Close Critical Attention Research Articles

Assyrians

This essay argues that Leo Bersani’s immersion in a discipline of reading theoretical and psychoanalytic texts and literature with close critical attention effectively writes out his observations from an epistemology of being gay. His attention to visual materials is similarly acute and detailed, and the observed and the read fragment interfere with each other in a virtuosic demonstration of criticism that is both involved and detached. In this process, his writing refuses any illusion of the possibility of theoretical coherence as a purpose of his text. Rather, Bersani’s writing produces new queer knowledge as a collateral effect of who he was.

Introducing Life to “the Young, the Ignorant, and the Idle”: Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe as Popular Novelists

The remarkable commercial success of the novels of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood in the first few decades of the eighteenth century testifies to a series of cultural phenomena that merit close critical attention. For instance, setting the overwhelming popularity of both writers during their lifetimes in contrast with the scant—though steadily growing—critical recognition accorded to Haywood in our time provides a succinct and vivid illustration of the vagaries of the literary canon. As can be guessed, the snakes and ladders in Defoe and Haywood’s game of fame had mostly to do with their gender, as well as with the genre of their most celebrated productions. Ironically, however, for good or evil, their contemporaries tended to put both writers together in the same basket. While professional critics belittled their talents in public—and perhaps envied them in private—the reading public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for their fictions. In short, Haywood and Defoe were fully-fledged popular novelists, with all the positive and negative connotations attached to this label. A key to gauging their place in the history of the novel lies, then, in the type of readers for whom they vied. This article reviews some of the correspondences between Haywood and Defoe—emphasizing their equality in terms of cultural relevance in their own time—with a view to complicate conventional assessments of Defoe as a star novelist and Haywood as a minor writer of amatory fiction, and to encourage reflection about literary practices then and now.

Following Bradshaw and Bishop into Jacob’s Room: British and Canadian editing strategies (tunnelling the textual hotspots, minding the gaps)

ABSTRACTThe pioneering editorial practices of Canadian Professor Edward Bishop and the late Professor David Bradshaw offer distinct but complementary approaches to annotating Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922). Bishop, editors of the Shakespeare Head edition of the novel and of a transcription of the holograph draft, has gifted new modernist editing the hugely influential, crucial instruction “Mind the gap!,” urging close attention to Woolf’s spacing and lay-out of the material page as important literary signifiers. “Mind the word!” might well be the riposte of Bradshaw (1955–2016) who has left a body of scholarship pressing for close critical attention to every passing cultural, material reference, not least in the numerous proper names of people, places, etc., populating this highly allusive, densely palimpsestic text. Building on Bradshaw’s critical technique and research into the onomastics and Bishop’s editorial insights into the spaces and gaps in Jacob’s Room, this essay explores some of my findings whilst working as an editor and annotator of the work for the forthcoming Cambridge UP edition. “tunnelling,” as Woolf herself called it, into the signifying networks behind her writing, to consider questions of paternity, war and national identity that hang over Jacob’s Room: “‘Did you ever hear who his father was?’”

Metaphysical or Differential: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby under Derridean Concept of Love

Jacques Derrida revolutionized the Western Philosophy by reconsidering the previous ideas in a new perspective. In his view, human subjectivity is explained within the system of language and the meaning is conveyed through the concept of differánce. As such, he imparts the notion that nothing ever exists outside the text, yet the text is filled with innumerable meanings not a specific one. The net of his deconstructive thinking cast vast enough to devote close critical attention to any previously regarded metaphysical idea like love. Transcendental or metaphysical love is shorn of meaning in Derridean notion of deconstruction. For Derrida, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability which proves the free flow of signifiers. In this regard, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as one of the most critically studied work in America is recruited to examine the Derridean deconstructive notion of love. Gatsby is exclusively focused on seeking Daisy's transcendental love even at the expense of repeating the past. Nonetheless, the evanescent fluidity of the notion of love totally ruins Gatsby's chance of ever achieving Daisy's love. Accordingly, Gatsby's ultimate failure is expected for the reason that an "absolute moment" is never devoid of any trace of past or future time. Thus, The Great Gatsby attends to why the notion of love defies any metaphysical or transcendental status and instead it has differential and deferral meaning.

METAPHYSICAL OR DIFFERENTIAL: FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY UNDER DERRIDEAN CONCEPT OF LOVE

Jacques Derrida revolutionized Western Philosophy by reconsidering the previous ideas from a new perspective. In his view, human subjectivity is explained within the system of language and the meaning is conveyed through the concept of differance. As such, he imparts the notion that nothing ever exists outside the text, yet the text is filled with innumerable meanings, not a specific one. The net of his deconstructive thinking cast vast enough to devote close critical attention to any previously regarded metaphysical idea like love. Transcendental or metaphysical love is a shorn of meaning in the Derridean notion of deconstruction. For Derrida, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability which proves the free flow of signifiers. In this regard, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as one of the most critically studied works in America is recruited to examine the Derridean deconstructive notion of love. Gatsby is exclusively focused on seeking Daisy's transcendental love even at the expense of repeating the past. Nonetheless, the evanescent fluidity of the notion of love totally ruins Gatsby's chance of ever achieving Daisy's love. Accordingly, Gatsby's ultimate failure is expected for the reason that an absolute moment is never devoid of any trace of past or future time. Thus, The Great Gatsby attends to why the notion of love defies any metaphysical or transcendental status and instead it has differential and deferral meaning.

Introduction

Introduction

The aesthetics of ritual – contested identities and conflicting performances in the Iraqi Shi’a diaspora: Ritual, performance and identity change

What are the processes through which identity change takes place at the individual and collective level? How might a focus on embodied religious performance and ritual contribute to understandings of such identity change? Through an ethnographic analysis of the Muharram rituals of Iraqi Shi’is in London, I take religious rites as a starting point from which to theorise a performative theory of identity change to highlight the role of ritual and performance in shaping changing notions of identity at both the individual and collective level. Such a project necessarily engages both with processes of identity change and with the paradox of identity/difference, particularly the ways in which articulations of subjective identity are ontologically dependent on an external ‘other’. Ultimately, I argue that paying close critical attention to the performative and (re)iterative processes of micro-level identificatory practices allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms through which identity change comes to take effect, both at the level of individual subjectivity and that of collective social belonging.

Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images.

Exploring the challenge of health research priority setting in partnership: reflections on the methodology used by the James Lind Alliance Pressure Ulcer Priority Setting Partnership.

Plain English SummaryThe James Lind Alliance (JLA) brings patients, carers and clinicians together in Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs) to identify and prioritise shared uncertainties about the effects of treatment. The JLA emerged from the evidence-informed healthcare movement to address a concern that the research being carried out on treatment effectiveness is not that of most importance to patients and health professionals. In the JLA PSPs, ‘hard’ evidence-informed ideals meet ‘soft’ participatory practices. This article explores the challenges of putting co-production methods into practice by reflecting on the methods used by the JLA Pressure Ulcer PSP (JLAPUP). The JLA principles are transparency, inclusivity and avoiding waste in research. This means paying the same close critical attention to how PSPs are designed and run, as is desired in the health research which the JLA seeks to influence. JLAPUP showed that it was possible to work in partnership in a field where patients are often elderly, immobile, unrepresented and particularly unwell, many of whom are living with more than one long term condition. However, for those unfamiliar with it, ‘uncertainty’ was a difficult term to get to grips with. Also, it was harder for some people than others to take part and to have their voices heard and understood. In keeping with other PSPs, JLAPUP found that the nature and quality of research into pressure ulcer prevention and treatment did not reflect the priorities of those who took part.ᅟBackgroundStudies identifying a mismatch between the priorities of academics and clinicians and those of people with direct experience of a health condition pose a challenge to the assumption that professional researchers can represent the interests of patients and the public in setting priorities for health research. The James Lind Alliance (JLA) brings patients, carers and clinicians together in Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs) to identify and prioritise shared uncertainties about the effects of treatment. There is no formal evaluation yet to examine the different approaches used by individual PSPs and the impact these methods have on the quality of the partnership and subsequent outputs. There is no gold standard method for health research topic identification and priority setting and reporting on public involvement in this area is predominantly descriptive rather than evaluative.Methods and FindingsThe JLA Pressure Ulcer PSP (JLAPUP) was developed and worked between 2009 and 2013 to identify and prioritise the top 10 ‘uncertainties’, or ‘unanswered questions’, about the effects of pressure ulcer interventions. JLAPUP identified a mismatch between the nature and quality of RCTs in pressure ulcer prevention and treatment and the kind of research evidence desired by patients or service users, carers and health professionals. Results and methods have been reported fully elsewhere. The consultative and deliberative methods used to establish health research priorities in PSPs are fundamentally interpretive. PSPs are therefore an arena in which ‘hard’ evidence-informed ideals meet ‘soft’ participatory practices. This article provides an account of the challenges faced in one particular PSP. We explain the rationale for the approaches taken, difficulties faced and the limitations at each stage, because these aspects are particularly under-reported. The JLAPUP case is used to identify possible areas for evaluation and reporting across PSPs.ConclusionEngaging people with very different health and life experiences in the complexities of health science based discussions of uncertainty is challenging. This is particularly the case when engaging groups routinely excluded from participating in health research, for example, older people with multiple comorbidities. The JLA principles of transparency, inclusivity and avoiding waste in research require paying close critical attention to PSP methodology, including full evaluation and reporting of PSP processes and outcomes. Assessing the impact of PSPs is contingent on the decision making processes of commissioners and funders.

Paradoxes of the Heart: The Philosophy of Horror Twenty-Five Years Later : An Interview by Caetlin Benson-Allott

Since its publication 25 years ago – and despite controversy regarding some of its key claims – Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) has led a renaissance in horror studies by paying close critical attention to the form and structure of scary movies. The Philosophy of Horror was one of the first academic monographs to attempt a theory of horror with its groundbreaking call for greater attention to negative affects in aesthetic experience. In this interview, Carroll reflects on horror studies since The Philosophy of Horror, historicizes some of his most controversial claims, and examines new developments in horror production, including horror film franchises and horror video games.

Molinet le sequelle. Du maître au prince et du pouvoir à l'écriture, une difficile filiation

The work of Jean Molinet exemplifies a type of writing narrowly defined in terms of its relationship with the literary tradition and more specifically with the direct and impressive legacy of Georges Chastelain. In Chastelain’s hands, the chronicle became a written space conducive to a construction of history as narrative. In the sequel to his chronicles, Molinet carries out a project of detournement and of reinvestment in the narrative procedures and motifs bequeathed to him by his master. Chapters 34 and 36 as well as both prologues, which have not previously received close critical attention, are illuminating examples of a process through which the master sees historiography as a space for comprehension and redemption of the world through the written word, while the disciple considers the possibility that it might have pragmatic power and emphasizes its use as recollection. The same is true of the treatment of the figure of Mary. The theological and poetic density of Chastelain’s representation of Mary is replaced by Molinet’s theological and political figure, whereby the Virgin is no longer a mirror in which his writing is reflected but a model that he presents to Marie of Burgundy, his mistress. Hence Molinet’s work constitutes an attempt at distorting Chastelain’s rhetorical edifice, affecting the representation not only of the prince but also of the writer as well the conceptualization of writing as redemption.

Feather coats and friendship: Poietic space in Claire Massey’s ‘Feather Girls’

The position of the author in a literary fairy tale is ambiguous; either they can control the text to suit their purposes and force their style of morality on their readers, or they can enter into friendship with their text and their readers on a joint search for wonder. Developing the educational theories of Parker J. Palmer, this article suggests a concept of the fairy tale as poietic space, textual dialogue arising from a ‘knowledge born of compassion’ rather than violence or control. It uses this theory to discuss Claire Massey’s short story ‘Feather Girls’ (2010), a re-imagining of the swan maiden tale type (AaTh 400). Massey is rapidly emerging as one of the most significant authors of her generation, and her work deserves close critical attention. In particular, this article addresses how Massey uses bird metamorphosis to re-imagine and reconstruct gender dynamics, femininity and motherhood in the fairy tale tradition.

Coming 'Home' to (post)Colonial Medicine: Treating Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain

While investment and popular enthusiasm have fuelled significant growth in the history of medicine since the 1980s, it remains by some metrics well outside of the historical mainstream. Yet developments in the history of medicine could offer traction to historians more generally. Through its close critical attention to power, embodiment and hegemonic institutions and knowledges, the history of medicine also presents a unique perspective from which to interrogate ‘postcolonialism’. Here, post-war British examples demonstrate the potential of a medical and postcolonial lens for historians exploring policy making, immigration or identity. In this period, civil servants, biomedical researchers, policy makers, and publics including migrants actively shaped medical and governmental responses to an apparently novel phenomenon: the mass migration to Britain of its former tropical subjects. Postcolonial analysis uncovers new models of community, and highlights the importance of the late twentieth-century and the post-imperial city as sites of historiographic and theoretical development.

Icebergs and other hazards: An epilogue

The articles in this Special Issue of Time & Society provide a fascinating panorama of the range of factors responsible for the acknowledgement and remembrance of historical wrongs. The authors explore some of the means by which historical injustices are addressed, including apologies and reparations, and discuss how memories of ‘unquiet pasts’ (Torpey, 2003) are kept alive or revived – for example, in museums or through commemorative ceremonies. In what follows I do not revisit these issues in any detail. Instead, I draw attention to questions that could arise out of the conclusions drawn in the six articles and in the introduction, and query some of the implicit assumptions that underlie arguments made in this Special Issue. In other words, rather than concluding a discussion, I am trying to open it up by pointing towards potentially productive avenues for further research. The focus on why and when a historical wrong is addressed, acknowledged and/or remembered, which is common to most of the articles in this Special Issue – and indeed to much of the recent scholarship on issues of public memory and historical justice – has tended to entail close critical attention to the modalities and performance of redress and remembrance. The question of what qualifies a past to be considered a historical wrong in the first place has informed comparatively few scholarly analyses. There are two parts to an answer: the first has to do with the nature of the past, and the second with its relative distance. I do not intend to engage in any detail with the former, except by noting that wrongs are considered historical because of their symbolic purchase: an historical wrong is one of proportions that are either significant in themselves or considered exemplary, standing in for something bigger. The case study presented by Rommel Curaming and Syed Khairudin Aljunied provides a good example. The execution of Muslim recruits by their instructors on Corregidor Island in 1968, an event that became known as the Jabidah Massacre, has become a symbol for the suffering of Moro at the hands of the Philippines government, even though the number of victims was comparatively small. There is no objective scale that determines the effects a particular atrocity may have.

C.L.R. James, Vanity Fair and the Audience

Abstract This essay considers what we can learn about the role of the audience or the reader from the work of C.L.R. James. Beginning with a brief consideration of James' theorisation of audiences, it moves on to discuss his own reading practice and, in particular, his relationship to Thackeray's Vanity Fair. It L· argued that in important ways James' love of Thackeray reflects and informs the construction of his own novel, Minty Alley, as well as the critical populism of his politics more generally. Keywords C.L.R. James, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Minty Alley, Audience, Marxism In 1948 C.L.R. James delivered a report to the national conference of the Socialist Workers' Party in America, entitled 'The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA. The report, which was published under a pseudonym in Fourth International later that year, is widely seen as the culmination of James' decade-long grappling with the experience and history of racism in America, and with the question of the relationship between the politics of black resistance and class struggle.1 In his peroration James appealed, as he did often in his writings and speeches, to a kind of ethnographic evidence. The 'awakening passions'2 which simmer among the black population in America, he says, are there to be recognised by anyone who takes the time to get to know that population and its history 'intimately'. And for James, it becomes clear, such intimacy begins with a willingness to watch that population as it gathers, not only in the overtly political contexts of public rallies and marches, but also in those social spaces given over to expressive and creative activity. Learn to watch this community, James suggests to his comrades, 'at their own theatres [...] at their dances [...] in their churches'.3 Anyone reasonably familiar with James' work will no doubt recognise this move on his part. For all of the close critical attention that James always paid to the action up on the screen, or to the texts in front of him, he spent just as much time glancing sidelong at his fellow watchers and readers. Repeatedly in his cultural criticism he steps back from the events or texts at hand in order to watch those who bring themselves and their longings to these things. When, to give a famous example, at the start of Beyond a Boundary* James remembers the shot making of the local 'ne'er-do-well' Matthew Bondman, it is a memory secured by the 'long, low Ah!' [which] came from many a spectator'5 as those shots were played. Indeed, in a sense, it is the memory of that 'ah', that James records. Although Bondman is the one who makes his shots, it is the 'ah' of the crowd which makes something of them. And it is that response, therefore, which raises for James all of his subsequent questions regarding the true definition of art, and the relationship between popular culture and politics.6 Later on in Beyond a Boundary James admits that his critical, historicising approach to understanding sport is unlikely to be common practice among the crowds who attend sporting events.7 Nevertheless, James arrives at his own historical interpretation of sport, and of other forms of culture, precisely through an attentiveness to the attitudes of such crowds. That intimacy with the audiences of cultural production which he called for in 1948 was not a pretentious populist gesture. Rather, it was something like a statement of practice, and repeatedly the conclusions of James' cultural analyses are informed by the judgements or responses of those around him, by the vernacular criticisms which he overhears on the terraces during a dull day's play at the Dover cricket festival,8 for example, or by the communication of energy between band and dancers which he recognised excitedly as he spent an afternoon watching the audience in Harlem's Apollo theatre.9 In other words, as Neil Lazarus has argued, 10 an emphasis on the role played by the audience is a pivotal and pioneering part of the way in which James went about analysing the colonial and postcolonial politics of culture. …

Through the Looking Glass and Back with Agatha Christie

Through the Looking Glass and Back with Agatha Christie Cushing Strout (bio) Andrew Eames , The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express. Overlook Press, 2006. 404 pages. $14.95 pb. The title of Andrew Eames's book sounds so much like a mystery by Agatha Christie that Borders puts it in its mystery/thriller category. Actually it concerns his attempt in 2002 to retrace her steps taken in 1928 as a thirty-eight-year-old single mother and popular writer who was traveling by train from London to Iraq. One of the reasons for her journey was to leave behind the wreck of her marriage to a husband who had rejected her for another woman. The novelist also left behind the unsolved mystery of her famous disappearance for ten days in 1926, until she was discovered in a Yorkshire hotel, where she had checked in under the surname of her husband's mistress. [End Page 141] One can easily imagine Hercule Poirot analyzing various possibilities before he sets out the true explanation. The mystery writer Edgar Wallace, as Eames notes, "theorized that she had faked her own disappearance simply to spite her husband." But her confusion of identity was real: when her husband found her, he said she neither recognized him nor herself. She used the mistress's surname as if it were a magical way of restoring to herself her husband's affections. What is clear from The 8:55 to Baghdad is that Christie's journey was her way of dealing with the end of her marriage and the death of her mother by recovering in a challenging setting her sense of herself as a competent person. Eames frames his own journey with the metaphor of Alice's adventure down the rabbit hole into a strange new world; and he hopes that his trip, like Christie's, will "set the personal compass free and see if it found any new magnetic poles." The weakness of his story, however, is that there is no equivalent personal significance at all to his route into the Balkans in a time of war, when President Bush was making a foray into "the lair of Saddam Hussein, where Off With Their Heads could definitely apply." Christie wrote several famous mysteries about dramatic happenings on trains, but in her real life the drama is all in the reason she made her journey and how she found a new life in Iraq. Christie met there the young assistant archaeologist Max Mallowan, with whom she would begin a new marriage and find satisfying new work in cleaning, mending, and photographing the objects he and his team excavated. Eames is disappointed to find no traces of the dig in Ur where they had worked together. He unwittingly wanders into a nato target zone and is startled to see a pall of white smoke arising from a loud explosion. It is the only adventure in Eames's own story. Eames is surprised to discover shelves of Christies's stories in Arabic editions in Middle Eastern cities, even though only one of them, Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), is set at the site in Iraq on which she worked with her husband for many winters. Eames has little interest, however, in analyzing her fictional talents or works. He does have the wit to return to his metaphor about Alice by reprinting as an epilogue "A-Sitting on a Tell"—Christie's rewriting of the White Knight's song about "an aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate." She cleverly adapted it to her archaeological life with her husband: I sigh for it reminds me so Of that young man I learned to know Who lectured learnedly and low, Who used long words I didn't know, Who sought conclusively to show That there were things I ought to know And that with him I ought to go And dig upon a Tell! [End Page 142] Eames is an amiable and knowledgeable travel writer, but it is a fellow mystery writer, Robert Barnard, who has paid close critical attention to Christie's work in A Talent to Deceive (1980...

The Validation of the Writer's Prophetic Status in the Russian Literary Tradition: From Pushkin and Iazykov Through Gogol to Dostoevsky

Although it is widely recognized that the image of the writer as a prophetic figure has played an unusually prominent and persistent role in the development of the Russian literary tradition, this intriguing phenomenon has not received the close critical attention that it deserves. West European literary tradition provides a well-established context for the image, stretching from Homer and Virgil through Dante to Chenier, Blake, Byron, Hugo, Mickiewicz, and Nietzsche, to cite just some of the most obvious authors associated with prophecy. This broad framework clearly had an important influence on the Russian adoption of the image of the writer as prophet. Yet Russian writers took up this image in a substantially different and unique way.

Institutionalising Future Geographies of Financial Inclusion: National Legitimacy Versus Local Autonomy in the British Credit Union Movement

In Great Britain, financial infrastructure withdrawal and community economic decline have focused attention on the capacity of locally “alternative” financial institutions to combat social and financial exclusion. This paper examines one such institution, the residential or “community” credit union, which provides a low‐cost source of credit for members drawn from a common bond area usually based upon place of residence and/or work. Although community credit unions have traditionally been seen as providing individuals and communities with the opportunity to access credit and savings facilities in areas where there has been contraction in bank and building society provision (the financial “mainstream”), ongoing attempts exist to move away from the traditional role of community credit unions. This transition has set up three main challenges for the British credit union movement, discussed in this paper as follows: (1) a struggle over the attempt to redefine the “model” credit union within the national credit union movement; (2) the changing regulatory context for credit union development, including attempts to embrace credit unions within New Labour policies on social exclusion; and (3) a “local” challenge, including the incorporation of credit unions into community economic development initiatives. The paper considers how these challenges feed into wider understandings about the social relations, categorisation and autonomy of locally “alternative” financial institutions. We argue that future research on geographies of financial inclusion focusing on “alternative” institutions and their relationship to the financial mainstream needs to pay close critical attention to potential contradictions and tensions operating at different, yet intersecting spatial scales.

Emily Dickinson, Ralph Franklin, and the Diplomacy of Translation

Emily Dickinson, Ralph Franklin, and the Diplomacy of Translation Domhnall Mitchell (bio) On June 3rd, 1996, the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts paid $24,150 to Sotheby’s for an “unpublished poetical manuscript” by Emily Dickinson which was discovered afterwards to have been counterfeited by Mark Hofmann, the Utah forger and double murderer. Before this knowledge became public, however, and especially during the period when funds were being raised to make a bid on behalf of the Library, the appearance of a rare autograph poem generated considerable excitement. The discovery was additionally timely given the increasing levels of attention being paid to Dickinson manuscripts generally. Briefly stated, the assumption in many recent critical works is that studying Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes, are all potentially integral to any given poem’s meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents. 1 For people working on characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry in manuscript form, then, the newly found lyric seemed to provide a novel opportunity for assessing the status of such characteristics. Presupposing that the text was genuine, and that it would shortly receive close critical attention in a variety of scholarly publications, one of the questions facing the reader was how best to present reproductions of the work in other, textual and electronic, environments. This challenge was a miniature counterpart to the major and genuine difficulties Ralph Franklin had been working with for more than three decades. Franklin himself had approached the problem of representing the integrity of Dickinson’s originals in different ways. In 1980, he edited The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, using facsimile copies of Dickinson autograph poems in the sequence of their collation by the poet herself. In 1986, he edited The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, which [End Page 39] included photographic duplicates of the separate pages of the three letters, print transcripts of their contents retaining the lineation of the original, and reproductions of the documents themselves, in the guise of sheets of paper folded to form four pages of writing and placed in an envelope enclosed within the book. In his 1998 three-volume variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, he arranges the poems chronologically, in type, and regularizes the majority of them, in the sense that they are often presented as eight-line poems divided into two stanzas. As a consequence, his procedures run contrary to recent assumptions about the primacy of the manuscripts themselves —assumptions which, ironically, emerge historically as responses to his earlier publication of the Manuscript Books. Ellen Hart, for instance, has written about the importance of diplomacy in adapting Dickinson’s poems for print, and of retaining the line arrangement of the autograph as much as possible (Hart 72). Franklin tries to allow for this, however, by supplementing his edited versions of individual poems with information as to word-, line- and page-breaks in the originals, so that as much of an apparatus exists for the reader to judge the merits of the transcription as print will allow. (When appropriate, he also supplies the placement of the poem in its fascicle grouping, the name of the poem’s recipient, as well as an approximate date of composition and details of the paper on which the poem is recorded). In the light of this debate, what was initially interesting about reading the Dickinson poem by Hofmann (before its provenance was known) was the kind of information it might be seen to provide as to the significance of its own appearance. Had it been genuine, then we might have seen a “diplomatic” version of the poem such as this: That God cannot be understood Everyone Agrees - We do not know His motives nor Comprehend his Deeds - Then why should I Seek solace in What I cannot Know? Better to play [End Page 40] In winter’s sun Than to fear the Snow Emily In fact, the Boston Globe published the entire text as an untitled, two-stanza poem in fifteen lines, with a...

Resolving time in paleobiology

Time is so fundamental to the everyday thinking of paleobiologists and geologists that it is seldom given close critical attention. Many of the currently debated issues in evolutionary history—catastrophic extinctions and punctuated vs. gradual morphological change, for instance—include assumptions about time and rate which are seldom made explicit. Methods now exist for calibrating evolutionary patterns through estimates of time components in the fossil and sedimentological records. There is a growing realization that increased precision in defining time frameworks can greatly clarify evolutionary problems. This has helped to stimulate renewed interest in the traditional topic of time and how it is represented in the biological and geological record.