Critical Impulse Research Articles

Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism by Alexander Regier

BOOK REVIEWS 627 as it is. The move to paper money in the book’s concluding pages helps Lindstrom argue that Shelley, Goethe, and Byron worry that a reductive reading oflyric fiat has become too much the model for capitalism’s singleminded drive to recreate the world in human terms. Letting the world be increasingly becomes the most difficult thing to do. What begins as a study ofa particular poetic construction in romantic lyric poetry thus opens on to the same concerns shared by twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory, from Jacques Derrida’s work on debt and forgiveness to Mark C. Taylor’s studies of economics and theology. Unwilling to celebrate one reading offiat over another, Lindstrom’s Ro­ mantic Fiat lingers instead with the difficulties introduced by “let there be” constructions and shows, once again, the sophistication with which Roman­ tic writing anticipates and so questions the dominant interpretations of Ro­ manticism that inevitably follow in its wake. The now conventional equa­ tion ofRomanticism with individual creativity is, after reading Romantic Fiat, yet another example of our unwillingness to read the actual language of the poems we purport to value. The preoccupation within Romantic poetry with “let (there) be” constructions demonstrates both its celebration of and resistance to modes of creativity dissatisfied with “what is.” As a less careful reader than Lindstrom—one less willing to linger as long on the dou­ ble reading of fiat he so carefully explores—I conclude with an injunction: “do not let this book be,” by which I mean, read this book. Brian McGrath Clemson University Alexander Regier. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 256. $89. Perhaps because of the inherent self-reflexivity of the subject, or perhaps because of the anxiety about its definition, studies on the Romantic frag­ ment seem to provoke two very different critical impulses. The first aims at a kind ofscientific clarity, classifying particular types offragment poems ac­ cording to familiar likeness, degree of completion, or some other category. The other impulse, best realized in Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe LacoueLabarthe ’s still-influential The Literary Absolute, allows the study to mirror its object, offering a kind of elliptical and fragmented criticism that ac­ knowledges its own self-reflexivity but revels in the impossibility of escap­ ing it. One sees both impulses in Alexander Regier’s Fracture and Fragmenta­ tion in British Romanticism, despite an attempt to negotiate a critical stance of studious neutrality. SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) 628 BOOK REVIEWS “Fragmentation is central to Romanticism,” Regier states, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone disputing this, despite disagreement on why or how (3). However, Regier means his thesis be taken literally—that is, the process offragmentation is not only central to Romanticism, but Romantic “fantasies of wholeness that turn out to be broken in their origin or hide a fracture at their centre” (25). His analysis is distinguished by an attempt to shift attention from the question of fragment genres to fragmentation as a process, “a notion whose multifacetedness and intricacy enable conceptual and textual analysis not normally thought of in relation to brokenness” (25). These titular terms, Regier hopes, will “require of us a certain atten­ tiveness that reminds us how each fracture, textual or phenomenological, demands scrutiny in its relation to a larger structure” (25). On one hand, this is an extremely practical move, since it allows him to sidestep the usual argumentative abyss of defining exactly what a fragment is—a form? a genre? a continuum?—and call our attention to its conceptual significance, within the context of Romanticism and beyond. On the other hand, in re­ placing generic boundaries, however much in question, with more abstract terms, the book sacrifices some cohesiveness, and as a result is (intention­ ally?) riven by swerves in argument and topic; its chapters feel largely like separate fragments, rather than interlocking pieces or building blocks. Regier deliberately chooses material outside the traditional purview of Romantic fragments, and readers expecting new insights into “Kubla Khan” and “Hyperion” will be surprised by an eclectic set of subjects that includes the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Wordsworth’s parentheses, Keats’s letters, and De Quincey...

Analysis of the dielectric behavior of distribution insulators under non-standard lightning impulse voltages

Overhead distribution lines are often exposed to lightning overvoltages, whose waveforms vary widely and can differ substantially from the standard impulse voltage waveform (1,2 - 50). Different models have been proposed for predicting the strength of insulation subjected to impulses of non-standard waveforms. One of the most commonly used is the "disruptive effect model", but there are different methods for estimating the parameters needed for its application. This paper aims at evaluating the dielectric behavior of medium voltage insulators subjected to impulses of non-standard waveforms, as well as at evaluating two methods for predicting their dielectric strength against such impulses. The test results relative to the critical lightning impulse flashover voltage (U50) and the volt-time characteristics obtained for the positive and negative polarities of different voltage waveforms are presented and discussed.

Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11

Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11 Margaret Scanlan (bio) The novelist Louis Begley recently noted that the War on Terror, though seemingly “limitless,” has “not been the theme of any great literature” (204). Begley’s scrupulous word choice suggests that novels such as Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which prompt us to imagine what it was like to be in the World Trade Center when the planes struck or how that experience might transform a survivor’s life, open up reflection on what the September 11 attacks did to America. But such novels, however accomplished, cannot offer a historical perspective on what Begley sees as an even more compelling topic, “the nature of the damage done . . . to American society by the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration.” It is too soon to know if these abuses will be remembered or even judged criminal: “the great plays and novels that will open our eyes to the work accomplished by time and its great partner oblivion remain to be written” (204). Two novels of alternative history, however, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, move in the direction he suggests. Indeed, alternative history, which always plays with the way we remember, forget, and reinvent the past, proves an apt medium for interrogating America after 9/11, a time when renewed calls for old-fashioned patriotism and pride in the military clash with calls to remember that the nation was founded on the separation of church and state and on liberal views of the right to free speech and privacy. [End Page 505] Roth and Chabon are both regularly celebrated for memorializing American Jewish life and criticized for caricaturing it. Kyle Smith, the reviewer for the New York Post who remarked that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was so anti-Semitic that “maybe Mel Gibson would like to direct” its film adaptation, echoed reviewers who have been calling Roth “self-hating” since the early 1960s. Both novels reimagine the American government’s response to Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and in doing so violate taboos about fictionalizing the Holocaust. When D. G. Myers chastises Chabon for ignorantly using “yids” as a plural instead of the correct “yidn” or for creating a fictional kosher restaurant in which people eating meat sit next to people having a dairy meal, he suggests that invention is sacrilege when a contemporary writer evokes a decimated culture. Real suffering, which is a form of sacred truth, demands scrupulous historical accuracy that fiction trivializes. Walter Benn Michaels betrays a similar concern when he criticizes Roth for inventing pogroms in Kentucky. Why, he asks, should we worry about American Jews, who were never seriously at risk in 1942, when African Americans lacked basic civil rights in many states and were subjected to social discrimination virtually everywhere? “Why should we be outraged by what didn’t happen rather than outraged by what did?” (296). This concern for literal truth, whether about Yiddish grammar or US civil liberties in the 1940s, elides the critical impulse so central to Roth and Chabon. As Gavriel Rosenfeld argues, alternative histories “are essentially defined by an ‘estranging’ rather than a mimetic relationship to historical reality” (5). A novel that juxtaposes the shock of 9/11 and moral outrage at the War on Terror with the Holocaust takes deliberate risks with history, challenging readers to bring new insight to their own times. Roth’s blasphemy in inventing an American president capable of making a pact with Hitler matches Chabon’s creation of another who plots with Zionist terrorists to bomb a distant shrine sacred to Muslims. The risks both writers take in imagining an alternative American history with a new relation to Hitler’s Germany permits them to explore a more current topic: the relationship of American Zionists, both Christian and Jewish, to their militant counterparts in Israel, as well as the implications of that relationship for the War on Terror and for the American Jewish community. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, probably the earliest imaginative work to juxtapose...

Deep waters: the textual continuum in American Indian literature

Acknowledgements Introduction: Diving into Deep Waters 1. The Oral Impulse, the Graphic Impulse, and the Critical Impulse: Reframing Signification in American Indian Literary Studies 2. N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain: Vision, Textuality, and History 3. Trickster Leads the Way: A Reading of Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles 4. Transforming Eventuality: The Aesthetics of a Tribal Word-Collector in Ray A. Young Bear's Black Eagle Child and Remnants of the First Earth 5. Interpreting Our World: Authority and the Written Word in Robert J. Conley's Real People Series Epilogue: Building Ground in American Indian Textual Studies Notes Works Cited Index

Fixers in Motion.A Conversation

Since taking the editorial helm ofCSSHin 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our firstCSSHConversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas , and: Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, 2 nd edition (review)

Reviewed by: Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, and: Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, 2nd edition Vincent J. Del Casino Jr. (bio) Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas Denis Wood Siglio, 2010 Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, 2nd edition John Krygier and Denis Wood The Guilford Press, 2011 I have nothing to say (A Reflection on Everything Sings and Making Maps)The first book arrives1Blue cover, white pumpkinsI crack the first pageIra Glass"These maps are completely unnecessary," he saysI have nothing to say Panic, heart beats fasterDenis is messing with my headMaps as poemsI'll give you poems…I throw the book on my desk and walk awayWhy did they want my comment?I have nothing to say [End Page 133] Narcissistic dreamingUniversity of Wisconsin, David Woodward's seminarMaps as representational practiceBest friend Josh, dead way too earlyLondon Underground Map of 19332Maps are art, maps are scienceAn MFA in cartography, that's what Josh thought we neededI have nothing to say Maps as power"Destroy existing modes of mapmaking," Denis saysEasier said than doneMaps as art-science/science-artThe binary collapsesThe scrutiny is too much to bearI have nothing to say As Denis might say, fuck that…I must have something to sayI have written about mapsThought about mapsTorn maps upReoriented maps I don't think so, Ira Glass…"These maps are unnecessary"I know that he doesn't mean it literallyThey are completely necessaryThey not only tell storiesThey expose moments of power-knowledgeThey trace routes r-o-u-t-e-s and lay out roots r-o-o-t-sBicycle deliveries, newspaper routes, starting from homeTime-space, space-time maps—lifted off the ground (is this our goal?)What happens to these maps of time-space in the age of theInternet, I wonder? [End Page 134] Layers of theoretical insight"Neighborhood is process, a process place," Denis saysThat's right"General reference maps pretend otherwise""Has the hubris to present the world, you know…as it really is," he continues laterItalics for effect and affectDamn right, Denis And, maps can tell us…"Boylan Heights: process-thing unfolding in space and time"Foldings of space and timeA poststructuralist impulse, with clearly Marxist tendenciesLandlords stretching space, Denis aversTaking capital from Boylan HeightsSimple lines, densities appearPeople are disenfranchisedMaps expose the truth of economic power and authorityMore than artMaps are argumentJust read Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS As John and Denis say,"We have to mess with our spherical world to get it flat"Distortions, area, shape, distance and directionBut, we are making argumentsThat's what we do with maps Colors are "an agnostic sin," they exclaim"Never use them for mere decoration"We can sin with mapsBut, as they suggest, "color is emotive""Angry red, calm green"Can you see the poetry in maps?"They are not rules.""There are no rules." [End Page 135] But the foldingsMaps fold, spaces foldNot just maps and spaces but map spacesMaps are intertextual objects that demand interrogationThey go beyond their own boundariesThey are always more than they seemMap spaces are both object and subject Ah the critical Foucauldian impulse with a dash of Judith Butler's performativity theoryMy friend Steve and I always thought that was clever3Maps are partialities, temporary manifestationsFeelings, emotions, rituals, practicesMaps as critical humanistic possibilityMaps are so much more than scienceDare I say it, more-than-representational? Contour lines of assessed valueDenis exposes connectivitiesPatterns in spaceNot contours of altitude or temperatureBut, assessed valueAssessed value, really?Power articulated, power exposed"The world didn't ask for them," Ira Glass says of these mapsBut I think the world needs them!Goddam brilliant [End Page 136] Toward the end, Denis explains, "I set the type on our IBM...

Revisiting the New: Recent Fault Lines in American Modernist Criticism

Revisiting the New:Recent Fault Lines in American Modernist Criticism David M. Ball (bio) Moglen, Seth. 2007. Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $65.00 hc./$24.95 sc. xviii + 324 pp. Herd, David. 2008. Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. $79.00 hc. 212 pp. American modernism is a doubly fraught subject of inquiry. Modernism continues to be defined by its seeming imperviousness to critical definitions, generating a proliferating array of literary critical discriminants, chronologies, and canons. It has been alternately viewed as a response to transformational economic and social changes as well as a perceived abstraction from those changes. Likewise, modernism has been characterized as a period of flourishing generic experimentation [End Page 184] whose core anxieties persist to the present as well as a circumscribed or entirely failed aesthetic and political project, the period remaining one of the slipperiest fish in the literary critical sea. Michael North, whose two towering works The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994) and Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999) have contributed indelibly to the contemporary landscape of American modernist criticism, has gone so far as to see this difficulty as a measure of modernist innovation itself: "Attempts to formulate a unified formalist definition of modernism have always run afoul of the fact that modernism ceaselessly creates forms and in so doing confounds critical desires for formal consistency" (1999, 209). Modernism's critical contingency is, for North, a measure of its formal inventiveness, a claim which could be said with equal authority about modernist criticism and theory and their efforts to contend with and contain (however incompletely) a wholly coherent definition of modernism. These generative complications are compounded by the question of America in American modernism, one largely forestalled in early formulations of American literary history. A Library of Congress subject heading for modernist literature from the United States did not come into being until the 1970s—Hugh Kenner's A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975) being the first important study so listed—and the cosmopolitan and transnational orientations of much modernist writing have obscured the role that America has played in the genesis and development of modernism. Indeed, despite being a paradigm of economic, industrial, urban, and demographic change in the twentieth century, America was long regarded as anathema to modernist revolutions in art, literature, and culture, largely figuring into traditional histories of the period only as American-born writers escaped its provincial orbit. Earlier tellings of America in modernism are thus chronicles of belatedness or accounts, as David Harvey claims, of America's "absorption of a particular kind of modernist aesthetic into official and establishment ideology, and its use in relation to corporate power and cultural imperialism" (1990, 37). Even as recent American modernist scholars have argued for a more thoroughgoing and meaningful role for America in the history of modernism, the very notion of "America" is being radically transformed in the wake of the revisionist work of John Carlos Rowe (2000), Amy Kaplan (2002), and a growing chorus of American Studies scholars who have fundamentally reconsidered "America" as a hermeneutically valuable term. As a result, American Studies has seen multiple geographic turns—globalization studies, hemispheric studies, the return of regionalism—embodying trends that have begun to affect modernist studies as a whole, including the edited volume Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity [End Page 185] (2005) and the spring 2009 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "regional modernism." Thus America, like modernism itself, remains an idea both subject to increasing scrutiny and undergirding an extraordinary amount of scholarly inquiry. Because of this doubly fraught enterprise, the critical impulse in the last twenty years has been toward an increasing heterogeneity in the modernist canon and a consistent troubling of the conventional chronology of so-called high modernism. Building on the work of canon-expanding scholars as distinct as Houston A. Baker (1987), Shari Benstock (1986), and Walter Benn Michaels (1995), among many others, some of the most exciting research in the field in recent years (appearing, at times, under the moniker "new modernism studies") has...

The impulsive motion of a small cylinder at an interface

We study the unsteady motion caused by an impulse acting at time t=0 on a small cylinder floating horizontally at a liquid–gas interface. This is a model for the impact of a cylinder onto a liquid surface after the initial splash. Following the impulse, the motion of the cylinder is determined by its weight per unit length (pulling it into the bulk liquid) and resistance from the liquid, which acts to keep the cylinder at the interface. The range of cylinder radii r and impact speeds U considered is such that the resistance from the liquid comes from both the interfacial tension and hydrodynamic pressures. We use two theoretical approaches to investigate this problem. In the first, we apply the arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) method developed by Li et al. [“An arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method for moving-boundary problems and its application to jumping over water,” J. Comput. Phys. 208, 289 (2005)] to compute the fluid flow caused by the impulse and the (coupled) motion of the cylinder. We show that at early times the interfacial deformation is given by a family of shapes parametrized by r/t2/3. We also find that for a given density and radius there is a critical impulse speed below which the cylinder is captured by the interface and floats but above which it pierces the interface and sinks. Our second theoretical approach is a simplified one in which we assume that the interface is in equilibrium and derive an ordinary differential equation for the motion of the cylinder. Solving this we again find the existence of a critical impulse speed for sinking giving us some quantitative understanding of the results from the ALE simulations. Finally, we compare our theoretical predictions with the results of experiments for cylinder impacts by Vella and Metcalfe [“Surface tension dominated impact,” Phys. Fluids 19, 072108 (2007)]. This comparison suggests that the influence of contact line effects, neglected here, may be important in the transition from floating to sinking.

Role of instantaneous force magnitude and duration on particle entrainment

A new criterion for the onset of entrainment of coarse sediment grains is presented here. It is hypothesized that not only the magnitude, but also the duration of energetic near bed turbulent events is relevant in predicting grain removal from the bed surface. It is therefore proposed that the product of force and its duration, or impulse, is a more appropriate and universal criterion for identifying conditions for particle dislodgement. This conjecture is investigated utilizing two theoretical models, representative of two modes of entrainment: saltation and rolling. In these models, instantaneous, highly fluctuating turbulent forces are simulated as short‐lived pulses of characteristic magnitude and duration, which transfer adequate fluid momentum to the particle, to trigger its entrainment. The analytical solution of the respective equations of motion is employed in deriving representations of threshold conditions in terms of the impulse characteristics. It is shown that hydrodynamic forces of sufficiently high magnitude are capable of entraining a particle only when they last long enough so that their impulse exceeds a critical value. To illustrate further the validity of the critical impulse concept, as well as extend and generalize its application to different entrainment levels of an individual grain, a novel experimental setup is utilized. This setup facilitates observations of angular displacement of a steel mobile particle in air due to electromagnetic pulses of different magnitude and duration. The experimentally obtained conditions for partial or complete entrainment support the concept of a critical impulse.

Impulse and particle dislodgement under turbulent flow conditions

In this study, we investigated the role of turbulence fluctuations on the entrainment of a fully exposed grain near threshold flow conditions. Experiments were carried out to measure synchronously the near bed flow velocity and the particle movement for a range of flow conditions and resulting particle entrainment frequencies. We used a simplified bed geometry consisted of spherical particles to reduce the complexities associated with the variations in the bed and flow details in an effort to identify the underlying dominant physical mechanism. An analysis was performed based on common force approximations using near bed flow velocity. Turbulence fluctuations were treated as impulses, which are products of magnitude and duration of applied force. It is demonstrated that besides the magnitude of the instantaneous forces applied on a sediment grain, their duration is important as well in determining whether a particle will be entrained by a turbulent flow event. Frequency of particle entrainment varied remarkably with minute changes in gross flow parameters. Impulse imparted on the sediment grain by turbulent flow was found to be well represented by a log-normal distribution. We obtained a (log-normal) probability density function (pdf) dependent on only the coefficient of variation of the impulse (impulse intensity). Relation of the impulse intensity to the particle Reynolds number, Re∗, was established. The sensitivity of the computed impulse to the critical force level, as well as the influence of the critical impulse level on the dislodgement events, was explored. Particle entrainment probabilities were found using the derived pdf as well as experimental observations and a good agreement between the two is reported. Implications of the presented impulse concept and our experimental findings for sediment mobility at low bed shear stress conditions are also discussed.

Aesthetic Apprehension and the Novel

Even Though the Range of Aesthetic Objects that Have Captured Leo Bersani's Attention Over the Years is Wide, The Novel remains one of the more privileged objects among them and could arguably be taken as the point of departure for many of his reflections. His attention has been on the modern French novel in particular, from Honoré de Balzac to Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett—Proust and Beckett being two of the writers to whom Bersani has returned with the most frequency and inventiveness over the years. In the 1960s Bersani began elaborating a critical agenda for the reading of novels in books such as Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965) and Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970). His critical references in these books are also mainly French or francophone. He positions himself in various kinds of opposition to literary critics of the time like Jean Starobinski, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as the early Roland Barthes. This is also the moment when a certain number of other now familiar French thinkers were beginning to be read in the United States, and so Balzac to Beckett opens with a favorable reference to Michel Foucault, the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Jacques Derrida, the author of Of Grammatology. Bersani notes that these two books represent “in recent years … the most brilliant analyses of the history and consequence of those habits of thought” that believe that “significance precedes experience, which is both expressive and deceptive and which therefore needs to be decoded or interpreted” (4). For Bersani it is a failure of critical imagination to assume that present experience comes to be meaningful solely or primarily in relation to prior structures of meaning, which are simply rehearsed or repeated, instantiated or exemplified, by way of new experience. One could do worse than imagine that at the core of all Bersani's work is an effort to challenge the priority or precedence given by many writers and critics to significance over experience, and it is in this light that an association with some of the critical impulses (impulses that strive after yet-to-be-determined futures) of Derrida and Foucault makes a certain sense. Starobinski, Poulet, and Richard are often grouped together as “phenomenological critics,” critics who view a literary work as the expression of the patterns and structures by means of which a particular consciousness apprehends the world and who view the critical task as that of revealing the patterns or structures of apprehension that characterize a particular artistic subjectivity and allow it to produce a particular image of the world. Bersani's disagreement with these critics had to do with their focus on the “secret thematic selves which inform the writer's work but which the language of the work does not explicitly express.” Thus, “the writer's self” is equated to the work's “principal theme,” and such criticism places an emphasis on “centers … from which particular performances ‘radiate’ and back to which the critic draws the work” (Balzac 16–17). Bersani's preference, in opposition to this “centripetal” critical impulse, has been for “centrifugal” forces, both in art and in criticism: “My commitment to … open-ended, projective, and self-contesting art … will be expressed by a critical emphasis on those occasions in fiction which tend to disintegrate theme” (19).

Beyond Academic Outcomes

it may seem, because it lies behind many of the contemporary debates that circulate around and within either side of the academic-nonacademic outcomes discussions. For example, when critics within multicultural education argue that a reliance on programs that focus mostly on celebrations of difference and the recognition and valuing of nondominant cultures leaves unaddressed issues of structural transformation and the redistribution of power, they are building from the fundamental recognition that the institution of schooling functions as both a universal and differential mechanism of recognition and (re)distribution. Herein rests the reason it is possible to find variants of race theory, or multicultural education, that self-identify as race theory or multiculturalism. The critical impulse to understand and with the differentiating functions of schooling, as part of the larger societal apparatuses of structural inequality, will apply in any debate about what outcomes schooling does, could, or should produce. Herein lies the reason skepticism remains about the ultimate efficacy of programs that focus on celebrations and recognition of difference or identity in the critical pursuit of structural transformation (Badiou, 2008). Ultimately, however, such debates are not going to be settled by theoretical fiat or analytical nuance. The questions about what outcomes schools might produce and what their effects may be in the larger distributions of primary goods beyond schooling can be advanced beyond irreconcilable theoretical debate only if they are understood as questions of lived experience, empirical effects, and social collective experience. In 1981, Harold Berlak and Ann Berlak pointed out a paradox facing progressive educators who are concerned with educating the whole child. That is, as one of their dilemmas of schooling, Berlak and Berlak named a tension that lies between understanding the child as a person versus the child as a client. Applied to our current discussion, teachers focusing on the child as a client might be more inclined to This content downloaded from 157.55.39.130 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:55:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 138 Review of Research in Education, 34 focus on academic outcomes, whereas those concerned about the child as a person might lean toward focusing on nonacademic outcomes. However, as tempting as it is, as Berlak and Berlak pointed out, the more sides of a child's life we address as teachers, the more we open the whole child to our surveillance and control. Herein lies one of the paradoxes faced in debates about nonacademic outcomes. At the same time, though, it is very hard to know which outcomes to promote (or choose not to promote) without much more research into which nonacademic programs actually do work and which have lasting, powerful outcomes.

Modeling of Proximity Effect on Positive Leader Inception and Breakdown of Long Air Gaps

The paper presents the first effort to mathematically model proximity effects on continuous leader inception and breakdown of long air gaps under critical switching impulses. Three aspects of proximity with considerable practical importance are addressed. These include wall proximity in high voltage switching impulse tests, effects of protrusions and surface roughness on switching impulses performance of large electrodes and finally determination of critical ground fields for upward leader inception of a vertical rod under an energized plane electrode. The model results provide quantitative tools to assess proximity effects as well as means to keep such effects within acceptable limits. Whenever possible the model findings are compared with experimental results and internationally recommended practice and with view of the complexity of the problems, the agreement is quite satisfactory.

Analytical Modeling of Composite Sandwich Panels under Blast Loads

Analytical solutions were derived for the transient response and damage initiation of a foam-core composite sandwich panel subjected to blast loading. The panel response was modeled in two consecutive phases: (1) a through-thickness wave propagation phase leading to permanent core crushing deformations and (2) a transverse shear wave propagation phase resulting in global panel deflections. The predicted transient deformation of a sandwich panel consisting of E-glass vinyl ester facesheets and H100 PVC foam core compared well with ABAQUS predictions. Analytical predictions of the critical impulse for damage initiation in several foam sandwich panels also compared well with ABAQUS predictions.

Marx and the Sacred

Perhaps the most formidable obstacle in the task of retrieving a sense of the sacred in Marx consists in his repeated, and often polemical, statements against religion. Indeed, such an obstacle may in the end be one of our own making, as we are trapped within the labyrinth of our own historical understanding. Yet, assuming, for the moment, that religion and the sacred are the same phenomena, if we take his pronouncement (in the opening quotation) that religion is the opium of the people in isolation, we may be led to believe that Marx felt that at best religion—and thus the “sacred”—is a narcotic, which, while it may be utilized to alleviate pain, remains an illusory amelioration for a situation of despair. Religion as an opiate not only implies sedation from the pain of a life of exploitation, but also suggests a systematic and strategic attempt to deaden or absorb any critical impulse to liberation. In this sense, Marx’s characterization of religion as an opiate is a forerunner to many of the most radical criticisms of religion in twentieth-century theology and philosophy—Gutierrez, Miranda, Bultmann, Heidegger, and Bataille. Each of these thinkers, in his

The Art of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Fiction Stephen Arata (bio) Henry James , "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Consult just about any anthology of modern literary criticism and you are likely to find Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" somewhere on the premises. This 1884 essay—I am not going out on a limb here—is the best-known theoretical statement on the novel published in Victorian England. Together with a handful of other essays and, more pyrotechnically, the 1907-09 prefaces to the New York edition of his works, "The Art of Fiction" established James's posthumous reputation as the foremost narrative theorist of his era. For Anglo-American critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reputation was decisively shaped by Percy Lubbock and R.P. Blackmur. Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Blackmur's introductory essay to The Art of the Novel (1934) celebrate James for shaking the novel—theory and practice alike—out of its cozy Victorian slumber and charging it with modern sophistication and rigour. For the New Critics who read him by way of Lubbock and Blackmur, it was James's mastery of technique and his attention to novelistic form that separated his achievement from those loose, baggy monsters casually turned out by his immediate forebears. It was likewise, in this view, James's conception of his art as a sacred office that helped deliver narrative fiction from the banal moralism and misguided social activism characteristic of the Victorian novel. Such views have not worn well, and few would now argue either that Victorian novelists were unsophisticated in the practice of their craft or that James's own novels conform more than intermittently to New Critical standards. (Then again, neither would James.) If "The Art of Fiction" no longer seems the proto-Modernist manifesto it once was taken for, it nevertheless remains essential reading for literary critics. Its interest is not merely antiquarian, either. At this historical remove, what is most striking about the essay is the continuing relevance of the case it makes for the activity of criticism itself. In terms that are still recognizable, "The Art of Fiction" validates what we do. If some of James's evaluative criteria seem less compelling than they once did, his impassioned defence of the importance—as well as the pleasure—of criticism retains its freshness. This is not always the case with Matthew Arnold, whose apologies for criticism often sound, well, apologetic, as if Arnold were disappointed with the world for getting itself into such a state that criticism had become necessary and disappointed with himself for giving in to the critical impulse. It is doubtful that Arnold ever believed, as James did, that to exercise our critical faculties is to "enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures" (50). "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle," James avers a few pages earlier, "but the theory too is interesting" (45). The occasional [End Page 53] dilettantishness of his phrasing should not obscure the serious, indeed crucial, benefits James attributes to acts of responsible criticism. He does not, as Oscar Wilde would a half-decade later, go so far as to say that criticism is on par with the other creative arts, but he does insist that the arts are immeasurably enriched by creative criticism. It seems clear that James was moved to write "The Art of Fiction" primarily in the hope of getting a discussion going. He is less concerned, that is, to insist on the validity of his own critical methodology (though he does so insist) than to open a space for critical debate. Throughout the 1880s, James continually presents himself as a critic in search of someone to talk with. Later commentators have pointed out that the critical landscape was not quite so arid as James made it out to be. There is some truth to their claim, but only some, as anyone who has spent much time reading Victorian periodical literature dating from prior to 1890 will probably attest. Much more common are sentiments such as those expressed by Walter Besant in the lecture to which James's essay was a direct response. "I, for one...

Visual Poetics: The Critical Impulse in Contemporary Street Art from Paris to Melbourne

Visual Poetics: The Critical Impulse in Contemporary Street Art from Paris to Melbourne

Paired Opposites

■ Over the past two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the ways in which overtly progressive ideas of `development' have been used, paradoxically, to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty on a global scale. Such critiques have fed into a wider `postmodern challenge' which has importantly questioned previously held assumptions about development. However, this prevailing critical approach has led to a number of problems. In particular the deconstruction of development discourse has unwittingly re-inscribed many of the binary oppositions it seeks to overcome, without appreciating the complex ways in which development workers employ these. Moreover, a critical impulse to uncover what development practice `hides' focuses attention away from the ideas and practices that development practitioners actively privilege. In this article I argue that it is necessary to go beyond a critical, deconstructive approach in order to appreciate the socially and discursively complex ways in which development workers employ such oppositions. Through an ethnographic account focusing on how oppositions between `local' and `global' and `policy' and `practice' are used to frame a variety of development interventions in Ghana, I outline the mobile ways in which such oppositions are deployed and highlight the diverse ideas and agendas that they are used to articulate.

The Blast Behavior of Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastic Laminates

This article presents the results of a series of blast tests on a carbon fiber-reinforced poly-ether-imide (PEI) and a glass fiber-reinforced PEI composite. Initially, the fracture properties of the two composite systems were characterized through a series of flexural and interlaminar fracture tests. Blast testing was then undertaken on a ballistic pendulum facility, capable of measuring the impulse imparted by the plastic explosive. Delamination, localized fiber buckling, fiber fracture, and shear failure at the boundary of the clamped plates were identified as the primary failure mechanisms in the laminates, with their severity depending on the panel thickness and the applied impulse. Delamination was very localized along the center plane of the laminate, a reflection of the very high interlaminar fracture toughness of these composites. The critical impulse for rear surface fiber fracture has been found to increase rapidly with laminate thickness for the range of panels considered here. The impulses associated with the onset of rear-surface fiber fracture and complete failure of the target were similar, suggesting that rear surface fiber fracture is a pre-cursor to complete failure in these laminates. Limited tests on the glass fiber-reinforced PEI system showed that it offers a superior blast resistance to its carbon fiber counterpart.

The Victorians in the rearview mirror

When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.” The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination. Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture. Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.