Critical Legacy Research Articles

The Legacy of Child Development's 1990 Special Issue on Minority Children: An Editorial Retrospective

Sixteen years have passed since the publication of Child Development's Special Issue on Minority Children. It is suggested that the most critical legacy of the special issue is the conceptual and ideological zeitgeist it fostered. The issue set culture and ecological context in the foreground of analyses, advanced a cultural-variant perspective, and further discredited the deficit perspective that long dominated the study of ethnic minority children and families. The special issue is also significant for its role in shaping post-1990 research agenda. In addition, it underscored the need for more nuanced articulations of what cultural or ethnic characteristics are of special relevance for understanding specific domains of development and the need for well-crafted methodological tools with which to test these ideas.

Aspects of ‘Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics’

This article provides a selective overview of some of the key issues raised in Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics (Ward, 2004), one of the volumes in the UN Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) series. The book refers to the critical legacy of the UN in influencing, through its significant contribution to the development of an international statistical system, mainstream policy thinking in the crucial spheres of economic and, much later, social and environmental policy and analysis.

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley. By Marcie Frank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 175. $60 cloth.

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley explores the role theatrical artists played in the emergence of literary criticism. Marcie Frank suggests that a study of this emergence should begin with John Dryden, and that it must also include the contributions made by female playwrights (such as Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley)—not merely as side notes worthy of attention in a feminist attempt to include women writers in the history of criticism but, more important, as writings that actively carried on the genealogical literary tradition that Dryden established. Frank makes the case that by figuring the transmission of a national vernacular canon “as a patrimony, [Dryden] drew the lines of access to a native literary tradition for subsequent writers and critics” (2). The essays in the book work to establish the presence of a critical legacy left to us by Dryden, Behn, Trotter, and Manley. In doing so, Frank hopes to restore the theatre's rightful place in the story of criticism's emergence, thereby allowing an acknowledgment of the “performativity of criticism, both in the sense of what it accomplishes—the establishment of a native tradition coded as filiation—and in the appreciation of the means by which it does so” (2).

Democracy in One Country?

This article undertakes a critical examination of the political philosophy of Richard Rorty with special reference to his treatment of patriotism, pragmatism and democracy. Pragmatism, especially in the work of John Dewey, provided an energetic defence of American democracy, claiming that American democratic culture did not require any philosophical lessons from European social theory. American pragmatism is in this sense a celebration of indigenous political traditions. In his defence of pragmatism and patriotism against the cosmopolitanism of Left cultural critics, Rorty advocates pragmatic ethnocentrism. Through a parallel commentary on socialist internationalism, this article asks whether ‘democracy in one country’ - the United States of America - is either feasible or compatible with the critical legacy of pragmatism. In its response to the growth of international terrorism, especially in its ‘liberation of Iraq’, the United States is in danger of becoming a ‘predatory democracy’. While Rorty has in the past argued that America cannot function as a global policeman, the trend of contemporary international relations is to create an American Empire. The article concludes by arguing that Rorty’s patriotism functions as ‘a final vocabulary’ that contradicts his postmodernism and makes it difficult for modern pragmatism to remain a critical theory.

Porphyro's Rose: Keats and T.S. Eliot's ?The Metaphysical Poets?

A, Llthough T.S. Eliot's juvenilia display influence of Victorian aestheticism, his studies at Harvard, especially influence of Irving Babbitt's lectures there, helped foster his repudiation of Romantic forbears of turn-of-the-century poetics.1 In 1919, he had stated acerbically that the generation after 1830 preferred to form itself upon decadence, though decadence of genius: Wordsworth; and upon an immaturity, though an immaturity of genius: Keats and Shelley; and of English literature was retarded.2 George Bornstein notes that Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth became sort of anti-Trinity for Eliot, but by end of 1930s Eliot had reached general truce with Romanticism.3 A generation later, he implied that his struggle to find his own poetic voice had provided him an ability to view with greater clarity authors whom he had earlier disdained. As he remarked in 1955, final stage of development of taste and critical judgement in literature .. . is that at which we begin to enquire into reasons for our failure to enjoy what has been found delightful by men [; in doing so] one is seeking for light, not only about that author, but about oneself.4 Eliot's equivocal relationship to Romanticism reflects broader evolution of Modernist-Symbolist movement from early nineteenth-century roots, especially in its valuing of polyvalent symbol and organic nature of poetic form, key stone of Coleridge's critical legacy. In Eliot's case, he inherited from Romanticism a negative theology perfectly suited to genealogical recuperation of literary history as rebellion and restoration. Eliot's denials defend him against negative capabilities of his ancestors and plant his own negative authority in place of former laureates.5

Crowd Management: Matthew Arnold and the Science of Society

Through length and breadth of our a sense,-vague and obscure as yet,-of weariness with old organisations ... works and grows. In House of Commons old organisations must inevitably be most enduring and strongest, transformation must inevitably be longest in showing itself; and it may truly be averred, therefore, that at present juncture of is not in House of Commons. It is in of nation; and his is for next twenty years real influence who can address himself to this. Matthew Arnold, and Anarchy (1866-69) destinies of nations are elaborated at present in heart of masses, and no longer in councils of princes. Gustave Le Bon, Crowd (1896) GUSTAVE LE BON DECLARED IN HIS 1896 TEXT THAT THE COMING AGE WAS TO be The Era of Crowd. Matthew Arnold's own handbook to control, and Anarchy, published in 1869, suggests however that Le Bon merely sensationalized elements already potent enough some thirty years earlier to occasion Arnold's polemic on behalf of culture. Energizing Arnold's claims that through culture's opposition to and suppression of anarchy lies way not only to perfection, but even to safety, the era of crowd seems already to have arrived by middle of nineteenth century. While Arnold's sloganeering on behalf of culture produced such phrases as the that's been thought and said and sweetness and light, culture's antagonist, anarchy, has been a less conspicuous part of Arnold's critical legacy. As above passage indicates, however, power of figured by mass fermenting of nation should rightfully be accorded a signal place in reading and Anarchy, a text who se own apocalyptic tones resonate in amplified echoes of Le Bon.(1) monster-procession of Reform League's demonstrations for an expanded franchise in July 1866, a demonstration that turned riotous after police refused league access to Hyde Park, inspired Arnold to revise his initial lecture's title, Culture and its Enemies, and give his series of essays title of and Anarchy upon publication in book form in 1869. Officially relegating anarchic to a wound in social body, Arnold insists that best self of enjoins us to set our faces against whatever brings risk of tumult and disorder, most egregiously, processions in streets of our crowded towns (CA, p. 100). If these multitudinous meetings are to be put down, as Arnold insists, by soothing effects of culture, duly disperses, but does not quite disappear. Instead, in spite of a book intended to castigate and expel it as anarchic, scatters, only to regroup. collective character of is manifest not only in m onster processions, but also in men of culture who are docile echoes of eternal voice, pliant organs of infinite will, and our best self by which we are united, impersonal, at harmony (CA, pp. 186, 99). Even as is to be banished, Arnold acknowledges its governing power as a figure for social realm generally, vast fermenting mind of nation. Occupying a centre of movement that cannot be ignored, crowd's status as both anarchy and future of power for years to come impels in Arnold's work figurative efflorescences of a social force that can be acknowledged officially only in its suppression. Arnold's well-known efforts to dispel in and Anarchy, however, also run risk of eclipsing other, earlier manifestations of in his work. While and Anarchy is site of crowd's most infamous gathering in Arnold's corpus, reading poetry of years prior to his critical writings reveals that Arnold's interest in crowds predates Hyde Park demonstrations. And, though and Anarchy is site of Arnold's management in its official form, it is in Arnold's poetry that elaboration of as a manageable metonym of social realm begins. …

The voice that cannot be heard

Concerns are raised about the position of critical legacy and the formulation of orthodoxies in the rapid expansion of radio studies. From this location, the formulation of radio as a fundamentally ephemeral medium and a medium of voice is brought under scrutiny. So too the related formulation of radio archives as insufficient and lacking, especially in comparison to other media. In doing so, some methodological issues related to research and written archives vis-à-vis sound archives are brought into focus. Firstly, the problems of other media archives unsettle the orthodox position of the radio archives as fundamentally inferior. Secondly, the place of written texts in the production of voice is examined. Thirdly, postmodernist theory is employed to suggest that voice is not an object to be recovered from an archive, but that it is produced in the relationship between researcher, methodology and archive.

Porphyro's Rose: Keats and T.S. Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets"

Porphyro's Rose:Keats and T.S. Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets" Christopher Baker (bio) Although T.S. Eliot's juvenilia display the influence of Victorian aestheticism, his studies at Harvard, especially the influence of Irving Babbitt's lectures there, helped foster his repudiation of the Romantic forbears of turn-of-the-century poetics.1 In 1919, he had stated acerbically that "the generation after 1830 preferred to form itself upon a decadence, though a decadence of genius: Wordsworth; and upon an immaturity, though an immaturity of genius: Keats and Shelley; and the development of English literature was retarded."2 George Bornstein notes that "Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth became a sort of anti-Trinity for Eliot," but by the end of the 1930s Eliot had reached a "general truce with Romanticism."3 A generation later, he implied that his struggle to find his own poetic voice had provided him an ability to view with greater clarity authors whom he had earlier disdained. As he remarked in 1955, the final stage of "development of taste and critical judgement in literature ... is that at which we begin to enquire into the reasons for our failure to enjoy what has been found delightful by men [; in doing so] one is seeking for light, not only about that author, but about oneself."4 Eliot's equivocal relationship to Romanticism reflects the broader evolution of the Modernist-Symbolist movement from early nineteenth-century roots, especially in its valuing of the polyvalent symbol and the organic nature of poetic form, a keystone of Coleridge's critical legacy. In Eliot's case, he inherited from Romanticism "a negative theology perfectly suited to a genealogical recuperation of literary history as rebellion and restoration. Eliot's denials defend him against the negative capabilities of his ancestors and plant his own negative authority in the place of former laureates."5 [End Page 57] No predecessor could have modeled the virtues of negative capability for Eliot better than Keats, and there is ample evidence that he appropriated Keats's poetry and critical pronouncements to a greater degree than his early rejection of the Romantics suggests. Keats's influence appears in "Eliot's pre-1910 juvenilia, such as 'Before Morning' and 'On a Portrait,' where Keats, Rossetti and Swinburne preside over visions of 'fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn,' and the apparition of 'a pensive lamia in some wood-retreat, / An immaterial fancy of one's own.' "6 In The Waste Land, published twelve years afterwards, the line " '[o]ut of the window perilously spread' seems to owe something to Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale,' "7 and in the fourth of the "Five Finger Exercises" of 1933, Eliot alludes to the "Ode on Melancholy."8 His reference to the stillness of the Chinese jar in "Burnt Norton" (1936) section of The Four Quartets also suggests "Keats's Grecian urn—the static perfection acting as an unmoved mover upon the beholder."9 Eliot's practice of alluding to the work of others was pervasive enough to lead him to refer rather mordantly in a 1933 lecture to "the forty or fifty original lines that I have written."10 He ultimately came to share several fundamental tenets with Keats. Each believed that the English language as a poetic medium itself needed renewal; each looked for a way to embody meaning within the facticity of a physical image (for Keats this was the "material sublime," for Eliot the objective correlative); each praised the drama as offering a way of objectifying the poet's experience; and each sought a poetic perception founded on an undissociated sensibility—the meaning of Keats's noted remark: "O for a Life of Sensations rather than of thoughts."11 These Keatsian links in Eliot's work suggest the likelihood of an additional echo of Keats in Eliot's essay on "The Metaphysical Poets." Appearing first as a review of Herbert Grierson's 1921 anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, the essay contains his famous definition of that unified sensibility which he felt defined the Metaphysical poets prior to the Cartesian "dissociation of sensibility"12 which settled over English poetry after the Restoration. Eliot...

Data, Documentation and Display in Eighteenth–Century Investigations of Exeter Cathedral

Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth. His books include The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (Yale University Press, 1994) and Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain, 1770–1830 (Ashgate, 2000). He wrote J.M.W. Turner (2000) for the Tate Gallery’s British Artists series and is currently working on a re–evaluation of Turner and his critical legacy.Antiquarian inquiries into mediaeval architecture developed new approaches in the eighteenth century. In England, empirical observation, drawing inferences from the built structure and its embellishments, was championed as a corrective to the authority of earlier written accounts. Starting in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, medievalist research was put on a new footing, with careful surveys and accurate drawings promoted as the means to recuperate the development of mediaeval building techniques and architectural style. The work done on Exeter Cathedral is an early example of this turn in antiquarian research. With two nationally important antiquarians serving successively as Deans, Charles Lyttleton and Jeremiah Milles, work on restoring and researching the cathedral was undertaken from the 1740s onwards. The Cathedral was also one of the first to be published by the Society of Antiquaries (1797), with important engravings after John Carter’s drawings, and essays by Charles Lyttleton and Sir Henry Englefield. The success of Lyttleton, especially, in overturning the received understanding of the Cathedral’s development is notable, but his terminological looseness and his respect for textual authority were to be challenged in their turn by Englefield. The clarification of the history of Exeter Cathedral can thus stand as an epitome of wider changes in method in antiquarian scholarship in the second half of the eighteenth century.

'I Caught the Sudden Look of Some Dead Master': Eliot's Tradition and Modern Materialism

This essay explores the relations between T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition and the ‘modern materialism’ of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, and considers the implications of this resonance for both Eliot's critical legacy and the Marxist tradition. Initially surveying the critical controversy surrounding the canonical figure of Eliot and recent attempts to reconcile his avant-garde poetics with his reactionary social thought, the essay traces the roots of Eliot's tradition in a Nietzschean critique of historicism and its development into a theory of culture. Eliot's persistent drive towards impersonality echoes (and problematises) the efforts of Benjamin, Lacan and Althusser to construct a model of the social process that incorporates the unconscious. Rather than ultimately determining a set of political positions, the ‘missed encounter’ between Eliot's tradition and ‘modern materialism’ draws to light the Hegelian historicisms that haunt materialist theories of culture.

Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (review)

After reading Laurence Mazzeno's helpful if rather tendentious book, one cannot easily shake the impression that Arnold scholarship is as riven today as it was when The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems garnered mixed reviews in 1849. Few writers have elicited such extreme reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, as Mazzeno reminds us, Arnold seemed to delight in goading his critics, insisting that much of his task "as a reformer in poetical matters" was to "shake the present methods till they go down" (qtd. ix). Although Arnold was surely exaggerating here, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy can partly be viewed as a testament to his ongoing success.

"Pious Cant" and Blasphemy: Fanny Fern's Radicalized Sentiment

For contemporary readers who find nineteenth-century culture smotheringly conventional, Fanny Fern seems an enigmatically modern voice--funny, courageous, and disrespectful. She criticizes traditional Christian ministers, listless and blundering clerical expositors--many of whom offer us a Procrustean bed of theology, too short for any healthy creature of God to stretch himself upon (Fresh Leaves 90). By exposing materialism of pious, Fern demonstrates over and over that for many, contents of [the] pocket-book are most important, at expense of widows, orphans, immigrants, and poor (Fern Leaves, First Series 18). But unlike other nineteenth-century writers whose advanced feminism made them anathema to general public (for example, Lydia Maria Child), Fanny Fern was well-paid and popular. Her 1853 Fern Leaves From Fanny's Portfolio sold seventy thousand copies, and her success continued through a weekly column for New York Ledger (for more than fifteen years), two novels, five additional collections of articles, and three children's books. Fern's honored place in 1850s popular culture has prompted drastically different interpretive responses. Her literary success led Fred Pattee, in The Feminine Fifties, to describe her as the most tearful and convulsingly 'female' moralizer of whole modern blue-stocking school (110). The issue of sentimentalism has been central for U.S. feminist scholarship focusing on nineteenth century. Jane Tompkins's ground-breaking study Sensational Designs reclaimed culture as exemplary and formally skillful; in many ways, her work paved way for feminist re-evaluations of nineteenth-century women writers. Yet Tompkins's literary paradigm has often erroneously been applied to all women's writing of nineteenth century, and many scholars have moved away from Tompkins's celebration of sentimental power due to its gender essentialism and its often conservative politics. What is and how contemporary feminists can best understand and value are increasingly difficult questions to resolve. Fanny Fern is a prime example of this difficulty, for her writings both embody and challenge common understandings of culture. Her newspaper articles, even more than her fiction, combine funny and progressive critiques with pietistic fervor. It is this point that makes Fern so tantalizing and ultimately so frustrating, for alongside her subversiveness and her humor are anthems to God of nature and impassioned apologies for motherhood and religion--and irony is difficult to detect in many of these passages. Certain topics are off-limits for Fern; she approves of those who ha[ve] not learned to sniff at sacred things and never questions existence of God or truth of Christianity (Folly as it Flies 271). So is Fanny Fern or modern? Subversive or sincere? I would like to consider possibility that she is both. If Fern invoked irony to persuade her audience to a progressive Christian ethics and invoked pathos and religion for same purpose, what cultural implications might such a reading have for feminine fifties as well as for contemporary American culture? Examining Fern's critical legacy and her newspaper articles, this essay will consider following proposition: Fanny Fern's humor, her feminism, and her progressive politics came not in spite of or against her Christianity, but through it. CRITICAL ACCOUNTS OF FERN: SUBVERSIVE SENTIMENTALISM Before development of feminist literary and cultural criticism in seventies, Fanny Fern appeared in most critical accounts (when she appeared at all) as a prototype of weepy sentimentalism--a pious, insipid popular icon of a consumerized American culture. Feminist reclamations of Fanny Fern, by contrast, emphasize her nonsentimental qualities. To most feminist scholars, it seems incompatible for Fern simultaneously to lampoon hypocritically pious and to muse on joys of flowers, motherhood, and Christ. …

What Makes Successful Business Lobbies? Business Associations and the Rentier State in Jordan and Kuwait

Whether neoliberal or statist oriented, most social scientists concur that business-state relations are key variables in a developing country's economic performance.1 Recent studies of business-state relations in the developing world derive from analysis of the developmental Asian state and emphasize bureaucratic insulation and autonomy.2 Middle East comparativists have employed a similar top-down method that stresses the transformative effects exogenous state rents such as oil and aid have on the structural capacities of the state and relations with the private sector. Both approaches have generally ignored the institutional mediations between the private and public sectors. To construct more accurate models of business-state relations, scholars need to build on the statist approach by shifting focus to the institutional representation of business. In many developing countries the role of business in policy formation and implementation runs through business associations, yet we know little about how these associations, as variable institutions, affect that relationship.3 This issue is of particular importance in Arab and African countries, where business has come to occupy center stage as state officials struggle to balance revenue needs with the imperatives of economic growth. Moreover, a critical legacy of decades-long exogenous rent in these countries is the state's lack of extractive and information-gathering capabilities, institutional powers necessary for successful economic reform. Consequently, the role business associations play as providers of economic information and policy input is crucial. Faced with a decline in exogenous finance in the 1980s, most Arab states proclaimed a new openness to policy input from the private sector. Jordan and Kuwait were typical in this respect. However, the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) proved far better at advocating policy options and participating in policy implementation than its counterpart in Jordan, the Amman Chamber of Commerce (ACC). The comparison raises two questions. First, what conditions are conducive to policy capable associations that can lobby successfully and effectively participate with state officials to implement policy? Second, in Arab countries struggling with complex fiscal crises, what role do business associations play in the formulation and implementation of economic policy? Strong, effective business associations can compensate for weak state capacities in formulating and implementing economic reform in the developing world, and an often overlooked factor in the abil-

Matthew Arnold

Laurence W. Mazzeno's survey of the critical reception of Arnold's works in Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Camden House) should be welcomed by all Arnold scholars as a valuable aid to themselves and their advanced students as well. Mazzeno, an academic administrator with a longstanding interest in Arnold, is a former editor of The Arnoldian and also its successor, Nineteenth-Century Prose. Although he approaches the vast legacy of Arnold criticism with Arnoldian disinterestedness, his affection for his subject comes through as well. Like other scholars who have prepared studies of this kind for Camden's "Literary Criticism in Perspective" series--for example, Patricia O'Neill, Robert Browning and Twentieth-Century Criticism (1995)--Mazzeno has had to be highly selective, passing over many interesting but narrowly focused studies through the years.

The Real and the Formal: Legal Realism Revisited

The article aims to pursue a reassessment of one fundamental binary opposition legal realism invokes - the real and the formal. While some of the realist objections to the formal, mechanistic concept of adjudication have been insightful, the realist writers have been for the most part unaware of some of the formalistic and ultimately self-refuting presuppositions of their own rhetoric. This article argues that realism betrays its very rationale and mimics the mainstream formalism, as it effectively supplants the formalistic considerations of law as a system of rules with its own markedly formalistic preoccupations of law as the right method or theory. The article ventures to indicate some of the realist associations with the earlier European realism, with that of Françoise Gény in particular, which have consistently been neglected in the traditional assessments of the legal realist critical legacy. In so doing, the article relies not only on deconstructive strategies, but it also greatly presumes both the Wittgensteinean argument on ‘privacy’ and Stanley Fish’s critique of formalism in literary and legal studies.

Maria Irene Fornes and her critics

Introduction Critical, Theoretical, Historical Context Critical Legacy A Pragmatic Feminist Perspective Contextualizing Fornes Maria Irene Fornes: Career and Works Early Plays Fefu and her Critics The 'Mud' Plays And What of the Night? Appendix: Maria Irene Fornes Timeline References Index

Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism

Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism

Representation and Its Discontents. The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism

Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism. Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.

Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism

Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism

The alternative in Eastern Europe at century's start: Brozozowski and Machajski on intellectuals and socialism

It is unfortunate how unfamiliar social theorists and philosophers from Western Europe and even more so North America are with the East European critical intellectual legacy. Debates among leading East European communist intellectuals are usually part of the Western critical repertoire, and occasionally some anarchist contributions might inform Western thinking. But it is relatively rare to find theorists such as Machajski and especially Brzozowski in the bibliographies of Western products, even while the experiences of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. are becoming the stock of what transforms the critical perspective. This, I believe, is a major handicap for the analysis of socialism, as the issues that are central to the problem of socialism - the relationship between intellectuals and other classes on the one hand, and on the other the relationship between class and nationality - are dealt with in a more sustained manner by East European than by other intellectual cultures. I shall return to this claim in the conclusion of this essay, but it might be an argument difficult to sustain with East Europeans today as the Polish critical legacy pales in the light of the angloamerimania of contemporary Eastern European intellectual culture. One will not find many intellectuals focusing on Machajski and Brzozowski in Poland today. Indeed, Maehajski has never really been much of a part of Polish intellectual culture, given his anti-intellectual and anti-national stance. 2 Brzozowski is periodically fashionable in Polish culture, but at the present he is quite invisible in intellectual life.