De Rougemont Research Articles

Time reversal invariance in finance

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The author thanks Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Pascal de Rougemont for their questions and discussions on time reversal in finance that inspired this paper.

Introduction: Intellectuals, Nationalisms, and European Identity

Introduction:Intellectuals, Nationalisms, and European Identity Richard J. Golsan This special issue of South Central Review addresses a number of important, timely, and interrelated questions concerning the past, present, and future of Europe and the idea of the intellectual. These questions fall essentially into three categories. First, what is "Europe," and what is a "European," especially at the present time? How might one define or characterize a "European identity," now as well as in the past and future? What are the constitutive elements of such an identity? Is "Europe" in fact a tangible reality? Or is it rather a destructive illusion (as in its conception and exploitation by the Nazis), or, conversely, an ideal to which the peoples of the continent should aspire? Second, what is "nationalism" in the European context, and how might one define "nationhood" within the framework of the European Union and the Europe of today? Within this context, how might one characterize nationalist sentiments and patriotism in Europe? By way of contrast, how are these notions conceived and understood in contemporary Europe as opposed to the United States, for example? Certainly these concepts have undergone extraordinary changes during recent years, not only as a consequence of the creation of the EU but also as a result of the horrors perpetrated by extreme forms of nationalism in Europe over the last century. The European cataclysm brought about by Nazism comes first to mind, of course, but one should not forget that similar horrors on a smaller scale were perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia less than twenty years ago. The recent arrest of the Serbian nationalist extremist leader Radovan Karadzic on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a grim reminder of this all-too-recent past. A third and final series of questions clusters around the role, function, and definition of the intellectual and, more generally, the artist in the European context, past, present, and future. What role have intellectuals and politically committed artists played in shaping national identity and culture—what role have they played in defining "nationhood" ? Along similar lines, what roles have intellectuals and artists played in defining "Europe," as it existed or exists now? What is the "responsibility" of the artist and intellectual, not only in the democratic Europe of today, but [End Page 1] under the repressive, nationalistic, and even totalitarian regimes of the recent past? Finally, given that the very idea of the intellectual is linked historically as well as in the present to the idea of the nation, and that the traditional notion of the "nation" in Europe is changing rapidly under, among other things, the imposition of a "European identity," what is the role of the "intellectual" today? What will it be tomorrow? Will the intellectual eventually become extinct, or be transformed by events and circumstances into something very different? Among the intellectuals, writers, and artists discussed in this issue are Karl Marx and Thomas Mann from the German context, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre-Andé Taguieff from the French context, the Italian architect Giusseppi Taragni, and the Czech writer and intellectual Milan Kundera. Other important figures including Paul Valéry, Denis de Rougemont, and Maurice Barrès are discussed as well. In addition to thanking the outstanding scholars who have contributed to this issue, we wish to express our gratitude to two distinguished European "public intellectuals" for offering their insights on the important issues addressed here. These are of course Tzvetan Todorov and Pascal Bruckner, both of whom have generously contributed their work to South Central Review before. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Walter A. Strauss, Treuhaft Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Many of us knew Walter professionally, and some of us were fortunate enough to have Walter as a mentor and friend at formative and even crucial moments of our careers and our lives. In every way Walter embodied the ideal of European culture at its richest and very best. Walter was also a man of extraordinary intellectual curiosity, and we would like to think that this issue would have been of special interest to him. Thank you, Walter. Richard J. Golsan Texas A&amp...

European Identity

This essay explores the notion of European identity in the present. It begins with an examination of traditional definitions of Europe and of European identity proposed by Paul Valéry and Denis de Rougemont, among others. While these definitions rely primarily on the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritages, Todorov proposes a more “pluralistic” conception of European identity that encompases other, non-European heritages as well. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary Europe and European identity against the backdrop of the EU and America.

The Colonial Metropolis and its Artistic Adventure: Conrad, Congo, and the Nouvelle Revue Française

To Denis de Rougemont, critic, at the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, interwar was nothing less than the geometric of the modern adventure. (1) The he had in mind was of course an artistic one. He lists the works of cubism, surrealism, and l'ecole de Paris; the ballets of Diaghilev; the compositions of Six; and the writings of Apollinaire, Proust, Valery, and Gide--important contributors to the NRF. Rougemont's enthusiastic assertion obviously calls to mind Gertrude Stein's famous line: Paris was where the twentieth century was. (2) Yet, the modern she experienced amongst the American authors of the who resided in must have been an altogether different one than Rougemont's. Despite their simultaneity, Rougemont's is not Stein's, and it is even less the of, say, the Scandinavian modernists who gathered around the cafe Chez les Vikings at Montparnasse, or the of first writers of the negritude-movement. Rather than being monolithic locus of the modern adventure, represents various simultaneous and competing loci, which only partly overlap. As the leading literary review in France, the Nouvelle Revue Francaise played pivotal role in determining which modern adventure was most visible. In this article I shall point out that the transnational perspective, upon which the metropolitan review always prided itself, had its limitations when it comes to artistic representations of colonialism. My main focus will be the NRF's adoption of Joseph Conrad's oeuvre in relation to the genre and its colonial aspect. Through the two central forces of the first NRF, Jacques Riviere and Andre Gide, I shall demonstrate the review's tendency to glorify in literary setting--in Riviere's case through an admiration for the British story and in Gide's case through Conradian imagination, which to large extent prevented him from encountering Congo's colonial reality. Conrad and the Nouvelle Revue Francaise If the American writers of the were lost by the NRF, and the British Bloomsbury-group never discovered, one English-writing modernist did receive the NRF's full attention: Joseph Conrad. In 1910, Andre Gide read his first novel by Conrad, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus; and through the anglophile Valery Larbaud he met the Anglo-Polish author in Kent in July 1911.(3) Soon Conrad's novels were of the highest priority to the NRF. Conrad had first entrusted Henry Davray of the Mercure de France with the French translations, even dramatically exclaiming: ce sera vous--ou personne. (4) Yet, the NRF somehow managed to wring that responsibility from Davray, and from November 1915 Gide was officially in charge of the NRF Gallimard's series of Conrad's complete works with projected frequency of one translation every other year. In other words, Conrad's French reception was almost entirely in the hands of Gide and the NRF. In this sense Conrad's oeuvre was, as I shall show in more detail, appropriated by the NRF, culminating in 1924 with special issue at Conrad's death in which Heart of Darkness at last appeared in French, more than twenty-five years after its first publication in English. (5) Why did the leading French literary review persist in belated interest in Conrad's early modernism at time where its editorial board probably should have moved on to the emerging generation of high modernist authors such as Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce, who all even resided in the French capital? The simple answer is that Conrad fit their notion of the novel. The question is then what that notion precisely consisted in and to this there is no simple answer, especially since it needs to take into account the literary divergences within le team intime of the NRF--in particular between Gide and Riviere. (6) Habitually, critics explain that Conrad, with his dense prose style, provided a bridge between the British and Continental spirit. …

"Can Anyone Picture My Agony?": Visualizing Gender, Imperialism, and Gothic Horror in the Wide World Magazine of 1898

“Can Anyone Picture My Agony?”:Visualizing Gender, Imperialism, and Gothic Horror in the Wide World Magazine of 1898 Margaret D. Stetz (bio) Character may be destiny, but so is language, particularly when it comes to names. Was it mere coincidence that the word "new" figured so prominently in the name of the founder of the Wide World Magazine, George Newnes? If there was anyone in the late-Victorian publishing industry who could be said always to have imagined, engendered, promoted, and disseminated the very newest concepts in periodicals, it was certainly he. When he initiated the Wide World Magazine, An Illustrated Monthly of True Narrative: Adventure, Travel, Customs, and Sport in 1898, it joined a long list of innovative ventures that already had made "Newnes" synonymous with "newness." These included, most famously, Tit-Bits in 1881, but also the Strand in 1891, the Westminster Gazette in 1893, and in 1890, the Review of Reviews, which he established with and then turned over to W. T. Stead, the journalist and former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. The novelty and originality of the Wide World are what Kate Jackson celebrates in her single chapter on the magazine for her 2001 study, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910. There, Jackson asserts that the Wide World "reflected new developments in literature and the periodical press and represented, most significantly, the revolution in photographic illustration." Along with this advance came "the invention of the 'true story' magazine."1 Indeed, the Introduction to the inaugural issue of April 1898 proclaimed proudly that "There will be no fiction in the Magazine, but yet it will contain stories of weird adventure, more thrilling than any conceived by the novelist in his wildest flights." The reader's promised encounter with unimpeachable fact, unalloyed with fantasy, would begin with the magazine's packaging and continue through its visual contents, for as [End Page 24] the Introduction went on to aver, "The key-note of the Magazine is struck in the motto on the cover— 'Truth is Stranger than Fiction.' This we hope to prove by personal narratives and actual photographs." Recently perfected methods of half-tone printing meant that numerous black-and-white photographs could appear throughout, even in a magazine priced at a mere sixpence, and function as documentary evidence to guarantee the authenticity of the articles. Such technological progress enabled the writer of the Introduction to assure the consumer that "As to the pictures, these will be mostly direct reproductions from photographs."2 In The Most Amazing Story a Man Ever Lived to Tell (1977), a study of a series of articles titled the "Adventures of Louis De Rougemont" from the magazine's first year, Geoffrey Maslen has identified the anonymous Introduction printed in the inaugural issue as the work of the Wide World's editor, William Fitzgerald.3 Certainly, Fitzgerald was not merely the magazine's editor, but also an author, who appended his name to one article in May 1898, "Canadian Curiosities." But Kate Jackson, on the contrary, attributes the "Introduction" to the publisher himself, and her counter-claim is a credible one.4 Although this degree of hands-on involvement in a periodical was unusual, it was clear that George Newnes felt deeply invested—even beyond his financial stake—in the success of this enterprise, for he was already an enthusiastic traveler himself. So heartily, moreover, did he support the mission of educating audiences about the "thrilling" discoveries to be found in other parts of the globe that in March 1897, shortly before establishing the Wide World, he contributed a signed article about his own journey along the Nile to one of his other productions, the Strand magazine. Like the more sober and scholarly publications of the Royal Geographical Society, Wide World addressed a late Victorian epistemological hunger: it fed the desire in Britain for knowledge, for information about other lands—their flora, their fauna, and their peoples—though especially about those which were now part of Queen Victoria's Empire or which, like America, once had been British colonial holdings. In the 1890s, travel writing and the publishing of travel narratives was a growth industry. Narratives written by women...

Godard Counts

Godard Counts

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture Eugen Weber Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture. Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 449. $35.00 (cloth). Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar have written a diverse, disparate, protean book that is well worth heeding. They know that the so-called Popular Front was never an entity but a diversity—in fact a cacophony whose political drama "has kept off the page, and off the stage, aspects essential to the character and tone of the period" (9). They set out therefore "to thicken the political dimension by bringing out its cultural depth" (5). Which means that, in practice, they shortchange the political dimensions of the time to offer instead an agile montage of "cultural" activities in the broadest sense of that term. They begin, appropriately, by focusing on Alain Resnais's Stavisky: a film of 1974 about a scam and scandal of the 1930s that culminated in the bloody riots of February 1934 which, in turn, ushered in the coalitions and the blunders of a much-sundered and decreasingly popular Front. "The historical dissonance of Stavisky sets the complexity of the past into play . . . " (51). Neither dissonances nor complexities will be lacking in the pages that follow. Andrew and Ungar review a variety of politico-literary periodicals, and the passionate, rejectionist, committed, conflicted intellectuals opposed to fascism but also to rearmament against fascism. They depict what they term "The Literature of Discontent" (ch.2), represented in chief by bleak, caustic Louis-Ferdinand Céline who affirmed not revolution but revulsion; and by André Malraux, who deftly reconciled art and activism. "Esprit in the Arena of Extremist Politics" (ch.3) etches Emmanuel Mounier, of course, but even more the incandescent nuttiness of Georges Bataille and the religio-philosophical minuets of Denis de Rougemont and other intellectuals who railed against "the mindless proliferation of material goods" (113), affronting to sensitive souls, less so to the beneficiaries of the alleged proliferation. On to the rhetoric of revolution as social spectacle in Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise; to the energy that crowds unleashed, and to the evolution of demonstrations from protest to celebration and fête de famille (bring the children). [End Page 940] It is a pity that authors so aware of the discordant, jarring aspect of conflicted times have chosen to focus largely on their left profile. It was unfair of Gide to claim that fine feelings make for poor literature. But more attention paid to less exceptional novels, less ideologically-oriented publications (Canard enchaîné?) could provide more balance. The Maigrets of Georges Simenon, for example, are mentioned but not mined for their trove of social history. In the shadow of economic depression at home and fascist bluster abroad, France of the 1930s was already a train wreck aggravated by gerontocracy, mediocracy, and bureaucracy. The young and not so young who still nursed hope or passion gravitated to communism, or else to one of many fascist or proto-fascist movements vying for attention. Which side they joined was a matter of chance, circumstances, connections. In Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, released in 1974 like Stavisky, a peasant lad who sets out to join the Resistance ends up working for the Gestapo. In the everyday reality of the 1930s, rebelliogenic young like Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot could easily pass from one extreme to the other. Both featuring virulent tub-thumpers reacting against infirmity of purpose, celebrating action opposed to resignation, stressing the revolutionary struggle, emphasizing mass, power, energy, spectacle, fascism and communism were frères ennemis. Sensitive to so many nuances, Andrew and Ungar do not appear aware of such promiscuities. They do better in the second part of the book, promisingly entitled Atmosphères (after Arletty's famous replica in Marcel Carné's Hôtel du Nord). There are engaging chapters on daily life (flashy cars, flashy women, rare bathrooms, Jean Gabin); popular entertainment (music halls, café concerts, cabarets); architecture (including the vogue of Le Corbusier, but not his indifference to the convenience of the masses supposed to dwell in his structures); photography, atmospheric painting, exhibitionist avant-gardes, and scatty...

Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." Rochester, NY: Camden House,'2004. xiv +333 pp. This is an idiosyncratic book by a penetrating reader. Even though much of the material has appeared earlier in periodical publications, it is so extensively rewritten and so enriched by the central theme and its structure of repeated reflections that the book merits the attention of even those readers already familiar with some of the essays. While in harmony with current Anglo-American readings, the book is original in two important ways—first in its insistent juxtaposition of Goethe with the love-death tradition, and second in its unusually broad definition of that tradition. For love-death here extends beyond the Liebestod à la Tristan and Isolde to include any situation that brings love and death into conjunction, with or without causality. Romeo and Juliet is as valid an example as Tristan, but so too is any kind of love that connects the lover to psychological or theological otherness.Thus Dye addresses the connection between death and sexuality, but also wants to fill gaps left by Denis de Rougemont (Love in the Western World) and Edgar Wind (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance), and thus analyze love and death as the passage from the world to the divine, whether conceived in Christian or in Platonist terms. Ultimately in this book the love-death exemplifies the conjunction of unity and duality, the central issue for Goethe and for the German Romantics, and thus Goethe's fundamentally Romantic stance.This proposition consists less of a narrative or of a syntactically arranged argument than of fluent, indeed cascading, juxtapositions—in the book as a whole, within chapters, and even within individual readings of texts. Love-death may seem like an odd concept for organizing one's thinking about Goethe, but Dye marshals a commanding array of texts both to justify the choice and more valuably, to use Goethe to rethink the significance of the love-death. The breadth the concept must take on becomes clear in the first chapter, where Dye lays out his basic categories—individuation, coincidentia oppositiorum, Romantic dialectics and irony, and gender. They derive obviously from psychoanalysis , identity theory, Renaissance Neoplatonism, Romantic philosophy, and contemporary theory. Even within these categories Dye draws on a broad range of thinkers; in the first, for example, he cites with almost equal frequency Freud, philosophers, cultural critics and literary critics. The categories define the themes to which Dye's readings continually return as they situate Goethe texts in juxtaposition to one another, to examples of (mostly) European and American literature from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, and to the philosophical tradition. The further one reads, the more abstract and general the concept of Goethe Yearbook XIV (2007) 208 Book Reviews love-death becomes, so that the summary chapters at the end focus on truth, paradox, irony and virtuosity The book lands squarely on the paradox that Goethe, like all Romantics, valorizes the higher unity represented by the lovedeath , yet equally valorizes our imperfect life in time: Virtually everything Goethe thinks and writes about the human and the divine, Nature and human nature, subject and object, self and other, fate and freedom, time and eternity, spirit and word requires that a presupposed duality be sublated in a higher unity, as in the Liebestod. The yearning of subject for object or of subject for opposed subject is always for absolute identity, but approximation of this ideal is all that contngent, derivative, time-bound beings can have. Let us grasp, and glory in, the gifts that are ours—the ability to move toward, if never in life to gain, the true, the timeless, the beautiful and the boundless. Perfection is death, says Goethe."Gedenke zu leben!"(282). The middle eight chapters cover Goethe's work in roughly chronological order. Chapter two deals with Clavigo and ballads from the 1770s, while three addresses Götz under the alluring title "FrauWelt. Venereal Disease. Femmes fatale." The fourth chapter elegantly undoes the clichés about Werther with which it begins; the fifth focuses on substitution in relation to unity in Stella, Iphigenie, and "Die neue Melusine "The next chapter deals with...

Popular front Paris and the poetics of culture

The of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this story clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about farreaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented. In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative poetics of culture to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Celine), artists (Renoir, Dali), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises. Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

Divided natures: French contributions to political ecology

In this book Kerry Whiteside introduces the work of a range of French ecological theorists to an English-speaking audience. He shows how thinkers in France and in English-speaking countries have produced different strains of ecological thought and suggests that the work of French ecological theorists could lessen pervasive tensions in Anglophone ecology. Much of the theory written in English is shaped by the debate between anthropocentric ecologists, who contend that the value of our nonhuman surroundings derives from their role in fulfilling human interests, and ecocentric ecologists, who contend that the nonhuman world holds ultimate value in and of itself. This debate is almost nonexistent among French theorists, who tend to focus on the processes linking nature and human identity. Whiteside suggests that the insights of French theorists could help English-language theorists to extricate themselves from endless debates over the real center of nature's value. Among the French theorists discussed are Denis de Rougemont, Denis Duclos, Rene Dumont, Luc Ferry, Andre Gorz, Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Alain Lipietz, Edgar Morin, Serge Moscovici, and Michel Serres. The English-language theorists discussed include John Barry, Robyn Eckersley, Robert Goodin, Tim Hayward, Holmes Rolston III, and Paul Taylor.

Wu Li (1632-1718) and the First Chinese Christian Poetry

Jesuit missionaries in China quickly grasped the fundamental importance of poetry in Chinese civilization. They realized that presenting Christian theology in poetic form would greatly enhance the effectiveness of their evangelization. Michele Ruggieri, S.J. (1543-1607) was already publishing Chinese poems of this type, probably with the extensive aid of Chinese converts. Some later Jesuits also attempted to forge a Christian folk poetry. Francois de Rougemont, S.J. (1624-76), issued a group of Cantiones rusticae. Herein we examine what may be surviving examples of these, modeled on authentic Chinese or Hakka folk poems. However, it was only with the famous painter Wu Li (1632-1718) that there emerged a large and aesthetically successful body of Chinese Christian poetry. Wu Li was baptized, became a Jesuit in 1682, and in 1688 was ordained a Catholic priest. Examples of his poems in shih and ch'u formats are here analyzed for theological content, as well as for their innovative use of classical Chinese allusions.

The Christian Mission in China in the Verbiest Era: Some Aspects of the Missionary Approach, and: Francois de Rougemont, S.J., Missionary in Ch'ang-shu (Chiang-nan): A Study of the Account Book (1674-1676) and the Elogium (review)

The Christian Mission in China in the Verbiest Era: Some Aspects of the Missionary Approach, and: Francois de Rougemont, S.J., Missionary in Ch'ang-shu (Chiang-nan): A Study of the Account Book (1674-1676) and the Elogium (review)

Constructing a Medieval Genealogy: Roland the Father of Tristan in Castleford's Chronicle

Constructing a Medieval Genealogy:Roland the Father of Tristan in Castleford's Chronicle Caroline D. Eckhardt and Bryan A. Meer The predominant narrative "fact" about the knight Tristan, from the twelfth-century French poems of Béroul, Thomas, and Marie de France to Wagner's opera and beyond, is his love for Iseult, wife of his uncle King Mark: their tragic tale has become one of medieval literature's lasting contributions to the storehouse of European legend. The deaths of the two lovers, in particular, have long aroused a remarkable and perhaps morbid fascination, which Denis de Rougemont associates with a fundamental death-wish embedded deep within the Western imagination (34-42). In the early thirteenth century, the prologue to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan declares that the lovers' death is bread to the living, "und ist ir tot der lebenden brot" (line 240), a formulation that risks parody of the Eucharist; while in the Renaissance epic Orlando Innamorato, Boiardo epitomizes this fascination when he describes the lovers' last moments as sweet and joyful, "dolce et felice" (II.xxvi.2), because they died together in the same instant, entwined in each other's arms, hand in hand and heart to heart. The Liebestod music from Wagner's opera (1859), in a very different medium and century, testifies to the persistent appeal of the motif, and even Matthew Arnold's revisionist poem "Tristram and Iseult" (1852) dwells upon the same dramatic entanglement of love and death. For all its force, however, this concept of Tristan is not the only one to be found in medieval texts. The purpose of this paper is, first, to [End Page 1085] point out the presence of a rather different Tristan in a little-known work called Castleford's Chronicle and, second, to consider its genealogical implications. Written in the fourteenth century in a northern English dialect, Castleford's Chronicle is a massive, sprawling verse narrative in twelve books. Like many other medieval chronicles, it offers a multi-layered blend of fact and fiction, commonplaces and curiosities, memory and prophecy. Surviving in a single manuscript copy, it was not printed as a whole until 1996; thus its thousands of lines of Middle English verse have only recently become fully available to scholars.1 Along with much material that is routine, this text includes a number of surprises, one of which is discussed here. In nearly 40,000 lines of octosyllabic couplets the chronicle recounts what is, in general, the traditional medieval construction of the history of Britain, a cultural narrative told many times in Latin, French, and English, and sometimes in Welsh and other tongues. This widely distributed narrative sometimes begins with an origination-episode in which the island's first inhabitants are a group of sisters who murder their husbands and are expelled from their home in ancient Syria. There follows—or the accounts that omit the sisters begin with—the legend of the "Trojan descent," which asserts that Aeneas's descendant Brutus was the founder of civilization in Britain in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. As it continues, this history or story commingles the careers of fictional heroes such as Arthur and Lear with the reigns of the actual rulers of Britain, ending, in different versions, at various points before and after the Norman Conquest. The manuscript of Castleford's Chronicle ends with events of the year 1327, when Edward II has been removed from England's throne and imprisoned, but before he is murdered. In this text the only notice of Tristan occurs in Book IX, in a brief but puzzling passage that follows a description of Irish demands for tribute during the Saxon period: Now, quiles Adulf diademe bare,Cessede þe strife fore euermar.oru Rolande son, a knight, Tristreme,.at trauailde for Kyng Mark, his heme,Northumbre broght of sorow and site,Of seruage to be claimede quite. (28,788-93) (At this time, while Adulf bore the diadem, the strife permanently ceased through Roland's son—a knight, Tristan, who worked on behalf of his uncle King Mark [and] brought Northumbria out of its sorrow and anguish, to be released [lit., quit-claimed] from servitude.) [End Page 1086...

The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet

THE ORIENTAL FRAMEWORK OF ROMEO AND JULIET Abdulla Al-Dabbagh There has always been a tendency in literary and cultural scholarship to barricade oneselfbehind narrow specificities and a one-sided sense of "uniqueness," a tendency that may ultimately give the wrong emphasis to national, cultural, or even racial factors. The truly comparative counterapproach has, however, always reached for the universalist standpoint , from which literary phenomena can be regarded across borders and within a complex variety of cultural contexts. In the field of East/ West Uterary relations, and specificaUy in the area ofArabo-Islamic legacies in Western traditions, major strides have recently been taken in this direction. Although most of the advance has been in Spanish, and in general medieval Uterature, such work has impUcations for nearly the whole ofthe Western Uterary tradition. And even though numerous deta üed investigations have been successfully accomplished, a systematic overview of the field is yet to be achieved. The acute absence of such a comprehensive cross-cultural perspective —exemplified here by a lack of awareness or an incomprehension of the Oriental factor in certain Western Uterary phenomena—can sometimes lead to symptomatically misguided conclusions. This paper, however , is inspired by the broader, comparatist approach. It has been written to offer a corrective to the imbalance in many current interpretations of Romeo and Juliet and to contribute to recent advances in medieval/ Oriental studies by extending their spirit to Shakespeare, hopefully as a major stepping-stone to the field of Renaissance humanism generaUy. Emphasis faUs on the Oriental framework as an important key to the play and on its close Unk with the genre of Oriental tragic romance, an emphasis needed to foreground a major factor and to redress a crucial omission. Still, the essay should not be read in terms of the narrow, onesided "interpretation" approach and certainly not of the old-fashioned, cultural aggrandizement streak in comparative studies. Indeed, such a reading would defeat its purpose. The paper offers the Oriental framework as a necessary enhancement for any fuU appreciation of a complex, multidimensional piece of world Uterature, hoping to contribute, within its Umited scope, to genuinely cross-cultural genre studies. The Tragic Romance in Cultural Context—A Scholarly Enigma Three critics have been especially well placed to bring out the Oriental framework of Romeo and Juliet: Ahdaf Soueif and M. A. Manzalaoui, both scholars of EngUsh literature ofArab origin, and Denis de Rougemont , a master of comparative studies in the West. Yet each of them managed to overlook or failed to address the connection to be proposed in this essay. The most comprehensive attempt to encompass the play's VcH. 24 (2000): 64 ??? COHPAnATIST full range of cultural affiliations—unhappily termed its "symboUc context " by Soueif, the Egyptian scholar and later a well-known novelist— rightly affirms, from the beginning, the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of locating Shakespeare's works within an intellectual, or conceptual, framework. Soueif dismisses the view of Shakespeare as the miraculous natural genius happUy "untainted" by any need for systematic thinking. Unfortunately, her essay opts for an eclectic conclusion which, whüe claiming that Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted within the framework of more than one context, ends disappointingly with a conventional recourse to "the miracle [. . .] that in the fire of creative genius even contradictory material may be drüled to work together in harmony." The article tries to "harmonize" three different contexts for the play: Christianity , courtly love, and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the end, it is the critic's own bewüderment that bursts to the surface. The goal of harmonising the Christian with the non-Christian and the physical with the platonic leads to the unsatisfactory compromise of "sticking" to the golden mean as "the safest and most credible path to take" (Soueif 18). Manzalaoui and de Rougemont, whom one would have thought were the most likely to uncover the conceptual framework overlooked by Soueif , sadly have nothing but the most perfunctory and en passant remarks about the play. Manzalaoui's rich and stimulating essay, on "Tragic Ends of Lovers: Medieval Islam and the Latin West," mentions Romeo and Juliet only in its very last lines. Could the play have been deUberately preserved for a...

Jesuit cartographers in china: Francesco Brancati, S.J., and the map (1661?) of Sungchiang prefecture (shanghai)

The little‐known manuscript map discussed in this paper, now in the Löwendahl Collection (Stockholm), can be analysed as two separate maps, one Chinese and one Western. The original Chinese map dates from, or just after, 1656 at the earliest. It was over‐written in Latin in 1661, or immediately thereafter, by Francesco Brancati, S J. Brancati's aim was to present a visual statement of his missionary achievements in Shanghai and the Sungchiang Prefecture since his arrival there in 1639, prompted either by the recent arrival of a new colleague (François de Rougemont) or by the thought of his successors. The map belongs to both Chinese and Jesuit mapping genres in sixteenth and seventeenth century China.

Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of Frustration

Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of Frustration Aldo Scaglione —Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto III, st. 7 As Byron ironically intimated, there is a behavioral connection between much of the literature of love and sexual frustration. What is known as medieval “courtly love” was an epiphany of idealized love. Whether self-imposed or forced restraint, it infused much of Arthurian lore, the troubadours’ and then Petrarch’s lyric, and later partly merged with the Renaissance phenomenon of Platonic love. 1 But we wonder about possible historical derivation both on the cultural (literary) level and on the level of practical behavior. In other words, if taken case by case, is the similarity among cultural patterns and between literary phenomena and behavioral patterns a consequence of: 1) intertextual connections with courtly love and Petrarchism; 2) ideological circumstances similar to those which produced “courtly love”; or, inversely, 3) a broader human need that also lies in the background of courtly love? Where and how did frustration, denial, or sublimation acquire a deeper and greater value than consummation and satisfaction? Was it through religion, myth, morality, psychology, or a combination of these factors? Is this essentially an anthropological or rather a psycho-moral question? Does it originate in our perennial “nature” or in our time-bound mores? It seems safe to assume a combination of these factors. Ideals of psychologically sublimated, hence physiologically frustrated, love have an anthropological foundation and are inherent in any sophisticated cultural form. At the [End Page 557] same time, in the Western tradition they owe much to the persistence of the specific historical phenomena of courtly love and its Petrarchistic variations. Of course the folklore of love includes both satisfied and unfulfilled sorts. Jean Hagstrum’s Esteem Enlivened by Desire (1992) deals with the conjugal sort, implying consummation. He distinguishes his theme from “long-term relations that remain unconsummated, valorizing delayed or obviated climax, prolonged foreplay, ascetic discipline, traditional Platonic or Petrarchan love, or various forms of sublimation.” 2 Yet “this last ... is dialectically and psychologically tied to [Hagstrum’s] main theme: it is one kind of long-term love relationship with often more than a tinge of the erotic.” 3 For Hagstrum these behavioral variations are determined by culture, since purely “natural” behavior would be more uniform and “unhistorically” steady. 4 The notion that idealized desire is culture-bound finds support in Denis de Rougemont’s well-known thesis, that chivalry and courtesy are inventions of medieval Europe with no equivalent at other times and places except by direct influence or imitation: the behavior of an ancient Greek lover or a modern Japanese lover does not involve “chivalry” toward the woman. 5 For de Rouge-mont, ideal love came under the spell of what he called eros, defined as infatuation with desire itself rather than love for its natural end. Difficulties and obstacles became more meaningful than success, even to the point that, as in the story of Tristan and, differently and uniquely, in Dante’s poetry, the death of the beloved marked the culmination of eros. This eros postulates self-denial and sublimation for the sake of a higher achievement. Regardless of chivalry’s roots in medieval Europe, frustration can be a powerful ideal in non-Western cultures, too. One signal example might suffice. The Chinese literary classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber by Chan T’sao (ca. 1717–63), is the life story or Bildungsroman of a high prince who, after a [End Page 558] life of indulgence, decides to renounce the world and become an ascetic monk. 6 This problematic main character, Pao Yu, moves in the framework of Taoist and Confucian ideals, with the addition of some Buddhist religious traits. His final withdrawal from the world, however, which appears to family and society as a disappointing betrayal, obeys a psychological need for a frustration that represents a nobler achievement than the satisfaction of worldly ambition. The point of this essay is to sample a few cases of literary representations of idealized love while underlining their ideal and, at times, literal interconnections. I also mean to suggest...

Äventyraren, passionen och kvinnan

This artiele deals with adventure-ideology and its role in the formation of male identity. Adventureideology is therefore crucial in determining relations beteween men and women. According to Michael Nerlich, who has studied the emergence of adventure-ideology, this ideology is a corner-stone of modernity in Western Europé. For the first time in western civilization, change is regarded as a positive value, and adventure entails the active search for change and the unknown. What Nerlich doesn't consider, however, is the role of woman in this transformational process. By relating the theory of adventure-ideology with the theory of the ideology of love, as it was developed by Denis de Rougemont, it is possible to find a connecting link between man and woman. One aspect of the ideology of love as it emerged in the middle ages, was that it obviously prepared the male for adventure. I.ove as passion is synonomous with suffering and disorder, and everything that is opposite to the routine of everyday life. 1 then examine two nineteenth-century novels from the viewpoint of adventure-ideology, and the ideology of love. In the first novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometeheus, I lind a high awareness of the importance of adventure-ideology in forming the relations between the everyday and the extraordinary, between common knowledge and new knowledge, and between man and woman. Mary Shelley definitely criticizes adventure- ideology from a woman's perspective, but she is also ambivalent. The second novel I examine was written in 1888 by the swedish author Bernhard Meijer, and is fairly unknown today. In this novel I find the basic characteristics of the male identity in the twentieth century, an identity which I call the frustrated adventurer.

On Monadic NP vs Monadic co-NP

It is a well-known result of Fagin that the complexity class NP coincides with the class of problems expressible in existential second-order logic (Σ11). Monadic NP is the class of problems expressible in monadic Σ11, i.e., Σ11 with the restriction that the second-order quantifiers range only over sets (as opposed to ranging over, say, binary relations). We prove that connectivity of finite graphs is not in monadic NP, even in the presence of arbitrary built-in relations of moderate degree (that is, degree (log n)o(1)). This extends earlier results of Fagin and de Rougemont. Our proof uses a combination of three techniques: (1) an old technique of Hanf for showing that two (infinite) structures agree on all first-order sentences, under certain conditions, (2) a recent new approach to second-order Ehrenfeucht-Fraı̈ssé games by Ajtai and Fagin, and (3) playing Ehrenfeucht-Fraı̈ssé games over random structures (this was also used by Ajtai and Fagin). Regarding (1), we give a version of Hanf′s result that is better suited for use as a tool in inexpressibility proofs for classes of finite structures. The power of these techniques is further demonstrated by using them (actually, using just the first two techniques) to give a very simple proof of the separation of monadic NP from monadic co-NP without the presence of built-in relations.

Paratextes et journal non intime : le Journal d'une époque de Denis de Rougemont

Paratextsand the unintimate diary : Denis de Rougemont's "Journal d'une époque". The diary as a genre keeps the distinctive characteristics of regular entries ans focus on the writer. That the genre does not exist in a pure form induces the study of Rougemont's "Journal", a reedition of other diaries whose quasi-oxymoronic titles combine the generic (Journal) with the thematic (d'Allemagne, etc). Other paratextuel elements show the conscious creation of a hybrid to inscribe the interaction between the individual and the collective, in harmony with Rougemont's personalism.

Brazil by John Updike (review)

Reviews John Updike. Brazil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Pp 260. ISBN: 0-67943071 -7. $23.00. In his sixteenth novel, John Updike has shifted his gaze away from the suburban American culture with which we usually associate him and looked instead southward to Brazil. And while medievalists undoubtedly would not classify Updike among the likes ofMarion Zimmer Bradley, Sharan Newman, or Rosemary Sutcliff, they should not hesitate to explore his Brazil. In fact, Updike has long been concerned with the Tristan myth, as he showed in his New Yorker review of Denis de Rougemont's Love DecUred and Love in the Western World, as well as in many short stories and even novels such as Couples. Although noted for his sexually explicit writing, Updike has nevertheless shown a longstanding interest in the moral and the theological. Brazil is his latest — and a good — reformulation ofthe dilemmas faced in the pursuit ofEros. The novel is entertaining- especially because ofUpdike's playful, ironic gaze upon his dramatis personae. But what lies beneath the surface is darkly disturbing and provocative. Brazil presents an ideal geography for Updike's reworking ofthe Tristan myth, for as in the European versions ofthe myth, his hero and heroine move in and out of a sophisticated, modern city and a wild, uncivilized terrain. Thus we are exposed to beaches, boîtes, boardrooms, and coastal city life, while we also enter into the dark, interior jungle regions of the Mato Grosso. Furthermore, Brazil's multicultural character - with its European and African heritages added to its indigenous culture allows Updike to move beyond the conditions imposed on his usual American (USA) setting by the Puritan heritage. As in the settings ofEuropean Tristan tales, water and forest - here, the Copacabana beach and the Mato Grosso — play an essential, mystical role in the joining and separating ofthe two lovers. Updike's Brazilpushes the Tristan myth to a postmodern extreme by focusing on the binarisms black/white, primitive/civilized, male/female, third world/first world, indigenous/settler, training his eye especially on matters of race and politics by contrasting the racial features and the social situations ofthe hero and heroine. Here, Isabel is still the blond beauty, and like Isolde, she elicits the question, put by her lover to his half-brother, Angel or whore?' ButTristáo is Black. While retaining the guise of Reviews201 trickster (he isstreetwise), he has no claims to royaltylike theTristan oflegend (although for the reader there is a nagging doubt that he mayhave been die illegitimate offspring ofIsabel's rich and powerful father). And because 'husband' and 'man' are terms with, we are told, looser connotations in Brazil than in North America, Tristäo and Isabel re-present the issue of commitment: they most often consider themselves married, and they do live together as a married couple even after emerging from the Mato Grosso, eventuallywith the acquiescence ofIsabel's family. The question ofpossession and desire - theTristan dilemma, so to speak- is always in die forefront, but in newly configured ways. Tristlo is a ghetto-dwelling Black with his eye on something more; he has been seeking 'a way into the upper world.' The day he spots a golden goddess on the beach, his fate is sealed. Taken by her to her room in her uncle's luxury apartment, she gives herself to him utterly. 'Wc were brought together to prove love,' Tristlo tells Isabel, and they try to do so through murder attempts by Isabel's father's henchmen, forced separations, workin the mines, Isabel's concubinageandTristao'senslavement. Through all their adventures, Updike's Isabel is so curious and ravenous for Eros that she is willing to experience anything and everything for the sake of her love for Tristäo. Fashioning the tale oflove to the dictum that the lover aspires to become the beloved, Updike gives us an Isabel who is willingly transformed (after the six days ofCreation, as it were) by a shaman into a Black woman in order to liberate Tristäo from slavery among the Portuguese in the Mato Grosso. By that point, wé have come to see that Isabel's love is active, creative, masculine, even: the shaman himself and Isabel...