Biographical Chapter Research Articles

Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the earth, rooted in the sky: Hildegard of Bingen and premodern medicine, Studies in Medieval History and Culture, New York and London, Routledge, 2006, pp. xviii, 326, illus., £55.00, $75.00 (hardback 0-415-97634-0; 978-0-415-97634-3).

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess, mystic, physician, poet, and composer, has been the subject of a renaissance of sorts over the past twenty-five years. Historians of medicine and religion, literary critics, musicians, and even new-age medical practitioners have revived the Rhineland abbess as a unique and formidable intellectual figure of the twelfth century. While previous historians of medicine have looked broadly at Hildegard's medical views or narrowly at her pharmacological knowledge of plants, Victoria Sweet provides a solid and fruitful monograph on the connections between humoral theory and practical knowledge in Hildegard's thought. After an initial biographical chapter, which includes a definitive rejection of the theory that Hildegard's mystical visions were caused by migraines, Sweet turns to the impact of the abbess's probable training in horticulture (as monastic infirmarian) on her understanding of the body and humoral theory. Sweet argues that Hildegard's text Causes and cures (c. 1150) was a medical manual for a student infirmarian at her abbey, and as such can allow us to see how “concepts of premodern medicine were understood and used by a particular practitioner” (p. 7). Sweet argues that she is using an “anthropological” approach in this work, investigating the world of her informant, Hildegard the practitioner. This approach is in reality a form of historical analysis that pays close attention to intellectual traditions and wider, symbolic cultural meanings and contexts. Sweet keenly identifies Hildegard's distinct interpretations of such classical medical concepts as the four elements (chapter 3) and the four humours (chapter 4). Most revealing is Sweet's study (chapter 5) of the Hildegardian term viriditas (“greening,” the fertile power of all living things) from the perspective of horticultural and humoral knowledge in medieval thought. Where other scholars search for the symbolic and spiritual meanings of the term, Sweet demands that we take seriously the concrete reality behind Hildegard's notion of viriditas as a form of juice or sap in plants, a liquid which provides both sustenance for the plant and possible pharmacological succour for the ill. While the abbess may have borrowed the term from the theological tradition, she applies it broadly to the idea of fecundity and health in the natural world. The book argues well that Hildegard's views on the body and healing can best be understood by looking at the organic, natural imagery that underlies medieval medical thought. Sweet very nicely places Hildegard's unique vision and all of humoral theory in this context. But the author is less successful in the conclusion, where she attempts to place Hildegard's medical and horticultural ideas in the larger context of pre-Copernican geocentric views of the cosmos. Sweet argues that the crucial image uniting all pre-modern medical concepts is the fixed earth and the temporal changes (in the seasons, qualities, humours, and elements) that ensue as the moving firmament circles it. Hildegard was certainly concerned with the symbiosis of the macrocosm of the world—with its winds and seasonal changes—and the microcosm of the body, but her thought remains markedly anthropocentric rather than geocentric. It is revealing that the only Hildegardian evidence that Sweet supplies comes not from her medical writings but from her mystical and visionary treatises, which did not require strict adherence to natural philosophical or medical views. Most medical theory took into account fluctuations in the environment, but did not reduce health or illness to such shifting contextual factors. The author attempts to create a sense of coherence within a massive body of medical knowledge that resists any single theory, even within the work of a single author. The argument is intriguing and provocative, and requires more elaboration than it receives in the concluding pages of the monograph. None the less, the book's strength lies in its ability to identify a systematic natural philosophy that underlies Hildegard's medical material. Sweet does so by studying Hildegard's views of humours and viriditas, and by revealing the experiential and botanical underpinnings of Hildegard's life and thought. In all of this, Sweet hints at the relevance of Hildegard's medical ideas to the connections between gender, natural science, and medicine.

Olive Schreiner in Rhodesia: An Episode in a Biography

Readers of biographies of Olive Schreiner – except for the pioneering work of Vera Buchanan-Gould (see 1948, 198-99) – could be forgiven for doubting whether Olive Schreiner ever was in Rhodesia. Although her husband\'s edition of her Letters includes three which cover this journey (Cronwright-Schreiner 1924a), he makes no mention of it in his Life (1924), and it is not touched on either in First and Scott (1980) or in Stanley\'s impressive biographical chapter (2002). Arguably, it does nothing to alter the by now well-established outlines of Olive Schreiner\'s life; yet, as we shall see, the visit itself might have meant the premature end of that life. Moreover, it documents Schreiner\'s visit to two sites of immense importance to her: the ‘Hanging Tree\' in Bulawayo which features in the (deliberately shocking) photographic frontispiece to the first edition of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and, secondly, Cecil Rhodes\'s grave in the Matopos. In just over a decade (13 Aug. 1921), she too would lie in her chosen mountaintop tomb.English in Africa Vol. 34 (2) 2007: pp. 93-110

A Reply to Robert R. Calder

Robert R. Calder's review of my book, R.D. Laing (Calder 2006), is a startling contribution to Scottish history of ideas. The book, published as part of the series Edinburgh Review Introductions to Scottish Culture, is 'rubbish' because its author is complacent - 'patting himself on the back'; a rabble-rouser - 'His method throughout is demagogic'; intellectually dependent - 'parasitical on [Daniel] Burston'; and incapable of rational thought - 'eschewing [...] self-doubt and attention to standards of argument, or evidence'. I am mystified by Calder's attribution of demagoguery. I am alleged to have used Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as 'evidence of the state of current hospitals'; when I both explicitly refer to it as a literary representation, and stress that it was composed in die 1950s. A similar wilful distortion and exaggeration occurs in Calder's claim that my brief reading of Valeriy Tarsis's Ward-7, a satire on Soviet psychiatric repression, 'bawls Stalinists! at [...] orthodox psychiatrists'. It simply does not Abusus non toilit usum; a critique of Soviet abuses could not in itself convict Western psychiatry. But it surely invited concern about the possibility of Western psychiatric misuse. A further allegation is that I fail in intellectual consistency. On the one hand, I laud Laing for his awareness of the 'contrast between the understanding which a patient might share in respect of his condition, and explanation by way of sheerly causative factors'. Yet my brief biographical chapter supposedly provides 'sheer explanation' by referring to Laing's troubled family life. Calder fails to appreciate the distinction that he invokes. Had I argued that Laing's mother, by prohibiting jam and jelly-babies, in some way affected her child's brain development, then I would have provided 'sheer explanation'. But I say no more than what is understandabl e and highly plausible: Laing's family life gave him a motive and material for his intellectually accomplished explorations of madness.

Zwischen Intertextualität und Interpretation: Friedrich Schillers dramaturgische Arbeiten 1796-1805 by Marion Müller

MLR, 10I.4, 2006 I I69 sentiments uttered (by characters who are frequently to be understood asmouthpieces of their creator) and the language inwhich they are expressed. Summary judgements are offered: Fiesko has been underrated, Kabale und Liebe overrated; Maria Stuart 'erreicht nicht die Qualitit anderer Dramen Schillers' (which, apart from Wallen stein?). Michael Hofmann is taken to task for not discussing DieJungfrau von Orleans or Die Braut vonMessina in his recent Schiller: Epoche - Werk - Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2003), thereby ignoring 'diewohlbegriindete Selbsteinschatzung des Dichters' (p. 230 n.), but Oellers goes on to concede that Schiller's intentions inDie Jungfrau von Orleans are not made sufficiently clear and that inDie Braut von Messina they were effectively impossible to achieve, despite the unsurpassed stylistic virtuosity of the latter work. The prose works (only Der Verbrecher and Der Geisterseher) are presented in simi lar fashion; Oellers's concise account of Schiller's aesthetic philosophy is no more (but perhaps no less) successful than others in guiding us through its complexities and contradictions. The poetry perhaps fares best, in a chronological survey with brief but often helpful comments on individual poems, and welcome attention is drawn to Schiller's technical skill-his use of awide range of metres, his unsurpassed mastery of the elegiac distich. The much-maligned 'Lied von der Glocke' is, it is admitted, perhaps valuable only as a historical document, but it is to be regretted that its old-fashioned sentiments distract from its formal accomplishment, which includes 'schone Verse von iuf3erster Schlichtheit' (p. 380). (Evidently Schiller has not suc ceeded here in 'den Stoff durch die Form vertilgen', but when he did, inDie Braut von Messina, the results were no less problematic.) 'Nanie', one of Schiller's best poems (yes, surely!), ends 'mit einer nur schwach trostenden Versicherung [. . .] Weit also ist es mit dem Dichter der Ideale gekommen' (p. 38I); but three years later, in the preface toDie Braut, Schiller is still (or again) trying to persuade us (or himself ?)that Art can actually do more than this. The biographical chapter is illustrated with portraits, the chapter on the plays with photographs of twentieth-century stage productions. Some of these speak for themselves, others will be highly evocative for those who have seen the performances in question, but other readers might perhaps have welcomed some elucidatory com ments: Hollmann's Kabale und Liebe of I969 with its actors dwarfed by the colossal figure of the Duke, the increasingly bedraggled common soldiery of Heyme's Wal lenstein of I970, Andrea Breth's Maria Stuart of 200I with Burleigh and Leicester showing their true feelings for their royal mistress by ostentatiously smoking in her presence. WORCESTERCOLLEGE, OXFORD FRANCISLAMPORT Zwischen Intertextualitdt und Interpretation: Friedrich Schillers dramaturgische Ar beiten I796-I805. By MARION MULLER. Karlsruhe: Universitatsverlag Karls ruhe. 2004. 360 pp. E44.50. ISBN 3-937300-2I-X. Studies of Schiller's dramaturgical work, both written and practical, are compara tively rare nowadays and therefore inprinciple particularly welcome. Marion Muller's doctoral dissertation suffers from the constraints of that exercise. She tries to combine a literary-historical approach with a theoretical one. Her aim is to examine how far Schiller's stage adaptations fitwith his prevalent critical image as a dramatist who above all was writing to fulfil his own vision of high art (her conclusion being that they suggest his flexible and pragmatic approach to a difficult task). She then moves on to devote almost fifty pages to a theoretical discussion of intertextuality in order to underpin an attempt to categorize this very varied corpus of adaptations, though II70 Reviews in fact this section bears little fruit in the rest of the study, which is predominantly empirical. After outlining Schiller's dramatic theory and its possible dramaturgical implications, she sketches the historical context of the adaptations through a survey of the history of theWeimar Court Theatre. Missing from her bibliography are two essential items that would have given her amuch more informed view of the lat ter, namely C. A. H. Burkhardt's Das Repertoire desWeimarischen Hoftheaters unter Goethes Leitung, I791-I8I7 (Leipzig: Voss, I89I) and Bruno Satori-Neumann's Die Friihzeit desWeimarischen Hoftheaters unter Goethes Leitung (179i bis I798) (Berlin: Gesellschaft...

The white architects of black education: ideology and power in America, 1865-1954

The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 by William H. Watkins. New York, New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. 208 pp. $22.95, paper. Reviewed by Dia Sekayi, Howard University. Author, William Watkins, is a sociologist and historian of education. He is widely pubfished in this area. This background, along with his lifetime of political activism, leaves him well positioned to discuss the history of Black education from a unique perspective. Watkins uses the metaphor of architecture to refer to the ideological construction of colonial Black education. He opens the book with a helpful overview of the two parts; the first of which places the architects' lives within a political/sociological/historical context. Time is not typically taken to provide such a detailed context. However, Watkins deftly crosses disciplines to help the reader make sense of the events and people who have affected the history of Black education. In part one, Watkins chronicles the power, politics, and reality of educating Blacks. He reviews the ideology underlying various forms of philanthropy. His discussion of racism and eugenics as a backdrop is very informative. Indeed, the reader can carry away this portion of the book to interpret other historical texts that deal with the experiences of African Americans and other oppressed groups during the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part two of the book consists of seven chapters that chronicle the personal and professional lives of individuals, partners, and families described as the architects of Black education. While each of the names is familiar, the reader is provided with some extremely insightful information on persons whose names are usually only mentioned, comparatively speaking, in other texts on the same subject. Having access to a fuller history on General Samuel Armstrong, the subject of the first biographical chapter, assists the reader in interpreting the ostensible contradiction between his life as founder of Hampton Institute and as White supremacist. In poignant wording, Watkins writes: Theoretically, Armstrong brought together the powerful with the powerless. He brought racial supremacists together with those seeking equality. He brought together the lion and the lamb. It was always clear, however, that he was working for the powerful, the supremacists, and the lion. (p. 44) In Chapter 4, Watkins brings us into the philosophy of Franklin Giddings. His claim to fame is the infusion of scientific into the curriculum. This sociology justified a racial hierarchy that culminates in White supremacy. His social theory is said to have helped in framing a colonial model of segregation for America. In Chapter 5, the reader is introduced to the Phelps Stokes family. The theme of social justice coexisting side by side with deep seeded beliefs in human inequality continues. Watkins warns the reader to examine the company kept and projects funded by the Phelps Stokes family if we are to truly understand the motivation behind these leaders of corporate philanthropy. In Chapter 6, the life of Thomas Jesse Jones is presented. Again, this architect accepted the concept of racial hierarchy while acting as a champion for so-called Negro education. Watkins analyzes his experiences with settlement houses, the Hampton Institute, and the Phelps Stokes Fund. …

The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and Its Legacy

Robert Parkin's book gives a reading of each of these texts before going on to show their subsequent influence on anthropologists in particular. Hertz's activities as reviewer and phamphleteer are also covered. The introductory biographical chapter drawing on Hertz's surviving papers in the College de France, shows his own ambivalence towards his academic career and it also attempts to clarify the circumstances leading up to his apparently gratuitous death in the First World War. Two further chapters attempt to situate his work in the broader context of Durkheimian sociology.

Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights.

In the spirit of the time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 called for nondiscrimination for American citizens, seeking equality without regard for race, color, or creed. After the mid-1960s, to make amends for wrongs of the past, some called for benign discrimination to give blacks a special boost. In business and government this could be accomplished through racial preferences or quotas; in public education, by considering race when assigning students to schools. By 1980 this course reached a crossroads. Raymond Wolters maintains that Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds made the right when they questioned and limited the use of racial considerations in drawing electoral boundaries. He also documents the Reagan administration's considerable success in reinforcing within the country, and reviving within the judiciary, the conviction that every person black or white should be considered an individual with unique talents and inalienable rights. This book begins with a biographical chapter on William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General who was the principal architect of Reagan's civil rights policies. It then analyzes three main civil rights issues: voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. Wolters describes specific cases: at-large elections and minority vote dilutions; congressional districting in New Orleans; legislative districting in North Carolina; the debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964; social science critiques of affirmative action; the question of quotas; and school desegregation and forced busing. Because Ronald Reagan and William Bradford Reynolds were men of the right, and because most journalists and historians are on the left, Wolters feels the people of words have dealt harshly with the Reagan administration. In writing this book, he hopes to correct the record on a subject that has been badly represented. Wolters points out that, beginning in the 1980s and continuing in the 1990s, the Supreme Court endorsed the legal arguments that Reagan's lawyers developed in the fields of voting rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. In Right Turn, Wolters responds to those who claimed that Reagan and Reynolds were racists who wanted to turn back the clock on civil rights, and he describes civil rights cases and controversies in a way that is comprehensible to general readers as well as to lawyers and historians.

Gregor Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study By Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Gregor Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study. By Alain F. Corcos and Floyd V. Monaghan. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 1993. Pp. 220. $34.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Few publications start a revolution in the biological sciences, and fewer publications set the pattern for future research. At least three publications had such an impact on biology: Darwin—The Origin of Species, Mendel—Experiments on Plant Hybrids, and Watson and Crick—Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A StructureforDeoxyribose Nucleic Acids. While Darwin emphasized the role of variation in evolution, he had no explanation for the origin or transmission of variation . The Watson-Crick double-helix model for DNA had to account for the observations and concepts of Mendelian geneticists as well as the physicochemical organization of the genetic material. Until the rise of molecular genetics, the experimental designs of studies in transmission genetics were essentially extensions of Mendel's experimental designs. It is fitting that the first volume in a new series from the Rutgers University Press, Masterworks of Discovery: Guided Studies of Great Texts in Science, starts with Mendel's seminal paper. It should be noted that the papers by the three rediscoverers of Mendel's laws of heredity are rarely mentioned or cited. After reading the introductory biographical chapter which presents the formal education in the natural sciences and mathematics in some detail, Mendel no longer appears as an amateur scientist. His training in the physical sciences and mathematics is probably the reason that Mendel was able to design the breeding experiments and data in a way not available to contemporary biologists. Physical scientists (e.g., Delbrück, Benzer) played a significant role in the transmission genetics of bacteria and viruses. The detailed dissection, comments and analysis of paragraphs and even sentences in Mendel's paper, represent a new and exciting approach to understanding the mind of a scientist at work. In my opinion, this book will set the tone for the Masterworks of Discoveries series. As a teacher of genetics, I often wonder whether students appreciate the extraordinary contribution of one publication to an exciting science. Reading this book should do the job. I strongly recommend this book to any scientist and student interested not only in genetics but in the scientific method. Moreover, the price is right for both college and high school students. E. D. Garber Department of Ecology and Evolution University of Chicago Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. 308 Book Reviews ...

The Tragedy of Inés de Castro (review)

144 Reviews examples, but in none of them does he give precise references to the relevant court rolls, preferring instread to refer the reader to the Regional Data Bank at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. As for the audience to which this tome is directed, it is difficult to be certain. There is far too litde guidance for the amateur or the undergraduate, whilst the professional historian would undoubtedly prefer to have at his or her disposal the full Latin text and all the formulae with their minimal variations that DeWindt considers superfluous and unnecessary. Changes in diplomatic over a period of sixty years or so may be quite significant to the nonquantitatively minded historian. History can and should be more than the endproduct of the collection and analysis of summaries of data, all of which in this case have been admirably indexed in the final 76 pages. John Walmsley Department of History Macquarie University Ferriera, A., The Tragedy oflnes de Castro, trans. J. R. C. Martyn, Coimbra, Universidad de Coimbra, 1987; pp. 382; R.R.P. £12.00 John Martyn's translation with introductory essays of Antonio Ferriera's Tragedy oflnes de Castro is a valuable addition to the critical literature on this affecting drama of personal sacrifice for the nation's good. More importandy, perhaps, it provides a detailed source in English of the significant literary and historical work on the theme. For the many scholars w h o do not read Portuguese, this book offers an important corrective to the pre-eminent place of Camoens' treatment of the story in his more widely available Os Lusiadas published some years after Ferriera's play. Added to this is the fact of Ferriera's Castro being thefirstserious drama written in Portuguese, performed in the Royal College at Coimbra in about 1555. Martyn's introductory essays and appendices account for more than half the volume and provide a detailed and wide-ranging presentation of general history, biography and critical analysis. This has led to a rather uneven coverage of the very different topics treated. Following the preface which argues the importance of Ferriera's work is a lengthy and often speculative literary biography. Martyn has apparendy brought together every available shred of documentation which may cast light on the different periods of Ferriera's life and persuasively interprets evidence that has been the source of some disagreement among previous biographers. In addition, he postulates episodes and influences which at least serve to vivify the historical period. The very detailed sections on Ferriera's connection with the University and Royal College at Coimbra would certainly be of interest to anyone working on the history of education in Europe. In places, the focus on Ferriera's teachers Reviews 145 and other literary influences seem to lead the reader well into the area of general literary history. This is less true of Chapter three which deals specifically with the relationship between Ferriera and Camoens and displays some very interesting detective work on the debt of the latter to Ferriera's Castro . Chapter four is a well-focussed study of the Ines de Castro theme and contains lengthy discussion of the valuable version of the theme expressed in a Latin poem by Lucio Andre de Resende, discovered by Martyn and brought to notice here for thefirsttime. The six pages devoted to the Resende poem are clearly the reward of the outstanding manuscript scholarship displayed by Martyn. Chapter five sketches the political, social and religious background not to the setting of the play, but to the period in which it was written. It overlaps somewhat the lengthy biographical chapter and provides a very general summary of a complex era. Chapters six and seven of the Introduction are the best, containing a very good analysis of the play, first dealing with the staging, structure, and characters and then extending the analysis to a valuable comparative study of the Ferriera play with the most relevant works of Buchanan and Teive, especially a comparison of the dream sequence in the Castro and Buchanan's Jephtes. The translation is of a high standard, managing to express the formal elements of the original's language without sounding too stilted...

V. S. Naipaul (review)

Reviewed by: V. S. Naipaul Harveen Sachdeva Mann Richard Kelly . V. S. Naipaul. New York: Continuum, 1989. 182 pp. $18.95. In 1958, following the writing of his first three books, the Trinidadian-Indian novelist V. S. Naipaul commented regretfully upon the "regional barrier" responsible for the English reading public's "indifference" to his works. "It is an odd, suspicious situation," he observed, "an Indian writer writing in English for an English audience about non-English characters who talk their own sort of English. . . . The only way out is to cease being a regional writer." In 1987, as if in belated fulfillment of Naipaul's wish to transcend his literary marginality, his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival reached the top of the English best-seller list. In the same year Naipaul was introduced on British television as "one of our most distinguished novelists." And now the American publishing company Continuum (Ungar) offers Richard Kelly's V. S. Naipaul as part of its Literature and Life: British Writers Series, which includes studies of such authors within the British mainstream as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Burgess. In his introductory study of Naipaul, however, Kelly neglects to address the important ideological question of what constitutes "Britishness" in postcolonial times. Seeking artistic freedom and a larger, Occidental audience, authors from the ex-colonies have flocked to London in recent decades; England itself, home to more than two million immigrants in the 1980s, today demonstrates a cultural and literary diversity unparalleled in its history. Is the demarcation between British and non-British in the literary sphere determined by a writer's length of residence in England? By his/her declared nationality? Political fealty? Empathy with English life? Textual subject matter? Or is it decided by literary recognition as measured by British awards and book sale figures? Not only does Kelly disregard the political significance of using the designation "British" to describe Naipaul, but he also largely ignores the contextual significance of the Caribbean and Indian literary and historical traditions in shaping Naipaul's works. Landeg White, John Thieme, and Selwyn Cudjoe among others have elucidated the influence upon Naipaul's themes and craft of the works of the West Indians C. L. R. James, Edgar Mittelholzer, Roger Mais, Seepersad Naipaul, and Samuel Selvon on the one hand and of the Indian literary-philosophical tradition as embodied in the Bhagvad Gita, Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabharata on the other. Kelly, in contrast, likens Naipaul's texts to those [End Page 870] of Dickens and Arnold, T. S. Eliot and Yeats, Conrad and Greene. By locating Naipaul's work exclusively within the Western tradition, Kelly both suggests his own lack of familiarity with non-Western literatures and reflects the narrow interpretation of the term "British Literature" by most Occidental critics. In his Western, "universalist," chiefly ahistorical reading of Naipaul's works, Kelly also overlooks the ideological debate in Naipaul criticism between First World critics who regard him as a remarkable diagnostician of our age and Third World critics who attack what they construe as his imperialist politics and latent racism. Kelly's omission of the Caribbean-Indian determinants of Naipaul's oeuvre as well as his neglect of the politics of reading Naipaul may make his book more accessible to American readers, but it betrays a continuing cultural and literary insularity among all but the most progressive Occidental scholars. Consistent with Continuum's apparent aims for its Literature and Life Series—the volume lacks an editorial preface and introductory remarks by the author—Kelly's V. S. Naipaul seeks not to present a polemical, thought-provoking analysis for the Naipaul scholar but to introduce Naipaul's work to an uninitiated Western audience. And in the latter aim it does succeed, albeit with a Western bias. Following a prefatory chronology of Naipaul's life and writings, the text provides a biographical chapter that links Naipaul's history with his thematic concerns in his texts. The remainder of Kelly's book presents a chronological reading of all of Naipaul's novels, drawing upon the travel narratives and essays only as they comment upon the fiction. Instead of foregrounding a controlling theoretical-critical...

N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background by Matthias Schubnell (review)

Book Reviews117 psychoanalysis reveals private motives. But . . . " (296). Fortunately, Rabaté resists the temptation to tie it all up in so tidy and trite a package, moving instead toward a larger view which sees the poem as a tragedy of the imagination, not without its Oedipal overtones but finally reaching beyond that, following "a thin trace in the air" to that country "which leaves the voice mute but heals all wounds" (298). In sum, then, this is a stimulating study of Pound, one which approaches the Cantos from an unusual perspective and uses that perspective to help locate the Cantos in the overall context of postmodern continental thought. While I find myself disagreeing with Rabaté on a few matters (his reading of the tale of the honest sailor, for instance), these are minor quibbles. This is a solid, well written book — of immense value to the novice and the initiate alike. CHARLES GUILFORD Boise State University MATTHIAS SCHUBNELL. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. 336 p. Matthias Schubnell's work is both a biography and critical overview of this Pulitzer Prize-winning American Indian author. In the best tradition of such works, it will be valued, among other things, for its successful incorporation of Momaday's private papers, which provide for useful comparisons between published and unpublished work, and for its thorough bibliography of both primary and secondary source materials. A biographical chapter is coupled with chapters on two important Momaday themes, language and landscape, as an extended preface to individual chapters discussing House Made ofDawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names, and Momaday's poetry. Schubnell's book seems aimed at reconciling two audiences who are inevitably divided over Momaday because of their critical interests. The first are those passionate advocates of Native American literature for whom the principal virtue of Momaday's work is that it is the work of an Indian author and bears marks of this "Indianness ." The second includes those who want to read Momaday as a writer who has transcended this Indianness to produce a body of work of "universal" appeal. Schubneil argues that neither perspective on his subject is useful because both are constrained by inadequate notions of self and culture as static, impermeable, unalterable realities. Instead, not surprisingly, his analysis of the reader-writer-culture relationship resembles what he quotes as Momaday's own: "An Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself. And it is a moral idea. . . . And that idea, in order to be realized completely, has to be expressed," particularly in words (41). Unfortunately, this crucial argument only intermittently surfaces above the book's explicit agenda of providing close readings and historical contextualization for the Momaday corpus. A book of such scope and complexity demands more attention than can be given here, so let me only sketch out the volume's strengths and weaknesses. Schubneil is at his best in articulating the commonality of interest, method, value, and poetic theory Momaday shares with a number of twentieth-century writers. My sense is that this is one of his central aims, a revisionist impulse against the faddish 118Rocky Mountain Review neoprimitivism of some who want to attribute the distinctive features of Momaday's work to his Indianness, and he has brought this off with great skill and force. Especially illuminating here are his comparative readings of Lawrence, Dinesen, and Momaday on landscape. By using Momaday's correspondence, he convincingly demonstrates the direct influence of Winters and Stevens on the younger Momaday. The elucidation of the relationship between Stevens' idealism and Momaday's "idea of himself" is effective and powerful if for no other reason than it demonstrates that all that is not Aristotelian is not Indian. Occasionally though, Schubnell's attempted demonstrations of influence, like those of others before him, get caught up in the problematics of influence-peddling and their success varies greatly. A second great strength of the book is that is supplies useful readings of neglected works in the Momaday corpus. For instance, the book's longest chapter, which is on Momaday's poetry, is a storehouse of not only sound but insightful readings. I learned...

Cesar Vallejo, the Dialectics of Poetry and Silence

This 1976 book was the first full-length study in English of the poetry of the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo (1892 1938). A major poet, who approached the problem of revolutionary aesthetics in a manner radically different from that of his contemporaries, Vallejo was comparatively little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. This neglect is attributable to the difficulty of a poetry which deliberately resists interpretation and assimilation into the established order of things. Professor Franco's book is therefore an exploration of the problems of poetic production. In the opening biographical chapter, she shows the kind of social constraints which limited what the poet could say, which led him in Trilce (1922) to write a hermetic poetry using euphemism, pun and indirection. She goes on to explore Vallejo's later poetry, which was shaped by the Spanish Civil War and gestures towards the tentative nature of humanity and civilisation that gives the poetry its abiding relevance."

Jack London and His Times—An Unconventional Biography by Joan London

172 Western American Literature may be assumed to be complete. It has also a “Note on Sources,” a happy substitute for the expected bibliography. P reston E. O nstad, Oregon State University Jack London and His Times—An Unconventional Biography. By Joan London. With a New Introduction by the Author. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1968. xvii + 385 pages, $6.95.) It is generally conceded that the truly definitive biography of Jack London has yet to be written, and this probably cannot be done by any competent scholar until such time as unlimited access can be gained to all the available London papers, both in private hands and public institutions. However, in 1939 a biography was published that probably came closer to being reliable than any of the several others that had been done either before or since. For who could know Jack London better than his eldest daughter, with strong memories of her father to the age of sixteen, and a serious student of his life and writings ever since. The author has written a new Introduction to this edition, letting her textual portrait of the man and his times stand as it was written almost thirty years ago : a penetrating, vigorous, and candid document. In her introductory reappraisal, Joan London examines the many reasons for her father’s enduring and increasing popularity, and analyzes the changing modes in critical appraisal of London’s writings over the past fifty years. An important clue to the content of this biography lies in the title “. ..and His Times.” MissLondon is a skillful interpreter of the times in which her father lived, and she weaves national and international events into the fabric of his life, experiences, and philosophies with a deft hand. With many years’ experience herself in the California State Federation of Labor in a variety of tasks, she displays excellent insight into her father’s socialistic activities, and the way in which these many events helped shape and pattern his life. As Jack espoused socialism for the greater part of his entire life, these interpretations shed important light on aspects of his life hitherto not too well understood by other biographers. Having done intensive research intothe life of William Henry Chaney, the itinerant astrologer * ,Miss London doesn’t hesitate very early in the book to establish unequivocally Chaney as Jack London’s father. Her con­ victions were firm on this point when she wrote the book thirty years ago, *"W. H. Chaney = A Reppraisal,” by Joan London, American Book Collector, Vol. XVII, No. 3, November 1966, pp. 11-13. Reviews 173 and they remain as firm today. Unfortunately, she cannot be as positive on the matter of London’s death, saying, “He had taken a lethal dose, but who could say whether it had been with suicidal intention, or merely an overdose miscalculated in the midst of his agony?” Much conjecture and subsequent study have surrounded the circumstances of London’s death. Whether or not the mystery will ever be solved, other than in a conjectural way, is doubtful. Although the book was written thirty years ago, the prose remains as fresh and captivating today as the day it was written. And one is impressed by the effectiveness with which the author has organized and presented the myriad details and experiences relating to London’s early struggles to become a writer, his worldwide adventures and travels, his socialist leanings, his home life, his friends, and his many published books and short stories. The press has produced a convenient, well-designed book, somewhat smaller in format than the first edition, but alike in every other respect, in­ cluding the frontispiece portrait of London as a young man, and a working index. All London collectors, scholars, young students learning about Jack for the first time, and readers looking for a good book, will want this edition. It is indispensable to an understanding of a great American author. G eorge H. T w eney, Seattle, Washington Joaquin Miller. By O. W. Frost. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967. 140 pages, $3.95.) Like other volumes of the Twayne United States Authors Series, this study commences with a biographical chapter. Then follow sections...

Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism (review)

262 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (p. 86). Since a category is a type of concept, it appears from this account that Kant holds a linguistic theory of concepts in general. According to Bird, Kant identifies concepts with language (pp. 61, 121, 123-124); they are, for him, linguistic entities (pp. 100, 104). On one occasion he refers to Kant's theory as a "picture of language" (p. 102). Kant seems thus to be transformed by Bird into an ordinary language nominalist--and that a century and a half before Wittgenstein. The trouble with all this is that it simply is not supported by the text. Rather than giving a linguistic interpretation of concepts in general and categories in particular, Kant constantly analyzes them in conceptual terms. He speaks of them as forms of thought, ideas, conditions or criteria of thought, acts of pure thought, and so on. Their origin is always the human understanding. But, as Bird states in the passage quoted, Kant believes that our language sets a limit to our understanding. This might be taken to mean that language controls our thought so that we can conceive only what we can verbally describe. Or it could have a stronger meaning--that thought is reducible to verbalization. Bird seems to accept the latter as the proper interpretation of Kant for he contends that Kant holds the view that to conceive something is to describe it linguistically (pp. 127-129). If these words are to be understood in their ordinary meanings, one seems forced to the conclusion that in Bird's mind Kant is a linguistic behaviorist. If this is what Bird means to imply, it hardly seems worthwhile to pursue his linguistic reformulation of the critical philosophy any further. Nevertheless, the question remains in the reader's mind, "Why should any student, particularly one who has shown such understanding and appreciation of Kant, depart from his scholarly approach to the Critique to attribute to Kant a theory which, instead of having any plausibility as an interpretation of the Kantian epistemology, seems rather to be a parody of the argument it is meant to explain?" OLIVERA. JOHNSON University of California,Riverside Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism. By Edward H. Madden . (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963. Pp. vii + 203. $5.00.) The importance of Chauncey Wright in the history of American philosophy is being increasingly realized. Professor Madden's work is the first comprehensive account of his life, his writings, and his ideas. The sources are scanty and often obscure, but Madden has made exhaustive use of them and gives us a bibliography and critical notes. This is a product of first-class scholarship, bringing together what the author had published in scattered BOOK REVIEWS 263 articles, and supplementing his anthology of Wright (Liberal Arts Press). The biographical chapter presents Wright as an attractive character among devoted friends and also as a solitary, original scientist. Wright's primary achievement was to apply utilitarian principles to Darwinian natural selection theory. Since Darwin himself made no such attempt, nor did John Stuart Mill, and since Darwin showed an evident interest in Wright's attempt, this represents a major contribution to evolutionary theory. On the negative side, too, Wright was incisive in his criticisms of Spencer, Mivart, Hamilton, Mansel, and Lewes. The pragmatic strains in Wright's philosophical method were incidental to his primary interest in showing that sciences are metaphysically "neutral." But his influence on Peirce and James was direct and strong, both on their cosmological and methodological doctrines. He deserves to be mentioned as the prime mover in this trinity of early pragmatism and naturalism, but since his own writings were relatively few and scattered, his historical importance rests largely on the use which Peirce and James made of his ideas and the development which they gave to his philosophy. HER~VRTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Propos sur Jules Lequier: Philosophe de la libert~--R~flexions sur sa vie et sur sa pens~e. Par s Callot. (Paris: l~ditions Marcel Rivi~re et Cie, 1962. Pp. 142 [1]. Biblioth6que Philosophique.) L'oeuvre de Jules Lequier est importante. Nos philosophes am~ricains Charles Hartshorne et William L. Reese en ont fait...

Clifford Odets by R. Baird Shuman (review)

326 MODERN DRAMA December to paragraph after paragraph of plot summary, length-of-run statistics, and critical reaction from the left, this book must be regarded more as a reference work-and a very useful one--than as a general work. MICHAEL J. MENDELSOHN United States Air Force Academy CLIFFORD ODETS, by R. Baird Shuman, Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, 1962, 160 pp. Price $3.50. This study of Clifford Odets, the man and his works, is the thirtieth in the Twayne's United States Authors Series under the general editorship of Sylvia E. Bowman. As the author says in the Preface, this book represents the first fulllength study of Odets and of his plays. Following a brief biographical chapter, "Odets the Man," and a briefer one titled "Odets and the Proletariat," the sub· stance of the book is made up of an examination of the eleven Odets plays which have had New York productions. Mr. Shuman divides these chronologically into three periods: the first extending from 1935 to 1937 and including the famous social protest plays from Awake and Singl to Golden Boy,- the second from 1938 to 1941 and including three plays, Rocket to the Moon, Night Music, and Clash by Night, considered under the mapter heading "Love and Marriage"; and the third, from 1941 on, the period which Mr. Shuman calls that of "The Locust and the Peach," represented by The Big Knife, The Country Girl, and The Flowering Peach, the last of which opened on Broadway late in December of 1954 and ran until April of the following year. Mr. Shuman's discussions of these plays concentrate on analysis of theme and characterization. A roundup of criticism, mainly from reviews of the Broadway productions, is provided for each play. The author's own evaluation of Odet's output, however, is hardly provocative. He guardedly concedes, for example, that Odets "may well be called the most significant of the specifically proletarian of the 1930'S." (p. 148) That Mr. Shuman should, in his summing up, concede that Odets wrote his most important plays during the Depression, and thereby concur with the majority opinion, seems to belie his contention stated in the Preface that "All too little that has been written gives fair consideration to the fact that Odets has very much broadened his scope in the years following his initial successes--or to the fact that he has become more artistically conscious during these years." "Greater scope" and "greater artistry" would surely lead to "greater plays." Yet Mr. Shuman's judgments of the plays of the second and third periods tend to be negative: Rocket to the Moon "does not mark an artistic advance," (p. 100) and Clash by Night "was inherently weak in many respects." (p. 116) What positive judgment there is is not, except in regard to The FloweTing Peach, generous. The Country Girl is remarked upon for its "more restrained manner," (p. 135) and The Big Knife has "significant, far·reaching implications," (p. 126) even though the quotation from Brooks Atkinson immediately following this assertion-" . . . one of Mr. Odets' virtues is that he always tries to write on the high plane of dramatic art. . . ." (p. 126)-sounds like weak praise of the play's significance. Mr. Shuman calls The Flowering Peach the "most signif· icant Odets play." (p. 144) It marks a return to the specifically Jewish milieu of Awake and Singl, but one that substitutes for the bitter, naturalistic melodrama of the earlier play a kind of earthy gool humor. In The Flowering Peach the wisdom of the parents counts for more than the rebelliousness of the children. 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 327 For Shuman this is evidence of "Odets as a mature and well-developed artist rather than as a radical playwright who wishes to use the stage as a soapbox_" (p. 144) As a compilation of critical opinion about Odets' plays, Mr. Shuman's book serves a useful purpose. But to call it, as the author does, a full-length study, would seem to be promising more than is actually delivered. As the author himself says, in the Preface, "This book has done little to trace the literary and philosophical influences which...