Dialectical Opposition Research Articles

Rethinking Modal Gender in the Context of the Universe of Tn-Types: Definitions and Mathematical Models for Tonicity and Phonicity

An indisputable cornerstone of the Western music tradition, the dialectic opposition between the major and minor grammatical modal genders has always been present in the imagination of musicians and music theorists for centuries. Such dialectics of opposition is especially important in the context of nineteenth-century harmonic dualism, with its ideas of tonicity and phonicity. These concepts serve as the main foundation for the way harmonic dualism conceives the major and minor worlds: two worlds with equivalent rights and properties, but with opposed polarities. This paper presents a redefinition of the terms tonicity and phonicity, translating those concepts to the context of post-tonal music theory. The terminologies of generatrix, tonicity, root, phonicity, vertex, and azimuth are explained in this paper, followed by propositions of mathematical models for those concepts, which spring from Richard Parncutt’s root-salience model for pitch-class sets. In order to demonstrate the possibilities of using modal gender as a criterion for the study and classification of the universe of Tn-types, we will present a taxonomy of the 351 transpositional set types, which comprises the categories of tonic (major), phonic (minor) and neutral (genderless). In addition, there will be a small discussion on the effect of set symmetries and set asymmetries on the tonic/phonic properties of a Tn-type.

An Object that Belongs to No One

In “An Object That Belongs to No One: Theorizing Performativity in Relation to Trans-”, Tawny Andersen suggests that the ubiquitous, yet little understood, concept of performativity might best be elucidated in relation to the notion of trans-. Andersen sets the stage by contextualizing performativity within its accompanying cultural turn. Next, she reviews performativity’s intellectual history by means of a brief summary of the seminal texts of its major theorists (J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler). From here, she moves on to tease out the structural ties between performativity and trans- in order to question how the latter term might contribute to a deeper understanding of the former. In so doing, she advances the following hypotheses: 1) performativity is transdisciplinary; 2) performativity is not a transcendental signifier; 3) perfomativity is implicated in processes of transposition, transgression and transformation; 4) performativity transcends the series of dialectical oppositions that define it.

The Art of Storytelling as an Exploration of Re-Writing Gender Roles

Abstract: This paper explores Grace Paley's A Conversation with my Father, which was first published in the New American Review (1972), from a feminist perspective precisely using terms by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. A Conversation with my Father is about storytelling; the daughter entertains her father by telling him a story; hence, storytelling as an art is at the center of this study. The main theme of the story is considered to be a generation gap between the female author and her father, yet it mainly deconstructs the image of the father and the daughter into a dialectical female and male binary opposition. Consequently, this leads to a new meaning that shows the intricacy of the art of storytelling which informs a re-construction of gender roles. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the complex role of the female narrator who verbally informs her father of her artistic creation of the story, and the complex role of her father who criticizes her story, and asks her to re-write it from his male perspective. Through the narrator's storytelling, women’s roles as subject/object shed light on the perceived image of women in literature by a patriarchal system.

Informatics in the context of the differentiation and integration of science

Differentiation and integration of the life of society play a prominent role among dialectical opposites that determine social progress. This is certainly true for science as well. A special aspect of this problem is interlinked with the development of informatics. It has many links with extension of scientific-technical revolution. It will not be an overstatement to say that today's informatics has been determined by differentiation and integration in modern science. The future of informatics is also linked with these trends.

Frank O’Hara Drives Charles Olson’s Car

This article shows how Frank O’Hara’s quintessential “I do this I do that” style, and especially his time signals (“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday”), were inherited from Charles Olson. O’Hara’s inheritance is also a critique of Olson’s contradictory poetics of manly immediacy through machinery on the one hand, and claims to autonomy from commercial culture on the other. By immersing himself in consumer culture, O’Hara, contrary to predominant interpretations, is not being flippant. Rather, his cataloging of the life of commodities betrays a deep anxiety about the stability of selfhood in Fordism, evinced in the deaths populating his poems. Both Olson and O’Hara reveal how the Fordist fantasy of personal freedom through machinery (especially the automobile) is haunted by its dialectical opposite: men becoming mere moving parts on the assembly line of the administered world.

THE ROLE OF FORCE IN STATE FORMATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The basic thrust of this article is an in-depth analysis of the established proposition in the existing literature on civil–military relations (CMR) that the military or instrumentality of force is a sine qua non to the formation and consolidation of the state. From that premise, the article considers the views of the founding fathers of CMR and with historical facts lend credence to that proposition. On the other hand, the article emphasises the fact that force and brute force alone is not sufficient to attain national integration. The study on which this article reports, surveyed stages of state evolution and inferred that force and nation building are in dialectical opposition, whereas consensus and cooperation are required more than force in the process of nationhood. The article infers that in this 21 st century, even after attaining nationhood, the state is still in need of very strong armed forces because of the challenges of globalisation, which include terrorism and territorial expansion by neighbouring and far-away states.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire by Isabel Torres (review)

TORRES, ISABEL. Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. xv + 228 pp.In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to the historical and social pressures found in the "imperial 'home' space" (ix). Torres takes as a starting point the "nagging" question "What has love got to do with it?" However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on the other hand, purely formal answer to the question. Instead, the author prefers to inquire "what love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does" (xii). The context is an imperial Spain in which the idealism and anxiety of an emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in the coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.The section on Garcilaso de la Vega focuses on the tension made patent between a productive imitation of the Petrarchan model-which transforms and nourishes the work-and a "project of lyric self-creation" that simultaneously needs to move beyond "imitative/emulative" poetics (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to the analysis. In Chapter 1, "Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation," the author delves into the synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading an erasure of the residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how the reader is faced with what seems to be "an objective site of aesthetic contemplation" that can nonetheless only be accessed through "immersion in a subjective imagination that is rendered in deceptively material terms" (29). The summing statement for the analysis of Eclogue III follows the same logic: "The anxieties expressed in the text about the vulnerability of the voice, and of the written artifact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped in time, are integral to Garcilaso's self-conscious poetics. But in Eclogue III such concerns are balanced by a sophisticated self-elaboration that is enabled and sustained through appropriation, and by the sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal" (34).Chapter 2, "Garcilaso de la Vega: luz de nuestra nacion?," further explores the manifest-and less clearly resolved-tensions in the poet's more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically the imbalance in the arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates an encounter between the aesthetic distance provided by letters and the "anguished questioning of a subject voice" which cannot escape the tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from the position of the conqueror to the position of the conquered, displays a transfer also between the historical past, literature's role in the creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poetsoldier's intimate experience, all together revealing how "the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with the anxieties of the old" (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with the aim of bridging the apparent incongruity in the shift between the pastoral scene and the historical account of the House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies the consistency throughout of "water/mirror poetics" (59), which play out inherent tensions between reality and illusion, past and present, art and time (as found in ekphrasis), and integration and disintegration both at the level of the self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to an emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso's political poetry as harmonizing the arms and letters, and would offer the poet as a model "luz de la nacion," Torres highlights the paradox of the self as haunted by an "indeterminate human condition" navigating imperial ideology as reflected in its literary reconstructions, revealing how the success of the individual and the community often depends on the sacrifice of one for the other (59). …

"Christian Socialism": The Fate of Russia in M.M. Prishvin’s Novel "Osudareva Doroga" (“Tsar’s Road”)

The article discusses the idea of "Christian socialism" in Mikhail Prishvin’s late novel "Osudareva doroga" (“Tsar’s road”). The key concept of the novel is analyzed via the image of the "all-powerful" supervisor, Sutulov. The character’s fate is purposeful, following a certain way to implement the planned governmental project, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorkanal - known as the Tsar’s road). One of the central motifs of the novel, the motive of power, is expressed through the language of spatial relations. The power of one individual over another’s destiny is shown through the spatial opposition "top-bottom". A myth-poetic analysis of Sutulov’s image in the aspect of the central philosophical category of the novel, a dialectical opposition "would like to - have to" (personality and society), allows for the explicit "Christian socialism" phenomenon in the novel, which is a specific synthesis of "ethical" communism and Christian orthodoxy. In Prishvin’s narration, Sutulov’s image is associated with the mercilessness of the historical period, bringing both inevitable changes and the hope for a bright future for Russia. Considering the phenomenon of "Christian socialism" through the example of Sutulov’s image, we found that Prishvin represents his special project in this novel. It is the project of the creation of the higher organization society type, the "social sobornost (unity, conciliarity, collegiality)". "Tsar’s road" is a novel of "reconciliation", showing the way out of this difficult historical period that brings in the spirit of Christianity; it is an attempt to eliminate the dreadful warp towards spiritual poverty against the background of universal equality. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s4p202

Using Dialectics to Build Leader-Stakeholder Relationships: An Exploratory Study on Relational Dialectics in Chinese Corporate Leaders’ Web-Based Messages

In large Chinese corporations operating in the Greater China region, there is an increasing use of web-based bilingual messages by their corporate leaders for fostering relationships with stakeholders. Although frequently presented as literal translations of each other, leaders’ bilingual communication sometimes tends to exhibit nonliteral variations. This study aims to examine the relational dialectics theory in the construction of leader-stakeholder relationships in leaders’ bilingual web-based messages and explores the dialectical oppositions that are embedded in the Chinese and English versions of these messages. The results suggest that leaders’ communication is characterized by the deliberate use of different dialectics that allow them to tailor their communication to the perceived needs of stakeholders from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In particular, the Chinese version of the message is adapted to exude greater connection, openness, affection, and predictability in content as well as style, which is believed to strengthen relationships with stakeholders.

DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE LEADERSHIP POTENTIAL IN EDUCATION SYSTEM

The aim of the research is to reveal the educational formation mechanisms of manager personality, including the ability to operate the intellectual capital at all levels of activities, to disclose innovative competence in dealing with special problems as the regulation of social and organizational processes, to apply knowledge on the management factors efficiency, human needs, attitudes, and modern management techniques. Methods. The research outcomes include the methods of social control organization in the innovation sphere, based on the design of the value system that integrates the intellectual activities of employees into a unified semantic informational space, which promotes the socio-cultural development of various social groups and institutions. Sociological methods of the expert survey in the form of in-depth interviews are applied as an empirical basis of the present study. Cognitive modeling method is used in the course of interpretation and data analysis. The author draws the conclusion using the method of dialectical opposition unity. Results. The research findings demonstrate the characteristics of managers who are good at effective mobilizing the intellectual resources while encouraging the staff members’ capabilities of self-development and self-training. The article deals with the integral indicators of management entity engagement including the arrangement of conditions and interaction system that sustain innovative values updating in some organizations in order to improve organization efficiency in accordance with the stated objectives. Scientific novelty. The author summarizes the theoretical basis of modern means and methods of social institutions management, including educational institutions. General management mechanisms of innovative leadership potential realization are presented in the form of the hierarchic unity. It is shown that intellectual capital integration into innovative processes of an organization ought to include the creation of an integration system of human, national and organizational values. Intellectual capital is considered as the main subject to management. The author insists on the succession principles observance analyzing the management theories of various intellectual assets and its process of transformations. It is specially noted that the integration of management models based on innovation, and classical resources, allows the development of social control methods to minimize the risk in the face of uncertainty, forward the sustainable development of the organization, able to adapt not only dynamic, but also a stable environment. Practical significance. The research outcomes can be used for further development of management training techniques involved in the innovation process, as well as by the managers to improve the methods of updating the intellectual capital of the organization, including educational institutions.

Consciousness-Raising: A Tool for Feminist Praxis in Research and Granting Voice

There is a long standing debate among researchers within the social sciences. Scholars argue the virtues of quantitative versus qualitative research, positivism versus subjectivity, and the use of mainstream/traditional methods of data collection versus constructionist, feminist, and multicultural methods of data collection. At the core of this debate is the quest for truth and an understanding of the social. From this debate emerged a number of new and innovative methods of data collection. Feminist researchers led the way in challenging mainstream, positivistic, quantitative approaches to research. That is not to say that feminist is limited to qualitative methods. Feminist researchers utilize existing methods and much more. They challenged the basic methodological assumptions of mainstream/traditional (ArdoviniBrooker 2001). Feminist researchers viewed, and still view, as a form of social activism. Research is done for praxis and not for the sake of research. Due to this new purpose of research, new and innovative methods developed along with the modification of the old ones. With this in mind, I must state that this paper can not do justice to all the methods used by feminist scholars. Therefore, I am only offering insight into a tool that may be utilized as a feminist form of praxis. This article explores the use of consciousness-raising as such a tool.Although there aren't any methods of that are specific to feminist research, there are some underlying elements that are consistent to feminist methodology. Basically, feminist methodology attempts to join the subject and the object by using reflexivity and rejecting positivism. Thus, feminist methods are performed by those who consider themselves as feminists. Feminist methods are also performed by researchers who reject old constraints, to make women and minorities aware of the conditions that limit their life choice, and to ensure that woman and minorities are no longer barred from access to high-level position (Reinharz 1992, p. 218).However, let us digress and address the importance of the Feminist Movement in the creation of feminist methodology. The Feminist Movement assisted in opening the door to feminist researchers, theorists and called for the challenging of the mainstream/traditional paradigm. Thus, feminist researchers challenged the methodological assumptions of past research. Many feminist researchers no longer viewed as research for sake. Research was now viewed as praxis oriented. The person now became political.As noted earlier, one method that best lends itself to this new perspective is consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising is a unique tool used by feminist methodologists as well as qualitative methodologists. It embodies principles of enabling women and minorities to discuss and understand their experiences from their own viewpoint (Reinharz 1992: 220). Consciousness-raising assists in uncovering the reality of those that are marginalized, rather then regurgitate a reality that is constructed for them.Since consciousness-raising explores the unexplored, there is an issue that is raised by feminist methodologists. This issue is concerned with the domination of grand narratives in mainstream research. In other words, feminist methodologies are mostly reflective, they speak to multiple truths. Therefore, the methods used to conduct feminist research, as well as multicultural social theories, speak to multiple and different truths because there are many women and cultures with many different points of view that were and are silenced by mainstream methods and theories. For this reason, consciousness-raising may assist in discovering these many truths, instead of just one Truth.Since the subject of this article is consciousness-raising, a feminist method; it seems only logical to begin with a definition of feminism. The term feminism has many definitions, which include:1) A holistic theory concerned with the nature of global oppression of women and minorities;2) A sociopolitical theory and practice that aims to free all women and minorities from exploitation;3) A social movement encompassing strategic confrontations with the racist, sex-class system;4) An ideology that stands in dialectical opposition to all racist and misogynous ideologies and practices (Jary and Jaiy 1991:167). …

Neither Dokdo, Nor the DDP: An Argument for Negative Hybridity

This paper argues for a reconceptualization of hybridity. Rejecting the definition of hybridity as a ‘cultural melange’ as ideological, it reconstructs the contradiction inherent to hybridity as a dialectical opposition, and then, following the dialectical materialism of Slavoj Žižek, this paper follows this opposition through its dialectical resolution. Consequently, the model of hybridity that claims the compatibility of local and global identity is resisted in preference to a form of negative hybridity that rejects the choice between local and global identity as false. This theoretical model is played out with reference to contemporary South Korean identity, using the tension between local Korean culture and an intruding global culture to explore the contradictions that hybridity tries to contain and the motivations that give rise to them.

La Crítica genética: un marco teórico sobre la disciplina, objetivos y método

El primer objetivo de la crítica genética es reconstruir la marcha de la escritura, pero a la vez intenta desentrañar la red de significaciones que se va configurando; desarrolla para ello dos tipos principales de actividades: la edición genética de textos modernos y el emprendimiento de diversas orien­taciones interpretativas. El examen de los procesos escriturales demuestra que en ese espacio late un perpetuo enfrentamiento entre unidad y diversidad, equilibrio e inestabilidad, y esa oposición dialéctica entre la permanencia y el cambio –inherente de la naturaleza de los procesos culturales– acompaña a los estudios filológicos desde sus orígenes: la crítica genética puede ser considerada, entonces, un avatar moderno de la Filología.

Seeking an ‘other’ desperately: the dialectical opposition of political Islam in Morocco

This article uses the ‘opposition’ parameter to analyse the political discourse and practice of the main Islamist political actors in Morocco: the ‘officialist’ political Islam represented by the Harakat al-Tawhid wa-l-Islah (Unicity and Reform Movement, MUR) through its political alter ego, the Hizb al-‘Adala wa-l-Tanmiyya (Justice and Development Party, PJD) in which it is included, tries to reach the power in order to reform the political system in moral terms from the inside, by establishing a dialectical opposition based on Islamic concepts against the rest of the primary elites (opposition-instrumentalisation). The outsider Jama'at al-‘Adl wa-l-Ihsan (Community of Justice and Spirituality, CJS) keeps a firm opposition role against the Moroccan regime, denying both moral and political legitimacy to the ‘Alawi monarchy and trying to change the social and political system from outside of the party system (resistance-démarcation). This study offers some perspectives on the place of the dialectics of opposition in political discourse and their respective position regarding power. It also offers insight into the ideological challenges political Islam should face in the short term.

Henry James at the Ethical Turn

Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical approaches have associated Henry James’s fiction, and the ethical import of reading literature more broadly, with an array of related values including particularity, impulsiveness, and indeterminacy. Seeking to complicate this characterization of the ethical effects of Jamesian fiction, this paper emphasizes the debt of The Ambassadors (1903) to a form of dialectical narration that privileges an array of antithetical values including abstraction, analysis, and understanding. Attending in particular to the novel’s opposition between Lambert Strether’s imagination and Maria Gostrey’s discrimination, I argue that The Ambassadors uses perspectival relations between characters to clarify and challenge the judgments of its characters and, by extension, its readers. By building dialectical oppositions like these into his novels, James does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling so much as he shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought. The paper makes the case that it is through juxtaposition to characters like Maria that the full significance of Strether’s feeling—that is, the perspective of value that motivates his practice—can be grasped by readers seeking to refine their own ethical thinking. By emphasizing how James’s fiction facilitates thoughts that attend to the whole, rather than just provoking feelings that attend to the particular, the paper seeks to expand both received understandings of James’s fiction and of ethical approaches to literary criticism more broadly.

Preacher as Balanced Extremist: Biblical Dialectics and Sermonic Certainty

Preachers are called to take seriously the theological tensions within Scripture alongside the contingent sense of ‘certainty’ that ought to accompany the preaching moment. Addressing this paradox often invokes a call to ‘balance’, which sometimes proves to be as equally unbiblical as outright extremism. Drawing upon Barth’s notion of dialectical ‘one-sidedness’ and Chesterton’s expression of the ‘furious opposites’ of theological paradox, this article sketches the possibility of dialectically dogmatic preaching. This concept will be partially illustrated via an unexpected source, the influential British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who exemplified a dialectical awareness which chaperoned his famously ‘dogmatic’ emphases. Such an approach highlights the vital importance of retaining the particularity of a theological truth in its radical fullness without ignoring its dialectical opposite, nor swamping the pulpit in perpetual ambiguity.

The postmodern ethnic condition in Ernesto Quiñónez’s Bodega Dreams

Ernesto Quinonez’s novel, Bodega Dreams, is presented as an exemplar of contemporary Latino/a writers’ persistent depiction of ethnic identity as a life-defining social factor. By positing the dialectical opposition of the ethnic to the mainstream as the analytical framework for interpreting the significance of the moral dilemma central to the novel, the argument advanced is that Bodega Dreams instantiates a particular social sensibility tied to ethnicity and character formation that may be referred to as the postmodern ethnic condition, and that the definition of that social sensibility is a permutation of the political project of the fading civil rights era.

Drivers of Creativity: How Theory Can Inform Contemporary Practice in the Art School Curriculum and Beyond

This paper discusses an innovative strategy for the integration of theory modules, termed Drivers of Creativity, with the studio practices undertaken in the MA portfolio of courses in Fine Art, Photography, Visual Communication and Textiles at the Dynevor Centre for Arts, Design and Media, Swansea Metropolitan University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Wales, UK. It argues that at the heart of the creative process, there lie tensions which drive much – if not all – creative activity in those disciplines. Such tensions emanate from dialectical oppositions which impinge upon all producers of artworks of all kinds, firstly between notions of individual identity and the mores of the social group; and secondly the dialectical opposition between the natural environment and human cultural constructions and interventions. These two dialectical oppositions inform the structure and content of the two theory modules undertaken by all first year students on the MA Programmes. The modules are described in terms of their aims, objectives and learning outcomes, and an indication of the modules’ content and teaching strategies is given. The paper is illustrated with a range of case studies, illustrating both the author’s and students’ practice motivated by the Drivers of Creativity modules. Evaluation of the quality of the project work is informed by a general criterion: the degree of balance evident between two factors, introduced and explained as conceptual intrigue and perceptual intrigue.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire by Isabel Torres (review)

TORRES, ISABEL. Love Poetry in Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. xv + 228 pp.In her book Isabel Torres sets out to study Spanish Golden Age love poetry in relation to historical and social pressures found in 'home' space (ix). Torres takes as a starting point nagging question What has love got to do with it? However, she soon reformulates it, discarding either a strictly biographical or, on other hand, purely formal answer to question. Instead, author prefers to inquire love, as a complex and contestatory signifier, actually does (xii). context is imperial Spain in which idealism and anxiety of emerging and yet threatened national self-consciousness are embedded in coordinates of desire, temporality, and loss represented in love poetry.The section on de la Vega focuses on tension made patent between a productive imitation of Petrarchan model-which transforms and nourishes work-and a project of lyric self-creation that simultaneously needs to move beyond imitative/emulative (5). This terrain has been previously covered by Anne J. Cruz and Ignacio Navarrete, yet Torres brings admirable nuance to analysis. In Chapter 1, Garcilaso: Transfiguration and Transvaluation, author delves into synthesis of dialectical opposites (immediacy/mediation, unity/loss, rest/motion, origin/originality, memory/imagination) without forcing through her reading erasure of residues of conflict that remain and may be recalled within any given opposition. For example, in her reading of Sonnet XI Torres notes how reader is faced with what seems to be an objective site of aesthetic contemplation that can nonetheless only be accessed through immersion in a subjective imagination that is rendered in deceptively material terms (29). summing statement for analysis of Eclogue III follows same logic: The anxieties expressed in text about vulnerability of voice, and of written artifact itself, as it takes shape and is shaped in time, are integral to Garcilaso's self-conscious poetics. But in Eclogue III such concerns are balanced by a sophisticated self-elaboration that is enabled and sustained through appropriation, and by sheer rhetorical force of a sensed infinity that promises infinite renewal (34).Chapter 2, Garcilaso de la Vega: de nuestra nacion?, further explores manifest-and less clearly resolved-tensions in poet's more patently political poems (or segments thereof), specifically imbalance in arms and letters dichotomy. Once more, critics such as Cruz provide a precedent that Torres develops with considerable finesse. Elegy II demonstrates encounter between aesthetic distance provided by letters and anguished questioning of a subject voice which cannot escape tragedy caused by imperial arms (38). Sonnet XXXIII, with its lyrical movement from position of conqueror to position of conquered, displays a transfer also between historical past, literature's role in creation of a collective remembering and forgetting, and a poetsoldier's intimate experience, all together revealing how the new literary political orders he proclaims are marked very deliberatively with anxieties of old (43). Eclogue II receives close attention with aim of bridging apparent incongruity in shift between pastoral scene and historical account of House of Alba. In this section Torres identifies consistency throughout of water/mirror poetics (59), which play out inherent tensions between reality and illusion, past and present, art and time (as found in ekphrasis), and integration and disintegration both at level of self (think Albanio and Nemoroso) and in relation to emergent national consciousness. Against readings that would interpret Garcilaso's political poetry as harmonizing arms and letters, and would offer poet as a model luz de la nacion, Torres highlights paradox of self as haunted by indeterminate human condition navigating imperial ideology as reflected in its literary reconstructions, revealing how success of individual and community often depends on sacrifice of one for other (59). …

Bonaventure Contra Mundum? The Catholic Theological Tradition Revisited

Conventional Catholic interpretations of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure often pose them as dialectical opposites representing two distinct theological traditions. This article calls these interpretations into question, and, after offering an alternative sketch of each thinker's theological accomplishment, argues for a Catholic theology of history and tradition that can admit plurality without resorting to binary opposition.