Early Masterpiece Research Articles

Comments on the book of Tereza Matějčková Gibt es eine Welt in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes? / “Is there a world in Hegelʼs Phenomenology of Spirit?”, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018

Tereza Matějčková’s book presents a highly interesting phenomenological reading of Hegel’s early masterpiece. The result is a proposal to take the title seriously – such that we can see the book as the earliest introduction into the methods and topics of philosophical phenomenology, despite the fact that Husserl himself, in contrast to Heidegger, did not seem to see the narrow relation. I especially value Tereza Matějčkováʼs very deep understanding of the dialectical humour and irony of Hegel’s writings. However, I understand the Phenomenology of Spirit in a somehow more radical way as a most general ‘logicֹ’ of self-consciousness. It shows how referring to myself is referring to the world and vice versa, despite the fact that the word ‘world’ does not play a prominent role in Hegelʼs text. Some disagreements result over Hegelʼs wide use of metaphors and analogies in his structural analysis of personal self-relations, for example in his reconstruction and critique of the age-old (in fact Platonic) image of a fight between a thinking soul as master and a system of immediate bodily desires as slave. We cannot get rid of inclinations and appetites, and we cannot retreat, as the Stoics had thought, into pure thinking. In other words, there is no fight ‘for recognition’ between different individuals in Hegelʼs book, but in the end an answer to a classical theodicy saying that the world, as it is, is the best one we have because there is only one world.

Solitude and Despair in the Literary Oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński1

ABSTRACT This article looks at the solitude and despair in the literary oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, drawing on three stories constituting a ‘metaphysical direction’ rooted in Italian historiscapes, and which the writer published in a 1960 collection entitled Skrzydła ołtarza (Polyptych). It marked a new departure from his heavily political work grounded on personal experience of the war and totalitarianism. The article engages with this literature from the author’s personal circumstances, and looks at the sentiments he confronts us with from a long overview of writing upon solitude and on the subject of ‘the island’. It concludes that this ‘new’ direction was nevertheless grounded on sentiments touched upon in his early masterpiece of the Soviet labour camps, Inny Świat (1951), and that for Herling, who renewed his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith in 1943 whilst in hospital, religion constituted the solution to despair for all thinkers with a moral voice; specifically, the solace of compassion.

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

Theolologicophilolological Investigations: Is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus a Modernist Work?

AbstractIn her recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty, Karen Zumhagen‐Yekplé uses a resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus to highlight similarities between Wittgenstein’s work and his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. On the basis of this reading, she claims that Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece is a modernist work.This article argues that there are profound problems with the resolute reading that she offers, and it suggests that ‘traditional’ readings of the Tractatus survive the criticisms she makes of them. Nonetheless, a case can still be made that Wittgenstein’s work is a modernist one, and it is a useful exercise to compare the Tractatus with modernist works from the 1920s.

Impact of using modern technology in training on sports performance

Abstract Introduction: The close relationship between technology and sports is not necessarily modern. The ancient Greeks had the idea of sculpting and making an extraordinarily aerodynamic object in the form of a disc, an early masterpiece that has remained largely unchanged to this day. Purpose: This paper aims to show the importance of monitoring training using technological tools, so as to result in a beneficial effect on athletes. Materials and methods: In order to carry out this research, 32 athletes, boxing practitioners for at least two years, and with at least one year of preparation for participating in domestic and international competitions, were selected. Subjects were divided into two groups, one that was subjected to research (experimental) composed of 12 athletes aged 15 to 18 years, and the other composed of 20 athletes aged between 15 and 18 years. Results: The average scores for the four parameters of the experiment group (N= 12) (Forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), M = 6.95, AS = 0.53; peak expiratory flow (PEF) M = 9.43, AS = 1.35; Right direct punch (MYO_DRP) M = 588.33, AS = 181.94; respectively the left direct punch (MYO_STG) M = 546.75, AS = 136.82) were significantly higher than those of the control group (N=20) (FEV, M = 5.46, AS = 1.22; PEF M = 7.33, AS = 1.43; MYO_DRP M = 426.55, AS = 151.68; MYO_STG M = 406.50, AS = 139.13, respectively). Conclusions: Based on the analysed data, we can say that our hypothesis that continuous implementation and monitoring of training plans using technological means will lead to the improvement of the indices pursued in the research, is confirmed. Thus, the group that underwent a training regime using certain technological tools recorded significantly higher values at the end of the programme in comparison with the control group. However, we could see that the use of devices during training, which require them to be fitted every time on the athlete, leads to an extension of training duration and takes the athlete out of the training state. To remove this shortcoming it would be useful to integrate these equipments into a system that incorporates them all.

Dead Serious? On the Presence (and the Absence) of Comic Elements in Cyprian Norwid’s Works

Critical studies of Cyprian Norwid’s writing, just like the scholarship on the literature of Polish Romanticism, focus mostly on the religious, philosophical, ironic and aesthetic aspects of his works. The question of humour in Norwid’s literary output still has not been extensively examined. The paper analyzes Norwid’s comical works. In his early masterpieces, published between 1842 and 1852, comic elements were almost absent, but after his trip to the United States an important change can be noticed in his way of writing, and humour becomes a key elelement of his literary writing and visual art. It can be argued that his diffi cult American experiences (alienation, struggle with the new language, desperate attempts to fi nd work) changed Norwid’s perception of himself as an artist and taught him to look at his art from a distance.

Reading Memory and Desire in ‘La Figlia Che Piange

“La Figlia Che Piange,” one of the poems included in T. S. Eliot’s first volume of poetry, has attracted relatively meagre attention from critics, much less than, say, his early masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “Portrait of a Lady.” The poem has often been noted for its beauty and lyricism, but the speaker’s destabilized presence deserves more discussion than it has received so far. “La Figlia Che Piange” presents a male speaker who (re)enacts and transforms his memory of a breakup in three verse paragraphs consisting of imperative, pluperfect subjunctive, and indicative sentences, respectively. As a poem of introspection, “La Figlia Che Piange” explores the speaker’s memory in grammatically complex ways, but the poem’s inward-turning eye discovers an unstable self as elsewhere in Eliot’s poetry. Nevertheless, all this is heuristic in discussing modern poetry and serves a good example of Wallace Stevens’s “poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History by Susan Scott Parrish

Reviewed by: The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History by Susan Scott Parrish Robert Jackson The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History. Susan Scott Parrish. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. $35.00 (cloth); $14.99 (eBook). This book investigates a flood that sprawled across forty percent of the United States (and some of Canada), killing hundreds (and perhaps thousands, since African American deaths were not included in any "official" count), displacing nearly one million people—including 300,000 African Americans who were placed in makeshift camps, which the Red Cross called "concentration camps" and which reproduced a particularly American racial logic—and stimulating an enormous range of intellectual and aesthetic production from the Mississippi Delta blues of Bessie Smith to the Berlin radio broadcasts of Walter Benjamin. The 1927 Mississippi flood, Parrish argues at length, and quite compellingly, should be understood as one of the central events in the history of modernism. This is a work that situates the disaster alongside others of its era: World War I, the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, fascism and genocide in Europe and the Near East. Parrish aspires to bring "eco-catastrophe into our discussions of modernity, its experiences, and its cultures," and to explore "how this disaster took on form and meaning as it was nationally and internationally represented across multiple media platforms, both while the flood moved inexorably southward and, subsequently, over the next two decades" (3–4). Consequently, and because it illuminates so well the wide range of cultural forms given shape by the flood, The Flood Year 1927 ought to take a prominent place among other important works in modernist studies devoted to disaster and trauma. It will be of particular interest to scholars of environmental humanities and others seeking models for the integration of ecocritical scholarship with modernist studies, and its focus on the complex historical roots of this most unnatural of "natural" disasters will challenge us to revisit our assumptions about "man-made" disasters such as wars and financial collapses. Indeed, one of Parrish's signal achievements is the excavation of a set of discursive practices ranging from journalism to blues music to the experimental novels of William Faulkner that articulate an awareness of the inseparability of "man" and "nature" in the modern world. Failure to discern this foundational concept, she suggests, is symptomatic of the political and social history that made the flood possible in the first place, and continues to obscure its important lessons for us in the age of the emphatically man-made Hurricane Katrina and its now-prolific successors. Parrish's book will not be confused with other narratives of the flood's history, usually political histories with a primary focus on the land-use policies that emerged in the flood's aftermath; the most prominent among these is John M. Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1997), which Parrish cites frequently. Instead, Parrish utilizes a wide range of theoretical texts and devotes her chapters to a series of case studies to demonstrate both the embeddedness of the flood zone in a heavily mediated "contemporaneous global skein" and the imaginative responses to the flood that registered its cultural impact [End Page 616] in the midst of the modernist era (11). After an early chapter provides a more general historical account of the flood and its national scale, subsequent chapters address Bessie Smith's "BackWater Blues" and other African American musicians' treatment of the flood; the portrayal of the disaster in vaudeville and minstrel performances, including several highly publicized fundraising benefits sponsored by organizations outside the South; the flood-inspired aesthetics of Faulkner's early masterpieces The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), and Faulkner's return to the flood in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939); and the contributions of the flood to Richard Wright's nascent political thought and creative work. Parrish is also quite attentive to print journalism, combing through the archives of major national newspapers as well as those of the African American press and smaller local newspapers in areas most directly affected by the flood; the flood's mediation is a vital...

The University of Iowa Tractatus Map

Drawing on recent work on the nature of the numbering system of the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s use of that system in his composition of the Prototractatus, the paper sets out the rationale for the online tool called The University of Iowa Tractatus Map. The map consists of a website with a front page that links to two separate subway-style maps of the hypertextual numbering system Wittgenstein used in his Tractatus. One map displays the structure of the published Tractatus; the other lays out the structure of the Prototractatus. The site makes available the full text of the German and the two canonical English translations. While we envisage the map as a tool that we would like a wide variety of readers to find helpful, we argue that our website amounts to a radically new edition of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, with far-reaching implications for the interpretation of that text. In particular, we claim that our visually compelling presentation of the book’s overall structure delivers on Wittgenstein’s cryptic claim in a letter to his publisher that it is the numbers that “make the book surveyable and clear”.

Капельмейстер, архитектор, ботаник и антрополог: о подтексте и контексте поэмы В. Маяковского ‘Флейта-позвоночник’

One of the early masterpieces by Vladimir Maiakovskii, the poema ‘Backbone Flute’, was first published in February 1916 with many censor cuts. However, even in this corrupted version it made a strong impression on the poets' contemporaries, due to the utmost emotional tension and confessionary nature of its lyrical theme, and the theomachy that penetrates the overall poem. In this article for the first time the poem's dense Hoffmannian underpinning is revealed and the cross-motifs of Maiakovskii's poetry are accounted for. These allusions have been left unnoticed by researchers of literature, but they were certainly seen by the contemporaries of Maiakovskii. Thanks to the Hoffmannian images in the story by Aleksandr Chaianov, ‘History of the Barber Doll’ (1918), the portrait and the facts of Vladimir Maiakovskii's biography can be recognized.

Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity.

Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998): a Japanese planner devoted to historic cities in the Middle East and North Africa

Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998) was a Japanese urban planner whose life-work was urban planning in the Middle East and North Africa. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of his work, which still remains unknown. His early masterpiece, the ‘Square House’, shows how he was influenced by Kiyoshi Seike to apply historic spatial composition to realize width and convertibility in low-cost housing. Following this, Banshoya studied under the supervision of Gerald Hanning and George Candilis at Ateliers de Bâtisseurs in Paris, and went to Algiers to engage in the study of ‘evolutionary habitat’. As a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) expert, he began working with Michel Ecochard in 1962 in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. They were responsible for the elaboration of master plans for these three cities, and that of Damascus still remains as a legally active master plan today. Coupled with the Syrian political struggle since the 1980s, there has been some reaction against their modernist policies. However, the case is made for a detailed examination of Banshoya's work, and re-evaluation of its legacy for the urban planning history of the Middle East and North Africa.

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular: Petrarch at Sea

Casual readers and scholars alike celebrate Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta ( RVF ) as an early masterpiece of vernacular lyric. Yet Petrarch directed most of his professional energies as writer to Latin composition, in the belief that Latin was the language of his most important literary models and of the literary future. This essay studies Petrarch’s life – in particular, episodes revealing his conflicted attitudes toward the sea and especially toward travel by ship – in order to comment on his attitude toward the language of literature: his respect for Latin, his enduring affection for Italian, and his work on the vernacular lyrics at the very end of his life. The essay uses Theodor Adorno’s formulation of late style (Adorno used this concept to discuss the late work of composers, in particular Beethoven) to describe Petrarch’s late work on the RVF in his last years. It argues that Petrarch’s turn to the vernacular in his final years should be read as a kind of linguistic experimentalism – fragmentary and catastrophic, as Adorno would describe it, rather than sweet, unified and harmonic – made possible when Petrarch is no longer using Latin to think about literary posterity.

Verdi: the operas and choral works

Giuseppe Verdi's career forms one of the loveliest arcs in musical history. The passion of his works resonates universally, while the sophistication of his middle and late operas satisfies demanding ears and tastes. In Verdi: The Operas and Choral Works, Victor Lederer surveys every one of the master's 28 operas and his greatest choral pieces, showing Verdi's growth as a musical dramatist-he would revolutionise the hidebound conventions of 19th-century Italian opera-and his single-minded pursuit of dramatic truth. After describing the chaotic milieu in which Verdi learned his craft, the book provides act-by-act analyses of the early masterpieces Nabucco, Ernani, and Macbeth. The neglected operas from the composer's self-described years in the galleys are covered together. Lederer then takes readers through the magnificent sequence of Verdi operas from Luisa Miller onward, including the fine but underrated Stiffelio. Each of the late operas - Don Carlo, Aida, and Othello and Falstaff, the twin Shakespearean masterworks that crown Verdi's oeuvre - is discussed at length in its own chapter. Lederer also examines Verdi's monumental Requiem along with the choral Quattro pezzi sacri, Verdi's sublime final achievement. The book comes with a Naxos CD of musical selections representing highlights from throughout Verdi's long, remarkable career.

Embodied Cognition and Camera Mobility in F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Fritz Lang's M

This essay employs insights from embodied approaches to cognition to develop a tighter grasp on the phenomenon of camera mobility. Close readings of two early masterpieces of German cinema investigate how the viewer relates to camera movement on the basis of kinaesthetic empathy and is thereby transported, emotionally gripped or expelled from the storyworld. I argue that the construction of the fictional world is based on this specific viewing attitude, which invites us either to merely observe or, in contrast, to engage with the events on screen. As a consequence, the investigation of camera movement on the basis of embodied cognition helps us both to gain a deeper understanding of how we are drawn into the space defined by camera movement and to open up the possibility of a ‘natural’ history of camera conventions as they were established at this early stage of cinema.

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

슈퍼히어로 코믹의 반복과 다양체적 형식에 관한 연구

현재 다양한 플랫폼에서 슈퍼히어로 코믹을 바탕으로 한 미디어들이 쏟아져 나오고 있고 영화의 경우만 보면 다수의 슈퍼히어로 영화들이 역대 전 세계 흥행 순위 상위권에 오르는 등 높은 인기를 누리고 있다. 이러한 현상은 '슈퍼히어로의 역습'이라 표현할 수 있는 2012년 국내 극장가에서도 똑같이 재현되고 있다. 슈퍼히어로에 대한 높은 관심에도 불구하고 이들의 고향이나 다름없는 출판코믹은 아직 국내 팬들에게 생소하다. 본 논문은 출판 코믹에서 구현되는 슈퍼히어로의 다양성과 방대한 세계관에 주목하고 이러한 끊임없는 생성과 무한 반복이 슈퍼히어로의 정체성과 어떤 연관성이 있는지 존재론적 관점으로 연구한 것이다. 먼저, 2장에서 한명의 슈퍼히어로가 다수의 평행우주에 개별적으로 존재하는 슈퍼히어로 코믹의 다중 우주적 세계관을 구체적으로 설명하였다. 복수적인 한명의 슈퍼히어로와 복수의 시리즈는 내러티브의 통일성을 무너뜨리고 모순과 역설을 초래하지만 다양한 실험적 창작을 허락하기 때문에 슈퍼히어로 코믹을 생동감 있는 생성/창작의 공간으로 발전시키는데 공헌하였다. 3장에서 본격적으로 반복의 사유로 슈퍼히어로와 코믹 텍스트를 살펴본다. 슈퍼히어로의 반복은 경제적 실리의 잉여적 생산이기 이전에 창조적 역량의 반복임을 주장한다. 질 들뢰즈가 그의 초기 저서 <차이와 반복>(Diff<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>rence et R<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>p<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>tition)에서 현실을 왜곡하는 일반적인 동일성을 지적하고 플라톤의 재현의 체제를 전복하고자 그가 사유한 창조적인 반복을 슈퍼히어로의 반복의 중요한 논리적 근거로 활용한다. 들뢰즈가 창조적이고 역동하는 반복과 니체의 영원회귀 하는 초인이 다르지 않다는 주장에 근거하여 슈퍼히어로가 생기 있는 차이, 동일성에 종속되지 않은 시뮬라크르의 존재라고 주장한다. 즉 슈퍼히어로는 반복이 존재의 근거며 반복되어야 슈퍼히어로로 현실화가 가능하다고 주장한다. 또 반복의 출발, 근원은 들뢰즈가 베르그송에서 주로 차용한 다양제적 잠재성(the virtual)이라는 점에 근거하여 '일자一者'적 슈퍼히어로(예로, 슈퍼맨)이 '다자多者'인 내재적 잠재성을 형성하고 포괄적이고 심층적인 반복을 통해 이전의 모든 슈퍼맨의 통합된 기억, 과거, 지속(잠재성)에서 분화된 슈퍼맨으로 탄생(현실화)한다고 주장한다. 4장에서 수적 다양성과 내적 다양체를 논하고 모든 반복이 들뢰즈의 생성과 역량의 반복으로 귀결되지 않는다는 점을 밝히기 위해 한국만화의 대표적 만화 캐릭터인 이현세 작가의 오혜성과 슈퍼맨을 비교한다. American superhero comics are being produced in numerous different forms for multiple, and cross-platform media. In cinema, films based on superhero comics top the list of all time box office records. The same phenomenon of the 'Invasion of Superhero' is duplicated in Korean box office 2012, however, the korean fans are not familiar with the superheroes from the publication which provides the original source of characters and stories for other superhero related media products. Based on observing the multiple and vastness of world building characteristics of superhero comic, this paper attempts to associate the continuous creative nature and the infinite repetition of superheroes and comic texts with the identity of superhero on ontological level. First, chapter 2 examines how one superhero exists in multiple and different worlds individually by utilizing the concept of 'multi-universe' or 'multiverse' in comic texts. Initially, duplicating a superhero on multiple settings and series destroyed continuity and allowed contradiction and paradox confused narrative as a whole, but it also gave chances for comics to be more vibrant and experimental with their stories and characters. Chapter 3 analyzes the superhero comic texts in the light of repetition, concept developed by french philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and make the argument that the superheroes and texts are not repeated to generate surplus of source for economic utilitarian purposes, but it is, first and foremost, a repetition of creativeness and capability. Many concepts introduced by Deleuze in his early masterpiece, <Diff<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>rence et R<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>p<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>tition> are taken to support this argument. Mainly, his critical views on generality of the identity and his effort to replace the Plato's system of representation with vibrant creative, and renewal energy of r<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>p<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>tition. According to Deleuze, repetition is similar concept, if not identical, to what Nietzsche called the 'eternal return' which allows the return of the Overhuman or the Superhuman, and he extends his idea that the returning Overhuman is the singular simulacre which opposes the generalization of identity, in the likes of Plato's Idea. Thus, the superhero's identity is ever changing, ever returning, and ever renewing Overhuman. The superhero must be repeated to fully actualize his/her existence. Also, based on Deleuze's reading of Bergson's texts on the Virtual, the superhero, for example Superman, is actualization of his/her multiplisit<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>, the internally multiple, and differentiated variations from itself. These every Supermans' multiplisit<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX> shares common memory, past, and duration, thus the Virtual of Superman. Superman becomes himself only by actualizing the movement and differentiation from these multiplisit<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX> in his virtual on the surface of reality. On chapter 4, a popular Korean comic book character Oh, Hae-Sung's r<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>p<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>tition and multiplist<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX> are analyzed, and makes comparison to that of Superman to distinguish the repetition from r<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>p<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX>tition, and multiplicit<TEX>$\acute{e}$</TEX> from diversity.

Postfederman

Postfederman Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) As we mourn the recent death of longtime ABR contributing editor Raymond Federman, we also attempt to fully appreciate the scope of his achievement. This task turns out to be easier said than done. Over the past thirty or so years, his fiction has been the subject of a good deal of scholarship in multiple languages. However, in spite of this wealth of attention, the scope of Federman's achievements has yet to be fully recognized by the academic community. One of the reasons for this lack of recognition stems from the ways in which Federman's novels have been categorized. In the US, Federman's work has most commonly been connected with a group of writers that brought "new life" to American fiction in the wake of pronouncements of the death of the novel in the late 1960s. His revitalizing, innovative peers include Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick. While the identification of Federman with this group of writers is accurate and not without its merits, in the longer run, it has served to exclude or marginalize his work from other—and arguably even more significant—contexts. Far too many accounts treat Federman as merely a member of a small group of writers who created through narrative experimentation a pioneering body of "metafiction" or "postmodern" American literature. Though relevant to those interested in tracing the development of American letters, such accounts neglect the range of his contributions to both the contemporary critical and world literature canons—contributions that scholars are only just beginning to recognize and explore in detail. His recent passing provides a good opportunity for us to reconsider an amazingly creative and daring thinker whose work is significant to not just considerations of the development of innovative fiction in America, but potentially to a number of distinct disciplines, and established and emerging critical discourses. These critical discourses include translation studies, Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, bilingual studies, Beckett studies, cultural studies, philosophy of language, postmodern theory, body criticism, critical theory, identity studies, narrative theory, trauma studies, philosophy of literature, and autobiography theory, among others. It should be noted that the disciplines represented here are far wider than just English, the standard province of Federman scholarship. They include philosophy, comparative literature, foreign languages, history, linguistics, and sociology. Federman's emphasis on voice over character, his playfulness with identity, his use of numerous alter egos, and his investigation of writing in the shadow of the Holocaust make his work a rich source for those invested in contemporary cultural studies and literary theory. His writing is a powerful voice in an age that has redirected attention to the cultural, historical, and political powers of fictional discourse. Federman, who passed away last month at the age of 81, is probably more relevant now than ever. The discourses necessary for appreciating the range and depth of his achievement—discourses such as cultural studies and literary theory—have only recently reached full maturation and institutional acceptance. It is easy to see this when one recalls that when Federman's early masterpiece Double or Nothing came out in 1971, "new criticism" was still considered "radical" by most English departments—departments which rarely if ever considered contemporary fiction as worthy of scholarship. One must also remember that Federman's writing becomes more significant in a critical climate charged by discussions of the relationship between culture, history, language, and narrative. While these discussions were forming in the seventies, they were still far from maturation. The seventies saw the rise of elegant and close structuralist, deconstructive, Marxist, and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Increasingly, emphasis on the libidinal, political, and social and/or social nature of signification would come to challenge the very profession of literary studies by laying the foundation for cultural studies. It is in the context of this post-literary or post-literature climate that Federman's fictions can be best understood. While Federman's writing is an amazing resource to engage through structuralist and/or poststructuralist theoretical contexts, it becomes even more powerful when considered through theory sensitive to the personal, social, and political dimensions of interpretation. As the eighties...

Sergey Prokofiev diaries, 1907-1914: prodigious youth

Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. In candid and lively prose, he records the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man making his way in the brilliant social and artistic circles of the prewar Russian capital. Virtually every artist and musician of note appears in these pages, in penetrating and not always flattering vignettes. Prokofiev's main subject, however, is music, its creation and its performance. He reveals his own developing aesthetic principles through his assessments of the works of others, even as he composes such early masterpieces as the First and Second Piano Concertos, The Ugly Duckling, the First Violin Concerto, and the Classical Symphony. An inexhaustibly rich portrait of a vibrant artistic culture on the edge of war and revolution, Prokofiev's Diaries are both a dramatic illumination of a great composer's creativity and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of musical modernism. They constitute an essential and entertaining reference for all lovers of Prokofiev's music.

The enchantment of words: Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus

Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in Wittgenstein's early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . The Enchantment of Words is a study of that book, offering novel readings of all its major themes and shedding light on issues in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophies of mind, and logic. McManus argues that Wittgenstein's aim in this deeply puzzling work is to show that the intelligibility of thought and the meaningfulness of language, which logical truths would delimit and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would explain, are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways in which we happen to think, talk and act as reasons why we ought to think, talk and act as we do. The root of that misperception is our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we enchant, and are enchanted by, words, colluding in a confusion that transposes on to them, and the world which we then see them as fitting, responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such words promise to spare us the trouble, not only of thinking, but of living. In presenting this view, McManus offers readings of all of the major themes of the Tractatus , including its discussion of logical truth, objects, names, inference, subjectivity, solipsism and the ineffable; McManus offers novel explanations of what is at stake in Wittgenstein's comparison of propositions with pictures, of why Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of how a bookwhich infamously declares itself to be nonsensical can both clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.