Contemporary Idiom Research Articles

The souls of mixed folk: race, politics, and aesthetics in the new millennium

The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works-novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations-as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the mulatto millennium.The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed scholarship, between those who proselytize mixed as the great hallelujah to the race problem and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of civil rights destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more critically astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed by the multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and performers discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about mixed in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?

Do “Illegal” Im/migrants Have a Right to Health? Engaging Ethical Theory as Social Practice at a Tel Aviv Open Clinic

As the notion of a "right to health" gains influence, it is increasingly deployed in ways that are diverse, contextually variable, and at times logically inconsistent. Drawing on extended fieldwork at an Israeli human rights organization that advocates for "illegal" migrants and other vulnerable groups, this article contends that medical anthropologists cannot simply rally behind this right. Instead, we must take it as an object of ethnographic analysis and explore bow it is invoked, debated, and resisted in specific contexts. Critical ethnographies of right to health discourse and practice can enlighten us, and help us enlighten scholars in other fields, to the complexity, messiness, and "mushiness" (Sen 2009) of this right, especially in the context of advocacy on unauthorized im/migrants' behalf. It can also deepen understanding of the complicated and sometimes tense relationships among human rights, humanitarianism, and other contemporary idioms of social justice mobilization, especially in the health domain.

The West Looks East: The Influence of Toyohiko Kagawa on American Mainline Protestantism

Toyohiko Kagawa served as the leading Christian voice in Japan from the 1920s through the 1940s. While nationally respected throughout Japan, he also became a hero among American Protestants. Kagawa's popularity in the West rose during a time of transition for mainline Protestantism. The American mainline's optimism and dominance as the religious “establishment” began to falter. It faced both religious and economic depression, internal theological divisions, and a reassessment of their mandate for missions. In the 1930s, mainline Protestants in America were searching for a voice, and Kagawa provided one. Long before the recent scholarship on the rise of global Christianity, the mainline had turned to World Christianity as a model. It was not simply Kagawa's message as a world statesman, however, that drew American Protestants. They also employed him as a symbol for their own aims and ambitions. At a time of reevaluating the foreign mission enterprise, Kagawa and an indigenous Eastern church reminded the mainline of past success while promising hope for the future. As an interpreter of social issues, Kagawa likewise spoke a contemporary idiom. For a short time, the Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa became a Western hero, but a hero shaped through a particular Western lens.

Film Music, Musicology and Semiotics: Analysing The Draughtsman's Contract

This article is part of a developing argument towards a methodology of sound analysis centred upon creating a textual analysis framework that combines extant film theory and musicological techniques. This is an area into which more film theorists and musicologists are entering, as evidenced by the 2008 Screen Studies Conference with its focus on film sound and music, but is also one which many musical laypeople find difficult to navigate. The route towards analysing sound using these methods is paved, therefore, by the need to demonstrate how music theory can be made accessible and further the analysis of film music for film specialists, providing techniques and terminology which enable more precise ways to discuss the function of any given piece of music in a film. In this article I shall analyse a specific case study: Michael Nyman’s music for Peter Greenaway’s 1982 feature The Draughtsman’s Contract. The logic for analysing this film and its score is that it provides an example of a musical world fully integrated into the narrative of the film – something that characterises Nyman’s other earlier scores for Greenaway up to the 1988 film Drowning by Numbers. Before analysing the film, however, I shall discuss various approaches to film music, briefly examining the importance of understanding musical contexts and concepts, and considering the use of contemporary classical idioms in film music, specifically minimalism – of which Nyman is an exponent.

Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology. By Michael Fishbane

Michael Fishbane's Sacred Attunement is fascinating not only in what it says explicitly, but also in what it does not say. On one level, he presents a series of innovative insights into the parallels between modes of textual interpretation and modes of spiritual–ethical “interpretation” of the concrete details of lived human existence. In laying out such parallels, he succeeds—in a way that will engage both specialists and nonspecialists—in translating into a contemporary idiom the classical rabbinic notion that engagement in the study of scripture can function as a self-transformative practice. At the same time, though, we might also understand his project as implicitly putting forth a fundamental reconception of the very idea of “doing theology”—whether Fishbane himself consciously intends such a challenge or not. Prior to presenting the “Jewish” side of his project, Fishbane's first chapter lays out his understanding of “theology” in a general sense. He thus explicitly frames the chapters that follow as a specifically Jewish instantiation of a humanly universal “attempt to speak of the reality of God and direct the self toward this truth” (1). In this account, a Jewish theology does not entail claims of exclusive access to divine truth; rather, a theology is Jewish insofar as it engages in the human theological endeavor by means of close readings and constructive re-readings of the particular traditions and textual sources of Judaism (44). In this opening chapter, he emphasizes that his primary concern as a writer lies not with abstract theoretical constructions of God's being, but rather in an attempt to stimulate the reader's sensitivity to the easily overlooked depths and ethical demands that are inherent in the particulars of earthly life. For Fishbane, God is precisely in the details. The second chapter of Fishbane's book constitutes the core of his project and is where he truly breaks new ground. Taking his cue from four traditional Jewish modes of interpreting scripture, he lays out a striking account of the ways in which different ways of reading texts can serve as spiritual exercises. The same practices that make for careful interpretation can, Fishbane asserts, shape a person's mode of viewing existence as whole, train the reader's mindfulness to the details of the created world, and enhance one's ability to make active and conscious judgments in response to the choices and responsibilities that confront us in each moment. Thus, for instance, he notes the way in which the mode of peshat (plain sense) interpretation helps attune a reader to scripture's contextual particularities. Through its demand for close attention to the fine points of the written text, engagement in peshat reading counteracts the tendency to skip over the text's details in an attempt to arrive too quickly at one's own desired interpretation. In requiring care and concern for scripture's syntactical configurations that exist independently of our interpretive will, this mode of reading is “an exercise in attentiveness to the details of the text and its modes of presentation; and it is an exercise in the patient subordination of the self to the otherness of the language which has been selected by the author, but which requires one's readerly engagement to come alive” (71). After leading the reader through a peshat interpretation of Jacob's dream of the “stairway to heaven” in Genesis 28, Fishbane shifts our lens from a reading of textual phenomena to a reading of the phenomena of nature and of existence. The development of attunement to the alterity of scriptural words and phrases, he argues, will better enable a person to respond with ethical responsibility and patience to the alterity of things and persons that one encounters in daily life.

Globalisation, labour and development: a view from the South

The 'new' international labour studies (NILS) of the 1980s have been largely superseded by the globalisation and labour problematic which, arguably, translates the original NILS project into a contemporary idiom. An understanding of Karl Polanyi's 'double movement' has been important in that transition. But do we not also need a clear grasp of Karl Marx's analysis of capital accumulation and its impact on labour? And, has the era of globalisation done away with the 'law' of uneven and combined development? Finally, in the new flat world we inhabit, can we really articulate a 'view from the South' or is that just an anachronism? Taking stock after 30 years of international labour research this piece points to some possible avenues for further research on globalisation, labour and development from a subaltern perspective. Labour studies In the early 1970s a new labour movement began to emerge in South Africa to challenge the apartheid regime. As Eddie Webster describes it 'at first, sociologists were ill-prepared to explain the rapid rise of a militant labour movement in a country such as South Africa' (Webster 2004: 258). Eurocentric theories of trade unions and their stages of development were not particularly helpful and nor were the dogmatic Marxist accounts based on notions of trade union economism. As Webster puts it, 'To understand and explain the rise of labour a new generation of sociologists stepped outside the classroom' (Webster 2004:260). Thus in South Africa a new type of labour studies was generated (in large part due to the enthusiasm and expertise of Eddie Webster) based on critical engagement with labour organisations and the pre-existing body of knowledge around labour.

"Two-Bit Baseball": <i>Walla Walla and the Pacific Interstate League, 1891</i>

Local fans (cranks contemporary idiom) established first professional team Walla Walla, Washington, April 1891. Three nearby Oregon towns-Pendleton, La Grande, and Baker City-then joined Walla Walla to form Pacific Interstate League, inaugural minor league interior Pacific Northwest. The new league established standard admission price of at time when two bits meant 25 cents rather than measure of computer memory. Although nascent league failed to survive its initial season, it nonetheless illustrated role of baseball promoting civic pride American towns and cities. The league's story also exemplifies financial difficulties inherent minor league baseball at end of 19th century.Other leagues which may arguably be termed minor emerged 1877 response to establishment of National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, selfproclaimed league, 1876. Minor leagues quickly moved professional baseball out of large cities of eastern seaboard and spread sport to smaller cities and towns of American hinterland as frontier moved farther and farther west. Even though American Association (1882-1891), Union Association (1884), and Players' League (1890) went on to join National League as major leagues century, Reach Base Ball Guide argued 1891 that the life of game continued to depend on minor leagues.1The Sporting News cited no less than 17 minor leagues preparing to play 1891 season. These leagues represented virtually every region from New England to Pacific Northwest. This geographical diversity provided convincing evidence, publication stated, that base ball is still national game.2In this period of expansion, however, teams and leagues rose and fell like pop flies. In fact, The Sporting News identified five leagues that had played 1890 season but had failed to survive into 1891.3 The primary cause for this problem was operating capital. Because wealthy owners rarely invested baseball outside of urban major leagues and no farm system yet existed, teams had to depend on community rather than indi- vidual ownership. For example, Seattle Base Ball Association sold $25,000 worth of stock to baseball cranks at $50 share to fund its entry Pacific Northwest League 1891.4 Such community investment did not always succeed, as intercity rivalry often superseded financial prudence. To compete with its competitors, team would occasionally spend itself into insolvency as it sought to outbid other teams for services of best players. Although teams would begin season with careful investments of capital, Reach Guide noted that they quickly violated self-imposed laws of economy and, in their mad desire to strengthen their teams, [spent] clear beyond their means. As spending outstripped revenues, teams and even entire leagues collapsed before scheduled end of their regular seasons.5Financial issues notwithstanding, baseball continued to expand, particularly into West and Northwest. For example, popularity of Pacific Northwest League (Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and Portland), which played its inaugural season 1890, induced an editorialist for Spokane Review to note May 1891 that base ball fever seems to be catching [on in] all towns Northwest, and that locality is hardly worth name of city which does not possess one or more clubs.6 This confirmed comments by Reach Guide, which noted that a peculiarity about minor league organization is that they seem to be largely located West, while but few years ago East almost had monopoly on them.7The Bunch Grass LeagueSeeking to emulate recent success of Pacific Northwest League, smaller towns interior Northwest pursued their own league for 1891 season. Thus base ball enthusiasts four towns-Walla Walla, Pendleton, La Grande, and Baker City-made plans to form Bunch Grass League, provisionally named for ubiquitous local vegetation. …

S12.2 The perception of music: Intensity and affect

A strong positive real-time relationship between loudness and tension in music [1] and loudness and arousal [2] has been claimed. Given that intensity is a strong determinant of perceived loudness [3,4], and that we have as yet no validated computational continuous measures of loudness for long passages of music, Experiment 1 relates physical measures of intensity to listeners' real-time perceptions of change and affect in computer music. Computer music is not only a contemporary idiom, but also open to precise algorithmic control, unlike many experimental vehicles in music perception studies.

"Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom": Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman's Pound

Central to the work of avant-garde U.S. American poets from Ezra Pound to the present have been continuing conflicts between didacticism and coterie exclusiveness, and over the poet's relationship to pedagogical institutions. Within the contemporary poet Bob Perelman's ongoing consideration of the relationship between the avant-garde and pedagogy in all its forms, including but not limited to the academic, Pound has been a constant presence. This essay examines how some of the terms and categories surrounding the idea of "pedagogy"—teaching, learning, reading, knowledge, authority, the new—manifest themselves in Perelman's response to an influential predecessor such as Pound, particularly in poems from his latest book, Iflife . Pound is the precursor point at which all these concerns meet and from which they emanate, the central site for a contemporary avant-gardist's exploration of—and perhaps anxiety about—the nature of poetic learning and poetic knowledge, and for the relationship of that knowledge to poetics and to institutions.

Struggling Against the Specter of Dehumanization

One could interpret Gabriel Marcel's religious existentialism, or what I prefer to calls his method, as being founded upon at least two commitments.1 First, Marcel's reflective method is founded upon commitment to an ethico-religious insight where the highest ontological exigency human persons is to participate in being.2 Second, his reflective method is dedicated to struggle against the ever-present specter of dehumanization in late Western modernity,3 as embothed in our current technocratic socio-historical milieu. This essay will trace how Marcel's second foundational commitment serves as one of the experiential origins of his reflective method. Accordingly, the first section traces the experiential origins of Marcel's reflective method back to his response to the sociopolitical milieu in which he lived during the 1910s and 1 920s. Given mat Marcel's struggle against the ever-present threat of dehumanization is partially directed at early and mid-twentieth-century technology, the second section explains precisely what Marcel means by technology and how it often dehumanizes those who use it and are affected by it. The third section is dedicated to answering the critics of Marcel's philosophy of technology who have argued that it is just an outward manifestation of his technophobia. This is accomplished by translating Marcel's philosophy of technology into the philosophical framework of Albert Borgmann's neo-Heideggerian philosophy of technology, as much as possible. The last section of this essay describes how Marcel conceives of his reflective method in sociopolitical terms as perpetual struggle against the dehumanizing forces in late Western modernity. The Experiential Origins of Marcel's Reflective Method If we had to describetheconcrete experiential origins of Marcel's reflective method in sentence, we could describe it as follows: Marcel devised his reflective method as means of conserving the ontological significance of human existence in technocratic, ideological, and bureaucratic age in which many Westerners have, to their own detriment, forgotten their ontological exigency being. The above statement depicts how Marcel initially describes the experiential origins of his reflective method in his noteworthy essay Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery. There he diagnoses me origin of dehumanization in late Western modernity (from roughly 1910 onward) as subtle, often intuitive, unease felt by many Westerners for whom any sense of being or the ontological is lacking, or who - more exactly - have lost all consciousness of having had any such dimension to their lives.4 He sometimes calls living amid this general sense of unease, living in a broken world.5 To live in broken world means to Uve in world in which human societies are so bureaucratic mat everything persons do is subject to regulation. This means that we lose the intimate sense of human existence and replace it with sense of being cog in massive, social machine. Expressed in more contemporary idiom, to live in broken world is to be merely node in vast, complex neural network. However we happen to articulate the nature of this broken world, living in broken world means our being is identified with some abstract individual all of whose 'particulars' can be contained on the few sheets of an official dossier.6 What is left of us in such world is an empty shell of person. This shell of person is an abstraction, namely, an individual who is equal with all other individuals. Of course, this equality is detrimental one, it is merely formalistic notion, one which could only be obtained by leveling down every person to the point at which no one is unique and everyone is the same.7 We shall revisit Marcel's critique of equality later in this essay when we examine how his sociopolitical thought fits into his commitment to struggle against the threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity. …

Ignatian Themes in the Thought of Bernard Lonergan

What I hope to do in this essay is twofold. First, I have selected some themes and currents in Bernard Lonergan's work that have correspondences in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and may very well be Ignatian in inspiration, and second, I have identified in Lonergan a language, a contemporary idiom, that I believe helps us understand what Ignatius himself is up to. So I will try to identify a movement, a dynamism, from Ignatius to Lonergan, and then in Lonergan a set of contributions to the clarification and development of the Ignatian charism in the Church. These two tasks do not divide the sections of the paper. There are four sections, and these two tasks are present in all of them.

Shakespeare and the Language of Translation by Ton Hoenselaars

MLR, 101.3, 2oo6 82I both Johnson's relations to those, likeWarren Hastings, who were intimately con cerned in Indian politics and the representation of India and things Indian in his writing. One of themost satisfying, however, isKathleen Nulton Kemmerer's piece, 'Domestic Relations in Samuel Johnson's Life ofMilton', in which she places his treatment ofMilton's attitudes towards the women in his domestic life, and to an ex tent in his writing, alongside Johnson's own, quite different, principles and behaviour. Johnson, she argues, is unique among early biographers of Milton in choosing not 'to de-emphasize some of the incidents inMilton's private life that suggested that he was "arbitrary and severe"', but rather to show 'that these facts should trouble both biographers and readers of biography' (p. 78). Of the non-Johnsonian essays, Erik Bond writes a lively account (it is, of course, hard not to be lively when writing about Boswell) of a slightly worn subject, Boswell's self-fashioning, albeit from an unfami liar angle, that of 'the status of genre during the I760s' (p. I5 i) and in particular of dramatic criticism. Robin Dix has a short piece on 'Eighteenth-Century Develop ments in the Patronage System' and Kathryn J.Ready writes about 'Hannah More and the Bluestocking Salons', but themost compelling, and also most ambitious, non Johnsonian essay isCarol Percy's 'Plane English; or, The Orthography of Opposition inMid-Eighteenth-Century Britain'. Percy is interested in spelling variation and its relation, during the years of theWhig ascendancy, to social networks, to retirement, and to opposition politics. This is a long and richly detailed examination that well repays careful reading. Whether such contributions would ever persuade the scholar in the street actually to buy The Age of yohnson Idoubt, but if it continues to provide a home, albeit only on library shelves, for challenging criticism, then itwill deserve its longevity. NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY ALLAN INGRAM Shakespeare and the Language of Translation. Ed. by TON HOENSELAARS. (The Arden Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Language) London: Thomson Learning. 2004. xiv+346 pp. C45. ISBN 1-90427-I45-6. In his exemplary introduction to this much-needed volume, Ton Hoenselaars claims that he aims to bring the 'Cinderella' issue of translation into the centrefield of Shakespeare studies. No less usefully, however, Hoenselaars also brings Shakespeare into the centrefield of translation studies: though individual articles and book chapters have discussed drama translation, this is the first book I know of that is dedicated to the topic. Hoenselaars outlines translation as language transfer that also involves 'trading between cultures, between different ways of imagining the world' (p. 2, citing Michael Neill). He then sites Shakespeare's plays within the Renaissance's 'preoccupation with translation' between and among Latin, Greek, and the European vernaculars. Describing Shakespeare's use of classical sources and early translations of his plays, Hoenselaars shows how adaptation and cheerful plagiarism reigned: only with the Romantics' stress on the source writer's 'exclusive genius' (p. 9) did fidelity become the translator's dominant ethic. Fidelity is often not easy, as several contributors explain. Thus, in Twelfth Night, the cross-dressed Viola and his/her master Orsino flirtingly subvert differences of gender and social rank-differences whose linguistic expressions inEnglish are subtle and optional. In Japanese, however, asTetsuo Kishi beguilingly shows, these are overt and unavoidable, forcing a Japanese Viola tomake himself toomuch of aman or reveal herself as awoman. The type of fidelity can also vary. For Shakespeare students, Werner Bronnimann advocates literal translations with exegetic footnotes. Jean-Michel Deprats, by con trast, explains passionately and convincingly how directors and actors need a version 822 Reviews that conveys the rhythmic pulse, tone, and gestic potential of Shakespeare's lines. Deprats, however, like Alessandro Serpieri, stresses that the translator should keep faith both with stagecraft and with text. Thus Serpieri shows how his painstaking editorial unteasing of the First Quarto Hamlet enabled him to produce a stageable Italian version of a text normally seen as corrupt. Translators rarely advocate fidelity to Shakespeare's archaic texture, however: vir tually all translate the plays into a contemporary idiom. This, as several contributors point out, makes the translated plays easier to understand by...

About the Cover

Cover Photo: Atrium of the Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. This large, compelling space shows how in some jurisdictions the judicial function of government is able to achieve powerful architectural expression in a contemporary idiom. Photo and caption courtesy of Charles T. Goodsell, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Cosmopolitanism

This essay explicates and defends a version of moral cosmopolitanism. It builds on the work of Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who in turn build on Cicero and Kant. It is an update in a contemporary idiom of a classical cosmopolitanism. In a time when Enlightemnent ideas are widely discounted, it gives expression to an Enlightenment view arguing that there should be a fundamental allegiance to the ideal of a worldwide community of human beings where each human being, just because he/she is a human being, is equally a subject of concern and is taken to be of equal worth. Any patriotic concern for nation, or particularly groupings, should be subordinate to that ideal.It defends such a conception against the charge of elitism, unrealistic utopianism, anthropological naiveté and irrelevance, and of the charge that it involves a failure to attend to the importance of particular attachments.

"Forty Percent Is Luck": An Interview with C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee

Andrew Shin California State University, Los Angeles On October 2, 2001, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles premiered David Henry Hwang's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song to glowing reviews. Its initial run was extended, and after several months, the production moved to Broadway. Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, which opened at the St. James Theater in December 1958, is itself adapted from C. Y. Lee's novel The Flower Drum Song published in 1957. Rodgers and Hammerstein's original production was the first Broadway show to feature Asian American players, and the film version, released in 1961, inaugurated the careers of the first generation of Asian American actors, including Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, and Jack Soo. C. Y. Lee's work and career, however, have been largely overlooked because of the reception of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, which many observers felt perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Asians. Although Lee's novel was a New York Times bestseller, it quickly went out of print and rarely appeared on university reading lists. Ironically, the inception of the nation's first ethnic studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which aimed to overhaul a curriculum focusing on a received canon of predominantly white, European, and EuroAmerican writers, proved inimical to Lee's playful vision of the mixing of Chinese and American traditions in Chinese American life. The very identity politics and cultural nationalism that fueled ethnic consciousness-raising refused Lee's evocation of the Chinese experience in America. Hwang's musical, Flower Drum Song, meditates on its own process of artistic renewal, restaging, in a contemporary idiom, Lee 'S analyses of cultural and generational conflict as a struggle between Old Master Wang's desire to sustain Chinese traditions in the form of a run-down Chinese opera house and the Americanborn son Wang Ta's desire to transform the opera house into a Western-style nightclub. Significantly, Hwang's adaptation draws attention to Lee's modernity: the novel's representation of cultural conflict and the invention of new traditions in immigrant life is timeless and remains as relevant for contemporary audiences as it was in 1957. Indeed, Lee's depiction of life in San Francisco's Chinatown is undergoing a renaissance due in large part to Hwang's intervention: the musical, reinterpreted by Hwang, is once again on Broadway; in 2002, forty-five years after its initial publication, Penguin Books reissued Lee s novel. Also in 2002, the Enlightening Noah Publishing Company of Santa Clara, CA published four of Lee's works in Chinese: The Flower Drum Song. Lover's Point, Corner of Heaven, and a collection of short stories, Changsan Girl. Traditional Magazine of Taiwan is currently publishing Lee's memoirs in Chinese, with the English version forthcoming. C. Y. Lee's life offers a window to the historical and political upheavals of the time. He was born on December 23, 1917, in Hunan Province, China, and his family moved to Beijing when he was ten. Shortly after Lee enrolled at Jinan's Shandong University, Japan invaded China, forcing him to flee to Yunnan where he completed his bachelor's degree at Southwest Associated University in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 1942. That same year, driven by the continued turbulence in China, he traveled to the United States and enrolled in a graduate comparative literature program at Columbia University. After less than a year, he transferred to Yale University to study drama with Walter Pritchard Eaton, Eugene 0 'Neill's mentor, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1947. After completing his studies, Lee worked as a journalist, editing a Chinese-language newspaper, and wrote a daily column for Chinese World, a newspaper published in San Francisco's Chinatown; he also taught Chinese at the Monterey Army Language School. Lee is fond of telling the story of how he managed to stay in the United States and continue his writing career: in 1949 he won a Reader's Digest-sponsored contest for Forbidden Dollar, a short story anthologized in Best Original Short Stories later that year. …

The Postcolonial Middle Ages ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (review)

Reviews Jeffrey jerome cohen, ed., The PostcolonialMiddle Ages. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrsve, 2000. Pp. iii, 286. isbn: 0-312-23981-5. $21.95 (pbk). 'To be s medievslist is not a self-evident achievement,' said Paul Zumthor two decades ago in Speaking ofthe Middle Ages. As if responding to thst challenge, medievalists have since been labouring hard to mske themselves intellectually respectable again, ifnot downright sexy to boot. Non-medievslists have so fsr little noticed the medievsl make-over, but ifthey did theywould find themselves facing some challenging visions that have significant postmedieval implications. The PostcolonialMiddle Ages is one such vision. In his thoughtful introduction to this uneven but mainly stimulating collection offourteen essays, JeffreyJerome Cohen lays out a five-point program for achieving 'the medieval future' by way of postcolonial theory: rethink postcolonial thought in the light ofthe hard particulars ofmedieval evidence; 'rethink history ss effective history,' where the thing 'intervene[d]' upon is 'the disciplinizstion ofknowledge'; 'destabilize hegemonic identities' (e.g., racial, ethnic, sexual) by revesling them ss historically contingent; 'displace the dominstion of Christianity' (a tssk which involves examining Christisnity's multiple faces); snd 'decenter Europe.' According to Cohen, then, medievalists should pisce themselves firmly in the uncertain 'postcolonisl' global present and from that vantage point take as little ss possible for granted sbout their disciplines snd objects ofattention (their audiences, though, are to remain the same: the program does not csll for extramural outreach). The ambition is clearly a worthy one, ifmore conventionally academic than is suggested by the series' emphasis on novelty 'in a contemporary idiom' (Series Editor's Foreword). In any case, on the evidence of these essays, Cohen's medievsl future exists ss imagined futures do—in emergent rather than realized form. For one thing, and this is the book's greatest weakness, the postcolonial Middle Ages it offers is chronologically snd geographically highly limited—a point that Cohen himself makes. This is mainly an Anglo-American High/Late Middle Ages (thirteen ofthe fourteen contributors teach in North American English Departments). Apart from a few essays—Suzanne Conklin Akbsri's corrective to Edwsrd Said's account ofthe medievsl origins of 'Orientslism'; Kathleen Biddick's quite different corrective to Said byway ofDante, Erich Auerbach, snd Orhan Pamuk (a contemporaryTurkish novelist rethinking Dante's Vita Nuova); and Glenn Burger's reading of Prince Hetoum's La Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient against its Cilician Armenian origins—the collection's focus is resolutely British. Seven of the essays center on ARTHURIANA 12.2 (2??2) 152ARTHURIANA medieval English literary texts, and three on Celtic contexts (Cohen on Gerald of Wales, John Ganim on the 'orientalism' ofArthurian studies, and Patricia Clare Ingham on the Mabinogi); even Michael Uebel's account of the Letter ofPréster John ranges outwards less to its medieval reception than to John Buchan's British imperial recasting ofthe material in PrésterJohn (1910). This is not ofcourse to say that this narrow focus precludes excellent work; indeed, it is a necessary condition of it, as witness the learned, suggestive, and searching essays by Cohen, Géraldine Heng (on Richard Coer de Lyon), and Sylvia Tornaseli (on 'the virtual Jew' in Chaucer). It is rather to note that the scholarly net of a postcolonial medievalism needs to be csst much wider. Homi Bhabha is a much cited authority here, but too little argued or actively engaged with, and one looks in vain for engagement with other potentially relevant authorities: Peter Brown and Averil Cameron, for example, on early Christian imperialism. A serious postcolonial medievalism would, among other things, seek less to 'displace' than to rc-place Christianity, re-examining the millennium-long application of book, bell, and sword to indigenous, colonized, and colonizing populations in the Mediterranean basin and Europe—a process that continued into the later Christian expansion typically understood as colonialism. So too would it want to relocate (rather than simply dccenter) 'Europe' (one line ofinquiry was opened up in 1957 by Denys Hay in Europe: TheEmergence ofan Idea, a book nowhere cited in this collection). ThePostcolonialMiddleAges is hardlywhat Carolyn Dinshaw's blurb calls it—an 'expansion of] the boundaries ofWestern scholarship on the Middle Ages...

Homily at Herbert McCabe's Funeral

This is the story of one Dominican’s following the Gospel with faith, hope and above all charity.There was a restlessness about Herbert. All his life he was in some ways an adolescent. He had the virtues of an adolescent, and sometimes an adolescent’s infuriating ways. But our weaknesses, under God’s grace become our strengths. Immensely loyal to his friends, he liked to shock. Questing, critical, radical, ever seeking for the meaning of life, and for ‘meaning’ tout court, he could be quite arrogant in his own convictions. It did not mean that he could not brook disagreement. Intolerant he could be of what he called ‘playing games’, but he delighted in argument. He could not resist being outrageous at the expense of pompous authority. His Catholic orthodoxy, expressed in contemporary idiom, was unshakeable; his Dominican, questioning, obedience was absolute. Like adolescents, when asked questions which they find intrusive, he was economical in speech; this he honed into a fine precision, admirably editing out superfluous words. The adolescent’s unsureness of himself he turned into the humility of loving himself not for his own achievements, but for God’s gift of being God’s lover, able to speak with, and thank God. Still he hated going into print and agonised over sermons. Leaving instructions to any literary executor he talked about the “the bits of paper I leave behind. ... If I hear you have burnt the lot I shall merely add this to the eternal (no! perpetual) sufferings I shall be undergoing”

The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis by Clémence Housman (review)

120ARTHURIANA clémence HOUSMAN, The Life ofSir Agiovale de Galis. Introduction by Douglas A. Anderson. Oakland, CA: Green Knight Publishing, 2000. Pendragon Fiction. Pp. 320. isbn: 1-928999-08-05. $14.95. This is the third attempt to create interest in the third medieval-style novel by the sister ofA.E. and Laurence Housman. (The others are The Were-Wolf—considered a classic in its horror sub-genre—and The Unknown Sea, another novel of the supernatural.) First published in 1905 (London: Meuthen), Sir Aglovale was later reissued—at the insistence ofLaurence—in 1954 (Jonathan Cape), but these editions are now rare, and no one even knows who holds the copyright. Perhaps this third— the first American—edition will be a charm, and we will be quits ofthis ostentatious, ill-plotted, and virtually unreadable piece ofArthuriana once and for all. Working from scattered references to a minor character in Malory, the son of King Pellinorc (all meticulously paraded in an appendix), Housman mines the postVictorian anti-heroic vein. Sir Aglovale is hardly the ideal knight; in fact, his sins cover the spectrum—sexual misconduct, betrayal, cowardice. But Housman mitigates these imperfections in two ways: in the best modern way, she presents some ofthem as the result of youthful traumas, and she asserts that Aglovale's honesty more than balances his flaws. Aglovale never denies his sins, and the sufferings he undergoes as a result of them bring moral redemption. In this, he is favorably contrasted with Arthur and others for whom the appearance ofvirtue is all. The dishonesty and selfwilled blindness that are hallmarks ofArthur and most ofhis other knights (a few are able to see Aglovale's virtues) are seen as morally worse than any sin Aglovale might commit. In the end, in by far the most touching scene, Aglovale brings Arthur close to realizing that his own hypocrisy is largely responsible for his downfall. Unfortunately all this thematic interest is undercut by two fatal artistic flaws— Housman has no narrative sense, and she cannot find a style that clearly expresses her ideas. The story-telling is lumpy. Housman mechanically takes each ofMalory's references and retells it, sometimes (as in the story of Laytin Colombe in chapters xxi-xxm) without even placing it in any recognizable chronology. Then she moves on to the next Malory bit and retells it. Sometimes the thematic material provides transition, but more often than not continuity ofany kind is sorely missing and only pedantry comes across. Only very experienced readers ofMalory will have any chance ofgetting a sense ofdevelopment, and I doubt that even they will become very involved. Some of the stories start well, but even they sink into narrative flaccidity. Housman is not very good at characterization either. Compounding this inert story-telling is Housman's style. Rather than trying for something that tells the story or expresses theme in a contemporary idiom (pace Tennyson before her or White after), Housman opts for a heavily mannered, oppressively anachronistic, 'ye olde' style that gets in the way of flow and understanding. Douglas Anderson refers to it as 'a slow contemplative prose style' (7). But even ifhe is right, too much contemplativencss is fatal to this sort ofoperation. This is the sort ofnovel in which the characters say convoluted and semi-grammatical things like 'And however I have answered to Sir Gaheris, wit you all it was out of no REVIEWS121 fear of him nor of better than he, and that can I make good by whosoever should undertake to slay me' (45)—and the reader is left thinking: what? Again and again one has to reread passages to get their sense. It is a grand irony indeed that the sister of a poet whose claim to fame is his simplifying of poetic language would come up with this insufferably self-conscious and unreadable stuff. Housman's style makes that of another mannered pseudo-medievalist, James Branch Cabell, or of George Meredith (Anderson's choice of influence) look positively transparent. Clémence Housman's Life ofSirAglovalede Galis is a noble experiment in recasting Arthurian myth into modern terms perhaps, but it is not one to be recommended. JOHN CHRISTOPHER KLEIS La Salle University...

Faith and Reason Reconsidered: Aquinas and Luther on Deciding what is True

The Thomist 63 (1999): 1-48 FAITH AND REASON RECONSIDERED: AQUINAS AND LUfHER ON DECIDING WHAT IS TRUE1 BRUCE D. MARSHALL St. OlafCollege Northfield, Minnesota IN WHAT MAY REMAIN the most widely read book in English about Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton locates Thomas's chief contribution to the Church, and to the whole human enterprise, by contrasting him with Luther. "It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of the Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."2 Thomas's great achievement, Chesterton argues, was to achieve a perfect balance and harmony between faith and reason, Christ and Aristotle. Luther's great importance lay in his singleminded effort-remarkably successful, Chesterton ruefully concedes-to destroy whatThomas achieved. Luther's passionate hatred of reason rudely dissolves the problem Thomas had so exquisitely solved. Thus no comparison between them on the problem of faith and reason is really possible, since properly speaking Luther, having simply rejected reason, has no position on the issue at all. Indeed, while the two figures can rightly be compared for their great though antithetical historical influence, in the nature of the case there can be no comparison of their views on any matter of theological and philosophical substance. 1 This paper considerably revises a presentation first given at a conference on Trinitarian theology in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in March 1993, and published in German in the proceedings of that conference: Joachim Heubach, ed., Luther unddie trinitarische Tradition: Okumenische und philosophische Perspektiven (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1994). 2 G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956; first published 1933), 33. 2 BRUCE D. MARSHALL "To compare these two figures bulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible."3 This paper argues that Aquinas and Luther hold basically the same view of faith and reason: the view that the most central Christian beliefs, those generated by communal interpretation of Scripture according to creedal rules, enjoy unrestricted epistemic primacy. It is not my purpose here to argue that this is the right theological view to have of how to decide which beliefs (or candidates for belief} are true; that I have done elsewhere.4 But of course in order to hold this view one need not rely upon the contemporary idiom I have just used to state it. Despite their distance from us and their genuine differences from each other, Aquinas and Luther each counts as a rich precedent for a theological epistemology which accords unrestricted epistemic primacy to the Christian community's most central convictionsto the deliverances of faith rather than to those of reason. Of course much has changed since Chesterton's dismissal of Luther sixty years ago. A generation of Catholic and Lutheran scholarship has found Aquinas and Luther to be not only comparable, but in profound agreement, on some utterly central theological matters-above all the justification of the sinner and the wider complex of issues surrounding that topic, traditionally regarded as the most important and most divisive in CatholicLutheran theological controversy.5 Unfortunately school theology , both Catholic and Protestant, has barely begun to get the message that Aquinas and Luther might both be greatly misunderstood if they are assumed to be opposites. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly the case than on the question of faith and reason. Though in our day few would put the matter quite so bluntly as Chesterton, the assumptions which lead him to play Aquinas and Luther off against one another remain largely in place. Defenders ofAquinas on faith and reason 3 Ibid., 194. 4 In Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: University Press, 1999). 5 Above all see Otto Hermann Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas van Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Griinewald-Verlag, 1967; reprint 1985). FAITH AND REASON RECONSIDERED 3 (most, though not all, Catholic) still tend to assume that Luther was a naive if perhaps admirably passionate fideist, whose hatred of reason isolates Christian theology from the rest of human knowledge and thereby makes it impossible to...

Media French: a guide to contemporary French idiom: with English translations

Media French: a guide to contemporary French idiom: with English translations