed/CINAHL search defined search terms, resulting in: app(s), cellular phone, iPads, mobile phone, mobile telephone, smart phone, mobile, mHealth with diet, food and nutrition as qualifiers. Articles pertaining to app development, satisfaction, or feasibility, text messaging, digital photography, internet, and not including apps or nutrition as well as those with children or disease-associated were excluded. PubMed/CINHAL searched independently (2008-2013) by 2 researchers, who reviewed all titles to determine eligibility; abstracts read when ambiguous titles; articles evaluated for quality using Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Evidence Analysis Manual. Research quality; knowledge and behavior changes reported. Pubmed (12,010) and CINAHL (260) titles reduced to 17 meeting search and PICOS criteria; after abstract/article read then 10; compared/discussed resulting in 4 kept. Positive quality ratings given to 3; only 1 reported knowledge outcomes (non-significant); all evaluated weight loss (app advantage suggested); behaviors measured and found significant included increased adherence to diet monitoring, 1 study (P<.001);decreased effort to continue diet without app, 1 study (P=.024). Dietary intake measured but not significant. Few studies have investigated apps as education; all focus on weight loss with inconsistent outcomes measured. Using apps for education needs additional research to support efficacy.

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 ThomasDoherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.Using a provocative, ambiguous title, Professor Thomas Doherty (from Brandeis University) studies the anti-Nazi feature films produced before World War II. As a response to anti-Semitic propaganda films from Germany, a series of newsreels and short films were produced in Hollywood. None of those productions was really memorable, but this corpus of mostly short films deserves to be analyzed, and thus, this is what this Hollywood and Hitler is about. And no, contrary to what the book's title might suggest: Hitler did not visit Hollywood and had no direct relationship with the US movie industry.Doherty's book is well documented and brings together a corpus made of lesser-known, yet signifying feature films such as Die Vandemder Yid (1933), which was shot in the Yiddish language in Hollywood (53). This book's exploration tentatively ends with a well-known feature film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) (336). A distant observer might object that many important anti-Nazi movies were not included in these pages, but the author prefers to investigate an era (and a corpus) not well documented in previous books on a related topic (often focusing on war movies released after 1939). Therefore, there is no analysis of Chaplin's masterpiece The Great Dictator (1941). Instead, his previous movies such as Modern Times (1936) are examined.Subtle forms of racism and anti-Semitism occurred in the US during the early 1930s, when many Jewish employees of Hollywood studios lost their jobs due to secret orders from Berlin's new regime, which was established in 1933. This regime attempted to create an anti-Jewish movement outside Germany through foreign offices and a network of influential allies (36). This racist pressure was made in a context in which exports of Hollywood films to Germany were negotiated and sometimes refused or delayed. It was during a period of change (the end of silent movies) and adjustments of all sorts, for instance when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and the Hays Code (on morals and censorship) were enacted (40). However, despite the fact there were many German emigre's in Hollywood, it would be unfair to conclude they were automatically anti-Semitic. Incidentally, an anti-Nazi League was created in Hollywood in 1936 with filmmakers and producers from all backgrounds and religions, and among this elite were director John Ford and actor James Cagney (96). …

The Leipzig Manuscript of the Kitāb al-Zīna by the Ismaili Author Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. 322/933–934)

A collective volume containing fragments of the early 4th/10th century encyclopaedia Kitāb al-Zīna by the Ismaili author Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī was discovered within the holdings of Leipzig University Library in the early 2000s. On the one hand, the encyclopaedia is of particular interest because of its lexicographical content and also because of the subversive strategies employed by its undercover-agent author. On the other hand, the Leipzig fragment, recorded as Leipzig University Library manuscript or. 377, is an enigmatic piece of codicology for multiple reasons. Evidence suggests that it ranks among the oldest known copies of the book; at the same time, it is highly fragmentary and shows an unusual structure when compared to other witnesses of the text. Furthermore, several partial editions from the past with ambiguous titles have confused our knowledge about the book. This article attempts to draw a more precise picture of the encyclopaedia’s contents and of the scope of editions published to date. All known manuscript copies of the book are presented in a list, supplemented by an analysis of manuscript or. 377 and its peculiarities.

Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground By Gregory J. Snyder NYU Press. 2011. 252 pages. $20 paper

Gregory J. Snyder's Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground is a rambunctious and approachable ethnography of serious and not-so-serious NYC graffiti writers that does not bite off more than it can chew. The ambiguous title—is it about the lives of graffiti artists or is it arguing that the graffiti art movement lives?—nicely captures the author's approach, which involved chronicling the lives of the writers (the preferred term among graffiti artists) while at the same time tackling the ways in which graffiti continues to be a part of contemporary urban settings. Rejecting generalizations about graffiti artists and the meaning of graffiti, Snyder describes his work as a “snapshot of a particular period of time,” perhaps a too modest assessment of the book's relevance to broader sociological themes. Snyder touches on a number of larger issues, such as the relationship between graffiti and other criminal activity, the political meaning of graffiti, and ethnographic methods. Among the strengths of the book are candid interviews and accounts of the writers themselves, built upon relationships developed over a ten-year period. Snyder concludes by describing how the skills and experiences of graffiti writers shape them as they age and can be a resource for success in future endeavors and artistic careers.

'For the Love of God', 'Daddy's Girl' and 'Daddy's Little Princess'

For the Love of God (2009) is a diptych of knitted outfits for babies; they were knitted with stinging nettle yarn from original 1940s patterns. The yarn is coarse, and thus slow, painful and laborious to work with. The garments were knitted with resentment for traditional expectations placed upon women. The act left rope burn on the artist's fingers therefore introducing notions of female self-sacrifice, and also harm to children. Historically, stinging nettles were used as a method of self-flagellation by certain religious orders, as well as a material to make Nazi Officer's uniforms. The addition of bone buttons and needles used to the final works, further removes any typical sweet sentimentality associated with baby clothes. Instead, the details add notions of pain, and the ends rather than the beginnings of life.Daddy's Girl and Daddy's Little Princess (2012) are two separate pieces that on first glance appear to be padded headboards. Each piece is made up of 25 original vintage sewing patterns that have been moulded into shape when wet. The paper casts are hollow, making the work more fragile than it seems, as well as completely impossible to use. The pieces were painstakingly made and close scrutiny reveals that the pattern illustrations have been subtly altered and subverted by the artist. Shockingly, the little girls fight, drink and smoke, and it is through these hurtful and violent additions, along with the works' ambiguous titles that suggest abuse of many kinds. The uselessness of the piece also points to the heavy frustrations and disappointment experienced by the 'not good enough' mother.

Reading Games in the Greek Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Games in the Greek Novel Anastasia Natsina Eleni Papargyriou , Reading Games in the Greek Novel. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Pp. xii + 186. Hardback. $89.50. Eleni Papargyriou's first book is a most welcome addition to the scarce number of studies on Modern Greek Literature that focus on reader response. The ambiguous title explores the games that literary works evoke as part of the reading process (reading games). It also studies the reader's response to and interpretation of the various games (reading games), which feature in the five novels examined in the book, whose publication dates span the years 1935 to 1975. Investigating the notions of game and playfulness with regard to Modern Greek literature, Papargyriou traces a line of works that challenged the literary establishment of their time within the wider context of modernism. The first two chapters are introductory, placing the overall project in theoretical and historical contexts respectively. The first offers a succinct review of theories of play and games, and it focuses mainly on the aspect of play most akin to the reading experience, which is the creation of a fictional level in which participants immerse themselves. Furthermore, drawing from mostly European literary examples, it traces a shift in the form of playfulness—and the text's demands on the reader—from modernism to "post-WWII metafictions" (8): in modernism, playfulness is mainly based on the manipulation of knowledge, which leads to a "poetics of agonistics," whereas in late modernism and/or postmodernism, playfulness is increasingly linked to randomness. The second chapter examines the literary scene of the 1930s, which ushered modernism into Modern Greek letters. It outlines the lucidity, sombreness, and [End Page 350] lack of stylistic innovation of the period's dominant prose works, in stark contrast with the much more obscure and experimental (albeit equally sombre) poetry of the time. It discusses the provocation of the literary establishment by authors of the periphery (focusing on Yannis Skarimbas) and interestingly finds in the latter's playfulness a way to (re)negotiate their place in the establishment, unlike that of satire and parody, whose overt criticism tends to exclude them from the literary establishment. The second chapter is mostly a lucid and informative introduction to the third, which elaborates further on Skarimbas's work, focusing on his novel Mariambas (1935) and its multilayered intertextual practices. The third chapter illuminatingly discusses different approaches to intertextuality; in contrast to the limited, awed, and "educational" use of European intertexts exhibited by established prose writers such as George Theotokas and Angelos Terzakis, Skarimbas playfully blurs the boundaries between "reading and borrowing, citing and rewriting" (56) his multiple sources, as he bases his novel entirely on "intertextual imitation" (58). Instead of the passive consumption of the text instigated by the former writers' strategies, Skarimbas invites the reader's active attention to constantly move from text to intertext, by using implicit, explicit, and thematized intertextual references. This results in a text open to multiple "concretizations," as a game would be; this openness as well as the novel's own irreverent reading of its interetexts, render its "attitude—precociously—postmodern" (72). Intertextual games prove to be a key feature in Nikos-Gabriil Pentzikis's The Novel of Mrs. Ersi (1966) which follows its contemporary, characteristically postmodern, international trend of rewriting earlier works, in this case Yeoryios Drosinis's novel Ersi (1922). According to Papargyriou's insightful reading, Pentzikis rewrites Drosinis's novel by fictionalizing the latter's spots of indeterminacy, which challenges Dorsinis's neoclassical idealistic assumptions on a number of issues, among which the cultural centrality of Athens and a sense of timelessness. Furthermore, chapter four explains Pentzikis's playful stance towards his secondary intertexts, which he reformulates in a kind of collage that strips them "of their authoritative baggage, their ideological framework and their historical significance" (93). His technique encourages different readings based on the activation of multiple contingent relations among his sources. Papargyriou concludes that this work "perhaps heralds postmodernism in Greece" (93). Both chapters three and four, devoted to demanding novels, skillfully unravel the works' intricate intertextual networks, explain their playful character by detailing the role they ascribe to the reader, and make a significant...

Sexually transmitted infections and sexually transmitted diseases

This hefty, 925 page book summarises the most up-to-date information on sexually transmitted infections and diseases. The rationale for the seemingly ambiguous title is provided by the inclusion of diseases that are not transmitted sexually, but can be the result of an infection that is (eg, AIDS and HIV) and of ectoparasites that can be transmitted through sexual contact.