Cross Fire Research Articles

"Love More Powerful Than Death": Mystic Resonances in Corona de amor y muerte

eeLove More Powerful Than Death": Mystic Resonances in Corona de amor y muerte HAROLD K. MOON Alejandro Casona, even during his lifetime, was repeatedly accused of being out of step with "modern" theatrical practice, and has elicited scornful comments that go so far as to accuse him of insincerity. J. Rodriguez Richart, one of Casona's staunch defenders, answers the critical jeremiad launched by J. M. Velloso following the opening of La barca sin pescador in Madrid's Bellas Artes theater, pointing out several inaccuracies in Velloso's critique and, more to the point, negating many of his allegations.1 Velloso seems to suffer the same shortsightedness in dealing with Casona as the heirs of positivism had in understanding some of the baroque plays of Calderón." Velloso, of course, does not stand alone in his assessment of Casona's theater. Ricardo Doménech unleashed a diatribe in 1964 that aroused a full-fledged polemic between him and Luis Ponce de León. Doménech 's article first appeared in Insula (#209, abril de 1964), and the cross fire between him and Ponce de Leon enlivened several issues of Arriba (Madrid) later that year (Aug. 2, 12, 23); the whole package was later collected in Juan José Plans' Alejandro Casona (Oviedo, 1965, 125-138). Charles Leighton identifies the bone of their contention sucHarold K. Moon teaches at Brigham Young University. 1 Velloso's critique appeared in the weekly, El Español. 2 de marzo de 1963. Richart's article carries the title, "Imaginación y realismo en el teatro: La barca sin pescador de Casona," Boletín de la biblioteca Menéndez Velayo, 39 (1963), 225-51. 2 See Ernest Mérimée and S. Griswold Morley, A History oj Spanish Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1930), pp. 380-81 (on La vida es sueño and La devoción de la cruz) and Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 288-89 (on La vida es sueño). Both sources represent examples of "enlightened " short-sightedness in their comprehension of the Baroque theater. Charles H. Leighton makes this point in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Alejandro Casona and the New Theater in Spain" (Harvard, 1965), p. 199. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW47 cinctly: "[Doménech] condemns Casona for not being engagé while [Ponce de Leon] praises him for being evasionista." Then he adds, with characteristic acuteness, "[Casona] is much too subtle to be classified as either." 3 What, then, is Casona's theatre, if not engagé or evasionista? Appropriating the terminology devised by David Riesman, et al (The Lonely Crowd, Garden City, New York, 1953), Leighton shows that Casona's hero is traditional, or other-oriented, whereas the hero of the modern social theater is inner-oriented.1 Hence the difficulty that a typical engagé audience would find in grasping the appeal that Casona's plays still hold for those of us who refuse to surrender to social fundaments as the basis for all theater—or most criticism, for that matter. Mircea Eliade states the case for modern man: Modern non-religious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god. It does not fall to us to discuss this philosophical position. We will only observe that, in the last analysis, modern non-religious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness .5 Quite simply, then, Casona, whose dramatic technique needs no defense, stands as one of the spokesmen for the still numerous traditionalists , or the other-oriented audience. For such, Casona's plays represent anything but the tactics of "evasion" for which Ponce de Leon...

Book Review: Clergy in the Cross Fire

Book Review: Clergy in the Cross Fire

Book Review: Clergy in the Cross Fire, Coping with Role Conflicts in the Ministry

Book Review: Clergy in the Cross Fire, Coping with Role Conflicts in the Ministry

The oral contraceptive controversy

0 R A L contraceptives have been marketed in the United States since 1960. Probably no drugs have ever aroused such public controversy or been the subject of such sensational journalism. Legislative hearings have added their confusion to the issue. The controversy has become so heated that it is dishcult to tell fact from fantasy. The American physician, overburdened as he is with his medical duties, has been caught in the cross fire between the barrages of press releases and telephone calls from frantic patients. He has found it impossible to struggle through all of the scientific publications to learn the facts upon which the controversy is based. It would seem timely to attempt to present an objective resume of the pertinent facts available regarding the safety and efficacy of oral contraceptives and those upon which conjectures are based.

A computer program for 3-D planning in external beam radiation therapy, EXTDØS

In radiation therapy, external beams of ionising radiation are used in empirical cross fire configurations to produce distributions of absorbed energy in living tissues. For a given configuration to be useful, certain conditions have to be satisfied. The present program applies to rectangular beams of high energy X-rays and 60Co gamma radiation, interacting with unit density tissue. It is designed to simulate irradiation techniques generally employed in routine clinical practice. It is capable of producing relative distributions of absorbed energy (dose) in up to nine mutually parallel planes of a patient, thus enabling the radiotherapist to obtain quantitative information of the three dimensional dose distribution. The central problem is the computation of the contribution of one beam to the absorbed dose at an arbitrary point in the irradiated volume, in dependence of beam dimensions, filtering and shape of the patient. A summary is given of a semi-empirical generating function for this purpose, which was described previously [1]. The distribution of absorbed dose, for any kind of cross fire technique, is obtained by accumulating the weighted contributions from all the beam positions at all points of a three dimensional grid. After suitable normalisation, a quadratic interpolation method is used to compute and display isodose surfaces by means of sets of isodose lines in mutually parallel planes. Per plane of computation, a table of so-called zonal integral doses and zonal surface areas is produced as a potential means to compare the merits of different irradiation techniques. Finally, for 60Co radiation machines, basic treatment times are calculated. The program allows simulation of the following irradiation techniques, using beams limited by rectangular diaphragms: 1. (a) stationary beam cross fire, with, per beam, options for one “wedge filter”, and/or one of two “wedge type compensating filters”, and/or one block type beam shaping filter; 2. (b) moving beam cross fire, to a maximum of five arcs per patient, with the same filter options per arc as mentioned in (a), either isocentric (per arc), or tangential; 3. (c) moving beam cross fire, supplemented by stationary beams, with per arc, respectively stationary beam, the same filter options. In all techniques, the central axes of the beams must be parallel to the planes of calculation. The beams may be rotated about their own axes.