Chief Thing Research Articles

Geo into Bio and Back Again, or Tracing the Politics of Place and Sovereignty

Geo into Bio and Back Again, or Tracing the Politics of Place and Sovereignty Mark Rifkin (bio) The depiction of indigeneity as a set of ingrained, generationally iterated propensities in US policy discourses, and Native response(s) to that process, provides a frame through which to consider how modes of reference, knowledge-production, discipline, and regulation that broadly fall under the rubric of biopolitics might be understood as a vehicle for the erasure, reconfiguration, and genealogical reconstruction of alternative geopolitical formations—Indigenous and otherwise. The Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Kagama (1886) stands as a powerful example of US efforts to (re)define the legal and political character of Indianness in the late nineteenth century. The case addresses the murder of one resident of the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California by another resident and whether this crime can be tried as such by federal authorities and courts under the Major Crimes Act, passed the previous year, which made various acts committed by Indians against other Indians (including murder, rape, and larceny) a matter of US federal jurisdiction. The court upholds the act, finding that tribes do not constitute sovereign political entities. Rather, "They were, and always have been, regarded as having a semi-independent position when they preserved their tribal relations; not as States, not as nations, not as possessed of the full attributes of sovereignty."1 By virtue of being tribal, relations among Indians cannot be understood as "sovereignty"—as having an autonomous political existence not always already subordinated to the jurisdiction and governance of the settler state. From this perspective, Indianness can be defined as participation in a particular kind of antiquated social form, one from which Indian people might be freed and, thereby, transformed into something else. This perspective enables the portrayal of settler colonial exertions of jurisdiction and efforts to reorganize the quotidian dynamics of Indigenous political orders as beneficent acts of civilizational pedagogy. As Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan suggests in his 1889 report on government-mandated projects of Indian education, "Owing to the peculiar surroundings of the mass of Indian children, they are homeless and ignorant [End Page 871] of those simplest arts that make home possible," earlier indicating that "the chief thing in all education is the development of character, the formation of manhood and womanhood."2 Within the ambit of such accounts of Indianness, Indigenous peoplehood, placemaking, and governance are translated as kinds of entrenched and reiterated inclinations that remain fundamentally exterior (or anterior) to the political/juridical frameworks of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and citizenship. Therefore, intensifying colonial invasion appears as the process of facilitating well-being through processes of de-Indianization. In this way, a geopolitics of settler expansion and Indigenous dispossession is rendered as and pursued through a biopolitics, justifying policy on the basis of its capacity to enable forms of health and welfare for a population envisioned in racializing terms. Within Indian policy formulations in the late nineteenth century, a tribe is decisively not a nation. These groups, instead, are seen as a kind of population defined by their reproduction of Indianness as an ensemble of individual and collective tendencies. From this perspective, if Indian operates as a racial designation, it is less an indication of a stable kind of body reproductively transmitted across generations than an index of a kind of biosocial assemblage in which the continuity of Indianness as a physical type (including in-born abilities and inclinations) depends on the matrix of tribalism to sustain it. The understanding of Indianness as a set of heritable biosocial patterns oriented toward barbarous ends disqualifies it from serving as the basis for a political formation. Emergent forms of ethnographic writing in the period provided a means of inhabiting the biopolitics of Indianness in ways that foregrounded the value of Indigenous lifeworlds, drawing attention to how Native social processes generated healthful and sustaining place-based forms of collective identity. In doing so, such writing could challenge official accounts of "tribal relations" as a set of tendencies that create a degenerative milieu which retards the potential for personal and collective vigor and improvement. In 1900 Gertrude Simmons, who used the Lakota pen name Zitkala-Ša, serially published three...

Another Word on “God and the Twenty-First Century”

Another Word on “God and the Twenty-First Century”

The static displacement and the stress analysis of structures with bounded uncertainties using the vertex solution theorem

In practical engineering, on account of physical imperfections, model inaccuracies, and system complexities, almost all structures have physical and geometrical uncertainties in some degrees. In this paper, we focus on the static response problem and the stress distribution of structures with bounded uncertainties. In terms of the vertex notation in interval analysis, a new mathematical proof of the vertex solution theorem which is used to determine the supremum and the infimum of the static responses of structures with bounded uncertainties is given. Then, we extend this theorem for calculating the interval stress and the deformation distributions, which was only used to determine the supremum and the infimum of the static responses of structures with bounded uncertainties. The basic idea of the vertex solution theorem is to convert the interval linear equations into systems of equivalent deterministic linear equations. The resulting deterministic linear equations are then solved by using the familiar techniques like the Gauss elimination method or the Gauss–Seidel iteration method. Another advantage of this method is that the increase in number of the uncertain parameters in a structure element will not result in the increase in number of the uncertain elements in the stiffness matrix. For practical engineering problem with bounded uncertainties, the chief thing is to avoid the disadvantages of large calculation and much runtime of the vertex solution. In this paper, we present the parallel arithmetic of the vertex solution theorem, which can be used in large-scale computations in practical engineering to avoid much runtime. On the other hand, we can use the symmetrical characteristic of the stiffness matrix and the substructure method to reduce the computational effort in practical engineering. The numerical results of the typical example presented by Deif calculated by the proposed vertex solution theorem show that the width between the supremum and the infimum on the static response yielded by the vertex solution theorem is tighter than those produced by the KCN’s method presented by Köylüoğlu, Cakmak, and Nielson. The numerical examples of the two-dimensional shell with an edge fixed and the two-dimensional shell with surrounding fixed are used to illustrate the computational feasibility of the vertex solution theorem.

Debating Allison on Transcendental Idealism

People talk about rats deserting a sinking ship, but they don't usually ask where the rats go. Perhaps this is only because the answer is so obvious: of course, most of the rats climb aboard the sounder ships, the ships that ride high in the water despite being laden with rich cargoes of cheese and grain and other things rats love, the ships that bring prosperity to ports like eighteenth-century Königsberg and firms such as Green & Motherby. By making the insulting comparison - as I am in the course of doing – between us Kant scholars and a horde of noxious vermin, my more or less transparent aim is to mitigate, or at least to distract attention from, the collective immodesty of what I am saying about us. For my point is that, in the past half-century or so, Kant studies has become a very prosperous ship indeed. Its success has even been the chief thing that has buoyed all its sister ships in the fleet of modern philosophy, most of which are also doing very well.

A Rhyme Distribution Chronology of John Gower's Latin Poetry

A Rhyme Distribution Chronology of John Gower’s Latin Poetry David R. Carlson EARLY style, late style: in broad contour, this change in the Latin verse of the “English” poet John Gower (ca. 1330–14081) is clear. The chief thing is Gower’s deployment of rhyme, though there are other differences: the late Cronica tripertita (1399–1402)—Gower’s last grand work, in any language—has it, whereas the early Vox clamantis (1377–81) generally does not. Gower’s earliest surviving Latin verse is in elegiac distichs, relatively more informal and conversational, while the Cronica tripertita is in hexameters; also, the late verse is remarkably more spondaic than the earlier.2 The datable evidence of Gower’s Latin poetry other than these major writings may make it possible to specify more narrowly when Gower began to work thoroughly in his late style—though there may have been earlier trials, it will appear to have occurred during 1396–97, some time before he could have begun the Cronica tripertita—as well as the nature of the stylistic change involved: different kinds and combinations of rhymes, and more plastic, irregular treatments of metrical length of line. The datable evidence may in turn enable some chronological sorting on a basis of stylistic criteria of various otherwise undated pieces in Gower’s Latin oeuvre, and the proposed stylistic chronology may also help clarify some problems of Gower’s peculiar revisionary procedures. Finally, the pattern of the evidence of chronology will suggest an inertial impulse about Gower’s stylistic evolutions: once he conceived an ambition to elevate the tenor of seriousness about his work by writing Latin verse, rather than only vernacular [End Page 15] (howbeit his vernacular productions were relatively serious already3), the same ambition made it inevitable that eventually he would want to try writing Latin verse in the most elevated style then available, which was still the ornate scholastic style, featuring extensive, elaborate rhyming and rhyme schemes. That Latin was in process of losing its pride of place in England as the linguistic instrument most appropriate for serious, elevated literary undertakings4 seems not to have altered the case that, for Gower, Latin was still worth trying. England’s three (main) languages were not indifferent. Moreover, that rhymed dactylic verse in Latin was fairly soon afterwards, already early in the fifteenth century, to begin to fall from favor amongst those in a position to decide what was stylistically most estimable does not alter the case either that, at the century’s turn, rhymed Latin, by contrast with something plainer, evidently still had an unavoidable prestige for Gower. 1. RHYME IN THE VOX CLAMANTIS It can be difficult to tell whether Gower was rhyming or not, though dubiety most likely suggests the negative. The Cronica tripertita is unambiguous: all of its lines rhyme, and all their rhymes are disyllabic. Couplet rhymes, involving concatenations of pairs or triplets or strings of lines by shared rhymes, remain rare, in a sampled passage of about five hundred lines involving about five percent of the lines.5 As it happens, these are predominantly unisonant couplets in the Cronica tripertita, the lines having the same rhyme sound in both pairs of caesural and line-final positions, and such couplet rhyming can appear to lend emphasis, as for example in these concluding lines of the whole poem, made more arresting still by the fact that they are also the only elegiac distich in Gower’s otherwise wholly hexametral third book: Post sua deme rita periit sua pompa so pita ; Qualis erat vita , cronica stabit ita .6 [End Page 16] The intention to make rhyme seems clear here, as persistently throughout the Cronica tripertita. Gower’s “unrhymed” Latin verse also has rhyme, however, though predominantly of less persistent sorts, so it is less clearly intentional. In the “Visio Anglie” section of the Vox clamantis, for example—evidently written in late 1381—nearly twenty percent of the verses are Leonine, having internal rhyme of some sort. The rate is much the same in the contemporary “unrhymed” poem of Richard Maidstone, Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie (1392), where the rhymes that do occur are also similar to...

Kingdom of Ends: Nation, Post-Nation and National Character in Northrop Frye

Romance's last vision seems to be that of fraternity, Kant's kingdom of ends where, as in fairy tales, we are all kings and princesses. The principle of the aristocracies of the past was respect for birth; the principle of fraternity in the ideal world of romance is respect rather for those who have been born, and because they have been born. Frye, The Secular Scripture ... and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Aristotle, Poetics THE CONCEPT OF NATION has undergone considerable interrogation from a variety of theoretical and political perspectives in recent decades. Critical studies informed by poststructuralism have been suspicious of the nation's claim to stable unitary identity and its dependence upon tropes of organic growth and maturation. Certain post-colonial theorists have looked upon the concept of as the imposition of a European enlightenment project upon other cultures of the world. Critical perspectives foregrounding issues of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality have argued that a rhetoric of national unity and identity is one of the central means by which the conflictual and heterogenous character of any society is falsely neutralized and homogenized. (1) At the same time, however, there has been a recognition that if the can no longer be appealed to unproblematically as simultaneously origin and telos of the life and mind of a particular place (or widely disparate regions) nor can such a concept be exorcized by a theoretical fiat. The informs and is assumed by, haunts, even those theoretical positions which would most radically eliminate it. (2) The rejection of as a falsely totalizing and homogenizing concept of society begs the question: concept of society would be less so? To implicitly or explicitly pose such a question does not move us definitively beyond but presses for reconceptualizations of parallel ideas. Moreover, the only clear alternative to at the present time, the profoundly homogenizing forces of global capitalism, makes certain conceptions of seem appealing by contrast. Thus the nation, as Ian Balfour has remarked, dies hard. (3) In recent theoretical investigations Northrop Frye has not figured prominently as a theorist with whom to think through questions concerning the complex interrelations of nation and narration. This is in some senses surprising as Benedict Anderson's influential definition of the as an imagined produced in important measure through its national literature, recalls no other literary theorist more strongly than Frye for whom the ultimate purpose of literature was the achievement of community through the imagination. Frye makes this point in explicitly national terms asserting of Canada that what seems to reason and experience to be perpetually coming apart at the seams may seem to the imagination something on the point of being put back together again as the imagination is occupationally disposed to synthesis. Perhaps that is part of the real function of the imagination in every (Bush x). In addition, it is frequently pointed out that the narrative form underlying the ideology of is the romance: the fabulous tale of heroic destiny, of the triumph over adversity and the revelation of the hero's true identity. (4) The structure and social significance of romance was of course a central topic for Frye who compellingly isolated a central recurrent as being sleep and subsequent awakening to (or amnesia and recovered memory of) this true identity (Secular 104,145 and passim). Anderson, without reference to Frye, has argued for the astonishing popularity of this trope (195) in nationalist discourses. Furthermore, although it is often unknown or forgotten, Frye had incisive things to say about the potential ideological uses and abuses, both nationalistically and otherwise, of he termed kidnapped Romance (Secular 168). …

"Spare from Your Luxuries": Women, Charity, and Spending in the Eighteenth Century

"Spare from Your Luxuries": Women, Charity, and Spending in the Eighteenth Century CATHERINE KEOHANE The eighteenth century was proud of its charitableness: across a range of texts, including novels, sermons, conduct books, and periodical essays, writers identify their time as an age of charity or benevolence. Common is Henry Fielding's mid-century assertion that "Charity is in fact the very Characteristic of this Nation at this Time.------1 believe we may challenge the whole World to parallel the Examples which we have of late given of this sensible, this noble, this Christian virtue."1 Yet, giving was also worrisome, and such congratulatory characterizations of the period coexist with equally common depictions of the age as misdirected in its charity. The reported consequences of misdirected charity were quite serious and included the impoverishment of the country and the perpetuation of poverty.2 Given such worries, it is not surprising that many contemporary didactic tracts and sermons attempt to regulate giving. In one 1773 example, the sermonist Beilby Porteus alleges the presence of a "spirit of universal philanthropy," but also observes that the benevolent need direction: "The chief thing necessary is not so much to urge them to do good, as to show them, how they may do the most good; in what way they can bestow their alms to the greatest advantage."3 That this "greatest advantage" could benefit more than the poor is suggested by two methods that proposed how polite women were to fund 41 42 / KEOHANE their charity: the economy argument and its apparent inverse, consumer charity, attempt to regulate polite women's outlays of money not just in charity, but also in their consumption of so-called luxuries. As a result, these methods have larger significance for understanding eighteenth-century concerns about women's spending more generally. On the one hand, the economy argument (the model to which we will devote the most attention here) posits consumption and charity as mutually exclusive forms of spending, urging women to "sacrifice" luxuries in the interest of having money for charity; on the other hand, the model of consumer charity combines charity and consumption by identifying forms of consumption that can serve charitable ends. Focusing on the construction of charity allows us to see that, as Ken Jackson reminds us, charity "does not just involve charitable practices or good works, but a whole cultural belief system which helps determine and explain those practices."4 Looking at these two models of women's charity will allow us to see the concerns about women's money handling that "determine and explain" them and, in doing so, will open up our understanding of the opportunities available for eighteenthcentury polite women's participation in the public arena. Charity is a significant component of this participation, being a site of the intersection of both developing notions of feminine propriety and women's agency. Speaking to notions of propriety, conduct books and didactic literature assign women an innate charitableness and allege that its cultivation will develop polite women's character and fill up their time with appropriate activities. On the one hand, assigning women charitable duties allows them a degree of agency, by giving them some work to do. Yet, on the other hand, the models proposed by the economy argument and consumer charity seek to harness women's so-called natural charitableness in order to restrict their activity in the area of consumer spending. While conduct literature recommends charity as an activity that develops women's character, a byproduct of the inculcation of habitual charity, as we will see, is making them less self-interested in a more basic, economic sense. Although apparently contradictory models, the economy argument and the model of consumer charity both mask, as they also respond to, a more general fear of women's distribution of money that is fueled by the growing array of consumer products and increasing opportunities to spend money. While my emphasis here will be on conduct books' and charitable treatises' construction of these two models of charity, brief considerations of the fictional representations of women givers in Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) will confirm that conduct-book prescriptions...

Expressivism, Projectivism, and Santayana

Expressivism, Projectivism and Santayana Glenn Tiller 1. Santayana and Non-Cognitivism There is a general consensus that Santayana's metaethical analysis of moral judgments falls under the category of non-cognitivism. For instance, Timothy Sprigge writes that "Santayana's position shares some features with those attitudinist theories of ethics or values for which value judgments express attitudes rather than beliefs."1 In another example, John Lachs states that "Santayana agrees with the emotivists that moral terms have no descriptive significance.2 And, in a similar vein, Thomas Munson writes that, for Santayana, "Ultimate Good is not an opinion hazarded."3 Each of these writers classifies Santayana as one who expounds the basic thesis of non-cognitivism that moral judgments are not descriptive, and hence neither true nor false. Certainly there is a wealth of textual evidence which suggests this interpretation. While it is true, as Sprigge comments, that Santayana offers only a collection of "scattered observations" on metaethical questions such as the nature of moral judgments, those observations amount to a clear affirmation of non-cognitivism.4 Below is a small but representative sample of Santayana's statements on this metaethical issue: Moral terms are caresses or insults and describe nothing.5 In order to understand why Santayana thinks that moral terms "describe nothing" and that to "esteem a thing good" is never to assert a truth, we must turn to Santayana's account of valuation. Santayana's account of valuation turns on two principle ideas which lie at the heart of his moral theory. These two ideas can be set out as follows. First, there is the origin of morality, which takes us into Santayana's notion of the psyche. Second, there is the phenomenology of moral experience, which centers on Santayana's epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness. We turn first to Santayana's analysis of the origins of morality. 2. The Psyche And The Origin Of Morality Santayana vigorously rejects any Humean empiricist notion of the self as "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions."8 Santayana objects that this phenomenalistic conception of the self leaves "no room for anything latent," and "in a living being, especially in a nice Englishman, what is latent is the chief thing."9 In Santayana's opinion, the assumptions of materialism must underlie any understanding we have of human nature. Thus, for Santayana the psyche is not some evanescent phenomenal self or passing datum, but rather "that habit in matter which forms the human body and the human mind."10 It is the principle of the long-term development of the individual, for contained within our psyche: There is our whole past, as it were, knocking at the door; there are our silent hopes; there are our future discourses and decisions working away, like actors rehearsing their parts, at their several fantastic arguments. All this is the psyche's work.11 In sum, we can say that the psyche accounts for everything that is latent in the self; it embodies the potentiality of a human life from its beginning to its final development. To say that the psyche embodies all that is potential within us and accounts for our material development is to view the psyche as the ultimate origin of animal interests. In other words, we can say that the psyche accounts for all the physical predispositions of an animal life. These predispositions, such as the [End Page 240] habit of the body to repair itself after being injured, may be considered "animal interests" insofar as they represent the (innate) physical course of development of some animal life. Of course, here we are taking the terms "animal interests" and "predispositions" in a purely materialistic way; we are noting, to repeat Santayana's phrase, the "habit of matter." Accepting that the psyche accounts for all predispositions in animal life and that it is the source of animal interests has important implications. According to Santayana, this fact alone accounts for the origin of morality: This predetermined, specific direction of animal life is the key to everything moral; without it no external circumstance could be favourable or unfavourable to us; and spirit within us would have no reason to welcome, to deplore, or...

Evreinov and Pirandello: Two Theatricalists in Search of The Chief Thing

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.

Death at Work: A Case Study on Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth-Century Painting

I N PA I N T I N G, T H E N, the chief thing is the portrayal of a situation, the scene of an action. In this connection the first law is intelligibility.' This requirement-and it may come as a surprise-is laid down in Hegel's Aesthetics. Even at the acme of the idealist philosophy of art, recognition was accorded to the necessity of offering a plausible, clearly understandable art to a greatly expanded public, one that was as imponderable as it was unknown. In their famous essay of 1798, Uber die Gegenstande der bildenden Kunst (On the Objects of Plastic and Graphic Art), Goethe and Meyer stated with an unmistakable clarity:

Coward the Playwright by John Lahr (review)

Book Reviews JOHN LAHR. Coward the Playwright. London: Methuen 1982. Pp. x, 179, illustrated.£3.95 (PB). Political dogmatism has always been one ofJohnLahr's most marketable specialties as a critic. Seldom has his engagement seemed as mechanical- and as supererogatory- as in his book on Noel Coward's plays. It is a shame, too, because parts of Coward the Playwright indicate a receptivity to Coward's work far too valuable to be crowded off center by a "social conscience," the pertinence of which is never demonstrated. Lahr's organization of his topic is itself most promising. His fine introduction, entitled "Impresario of Himself," offers in a mere eight-and-a-half pages one of the best "establishing shots" of Coward's art that I have seen: Coward the self-dramatizing star, Coward the virtuoso craftsman, Coward the actor fathering Coward the writer - all cogently linked. Each of the five succeeding chapters unwinds a separate thematic thread: "The Politics of Charm," "Comedies of BadManners," " 'Savonarola in Evening Dress'?", "Ghosts in the Fun Machine," and "PartingShots." The progression is broadly biographical without being strictly chronological, each chapter focusing on two to four exemplary plays. But even in the introduction· one hears an ominous rumbling off Left. Coward's butterfly characters suddenly become "Monsters of vanity and selfishness" (p. 5). Thereafter, Lahr's very diction sets the reader careening through waves of approval and troughs of revilement, often without the support of persuasive logic. Something schizoid emerges, as though Lahr's own enjoyment had to be purged at intervals by a stem superego. We may call Lahr's superego "Ninotchka" and envision her costumed in five-year­ plan gray. There is certainly no reason to takeLahr's intermittent bouts ofLeft-Wingery as a more modem or nuanced Marxian critique. Ninotchka simply keeps score by the old dogmas: "Winners in a competitive society, stars of free enterprise, the famous are living embodiments of the society's economic rules" (p. 78); "But fame is a neurotic Book Reviews defence that dramatizes vindictiveness as drive, megalomania as commitment, hysteria as action, greed as just reward" (p. 8o). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coward got crotchety about the new class-conscious drama and its didactic defenders. In huffy response, Ninotchka does no more than commit that most mind-numbing of platitudes, "Entertainment is not politically neutral" (p. 103), and repeats it verbatim thirty-eight pages later. True enough, but it is as if Coward's own premise could not matter: that "mere entertainment," though it indeed battens on the status quo, is nonetheless an art experience qualitatively distinct from the hortatory mode, whether the latter is pro or contra the status quo. It was the hortatory that Coward disliked as "political," not merely the contra. But Ninotchka believes in criticism by aphorism. Ninotchka's interpolations take three directions: blunt contempt for Coward's "socially irresponsible" characters and plays (PrivateLives, Designfor Living); political -not merely aesthetic- condescension toward his patriotic pieces (This Happy Breed); and intense psychologizing, either to redeem a play that Lahr is fond of (Blithe Spirit, Waiting in the Wings, A Song at Twilight) or to ferret out some supposedly explanatory model based on Coward's covert homosexuality (passim). Often the three directions, like Coward and the Lunts in Design for Living, intertwine. Lahr's criticism can be astonishingly uncontextual. Not only theatrical fashions, but also genres, literary traditions and historical facts are ignored. He does not seem aware that Miranda in Relative Values is Coward's updating of Dickens's Mr. Bounderby. Coward's 1923 song lyric, "Life is nothing but a game of make-believe," is plumbed for dark revelations without any appreciation that its theatricalist metaphor was stock in trade to playwrights of the period across Europe - Pirandello, of course, but also Chiarelli (The Mask and the Face), Yevreinov (The Chief Thing), Molnar (The Play's the Thing), and even Chesterton (The Surprise). Lahr flagellates such of Coward's characters as Elyot Chase and Leo Mercure as if they were flesh-and-blood fiends standing athwart the Revolution ("swaggering" ... "glib" 0 0 . "cruel and bad-mannered" 0 0 0 "isolated in hatred" 0 0 . "vulgar ambition for attention"), when...

I am No Wolf, and You are Not Rabbits

Learning to write, like learning to juggle, requires practice. Writing places the highest priority on thinking. The writer must decide not only the form his writing will take, but also the viewpoint from which he sees his material. The text Worlds in the Making provides examples of ways authors “grok,” or assimilate all aspects of a problem. Other aids to students are the handbook and the teacher, not Big Nurse nor a wolf, but rather a human being, whose response is the chief thing offered. Students are not rabbits; they are creative human beings, who can learn to write. In this article, the author addresses her students and lays down some fundamentals of writing and teaching.

The Chief Thing is Economic Effectiveness

A characteristic feature of Soviet economic progress today is the acute interest in questions of economic effectiveness. This is accompanied by a persistent search for better methods and means of national economic planning, as well as by a broad exchange of views on the subject.

Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet

F we are to base aesthetic criticism of drama on any kind of evidence that may seem tangible, we must start with plot. The chief fault of most searchers for tangible evidence is their treatment of a play as if it were a transcript of real life, a view that Stoll and his followers have effectively exploded. Characters in a play do not have secret lives off-stage that are subject to guesswork as if actions, thoughts, and emotions not portrayed, or even mentioned, in play can nevertheless be reconstructed. Speculation cannot piece together a full continuum of detail that will weld what we see and hear on-stage to what we do not see and hear off-stage. Aristotle defined plot as follows: the Plot is imitation of action:for by plot I here mean arrangement of (Poetics, VI. 6), and he remarks shortly (VI. 9), the most important of is structure of incidents; and again, the incidents and plot are end of tragedy, and end is chief thing of all (VI. io). Butcher (p. 347) paraphrases in this manner: It is plot . . . which gives to play its inner meaning and reality as soul does to body. To plot we look in order to learn what play means; here lies its essence, its true significance. Lastly, plot is 'the end of a tragedy' as well as beginning. Through plot intention of play is realised. Modern critics have tended to overlook uses of plot analysis in service of aesthetic criticism, a form that should be aimed at determination and evaluation of meaning of a work of art, insofar as this end is possible within framework of an artistic production. Meaning is a slippery term, of course. At one end of scale we have authorial conscious intention deliberately worked out in a play; at other, we have unconscious meaning penetrating and shaping any great work of art well beyond an author's precise conceptions. Let us leave unconscious to other critics and concern ourselves, more humbly, with what must be starting-point for accurate criticism, of whatever kind: an attempt to utilize evidence of plot to determine at least some elements of an author's conscious intention. In doing so we shall be escaping older-fashioned method of seeking meaning through character analysis in Bradley manner, for Aristotle places character in a tragedy as secondary to plot. We shall also be escaping presentday analysis of Shakespeare's imagery as key to his true meaning. Aristotle again disagrees, and assigns to diction a place behind plot and character. Certainly, complaint is true that

Brutus, Virtue, and Will

i,! bfOR last century and a half most frequent critical comments upon Shakespeare's portrait of have been that he is imperfectly realized, that himself did not understand him, or that he is too virtuous a person ever to have been alive. Coleridge asked, What character did mean his to be ?' E. E. Stoll wrote that chief thing in is the neglect of analysis or motivation.... He is acting from some lofty and solemn sense of duty-he is a reformer, though without a cause or motive-we can see no more.... His conduct ... is, as conceived by Shakespeare, unjustified.2 Granville-Barker repeatedly laid his burden at Shakespeare's door by writing, Shakespeare himself is still fumbling . ., and why should his not be fumbling too? And further on, The plain fact is, one fears, that Shakespeare, even if he can say he understands Brutus, can in this last analysis make nothing of him.... . . . is not sufficiently attuned to this tragedy of intellectual integrity, of principles too firmly held (pp. 63-64). So also Margaret Webster,4 Donald Stauffer,5 and most recently, J. C. Maxwell: Brutus is a puzzle. M. W. MacCallum,7 Brander Matthews,8 Hardin Craig,9 Harold C. Goddard,10 and many others have considered Brutus' nature too delicate and fine for harsh world he lives in. .The first of two chief theses of present interpretation is that central quality of is not his virtue. It is his will. His virtue is splendid muffling that clothes his will, that hides it from all cynical, envious eyes, that garbs a thoroughly egotistical willfulness in white radiance of incorruptible principle. His virtue is his preoccupation, whence his unworldliness,11 and his virtue is his self-justification, whence his invariable insistence upon

Dew: Does it Rise or Fall?

MESSRS. E. E. Free and Travis Hoke begin Chapter xiii. of their recent work on “Weather” (Constable and Co., 1929) by stating that “the chief thing to be said about dew is that it doesn't fall, early or late, on Maxwelton or any other braes. In fact it rises.” They go on to explain that dew is formed when the warm, moist “breath of the ground” comes in contact with colder objects, such as leaves, twigs, or spider webs, causing precipitation. They make no note of the fact that dew is formed only under a clear sky which allows free radiation of the earth's surface heat; but they make the following surprising statement: “Most of the dewdrops on leaves and blades of grass, especially leaves close to the ground, are on the under sides; that is, the side of the leaf or grass closest to the soil.”

Teaching Pupils How to Study Mathematics

Of all the considerations connected with the study of mathematics, and indeed with the study of any subject, the most important is the mastery of the art of study itself. No topic has been so generally overlooked and neglected heretofore. This neglect is the source of many of our difficulties in teaching, and of many of the criticisms that have been heaped upon the various studies. A supervisor of the high schools of one of our states recently made a general outline for the reorganization of the courses in mathematics for the state. The matter of teaching pupils how to study had been entirely overlooked. His attention was called to the matter, and, realizing its importance, he made it a part of the program. After all, this is the chief thing to be gained from our schools. The pupil must leam the “how.” The “what” is not of so great importance. The “what” frequently changes. The “how” is relatively constant. In other words, the pupil should learn how to attack a problem with economy of time and effort, and with the greatest efficiency. The information he gains in the process is incidental, and illustrative of what he ought to expect as a result of his efforts after he has been trained. It is this sort of training that gives the educated man a measure of his powers, and ability to use these powers in the most effective manner in the various problems which he meets in his daily living. If education fails in this it fails utterly; indeed, it is then not education at all, it is a farce, and the school is a failure. Yet this is the point at which the schools do fail most lamentably. No subject in the high school curriculum is equal to mathematics in its opportunit ies for teaching the art of study. Geometry is especially valuable for this purpose.

Luther and the Real Presence

By 1523 Luther had thrown overboard the following items in the Roman doctrine of the Lord's Supper or mass: (i) transsubstantiation, (2) the absolute necessity of the priest, (3) the sacrifice of the mass, (4) private and soul masses, (5) the denial of the cup to the participants except the officiating priest. He taught positively, on the other hand, that active faith was necessary for a blessing in partaking, that the Word was greater than the sacrament and alone gave it validity, and that the Word could be received without actual partaking. It is evident from this that Luther's views were open to misunderstanding and objection, and he must either go backward or forward to clear matters up. The Catholic could say: You deny trans-substantiation. Well, how is the of Christ related to the sacrament ? Is it only a spiritual presence, or a bodily one, and, if so, how and where and why ? How do you understand This is my body ? How can you secure the presence of the ? The Protestant could say: You deny the indispensableness of partaking, because faith is the chief thing subjectively and the Word is the chief thing objectively, and faith is not bound to the sacrament but is bound to the Word. Then, why not restore the sacrament to its original position as a memorial meal where faith is stimulated to a spiritual feeding in Christ ? What special blessing is there in the partaking? what special gift in the Supper ? what special function in the presence of the and blood in the sacrament and nowhere else ? What is your religious interest in the doctrine of the Real Presence? What is the connection between partaking of the and blood and the forgiveness of sins ? It may be said, then, that partaking is necessary because we as sinners are subjected all the time to attacks which endanger

Heath and Steppe, Macchia and Garigue

Popular names are often very expressive and appropriate, and the Brussels Congress has voted in favour of their retention in phytogeography. However, Diels' arguments (in Flahault and Schroter, Phytogeographiscihe Nomenclatur, Ziirich, 1910) against the use of vernacular names are of considerable weight. Moreover, since the Congress was held (1910) the meanings of Flur, Hain and Trift, for instance, have not gained in uniformity: and in America the term chaparral, though in the strict sense colnfined to a definite community of evergreen Californian bushland, has been used by Clements and other writers for various kinds of bushlands, some very different from the Californian. The vernacular name not only gives rise to confusion in its application among travellers, geographers and others who are not experts in plant geography, but even anmong plant geographers themselves. Diels (loc. cit.) rightly remarks that if every nation continues to use the terms of its own language, then in future the expression of the larger relationships-the chief thing for universal sciencewill be lost. If the original meanings of some ternms were better known, perhaps the misuse of them would not be so great as it is now, though as a matter of fact I am rather sceptical about that. In any case, the terms are constantly used and we have to take them into consideration. Discussions on this subject were frequent during the Internatiolnal Phytogeographical Excursions of recent years, and it may be of interest to follow out a few of these terms and conisider in each case (1) the fornmal mneaning of the word, (2) how it found its way into the terminology of science in general and of plant geography in particular, (3) its use in different languages and language-groups and by different observers, anid (4) its value and the possible restrictions in its use which might lead to greater definiteness.

Modern English Grammar

Previous articleNext article FreeModern English GrammarOtto JespersenOtto Jespersen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 18, Number 8Oct., 1910 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/435626 Views: 224Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The School Review (1893-1979), which is continued by the American Journal of Education (1979-present). PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anne Jugnet Les pronoms non anaphoriques : perspectives de grammaire générative transformationnelle, Corela , no.HS-35HS-35 (Jan 2022).https://doi.org/10.4000/corela.14309Éric Gilbert Perception et représentation - De quelques structures infinitives et participiales en look, see, listen et hear, Anglophonia , no.3131 (Oct 2021).https://doi.org/10.4000/anglophonia.4400Jeroen Wiedenhof A Grammar of Mandarin, (Sep 2015).https://doi.org/10.1075/z.197Olga Borik, M. Teresa Espinal On definite kinds1, Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes , no.4141 (Sep 2012): 123–146.https://doi.org/10.4000/rlv.2104Arian Shahrokny-Prehn, Silke Höche Rising through the registers – A corpus-based account of the stylistic constraints on Light Verb Constructions, Corpus , no.1010 (Nov 2011): 239–257.https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.2110F. N. M. Diekstra Ambiguous that ‐clauses in old and middle English, English Studies 65, no.22 (Aug 2008): 97–110.https://doi.org/10.1080/00138388408598309