Critical Tradition Research Articles

The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature

The Trope of the Mirror in Contemporary Experimental Literature Saloua Karoui-Elounelli Ever since M. H. Abrams used the metaphor of the mirror in his theorizing of mimetic literature, the trope has been invested in communicating opposed tendencies of literary creativity and largely antithetical conceptions of the literary art. Indeed, from Abrams’ seminal work The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), and up to the theoretical rethinking of mimetic and anti-mimetic literary narrative, in works such as Narcissistic Narrative (1980) by Linda Hutcheon, Silverless Mirrors (1983) by Charles Caramello, or also Postmodernist Fiction (1987) by Brian McHale, the trope of reflection and mirroring have abounded in the critical discourse. Whether in the theoretical delineations of mimetic fiction or avant-gardist metafiction, such tropes have often prompted a questioning of literature’s relation to aesthetic and cultural paradigms, which, in turn, has directed scholarly research to a vital reconsideration of the notion of experimentation. Indeed, the persistent debate, and even controversy, in the discourse of literary criticism, around the idea of the experimental is partly grounded in the divergent approaches to the terms of the relationship that connects literary creativity to an apprehension of its poetics, as well as to the politics of culture. In the context of the modern and postmodern literary production, the debate around the experimental vein in literature has often acknowledged the relevance of the issue of literary self-reflexivity which is not assumed to be a (post)modern invention, but rather to have gained prominence since James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake (1939) and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim Two Birds (1939). The argument that the thematic and aesthetic significance of self-reflexivity in the poetics of experimental literature induces a rethinking of the two concepts of mimesis and representation has contributed a great deal to the critical interest in scrutinizing the metadiscursive, and often self-ironic, quality of such literature. In the context of the present issue, the term “experimental” is conceived of in line with what Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale posit when they argue that “all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself” [End Page v] (1). Experimentation and avant-gardism are both conceived of as interrelated qualities of the kind of literary texts that question and demystify their own formal constructs as much as they reinvigorate a critique and a skeptical outlook of cultural and ideological discourses alike. The radicalism of such critique and / or skepticism ranges from the aestheticism of literary self-irony—with an invocation of a sense of crisis with regard to the notions of creativity and representation that the verbal art can neither trust nor do without—to the engagement with the politics of representation and the unmasking of the ideological (and, possibly, hegemonic) implications of literary conventions and systems.1 The rhetorical turn in the discourse of literary criticism and in the critical dimension of self-reflexive literature, whereby the trope of the mirror becomes connotative of a metacritical, metadiscursive move, allows the trope to mediate a critical rethinking of literature’s representational processes. As Caramello puts it: “texts have turned their reflecting planes inward, towards one another, and they have skewed these planes even further by incorporating a metalinguistic discourse on that turning” (48). Far from being mere pointless solipsism, or expressing a predilection for aestheticism, the inward move of literary self-reflexive texts tends to be associated with a continuous interest in raising key conceptual questions that hinge upon the paradoxes of the creative process, or pinpoint, in the very play of self-reflexivity, issues of cultural encounter, traumatic experience, or the act of resistance. In fact, the essays gathered in the present volume / issue go each in either one of those directions, arguing either for the substantial metacritical thematics in metafictional narratives (Elounelli, Dridi) or for the significance of cultural and historiographic critique (Bueher, Souissi, Bouhlila, and Fekir). Critical works on self-reflexive fiction in the scene of experimental postmodern and postcolonial literary writing were mostly published in the late 1970s (Robert Alter, Robert Scholes) and the 1980s (Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Rose, Patricia...

To Reclaim Einfühlung: The Search for a Formula of Radical Empathy in Harun Farocki’s Early Work

Beginning with a close reading of Harun Farocki's Einfühlung, the author analyzes the formation of this tradition of empathy and the critical attitude towards it, with particular emphasis on the sense of failure and the retrospectiveness of the postulate of regaining the Einfühlung by the critical tradition. The author looks at the role of photographs of suffering bodies in the process of shaping the German public sphere during the Vietnam War. He tries to show the complexity of strategies critical of the mass media by reconstructing Farocki's polemics with terrorist movements. He analyses parodying the use of television aesthetics in Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and includes it into the tradition of fighting the tabloid media. He is interested in the reevaluation of the relation between the body and image, which enables reaching beyond the pattern of empathy by means of identification and the idea of “Einfühlung, which has caused the alienation effect.”

The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton

Reviewed by: The Norton Chaucer ed. by David Lawton David Raybin David Lawton, ed. The Norton Chaucer. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Pp. xii, 1196. $62.50 cloth; $35.00 e-book. Chaucer scholars and students alike may be grateful to David Lawton for his composition of a much-needed and reasonably priced classroom-friendly edition of Chaucer's complete works. The sturdy, hardback Norton Chaucer provides reliable texts and helpful introductory material, and it is admirably user-friendly for both students and a general audience. Pages are easy on the eyes, presenting Chaucer's poetry and prose in single columns and a large and crisp font. Marginal glosses are placed at the side of each page, with explanatory notes at the bottom. Lawton's lightly modernized texts are easily legible, and the presentation is comfortable enough for sitting back in a chair and reading. As best as I can tell, the only other edition of the complete works currently in print is Oxford University Press's 2008 paperback reissue of the 1987 Riverside Chaucer, available in Britain but not for sale in the United States or Canada. Thus, for North Americans who wish to read all of Chaucer, the book is a necessity. British readers may also prefer Norton, as the Riverside paperback's minuscule print and back-of-volume notes are difficult to use for many readers. It must be acknowledged that the Norton Chaucer is not a replacement for Riverside as a standard scholarly edition. The glories of Riverside are its voluminous explanatory and textual notes, detailed (albeit now out-dated) discussions of the critical tradition, and an authoritative list of primary texts. In contrast, Norton includes no textual notes and relatively few explanatory notes, treats the critical tradition only minimally, presents a selective three-page bibliographical note that ignores primary sources, and prints only fifty lines from the G-text of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (those related to "Chaucer's library" [1117]). Recommendations for reading about Chaucer's life are limited to Derek Pearsall's 1992 biography and two articles by Christopher Cannon on raptus and rape (though a careful eye will find Marion Turner's massive Chaucer: A European Life mentioned in relation to "Chaucer's place as a European writer and thinker" [51]). Norton's twenty-six-page glossary hardly compares with Riverside's hundred pages of Middle English words and seventeen pages of proper names. What the Norton Chaucer does offer is a splendid volume for classroom use. Lawton's General Introduction (fifty-three pages) speaks lucidly of Chaucer's life, reading, afterlives, and reception; of the urban and national [End Page 421] political and social environments that he inhabited; and of the manuscripts and principal editions of his various works. An additional section (eleven pages) offers a cogent treatment of Chaucer's language and meter, and a rationale for mild modernization of the manuscript spellings. Brief descriptive analyses introduce each of Chaucer's longer works, the different parts (fragments) of the Canterbury Tales, and the shorter poems. This presentation facilitates "reading Chaucer in his original language" by recognizing that "nonspecialist readers … may need less apparatus and more help than standard scholarly editions provide" (45). A CD included with the book introduces readers to the sounds of Chaucer's Middle English. Twenty-nine admirably clear recordings from across Chaucer's work—by Lawton, Jennifer Brown, Ruth Evans, and Elizabeth Robertson—capture the energy and many voices of Chaucer's poetry. What matters most in a Chaucer edition is, of course, the quality of its texts, and Lawton's texts are reliable. He has reedited "[e]very line of Chaucer's poetry, consulting manuscripts, [E. Talbot] Donaldson's text [in the 1958 Chaucer's Poetry]), and the decisions of other editors" (ix), including light adaptation of Kathryn Lynch's Norton Critical Edition of the dream poems. Chaucer's prose texts are newly edited by Jennifer Arch. Following on Donaldson's lead, Lawton has rethought punctuation and modernized spelling, though not to the extent of his predecessor, and he has retained the traditional Canterbury Tales line numbering by part instead of Donaldson's separate numbering of each tale...

Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance by Jelena Marelj

Reviewed by: Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance by Jelena Marelj Amy Cook SHAKESPEAREAN CHARACTER: LANGUAGE IN PERFORMANCE. By Jelena Marelj. Arden Shakespeare Studies in Language and Digital Methodologies series. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019; pp. 264. Jelena Marelj’s smart and insightful book argues that Shakespeare’s characters come into being and gain their extraordinary sense of depth and richness from the specifics of their language. Marelj intervenes in the long tradition of character criticism by “approaching character from the field of linguistic pragmatics to examine how our impression of characters’ ontological reality is produced” (4–5). She challenges her readers to see that this impression, at least in the case of Shakespeare’s characters, is not that of “interiority,” or the sense of having an “a-historical and essential” inner being, but is rather of “anteriority,” or the sense that the character “pre-dates its fictional life as a dramatic speaker.” The keyword here is speaker, since Marelj’s analytical method is rooted in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that foregrounds context, turn-taking, prosody—in essence the performance of language (an obvious fit for the study of Shakespeare and of theatre in general). This engagement with pragmatics allows us to see how Shakespeare builds characters from words, words, words in the right place and time. Marelj’s analysis of her chosen characters is rich and nuanced. She draws from pragmatics philosopher H. P. Grice the idea of “conversational implicatures,” or the implied meanings created by the use of language in a particular performance context, to illuminate the “excess meanings” produced by, for example, Falstaff’s many puns and insults (25). Falstaff’s speech early in 1 Henry IV, which begins by asking Hal the time of day and ends by requesting that his young friend, when a king, not hang a thief, is, Marelj shows, a complex series of puns on knights, booty, the moon, government, and stealing, leading to the implication that Falstaff, as noble knight and thief, is not that different from the thieving government of Henry of Bolingbroke. Falstaff’s point is not made directly, but arises in the performance of the text. Marelj also uses what Grice called “maxims,” or universal and unspoken rules for conversations, such as the need to “avoid ambiguity,” “be brief,” and “make your contributions as informative as is required” to measure certain dramatic choices (27). Identifying where characters flout these rules provides her with particular passages of analytical [End Page 383] interest. While her readings are firmly grounded in pragmatics, the value of this complex theoretical armature is not always evident. When performed by talented Shakespearean actors, for example, these meanings are clear even if the audience does not know what maxim has been broken. Perhaps this particular theoretical knife was necessary for Marelj to cut open these characters’ language, but as a reader, I found myself at once impressed by her insights into Shakespeare’s characters and un-persuaded to read Grice. The characters that anchor her chapters are the ones that readily lodge themselves into readers’ and spectators’ minds: the larger than life, the confusing, the paradoxical. Her first chapter on Falstaff argues that his “roundness” as a character in 1 Henry IV comes from his “linguistic performances in a theatrical context” (26). When Falstaff and Hal take turns playing the king, their funny, metatheatrical performance of kingship works to highlight, according to Marelj, the ways in which the king himself is only “playing” at kingship. Falstaff, as she puts it, “shows the king to be a counterfeit in counterfeiting the king” (49). Hal, once he becomes King Henry in Henry V, uses the lessons in language he received in 1 Henry IV to establish his right to the throne through manipulative oratory. Falstaff’s student receives greater attention in chapter 3, in which Marelj describes how both the episodic scene structure and the language that constantly shifts its perspective on the king and his history turn Henry V’s Henry into a strangely anamorphic character. For example, she points out that the juxtaposition of the scene with the noble traitors alongside the scene announcing Falstaff’s death frames Henry’s actions as similarly traitorous—or in...

Female perspectives on the Relationship between Janet Frame's autobiography and fiction

Female perspectives on the Relationship between Janet Frame's autobiography and fiction Eva Rueschmann Josephine A. McQuail , ed. Janet Frame in Focus: Women Analyze the Works of the New Zealand Writer. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. 207 pp. $49.95 ISBN: 9781476669731 In Patricia Moran's foreword to Janet Frame in Focus: Women Analyze the Work of the New Zealand Writer, she points out that Janet Frame may be more widely known as the [End Page 145] subject of Jane Campion's 1990 film An Angel at My Table , based on Frame's autobiography, than as a prolific writer of fiction, short stories, and poetry in her own right. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1924, Frame lived a life that was marked by multiple family tragedies, illness, and poverty; a profound sense of marginalization and insecurity; and an eight-year stay in a mental institution in her twenties, following a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. From a young age, Frame showed an extraordinary literary inventiveness and startlingly original prose. This unconventionality and her painful shyness often resulted in her social isolation and misunderstanding by a conformist society. Yet Frame's literary talent ultimately saved her life and creativity: in 1952, the announcement of the Hubert Church Memorial Award for her first shortstory collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), was a pivotal turning point and spared her from the looming certainty of a devastating lobotomy at the young age of twenty-eight. Writing became a refuge for what Frame called her "homelessness of self." Today Frame is highly regarded for her complex experimental (some people argue postmodern) writing and her poetic, richly metaphoric use of language—but she is less well known in the United States. This new collection of scholarly essays edited by Josephine McQuail, a professor of English at Tennessee Technical University, reintroduces Frame as a writer of autobiography, fiction, and poetry to an American audience and seeks to redress the dominant preoccupation with Frame as New Zealand's stereotyped "mad woman artist." Janet Frame in Focus features ten essays—eight written exclusively for this book—that offer an array of critical approaches but center on the ways in which Frame wrote about her childhood and life experiences, her quest for an artistic identity and voice, and her preoccupation with language—its conventionality and potential for originality and rebellion—in both her autobiography and her fiction. Overall, the collection follows in a tradition of feminist criticism concerned with social images of the female writer and artist as "mad" and "dangerous." In the wake of the women's movement of the 1970s, two influential works by prominent feminist scholars, Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1890–1980 (1985) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), famously critiqued the gendered conception of female creativity as malady and insanity. This critique echoed Frame's own perspective on the gendered social construction of mental illness decades before. Among previous scholarly studies of Frame's writing, Gina Mercer's Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (1995), which employs Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous as theoretical frameworks, is the most explicitly feminist treatment of Frame's work. Mercer is somewhat dismissive of Frame's autobiography as too linear and transparent compared to the radical feminist potential of her complex prose. In contrast, Claire Bazin, a French expert on Frame at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, argues in her book Janet Frame (2011) that Frame's more conventionally narrated autobiography serves as a valuable key to unlock the meaning of her fiction. Claire Bazin is one of the principal contributors to Janet Frame in Focus, with her essay on strategies of avoidance in The Lagoon and Other Stories. Bazin's scholarship on Frame also inspired her former students Aurelia Mouzet, Manon-Lili Morand, Jennifer Boum Make, and Marion Clavier to contribute original essays for this volume. These scholars bring a French perspective to Frame's writing, deploying the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean-François [End Page 146] Lyotard, Homi Bhabha, and Sigmund Freud in their both modern and postmodern readings of Frame. Janet Frame in...

Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener

Reviewed by: Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener Alberto Ribas-Casasayas Whitener, Brian. Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. Economic criticism of culture has had a robust comeback after the Great Recession. Arguably, though, most scholarly work has tended to focus on the cultural production of richer countries. In this context, Crisis Cultures by Brian Whitener represents a fundamental contribution to cultural approaches to contemporary Latin America from the perspective of finance and economics, and, more extensively, to global cultural critique. The stated objective of the book is to investigate “how the rise of finance has impacted social and cultural life” (13), with a focus on cultural production in Mexico and Brazil from the last decade of the twentieth century to present. Whitener’s account contextualizes this production beyond neoliberalism, which he understands as a modulation of a longer-term downturn originated in the decrease of capital returns in the 1970s and the hyperinflation and debt crisis of the 1980s. Whitener’s analysis is sustained by a comprehensive and solid theoretical grounding paired with a thorough understanding of the concrete particularities of political economic developments in both Mexico and Brazil. The book opens with a thorough and substantial introduction situating the importance of a financial approach to culture after nearly 40 years of a state of crisis, “and perhaps a Marxist and antistate critique of it” (9). Whitener understands that the rise of financial forms of accumulation were “fueled by a secular declining rate of profit or ongoing, underlying problems in the sphere of production” (11). Whitener understands that, after nearly 40 years in a crisis cycle in Latin America, we cannot ignore the cultural impact of economy and finance, particularly when, in a context of increasing surplus capital and surplus population, states resort to policing and violence to subordinate the latter. Whitener eschews traditional critiques of the “shrinking state” under neoliberalism, attending instead to infrastructures that organize bodies and producing them as weak individuals and collectivities defined by—borrowing an expression from Ruth Gilmore—“group-differentiated individuality to premature death” (19). Chapter one focuses largely on Jorge Volpi’s novel En busca de Klingsor as an intellectual response to the embedding of chaos and indeterminacy in Mexican consciousness—the result of dramatically deteriorating living conditions following the 1982 and other successive crises. Whitener’s interpretation of the novel is thorough and internally consistent, suggesting that the novel’s “schatologic” discourse attests to the institution of a “catastrophic and chaotic” concept of history (47). Hence, “the novel’s ontology that reality is indeterminate and that believing [End Page 885] in determinism tendentially leads to illiberalism” (50). Whitener further argues that Volpi’s novel partakes in a general conceptual recodification that leads to the expansion of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse to the more tenuous blanket identifier of “delincuencia” to surplus population in an escalating drug war conflict (44–46), a claim that may require more extensive verification and contrast with contemporaneous discourse. Nonetheless, Klingsor arguably “allows us to register this specific sense of the end of history and of the ideologies of progress in its context of semi-peripheral financial crisis” (52) and demonstrates “the deep roots of the tropes of ontology and catastrophe within a response to financial and state crisis and their continued importance in both literary and popular discursive spheres” (52, 53). Chapters two and three, focused on Brazil, elaborate on this latter point with particular pertinence to urban culture and society by means of an insightful discussion of Zuenir Ventura’s chronicle Cidade partida, Paulo Lins’s novel Cidade de Deus, the blockbuster film Tropa de elite, and the soap opera Cheias de charme. Chapter two explains how the socialization of crisis through hyperinflation and unemployment, inflected by an accelerated State violence, and aimed particularly towards the urban periphery, was accompanied by the development of an intellectual production that refashioned racial and discursive formations. The social forms that arose from local conditions of financial crisis reveal how debilitated national narratives such as “racial democracy” and the failure of social synthesis were animated by forces inherent to racialization and “real...

Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life by Jonathan Buckmaster

Reviewed by: Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life by Jonathan Buckmaster Gillian Piggott (bio) Jonathan Buckmaster. Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life. Edinburgh UP, 2019. Pp. xii + 220. £75.00. ISBN 9781474406956. For those of you who, like me, have never known quite how to read Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, you would do well to turn to Jonathan Buckmaster's great new study, Dickens's Clowns. It is an ambitious and admirable work, because not only does Buckmaster reappraise the Memoirs (and Cruikshank's illustrations within it) as a fascinating work and a major influence upon Dickens and his output, but he ranges much further in exploring how Grimaldi's pantomime clown informs Dickens's treatment of characters, his aesthetics and philosophy of life, as well as the contours of his humor. The book will be of particular interest to those working on theater and comedy in Dickens, as Buckmaster uses theories of comedy and the mechanics of pantomime performance to read the fictions. In addition there are some fascinating insights into the relationship between comedy and violence, slapstick and reading Dickens. Dickens's characters bounce off the page and "assault" the reader, displaying the anatomy of slapstick violence, Buckmaster claims. The author even asserts that some of Dickens's sentences are constructed in the form and rhythm of a slapstick gag in performance. The political resonances of pantomime's "illegitimacy," subversion and resistance to conformity, and the appeal this had for Dickens, are also an important part of the discussion. These are big issues to handle. To do so Buckmaster divides his study into three parts. The first part, "Dickens, Grimaldi and the Pantomime Clown," contextualizes the debate within the critical tradition of pantomime and the clown, which stretches back over Dickens's formative years, to the 1720s (ch. 2). In Chapter 3, Buckmaster tackles Dickens's journalism, bringing out and elaborating upon two overarching themes with respect to the writings on pantomime: the idea that life emerges as an absurd comedic pantomime, and Dickens's notion that pantomime is a crucial source of wonder and fancy in a cynical, dark, modern world. In Part II, Buckmaster turns to the Memoirs, reminding us of the palimpsestic status the Dickens text occupies in relation to its source material. Dickens is in fact synthesizing and making additions to Thomas Egerton Wilks's abridgement of Grimaldi's own account of his life. Building on the idea that biography in the 1830s was an unstable genre, and drawing upon extant life-writing theories such as eighteenth-century century stage biography and "the relational life," Buckmaster argues in Chapter 4 for understanding the work of Dickens's Memoirs as so much more creative than all of these theories, claiming that in writing it Dickens makes genuine advancements in the notions of theatricality and identity. Chapter 5 [End Page 437] explores the importance of Cruikshank's illustrations in the reconstruction of Grimaldi's life, presenting an image/text analysis that is familiar, but extending it to the idea that Cruikshank's involvement amounts to the perfect symbiotic relationship between nineteenth-century theatrical and pictorial traditions. Perhaps the most free-wheeling and enjoyable part of the book is Part III, "The Clown at Large." Here, Buckmaster revels in creativity, identifying three tropes – the excessive consumption of food and drink; the use of slapstick violence against the vulnerable; and the transformative power of clothing – that live out a new and expanded life in Dickens's own fictional creations and comedy. As a panto obsessive from childhood, Dickens absorbed the influence like mother's milk. Pantomime, for him, was a "polysemic vehicle for his own ideas" (43). As Buckmaster puts it: "Dickens found in pantomime an artform sympathetic to his attentiveness to … the hyperbolic, the bodily grotesque, the margins between good and bad, alive and dead, mundane and magical." Dickensian traits such as "exaggeration, magnifying, intensifying and accumulating, find a natural corollary in the practices of the pantomime clown, who supersizes the world and multiplies to excess" (52). The burning question, which Buckmaster does not answer directly, is why one of the world's...

À L'ombre De Vautrin: Proust Et Balzac by Mariolina Bongiovanni-Bertini

Reviewed by: À L'ombre De Vautrin: Proust Et Balzac by Mariolina Bongiovanni-Bertini Hollie Harder Bongiovanni-Bertini, Mariolina. À l'ombre de Vautrin: Proust et Balzac. Garnier, 2019. ISBN 978-2-406-08382-5. Pp. 209. Although Balzac's manner of depicting characters and illustrating social codes in La comédie humaine has often been compared to that of Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu, Bongiovanni-Bertini expands and enriches this critical tradition in her superb analysis of the Balzacian narrative techniques adopted by Proust to express some of his most profound ideas about literature and human nature. Her careful examination of Balzac's presence in Proust's opus, beginning with Jean Santeuil, under-scores shared elements in the novelists' works, such as textual heterogeneity (where commentaries on morality, politics, and philosophy regularly interrupt conventional storylines), encyclopedic explanations, melodramatic plot twists, linguistic diversity, and the novelty of characters who, transformed by time, reappear over the course of a number of volumes. But the central focus of this comparative study is the notion of déchiffrement, a writing strategy that appears chez Proust, for example, as early as 1903 in a Figaro article where he suggests that an architectural detail of the hôtel of a Parisian salonnière reveals an unsuspected trait of her personality. According to Bongiovanni-Bertini, Proust draws his inspiration for this literary technique largely from Balzac's "Les secrets de la princesse de Cadignan" and the multifarious personnage, Vautrin. In the short story, a veritable "texte-charnière" (47) for Proust, Diane de Cadignan tells complex lies to hide from her lover, Daniel d'Arthez, certain indiscretions in her past, a situation that foreshadows those of Albertine, Odette, and Morel in the Recherche. Like the princess's amoureux, Swann and Charlus are intent on interpreting the inscrutable signs of their loved ones. Unlike d'Arthez, however, the characters in Proust's novel ultimately fail in their attempts to decipher the other. Integral to the act of déchiffrement for both writers are the role of imagination in the experience of love and the impact of suffering on those who fear that at any moment, embarrassing details of their lives may emerge. From Proust's perspective, Vautrin's unique skill in [End Page 213] concealing a multitude of identities and secrets enables him to function as "le déchiffreur de 'l'envers de l'histoire contemporaine'" and represent "la 'vérité selon Balzac'" (118), the same sort of clandestine truth that Charlus elucidates in the world of the Recherche. The baron's gift for deciphering words, gestures, sounds, and images—the legacy of his literary forefather, Vautrin—makes Charlus not only "le plus balzacien des personnages de Proust" (165) but also the "porte-parole de la lecture proustienne de Balzac" (188). In a critical work of such high quality, it is surprising to find a gender error in the title of the first chapter. Nonetheless, this impressive study greatly enhances our understanding and appreciation of Balzac's substantial influence on the forme and fond of the Recherche. Hollie Harder Brandeis University (MA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Recensione a Montañés, maestro de maestros, catalogo della mostra a cura di Ignacio Cano Rivero, Ignacio Hermoso Romero e María del Valme Muñoz Rubio

The critical review, recent restorations and an excellent photographic campaign have allowed a new reading of the work of Juan Martínez Montañés, the greatest wood sculptor of the Andalusian Renaissance. The Seville exhibition and its catalog explored themes such as the role of the wood arts in 16th and 17th century Andalusia, the contextual meaning of the art of the retable and the importance of polychromy in Montañés’s sculpture. Some attributions appear less convincing and a summary biographical profile that would have facilitated the reading of the essays and catalog entries is missing. This paper takes its cue from the theme of the exhibition to compare the Italian and Spanish critical tradition on polychrome wood sculpture. In Spain the high consideration for this sector of artistic production has always kept it at the center of the interests of the client and critics, unlike what has happened in Italy.

Towards a Sociology of KOS and More Basic KO Research

It is suggested that the knowledge organization (KO) field places greater emphasis on basic research that examines the sociology of KO systems (KOS) and the broader, environmental reasons for the development of both formal and informal KOS. This approach is contrasted with applied KO, which focuses on the practical construction or improvement of specific KOS. The preponderance of applied research in the field of KO is confirmed, at least within the document-centric strand more closely aligned with library and information science, through a survey of articles in the Knowledge Organization journal published between 2009 and 2018. The survey utilized the Frascati Manual definitions for basic and applied research, and referenced Tennis’s classification of KO research (2008). There is considerable potential for building on the critical tradition of KO, with various areas ripe for further sociological investigation. A sociology of KOS could also be accommodated in the popular KO approach of domain analysis.

R. H. Tawney

R. H. Tawney is readily mistaken for an uncompromising moralist for whom the return of a Christian ethics of medieval intensity was the only way forward. Tawney never used the term “moral economy,” but he initiated the critical tradition that later gave that term currency. The term today bears the marks of these origins and is frequently seen as doctrinaire and retrograde. What put Tawney ahead of his own time, however, was his perception that the economists’ spiritual blindness was spreading. His concern was not to fill the ensuing vacuum with some prescribed content, but rather to make the deepening void notorious.

Doubled and Divided by the Gaze: Psychopathic Identity in Racine's Bérénice (1670)

The importance of the eye (visual metaphors, seeing and being seen) and more specifically the gaze in Jean Racine's theatrical corpus is well established (Barthes, Mauron, Starobinski), but under-analyzed in the construction and disintegration of Emperor Titus' identity in Bérénice. This article contests the critical tradition that interprets Racine's Bérénice as a tragedy of the lovers' painful parting and the contention that Titus makes a conscious decision to rule without his lover. Instead, it locates the tragedy in Titus' crisis of identity, a consequence of the conflict between his libidinal gaze and the paternal gaze of Roman Law and posits Titus as a character who attempts to reconcile incongruent, conflicting images of his own identity. Therefore, I argue, Titus becomes a figure for the double revealed in three configurations: lover/ruler, child/Father, and victim/executioner. Titus experiences these disparate selves as incompatible and hence suffers anagnorisis (leading to self-immolation) thus fulfilling Freud's three characteristics of modern drama.

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays ed. by Laurie Ellinghausen Marina J. Bergenstock Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays. Edited by Laurie Ellinghausen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2017. Pp. 249 + illus. $24.00, paper. Google the term “Teaching Shakespeare” and among the top hits will be: “How to Teach Shakespeare so Your Students Won’t Hate It,” “Teaching Shakespeare the Fun Way,” “How to Teach Shakespeare and Make It Understandable for Your Students,” and “Using Humor to Teach Shakespeare.” If this search is any indication, it seems clear that instructors want (or are required to) include Shakespeare in their curriculum, but how to do it in a way that engages students is not always evident. That’s where Laurie Ellinghausen’s Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays comes in. In this book, Ellinghausen has assembled a selection of excellent essays that collectively provide a thorough and innovative guide to bringing Shakespeare’s history plays to life in the modern classroom. The book is broken up into two parts. Part 1, “Materials,” provides instructors with resources for primary texts, performance, many branches of critical tradition based on the instructor’s interests, and digital resources. Part 2, “Approaches,” presents nearly thirty essays that provide exciting new material that is informative and accessible for everyone from a novice teacher to even the most seasoned instructor of Shakespeare, covering everything from the geography of the still-emerging Britain of Shakespeare’s time to land use, political power, ecological stewardship, and visualizing stagecraft. In Rebecca Ann Bach’s essay “Queering Richard II: Teaching Love, Sex, and Gender Historically,” the author takes us through an example close read of the text with a class. Bach points out that, in recent years, so much has changed in the United States in regards to gender and sexuality that students must take care not to make one-to-one comparisons in our modern thinking with what people in England thought four hundred years ago. In Lisa Siefker Bailey’s essay “Hustling Masculinity: Teaching 1 Henry IV with My Own Private Idaho,” the reader learns about the experiences Bailey’s students have had putting these two works in conversation with each other. Bailey notes that confronting the issues presented to them in Shakespeare’s text and Gus Van Sant’s movie emboldens students to engage in challenging dialogues. When asked about the challenges this particular aspect of Shakespeare’s canon poses for students, one respondent talked about the fact that, when it comes to the comedies, students seem to come in with relatively positive ideas about them and “with tragedies, students seem to come to class knowing they [End Page 239] are important and that they will be good” (24). However, with the history plays, students come in not understanding them or wanting to read them. Shakespeare’s history plays were written in a particular political and religious context that isn’t generally taught to students in the twenty-first century. Also, the issues don’t just begin and end there. It’s not difficult to see why students would be frustrated, with so many kinds of history at work in Shakespeare’s plays including (but not limited to) “medieval fabulae, urban history, chronicle history, classical allusion, and typological biblical history” (24). The essays compiled by Ellinghausen provide readers with specific approaches, relevant topic expansion, and additional resources. Moreover, the book is laid out in a way that is both intuitive and user-friendly. Each essay offers unique perspectives and arguments that contribute to the reader’s sense of security and possibility. Using each essay as a jumping-off point leaves readers easily able to imagine additional activities and topics for exploration on their own. Hugh Macrae Richmond’s essay, “Teaching Shakespeare’s Histories Using the Internet,” provides a remarkably clear and concrete path to using the internet in tandem with the history plays. In “Teaching Shakespeare’s History Plays in the Composition Classroom,” by Diane K. Jakacki, the reader is presented with specific examples of assignments and even evaluation from Jakacki’s own classroom. With this essay in particular, it’s easy to see how an instructor can...

The Romantic Grotesque of George Gordon Byron

The article explores the affi nities between Byron’s works with the seventeenth-century literary tradition of carnivalesque discourse. These affi nities can be traced in his comical burlesque writings, such as The Devil’s Drive (1813), Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–1824). There is a well-established British critical tradition which sees the author of Don Juan as a continuator of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century mock-heroic convention, but his use of the grotesque mode makes him the heir of Miguel de Cervantes or Francisco Quevedo. Byron’s literary identifi cation with the poetic style of the seventeenth-century baroque can be detected in his predilection for a comical deformation of characters, images and meanings. The poet uses the language of monstrosity and transgression to achieve political and religious provocation and to lure his reader into the world of a liberated language, freed from conventional connotations.

Wars of excess: Georges Bataille, solar economy, and the accident in the age of precision war

Both classical and critical studies of warfare often comment on the relationship between war and excess. However, even in richly theoretical work, this connection is unanalyzed. This article focuses on the link between excess and war, and seeks to deepen our understanding of why excess reappears so frequently in the study of armed conflict and security studies. Specifically, the article turns to the work of Georges Bataille, an overlooked figure in the critical tradition, who extensively theorized linkages between excess and war. In Bataille’s thought, excess is a key term for explicating the design, mobilization, and transformation of war. Moreover, Bataille sees the exposure to excess as playing a key part in social attachments to violence and armed conflict. The article unpacks how Bataille theorizes excess and applies his insights to the context of precision warfare. Using the case of the accident in the era of precision war, it reveals how Bataille anticipates many of the dynamics that structure late warfare through his understanding of excess. The article concludes by describing how Bataille’s vision of excess would challenge critical war and security studies literatures in relation to the problems of war experience, relationships to death, and scholarship.

“An Ægyptian darknesse”: pagan chronologies, historia sacra, and the hieroglyph in England, 1646-1690

ABSTRACT In this article I consider the depiction of the Egyptian hieroglyph in several seventeenth-century English religio-historiographical works that engage with the problems posed by the Egyptian dynastic records – records that challenged the validity of biblical chronology. Critical tradition has been keen to view the hieroglyph in the context of esoteric European scholarship, while scholarship on the English Enlightenment has tended to overlook the importance of religious motivations in “secular” intellectual projects. I show here, however, that some of the first apparently “secular” approaches to the hieroglyphs in England were not in works that espoused proto-Enlightenment linguistics or other intellectual ideals, but in religiously-motivated projects that, seeking to buttress sacred history and the primacy of the Judaic tradition against the threat of pagan chronologies, aimed to discredit the hieroglyph as an icon of pagan learning.

Restoring realism: themes and variations

In the critical tradition, environmental education discourse interrogates how knowledge constructs experience. But environmental education also emphasises perceiving, understanding and responding to “more-than-human” beings and processes. These two motivations are in tension. One problem is that the epistemological orientation driving the critique of knowledge seems to render access to something more-than-human a priori impossible. But environmental education squanders its promise and its dream if only ever permitted to talk about the natural world with scarequotes. Our field urgently needs to develop a realism robust against epistemologies that construct impassable barriers between humans and the rest of creation. I propose that this starts with radically reconceiving the nature and relationship between similarity and difference, interpreted in this article as the dynamic between theme and variations. Reworking Windelband’s distinction between idiographic and nomothetic research, I suggest that the relationship between theme and variation manifests a fundamental ontological pattern that pervades all things. “Theme and variation” proposes a unifying metaphysical duality in which the more-than-human reveals itself in how things suggest, conform to, modulate, and violate generalisation. Acknowledging and investigating this is part of restoring to other beings and processes their metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical status, from the skies to the psyche.

Integrated Approaches in Economics of Contracting and Knowledge Management

Knowledge management (KM) in the space sector is a particularly interesting study owing to the specific characteristics of lack of patenting and recording of information associated with security considerations, as well as the sectoral age pyramid and the obsolescence of equipment that results in significant KM transaction costs and loss of information. Coupled with the custom-made nature that is typical of space projects, the analysis in this paper focuses on contractual mechanisms that incorporate transfer of KM within and beyond a project’s life-cycle and the implications for specific types of contracts that are typically used -mostly in procurement. This leads to incentives for contractors to enhance also inter-firm transfer of knowledge and develop the management tools that will sustain virtual skills of past project teams. The paper shows that this approach can result in significant benefits for all stakeholders, despite challenges associated with potential transaction costs in contracting and lack of standards and relevant experience in usage of such mechanisms. Finally, a critique of the industry tradition of cost and performance assessments prior to end of lifetime is emerging.

Pueblos originarios y Ley de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual

El trabajo aborda el reconocimiento del derecho a la identidad de los pueblos originarios en su rol de prestadores de servicios de comunicación audiovisual a partir de analizar el caso de Wall Kintun TV, el primer canal de televisión mapuche, en el contexto de la creación y la implementación de la Ley de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual (LSCA) como resultado del proceso de recuperación de la tradición crítica latinoamericana.

The ‘Return of Religion’ in Martin Heidegger’s Work: Overview and Criticism

Martin Heidegger’s thought is often seen in the context of its opposition to the traditional notion of religion as expressed especially in Christianity. Since Heidegger became not only estranged from, but even inimical to Christianity at least from his mid-period, some interpretations label his thought atheistic. However, as was pointed out among others by John Caputo or Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, the relationship between religion and Heidegger’s thought is complex. As a young person preparing for Catholic priesthood, Heidegger had a deep understanding of religion on the spiritual as well as the theological level. This essay attempts to show the general background of Heidegger’s attitude concerning religion in the tradition of the medieval writing entitled German Theology and also in the age when Heidegger developed his insights. It argues that, especially from his mid-period, Heidegger developed a peculiar kind of mysticism, which can be conceived in the context of the critical tradition of previous forms of religious mysticism. This tradition is even more critical if we leave the realm of German ‘titanism’ and seek for alternative philosophical expressions not arising from that linguistic context. The essay concludes that it is possible to understand Heidegger’s proposals as instrumental to a new understanding of the continuously changing forms and contents of religion if and only if one is prepared to apply the necessary amount of critical reflection.