Elliptical Style Research Articles

Nation, Voice, and Character in “the Great Zambian Novel”: A Critical Reading of The Old Drift

ABSTRACT: Combining the objective voice of an omniscient narrator and the ironic “we” of a mosquito chorus, mixing “writerly” and “readerly” elements, The Old Drift (2019) adapts the family saga to a modern genealogical narrative of Zambia as a rainbow nation. A return to and settlement in an African “home” contrast thematically with the migratory, “Afropolitan” fiction of other African writers in the diaspora. Set largely in the capital city, as in recent novels by other Zambian women writers, the novel endorses a radical urban space. Yet its compacted, multilayered, subtle, allusive, and elliptical style, its copious range of characters and frequent shifts of place and time serendipitously woven into an intricate plot, come at a price. In Jamesonian terms, the “waning of affect” and postmodern “depthlessness” treat historical events as mediated simulations; they silence characters whose lack of inner life prevents empathy, prioritizes images and surfaces over internal feelings, and implicitly rejects the binarism of inner and outer. Thus revolution is a game played by a privileged few, since the struggle of the masses to overthrow an oppressive system is an unusable cliché.

The Transaction

Ancestral cradle and crossroads of civilizations, Sicily is an island of serene quietude and rough violence, of courage and connivance, of tradition and nonconformity, of immigration and emigration, of welcome and mistrust. In The Transaction, Guglielmo D'Izzia captures the island's self-contradictions and ambiguities as only an expatriate Sicilian can do. The novel traces the external and internal journey of an impenetrable and unsympathetic northern Italian who, in order to finance a property deal, travels from Milan to Sicily's hinterland with a luggage of antisouthern prejudice. This physically brave but morally weak protagonist, identified only by the last name of De Angelis, turns from businessman to occasional detective but, as in Leonardo Sciascia, it is the investigator who ends up being suspected rather than the murderer.D'Izzia sets his remarkable debut novel in the fictional town of Figallia, an archetype of the dark side of southern Italian small-town life where not even the Sicilian sunlight can penetrate the darkness and dispel the effects of provincialism, corruption, and brazen disregard of laws. A torrid sun plays its own merciless role in the protagonist's nightmarish journey, tormenting De Angelis from the moment he sets foot in Sicily to complete the titular transaction, through the destabilizing set of events leading up to the climactic episode. Here he experiences an outburst of an anguished inner world in a cathartic moment of self-discovery.While the author chose to set the story in an anonymous Sicilian village, he anchors the symbolic location in a specifically dated setting, the early summer of 1987, the year in which the most significant trial ever against the Sicilian Mafia, the so-called “Maxi-processo,” ended with the conviction of 338 mafiosi. Written in hindsight, The Transaction bears witness both to the tragic end of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the public prosecutors who gave their lives to the fight against Cosa Nostra, and to the dissipation of the general sense of hope of defeating the Mafia in Italy.With his accessible prose and detached sarcasm, as well as his view of Sicily as an inexhaustible mine of metaphor for Italy's seemingly invincible ills, D'Izzia follows on the footsteps of literary giants of the likes of Pirandello, Sciascia, and Andrea Camilleri. One of the book's closing sentences, uttered by an overcaricatured train-station employee, “mutu, orbu, e surdu sugnu!” (“I am dumb, blind, and deaf,” that is, omertà) (226) encapsulates both the essence of D'Izzia's Hemingwayan elliptical style and his condemnation of the Italian penchant for the comforting complicity of silence.

Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Nature: System and Method in What is Philosophy?

For its elliptical style, What is Philosophy? appears to be fragmentary and inscrutable, and its reception has been correspondingly contentious. Following an intimation by Gilles Deleuze himself, this article proposes that his final book, written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, contains a philosophy of nature. To address this proposition, the article begins by outlining the comprehensive system of nature set out in What is Philosophy?, defining it as an open system in motion that conjoins philosophy with the historical preconditions and intersects it with science and art. The article then addresses the precise method whereby the philosopher as an individual subject, emerging from nature, can succeed in becoming creative – that is, in creating concepts to bring forth new events. Finally, the brain turns out to be the pivot between the system and this method. What is Philosophy? thus presents an account of the brain based on a theory of the three specific planes of philosophy, science and art, and uses it to expand upon the idea of assemblage for a philosophy of nature.

"Imperfect Notices": The 1820 Continental Journal of Mary Wordsworth

Through a close reading of Mary Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental travel journal, this essay challenges her peripheral status in studies of the Wordsworth writing circle. It offers a formalist analysis of the text, demonstrating the qualities and aspects of Mary’s writing that contribute to the importance of her journal in relation to the other literary endeavors of the tour. Mary’s writing, with its elliptical style and panoramic descriptions, reveals a sophisticated and imaginatively creative mind, one that was an equal participant in the coterie of the tour’s writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson and Dorothy Wordsworth. This essay seeks to free the journal from its critical relegation to a mere resource for William Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, instead approaching the journal on its own terms. The analysis calls for further consideration of Mary’s journals in relation to contexts of travel writing, romantic narrative, and women’s writing

Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City SubwaySunnyStalter‐Pace. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway Sunny Stalter-Pace. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.I was recently in New York City riding the subway, when I came to the realization that subway systems are much like the arteries of a body (if the were an actual body). They take blood cells (or people) from one place and move them quickly and efficiently to another. Amazingly, subways allow for people to walk down (or up) a few sets of stairs and emerge in entirely new places. And much like arteries, they connect the entire beings together, unifying a multitude of people (or cells) into a single living organism, which, when used correctly, allows for agency and mobility. Subways also allow for symbolic (and actual) societal movement; so while possibly creating displacement, they assist in new discovery and change. So, while these ideas were not fully fleshed out in my own mind, it was an enlightening moment for me when I cracked the spine of Sunny Stalter-Pace's brilliantly taciturn work, which goes much further with these themes and uses a historical lens to look at the narratives of the subway system in both literary and nonliterary forms.In the first chapter, she examines the historical narrative of the subway with its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century through (mostly) newspaper articles. From the very beginning, Stalter-Pace focuses on the invisible connectivity created through the underground movements of the subway and how it has been seen as either a paradise or hellish place, depending on the time period. She also discusses the comparative symbolism of the subway system to that of a car in American popular culture (especially how the car gave agency and movement to an entire generation). Noting that while both permit movement across distance, Stalter-Pace argues that the subway, while not nearly as mobile (since it only can move along its designated tracks), allows for social movement and unification.In Chapters 2 and 3, Stalter-Pace examines the narrative of the subway created by poets, ranging from poetry published inside of magazines to interwar poets, who justify their elliptical style by placing it in dialogue with the subway's dissociated movement through the city (20). In Chapter 3, she closely explores Modernist authors like William Carlos Williams, Claude McKay, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Hart Crane to study the social landscape that has been created by the literature about the subway system and its impact culturally (as well as stylistically) within the American pastiche. …

Eros and Contemplation: The Catholic Vision of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder

Eros and ContemplationThe Catholic Vision of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder Kathleen E. Urda (bio) When Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life opened in 2010, it was met as often with derision1 as with celebration.2 Still, there is no denying its status as an event among the intelligentsia, and one that was often highly praised. His subsequent film To the Wonder in contrast, barely made an impression upon its release in 2012, and when it did, was routinely mocked.3 Even those who liked the film among mainstream critics were careful to qualify their endorsement. In Roger Ebert’s mostly admiring review (the last before his death), he admits, “There will be many who find To the Wonder too elusive and effervescent.”4 Ebert’s suspicion that many people would find the film’s style obscure is accurate, but Damon Linker is also almost certainly correct to attribute some critics’ indifference or outright hostility to their difficulty with To the Wonder’s overtly religious, and particularly Christian, imagery and themes.5 In the same vein as The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005) in terms of its loose plot, lack of dialogue, and emphasis on the beauty of light and nature, To the Wonder intertwines two main narratives. The first involves the passionate love affair between a taciturn Oklahoman, Neil, and a beautiful Ukrainian-French [End Page 130] divorcee and mother, Marina. It begins ecstatically in Paris and ends in near despair in an austere Oklahoma suburb. Along the way, the affair is interrupted by Marina’s return to Paris and by Neil’s brief romance with an old friend, Jane. The second narrative concerns Father Quintana, a Roman Catholic priest who serves a poor parish in Neil’s Oklahoma town and who is experiencing a dark night of the soul. While he is seen throughout the film advising both Neil and Marina, Fr. Quintana’s relationship with God is the real subject of his narrative arc and parallels the relationship between Neil and Marina; both relationships become a meditation on the nature of love. The unpopularity of the film cannot be entirely explained away as anti-religious or Christian prejudice; To the Wonder’s elliptical style, not to mention Malick’s penchant for lovely women dancing in fields, are challenging whatever one’s beliefs.6 But the generally more positive reaction among religious reviewers7 seems to support Linker’s view that some reviewers missed or rejected the film’s “ecstatic cinematic tribute to God.”8 Part of the object of this article is to acknowledge that tribute, but I also want to make a case for Malick’s undeniably odd film as a peculiarly well-suited response to our present struggles with love, marriage, and God. While the frustration that many people, religious or otherwise, have with Malick is related to his phenomenologically-inflected portrayal of seemingly inchoate but vivid feeling-states, I argue that this decision is also why Malick’s film makes an invaluable contribution to the artistic, and indeed, theological exploration of love and marriage in an age that defines them primarily as matters of emotion. The film mirrors its audience’s own preoccupations with and submission to intense passions—but with a crucial difference. The characters feel transcendent and then trapped because of their emotions, and Malick uses all his cinematic tools—music, silence, light, setting, narrative—to take us where they go. But he also employs those same tools to suggest the profundity of being and its intersection with, or rather, dependence on a love that is more than emotion and certainly more than the self. In so doing, Malick uses his form to create a deeply [End Page 131] Catholic vision of marriage and vocation that at its best becomes and inspires an act of contemplation amidst our contemporary crisis. It is one thing to claim that marriage is or should be a sacrament; it is quite another to try to understand what that might mean or look like, especially in a period convinced that love is primarily our emotional experience of it and in which traditional...

Paterson: William Carlos Williams’s Image of the City

Paterson:William Carlos Williams’s Image of the City Adam R. McKee A city is a multi-purpose, shifting organization, a tent for many functions, raised by many hands and with relative speed. Complete specialization, final meshing, is improbable and undesirable. The form must be somewhat noncommittal, plastic to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens. —Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 91. I’m in process of writing a book, the book I have contemplated doing for many years—prose and verse mixed: “Paterson”—an account, a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man Paterson. —William Carlos Williams to Robert McAlmon, 8 August 1943. (SL 216). The idea behind the poem Paterson was something William Carlos Williams contemplated for almost twenty years during the prime of his poetic career. As noted in the 1943 letter to Robert McAlmon, Williams’s poem would also become the primary literary output of the last twenty years of his life as it was published in five books from 1946 to 1958 (though the original plan was for four books only), and remaining unfinished at the time of his death in 1963 as indicated by the presence of notes for a sixth book. This magnum opus has drawn much critical attention, leading Paul Mariani to call the poem “the most radically experimental and successful long poem written in our time” (233). However, much of the critical attention paid to the text has underplayed or disregarded the central thematic characteristic of the text: how to best represent the form and image of the modern urban environment and its social spaces. The view of the urban form and the question of how best to represent [End Page 141] not only the city, but the distinctively American city, becomes the central motive for Williams. Miguel Carrasquiera, borrowing from Peter Halter, notes that Williams “saw in the city ‘the chaotic energies of the metropolis, its intoxicating promises and bitter disillusionments, its enchantments and sobering disenchantments’. In Williams’s mind, the city provides endless possibilities of success to its inhabitants” (119) and that Williams saw the city as “a dynamo of blossoming strength and of fertile renewal” (119). William Sharpe finds parallels in the ability to capture the form of Paterson as city with the form of Paterson as poem, noting, “Williams then radically reassesses the nature of the city poem (and all poetry). Paterson shows that the goal of the city poet should not be to dominate the multiplicity of his unwieldy subject, to make order out of its confusion, but rather to liberate his urban materials from the imposition of form and language” (65). Due to the fact that each of the first four books of Paterson employs a major physical location of the city as its primary setting, this study will be limited to a discussion of these sections of the long poem. Additionally, it is apparent that the form Williams employs reflects the cacophonous and open nature of the city. What is less apparent is the manner in which these items work together with the text. William Sharpe refers to Paterson as “a writing whose energy resists domination” (80) and states that Williams’s “city becomes a syntax, a way of mind, a disjointed and elliptical style” (83). Alba Newmann, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, finds Paterson as, “not only an invitation or guide, it is an enactment; it is a text that shifts, flows, and falls, that breaks off and starts again, that ‘somersaults’ and escapes” (54). Kevin McNamara argues that Williams “moved Paterson toward a representation of a city as an open nexus of overlapping communities with different histories, interests, and even languages” (147). William R. Klink, focusing on the geographical features of the poem, argues for a reading of the way in which Paterson has “affected the changes to the locale of Paterson itself” (173). These issues are all reflected in the way each book of Paterson takes a particular space as the central organizing feature, pulling together history, language, and geography to produce the seemingly chaotic form. These critics, while certainly interested in the way in...

Correspondance : Mail Art and Literary Appropriation in the 1920s

Correspondance:Mail Art and Literary Appropriation in the 1920s Jan Baetens and Michael Kasper Correspondance was one of the first Belgian Surrealist serials, produced over seven months in 1924 and 1925 by three Francophone writers, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte.1 It was made up of twenty-two single-sheet tracts whose short, dense texts critiqued contemporary literary personalities, tendencies, and events. Each issue (a4-size, approx. 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches) was distributed by post to around a hundred recipients, thus making it an early example of mail art: direct, anti-commercial, inbred, and visual—as the tracts were printed on and named for different colors, and purposely set in a modernist typeface. Correspondance was also ahead of its time in its use of literary collage, and it was influential; a direct line can be traced from Nougé's practice of plagiarism, launched in Correspondance, through détournement, the Situationist concept, to notions of appropriation popular in writing and art in recent decades.2 The magazine didn't last long, nor was it widely known—not surprising given its intentionally marginalized publication history, its elliptical style and obscure content, and its origin far from Paris—but it was an intriguing and subtle intervention in twentieth-century culture. Its Origin Far from Paris Correspondance is a difficult body of work, although its perplexities are no longer, or no longer only, those that must have challenged its first—not always consenting—readership. Making sense of these tracts requires some knowledge of their specific cultural and historical context.3 Thoughtful reading always requires this, of course, but in the case of minor literatures, from peripheral cultures (as Belgian Francophone culture undoubtedly is), the challenge is greater, since the background tends to be especially unfamiliar. [End Page 109] In these texts, the three authors were reacting critically to what was going on then in avant-garde literary circles in Paris, as adventurous Francophone Belgian writers generally did. Above all, Nougé, Goemans, and Lecomte targeted Surrealist writings, since they were at that time trying to resist incorporation into the hegemonic, Paris-based international movement. This relationship is the primary subject of Correspondance. Surrealists in France were the heirs of Paris Dada. Their Surrealism sought a cultural revolution—not just a revolution whose success would bring a new culture, but a revolution in culture that would cradle a new society. Framed in literary terms, such a revolution implied a refusal of the established canon (though not of the practice of canonization) as well as a radical overhaul of the fundamentals of what literary writing was supposed to be. First, writing had to become a type of scientific activity, a way of producing truth, which meant insight into mental processes obscured by bourgeois culture; second, writing had to employ innovative procedures, of chance and willing suspension of control, either by inducing trance-like states of mind or by using specific constraints or techniques (the famous exquisite cadaver, for instance); third, writing had to abandon obsolete ideas of authorship and craft(collective forms of writing were promoted, and artists were encouraged to work in media in which they had no training); fourth, writing could no longer be an aim in itself, but must be in the service of exploring new ways of living. Most remarkably formulated by André Breton in his first manifesto, in 1924,4 these principles were disseminated by the Parisian group (at this stage including Aragon, Éluard, and Soupault, among others) in journals, at public readings, and by personal contact. Other Parisian modernists, in particular the group associated with the Nouvelle Revue Française (Jean Paulhan, its chief editor, Paul Valéry, etc.), were receptive, or at any rate attentive, as were young experimental writers in Belgium.5 In 1924, there was as yet no official Surrealist group in Belgium, nor was there any distinctive gap between Surrealism and the wider cultural field of the time. In the wake of Dada, several noteworthy avant-garde journals emerged in Brussels in the first half of the 1920s. One was Le Disque vert ("The Green Disk") launched in 1922 by Franz Hellens (1881-1972), a novelist close to Paulhan and others...

Combining possibly reciprocally dependent linguistic parameters in the quantitative assessment of aphasic speakers' grammatical output

Background: The grammatical output of aphasic speakers is often quantitatively analysed in order to establish an effect of treatment. In many methods of quantitative analysis both the number of utterances produced and (their) length are calculated. The difficulty is that these parameters may show a trade-off effect (i.e., may be inversely proportional to each other). That is, when the amount of information to be conveyed remains constant, an increase in the number of utterances may be compensated by a decrease in their length (and vice versa). As a result, a lack of increase—or even a decrease—in one of both outcome measures may be incorrectly interpreted as a lack of effect of treatment. Aims: The current study investigated whether combining the possibly reciprocal outcome measures percentage of utterances and (their) length into a single parameter increases the interpretability of the results obtained with a quantitative analysis of aphasic speakers' spontaneous speech. In the current study the procedure of combining two possibly reciprocal linguistic variables into one dependent measure is demonstrated for the elliptical repertoire. Ellipses are grammatically well formed but incomplete utterances (e.g., problem solved). Contrary to sentences, ellipses lack finiteness. As will be argued in this article, the procedure of combining possibly reciprocal outcome measures could be useful in order to investigate both the sentential and elliptical repertoire produced by aphasic speakers. Methods & Procedures: The possibly reciprocal outcome measures percentage of ellipses and mean length of ellipsis, which were used in the study of Ruiter, Kolk, and Rietveld (2010), were combined into a single parameter of elliptical style: percentage of words produced in ellipses (in comparison to words in sentences). The data obtained by Ruiter et al. (2010), who investigated the effect of a compensation therapy on the production of ellipses in 12 chronically agrammatic speakers of Dutch, were re-analysed with the new parameter. Outcomes & Results: The parameter percentage words produced in ellipses was not only able to reproduce the results obtained in the previous study, but also seems to be more sensitive: It could identify significant changes in elliptical style in more participants than the two possibly reciprocal parameters could independently. Conclusions: The data obtained in the current study may be of relevance to aphasia researchers and therapists as the new parameter provides them with a more sensitive measure to establish the effect of therapy on aphasic speakers' grammatical output.

Le manque en tant que métaphore de l’écriture : de l’indicible et du mot-absence chez Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras’s works deal with the problems typical of the literary studies in the second half of the twentieth century: presence and absence, abandoning chronological order of events, and eroticism. This article analyses her literary technique, including text fragmentation and elliptical style. The author searches for appropriate means of expression, often using silence and loneliness in keeping with her vision of absence attributed to women, kept silent by the dominant culture. Omissions in the narrative emphasise the inexpressible, beyond rational. Absence is meaningful, e.g. the missing photograph in The Lover. Absence also implies a desire to change and to write. Duras shows the problem in the context of a hidden image and an act of creation. The missing word alludes to a search of self. The author grasps complexity and diversity of absence. It is part of the theme, style, and text structure, emphasising the limitations of the language and the powerlessness of the protagonist.

Speaking in ellipses: The effect of a compensatory style of speech on functional communication in chronic agrammatism

This study investigated whether a Dutch and adapted version of Reduced Syntax Therapy (REST) could stimulate and automatise the production of ellipses in Dutch-speaking, chronically agrammatic speakers (N = 12). Ellipses are syntactic frames in which slots for grammatical morphology tend to be lacking (e.g., everybody inside). When elliptical style is applied on a regular basis, the linguistic impairment is circumvented, at least for the greater part. We therefore hypothesised that REST increases participants’ functional communication skills (i.e., communicative efficacy and efficiency). This is of relevance because not all chronically agrammatic speakers become skilled at employing ellipses independently. The results of the present study suggested that when elliptical style is applied regularly, chronically agrammatic speakers get their message across more efficiently when compared to error-strewn production of sentential style.

Artists Talk: listen to the imagination

How does the imagination work? How do artists working in different forms move from the very beginning of an idea to something they are ready to share with the world? How do artists - even the most experienced - contend with the possibility of failure? And, how do we develop a robust reflective and creative practice in our creative writing programs? This article doesn’t pretend to answer the sequestions explicitly, rather, in its own elliptical style, it explores the possibilities of creation, how to express the inexpressible, how to share the most nascent of ideas. It introduces the reader to the Artists Talk program that has been developed successfully at the University of Canberra as a model of practice.

Review and Criticism: Research Pioneer Tribute—Rethinking Marshall McLuhan: Reflections on a Media Theorist

One of the striking features of mass communication theory in the millennial decade has been the reemergence of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). prominence is not what it was during the peak of his influence during the mid-1960s, but McLuhan is currently undergoing a revival. Wired magazine and various Internet-oriented publications have adopted McLuhan as the patron saint of the digital age (Wolf, 1996). phrases such as the global village and the medium is the message provide support for those commentators who view McLuhan as the oracle of the digital era. During the past decade, more than a dozen new books and countless articles have been published focusing on McLuhan, including Levinson's (1999) Digital McLuhan, Gordon's (1997) biography Marshall McLuhan, and Theall's (2001) The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. The media ecology movement spearheaded by scholars at New York University and Fordham University has celebrated McLuhan as one of the major thinkers of the 20th century. As a result of these developments, the moment is ripe to revisit Marshall McLuhan and to reassess his legacy. By way of self-disclosure, this author must admit that he has not been an uncritical admirer of McLuhan. Although a member of the media ecology movement, he has not displayed the boosterism of McLuhan that is characteristic of that organization. aphoristic way of speaking, his elliptical style of writing, and his heavy reliance on probes hurts the ability to understand his ideas. However, staying power is real, and the source of this power deserves to be examined. To comment on McLuhan, his ideas, and his critics requires a book-length publication. Instead, space limitations warrant that remarks be restricted to a few central ideas. Thus, this brief article is divided into two sections. The first part looks at McLuhan as a intellectual. It mixes Richard Posner's interpretation of a with biographical materials about McLuhan. The second part focuses on overarching thesis about the development of mass media, and his paradoxical views on broadcasting: He mistrusted television's influence while he saw television as the ideal exemplar of his notion of a cool medium. McLuhan as a Public Intellectual In 2001, Posner published Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. It was the first systematic, book-length study of modern intellectuals who are but who respond to market forces in their nonacademic role as commentators on society. Posner defined a public intellectual by using a multitiered definition. For Posner, intellectuals were academics outside their field or writing for a general audience (p. 1). Posner contended that because the modern university places such a great emphasis on specialization, heavily favoring depth versus breadth of knowledge, few are now trained, or inclined, to play the role of intellectuals. To Posner, this narrow training and socialization process in the United States explains why so many of the most distinguished academic intellectuals active in the second half of the twentieth century were foreigners--individuals such as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Friedrick Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Amartya Sen (pp. 4-5). Using Posner's terminology, McLuhan was a whose legacy was twofold: (a) his emphasis that mass communication has altered our perception of 20th-century life, and (b) his belief that the content of communication is dictated by its form. As Czitrom (1982) explained, McLuhan's efforts instilled an urgent awareness of the media environment as a basic force in shaping the modern sensibility (p. 165). McLuhan invariably has been depicted as an academic rebel who did not follow an orthodox outlook or doctrine in his writings. Although correct, such a characterization tends to obscure two biographical points. …

Virginia Woolf: The Ironic Feminist

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere . Melba Cuddy-Keane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 237. $60.00 (cloth). Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 244. $62.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper). Virginia Woolf as Feminist. Naomi Black. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 247. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Ever since Woolf's recuperation by feminists in the 1970s, critics have attempted to overcome the powerful stereotype of her as a fragile genius, unconnected with the world. This view, so dominant in Recollections of VirginiaWoolf by Her Contemporaries, and more recently in the book and movie The Hours, has been difficult to dislodge. Fortunately, these three books confirm Woolf's deep engagement in the social and political world of her times. Black and Cuddy-Keane concentrate on Woolf as a professional writer, as someone who had to meet deadlines, work with editors, and persuade readers. Cuddy-Keane examines how Woolf responded to specific political events, while Black integrates Woolf's lifelong feminism with her anti-war arguments. Humm concentrates on Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, as amateur photographers, showing how their fascination with contemporary visual technologies affected their work. All three would agree that this quintessential modernist appeals to a post-modern sensibility in her insistent creation of multiple layers and points of view. Like Woolf, all are very aware of their own critical biases. These authors acknowledge a characteristic that either endears or annoys readers: Woolf's repeated use of ironic fantasy, or what Black [End Page 809] calls her "dense, whimsical, and semi-academic style" (145). Each effectively defends Woolf's idiosyncratic style for its effective balancing of different arguments and positions. To paraphrase Woolf, they see her as one of the few English writers writing for grown-up people. Black notes how Woolf insisted that readers undertake an imaginative engagement with her argument by the use of provocative asides, digressions from the subject at hand, and a discordant combination of anger and humor. Cuddy-Keane concludes that Woolf's elliptical style encouraged her readers to think for themselves. Humm compliments Woolf's sophisticated use of "photographic tropes of illumination and reflection" (221), which draw attention to the elusive, evanescent nature of reality. These critics each provide such good close readings of Woolf's essays that I wish they had considered more fully the stylistic relationship between her nonfiction and fiction. Woolf's unique critical voice combines fact and fiction in psychologically and politically unsettling ways that are well worth exploring. There is surprisingly little overlap in these three studies. Woolf was so prolific that each author emphasizes different works. The most broadly based book is Cuddy-Keane's careful dissection of Woolf as a public intellectual. Her opening chapter on the interwar debate about education, mass culture and politics is especially strong. She documents Woolf's carefully argued position on the value of independent learning, of an individual's thoughtful engagement with books, ideas and ideologies. Cuddy-Keane labels Woolf a "democratic highbrow," which seems to me a perfect description of Woolf's mixture of elitism and social responsibility. Woolf had no illusions that everyone could be a sophisticated reader, but she always believed this to be a politically important goal for modern British citizens. Moreover, she especially wanted women of all social classes to benefit from a proper education. Woolf vehemently opposed any curriculum that was a watered-down version of middle-class culture; for her it was a repugnant perpetuation of second-hand ideas. A later chapter explores why Woolf always loathed honors, awards and hierarchies, whether for persons or for books. She opposed, for example, F. R. Leavis's creation of a canon of English literature, but she urged her readers toward specific English masterpieces. Especially during the 1930s, when literary commentators on all sides used a hard-edged political style, Woolf...

Writing the Self and the Sixties

I Lived Through the sixties and in certain ways could be considered typical of the times, or at least of women of my class and calling. I might even seem to some an emblematic person worthy, perhaps, of notice. But I belong among the millions elided from the historical records of their time, their lives unnoted and unremembered. I wonder now why I could not have done what Joan Didion did to make herself memorable. Like her, I might have picked out people who seemed, so she said, “emblematic” – Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Linda Kasabian at the Manson trial – and by writing about them I could conceivably have written my self into history. For clearly, Didion intended to inscribe herselfinto the record of the sixties by describing people she went tosee. “I went to see …,” she would write, and again: “I went to see.” She wanted to see symptoms of cultural decline, especially those connected to violence, and wherever she looked, with her selective and impounding gaze, she found what she sought – the disarray that confirmed her vision of a world “devoid of any logic” in which, as she (and Yeats) said, things fall apart. She wrote of social disorder in a stark elliptical style, her insistent parataxis representing the lack of connection that was her theme. The reportorial mode she adopted suited her intent, for personal journalism, which melded the topical with the autobiographical, allowed her to impress her self, as well as her nihilistic vision, upon the reader's consciousness. ‘I want you to know, as you read me,’ she wrote, “precisely who I am and where I am, and what is on my mind” (“In the Islands,”White Album, 133).

The monstered self: narratives of death and performance in Latin American fiction

Viewing stories and novels from an ethnographic perspective, Eduardo Gonzalez here explores the relationship between myth, ritual, and death in writings by Borges, Vargas Llosa, Cortazar, and Roa Bastos. He then weaves this analysis into a larger cultural fabric composed of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Benjamin, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Poe, and others. What interests Gonzalez is the signature of authorial selfhood in narrative and performance, which he finds willfully and temptingly disfigured in the works he examines: horrific and erotic, subservient and tyrannical, charismatic and repellent. Searching out the personal image and plot, Gonzalez uncovers two fundamental types of narrative: one that strips character of moral choice; and another in which characters' choices deprive them of personal autonomy and hold them in ritual bondage to a group. Thus The Monstered Self becomes a study of the conflict between individual autonomy and the stereotypes of solidarity. Written in a characteristically allusive, elliptical style, and drawing on psychoanalysis, religion, mythology, and comparative literature, The Monstered Self is in itself a remarkable performance, one that will engage readers in anthropology, psychology, and cultural history as well as those specifically interested in Latin American narrative.

Realism in Rough Water

Plotinus is a notoriously difficult philosopher whose eclectic and elliptical style generates numerous problems for the interpreter. Intent upon establishing the consistency and uniqueness of Plotinus' views about sense perception, the young Icelandic scholar Ey6lfur Emilsson boldly sets sail on this rough sea. 1 Directing our attention to specific texts where perception is discussed, he considers these passages in detail and examines them within the context provided by earlier Greek philosophy. This approach forces the reader to reflect on Plotinus' contributions to the philosophy of perception and to see that philosophy in a new light. Emilsson argues that Plotinus is a direct realist whose theory, nevertheless, embraces a distinction between sensory affections and perceptions. After introducing several central doctrines of Plotinus' metaphysics and psychology in the first two chapters, Emilsson turns to the topic of sensory affection in the third and fourth chapters. Examining Enneads IV.5.1-4,8, Emilsson, contrary to other interpreters, argues that Plotinus discusses a medium in vision, light, only to reject it as the vehicle for visual transmission. The organ is affected not by the medium but through sympatheia between the object and the eye due to the nonphysical omnipresence of in the medium (p. 57). In the fourth chapter, Emilsson develops the notion of sensory affection as an assimilation of the organ to the object and he argues that this assimilation is not merely a physical change in the organ. In vision, the organ is assimilated to the form (color) which possesses extensionality and spatiality but not mass and so is intermediate between the sensible and the intelligible. The next three chapters deal with perception. Here Emilsson broaches a number of important topics including the unity of perception, the relation between perception and the faculty of representation, perception as a form

Avoiding the tyranny of the written word

AbstractA study of literacy as a social rather than as a personal phenomenon reveals new aspects of its complexity. Looking in particular at Jewish literacy, a distinction is proposed between unmediated and mediated literacy, the latter referring to modes of literacy that continue to require extensive mediation by a teacher long after the initial skill of phonemic decoding of the orthography has been acquired. In the case of the Written Law (the Bible) this situation was maintained by the use of an orthography which did not record vowels or punctuation and by the maintenance of an oral tradition on correct reading in crucial points in the text. In the case of the Oral Law (the Talmud), when it was finally written down, it was recorded in an elliptical style that continued to make the mediation of a teacher necessary. The result in each case is a method of safeguarding transmission without fossilizing content. Even after unmediated literacy had become widespread for other purposes, the effect of the traditions has remained strong. The system of mediated literacy, combined as it is in the Jewish tradition with a strong value for universal education, assures continued interpretation of traditional knowledge.

One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture ed. by Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley

78 Western American Literature The real disappointment, though, is the narrative itself: it isa matter-offact , detailed, specific, almost day-by-day accounting of Crane’s life—and nothing more. This, among other problems, makes for pretty flat reading. I found myself picking up and re-reading—as a kind of relief—John Berry­ man’sbiography while reading and re-reading Colvert’s for this review. It is safe to saythat a biographer matching the upbeat, nervous, taut, elliptical style of Berryman—or his perceptiveness both about Crane’s character and about Crane’s art—will not appear soon. The point is that we need biographers who try to do what Berryman did: not just to report Crane’s life but to interpret what the life tells us about the man and about his literature. In fairness it should be said that Colvert’s work is well-researched and welldocumented , and that he does at times relate Crane’sexperiences to his writ­ ings, including his letters. The problem is that the relations drawn are too brief to be really helpful. It is with regard to Crane’s western journey that the inadequacies of Colvert’s noncritical, noninterpretive narrative are most glaring. The bare facts of the western trip are swiftly related in sixpages;the closest that Colvert comes to an interpretation of the meaning of these facts is to say that Crane’s Galveston and San Antonio sketches reveal “a yearning for the legendary which his skepticism was constantly called on to suppress.” I think it is time for Crane’s biographers to begin to recognize that his yearning for the legen­ dary, heroic American West was much deeper and much more real than this; that Crane did himself become a figure in the history of the western myth; that his western journey was an inspiriting, fructifying experience which changed both his life and his art. When this time will come remains to be seen. Though Beer’sand Berry­ man’s works make substantial contributions, the biography which does full justice to what the West meant to Stephen Crane has yet to appear. ROBERT GLEN DEAMER Rochester, Indiana One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture. Edited by Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. 428 pages, $29.00.) This centennial volume reminds us that Mark Twain’s classic novel has had a long, hard climb to its present pinnacle of acceptance and popularity. Twain himself was doubtful of its value. In 1886 it was banned by the Concord Public Library, and the Boston Transcript rejected it as “rough, coarse and inelegant.” By 1950, however, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that “all American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn,” the academic corps had got on the bandwagon, and the production line was going—three books, over 600 articles, and “literally hundreds” of briefer references. In our time the book is still a best-seller and still controversial, “the only nineteenth- Reviews 79 century classic in American literature threatened now and again with censor­ ship and banishment” (pp. 6, 30). In five sections the editors group essays on Twain’s writing problems, his sources and influences, his social background, basic attitudes, and public reception. Interesting sidelights involve classroom presentation (Eric Solo­ mon), reception in Japan (Jan B. Gordon), illustrations (Allison R. Ensor), and Huck’s management of his money (Paul Taylor). They agree that Twain’sbasic aim was to expose the “defunct southern society” and the “world ofhypocrisy, violence and greed” of the Gilded Age on the frontier, symbolized by the confidence man (p. 198). Basically a moralist and a preacher, Twain construed a “counter mythology” from Christian tradition, fulfilling the modern demand for “comic Doomsday vision” (pp. 299, 306). It is his assumption that we live in a “corrupt society” among “moral savages” (pp. 244, 248) that recommends Huck to a generation which accepts Waiting for Godot aswisdom and truth. All the contributors but one are English teachers, and they write more or less for each other, but non-specialists, especially historians, can learn much about their country from this deceptively simple tale about Huck and Tom and Jim and Pap on...

Constitutional Formulæ and the Progress of Organic Chemistry

IF the mere increase in the number of known facts were an accurate measure of the growth of a science, the question as to the progress of organic chemistry would be easily answered. Let the reader open a text-book on chemistry of fifty or sixty years ago, and he will find, sheltering itself under the wing of the inorganic chemistry of that day, the half-fledged science of organic chemistry. Then let him turn to Beilstein's gigantic Handbuch der organischen Chemie, with its more than two thousand large closely-printed pages—a mere classified catalogue of the known facts, written moreover in the highly-condensed elliptical style appropriate to catalogues. Here is increase.