Essay Sets Research Articles

Change on Earth through the Eyes of an Economist: A Synopsis

This essay examines the present in light of the past; it also examines the past in light of the present. The present is the phenomenon of modern technical change and economic growth; the past is the original physical endowment of the Earth and the billions of years of subsequent evolution. The link is that both past and present are the result of the remixing of the original endowment of the Earth – the material and forces that have shaped biological evolution from jellyfish to humans and physical evolution from an uninhabitable world to machine learning. The essay argues that what we know as technical change is but the most recent chapter in the long account of evolution that has transformed both the biological and physical worlds. However, this argument rests on our ability to expand substantially the boundaries of our conventional understanding of evolution and those of technical change, enabling both to view change in the physical and biological worlds as interactive, symmetric and therefore invention-neutral. The essay sets the stage for exploring various implications of this perspective, including the consequence of ideas rather than genes emerging as the fundamental driver of evolution.

Understanding Dante’s Comedy as Virtuous Friendship

As Dante explains in his epistle to Can Grande, the purpose of the Comedy is to move the reader from a state of misery to a state of happiness. The poet himself testifies that the poem was written as a work of moral philosophy oriented to the achievement of happiness, eudaimonia: the beatific vision of God. Moreover, Dante insists on his poem’s efficacy to affect in its readers a similar moral and religious transformation as that which the poem represents through the narrative journey of the pilgrim. To put it another way, Dante represents his poem’s relationship to its reader as a kind of virtuous friendship. This essay sets forth a model for teaching Dante’s poem as an experiment in virtuous friendship that can transform the classroom into a workshop for the philosophical and religious quest for happiness. This involves teaching the text with an eye not only to the content and style of the poem but also to the performative and participatory demands of the text. Beginning with this framework, this essay works out pedagogical strategies for teaching the Comedy as a form of virtuous friendship extended over the centuries between Dante Alighieri and the contemporary reader. Chiefly, I explore ways Dante makes his readers complicit in the pilgrim’s own moral and spiritual journey toward the virtue of hope translated into the practice of prayer through a close, pedagogical reading of Inferno 3, Purgatorio 5, and Paradiso 20. I explore ways that Dante’s use of surprise, shock, misdirection, appeal to mystery, and retreat to silence creates a morally significant aporia of knowledge that serves as a laboratory for readers’ own virtuous transformation. I end with a critical assessment of the challenges involved in understanding the Comedy as virtuous friendship.

Ethics and Evidence: Authorial Intention and Sedgwick’s “Reading Marcher Straight”

Abstract Building on the work of Reed Way Dasenbrock, this essay sets the critical principles Henry James outlines in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) against the post-structuralist interpretive procedu...

Experiencing Justice from the Inside Out: Theological Considerations about the Church’s Role in Justice, Healing, and Forgiveness

Recent suggestions have been made that theology may have more to offer on matters related to the subjects of punishment, corrections, and rehabilitation than has often been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. This essay sets out to explore the merits of such claims with regard to how they might assist ongoing efforts to address mass incarceration, including the theological dimensions of punitive justice along with other potentially redemptive realities that theological reflection may illuminate and make more visible. Consideration will be given to the ongoing role that religion plays in the life of the prison before giving consideration to the ontology of the church as a social actor, especially as locally-constituted within the prison—the ecclesia incarcerate, or the prison church. The theological rationale for the basic existence of such an actor is explored along with the effects of such a vision for this kind of transformation the church may experience along with both promises and potential challenges that come with the church having its own ontology, not as a given, but as a creature of grace.

Is it ethical to provide IVF add-ons when there is no evidence of a benefit if the patient requests it?

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) ‘add-ons’ are therapeutic or diagnostic tools developed in an endeavour to improve the success rate of infertility treatment. However, there is no conclusive evidence that these...

Communication that Develops: Clarity of Process on Transformational Leadership through Study of Effective Communication of Emotional Intelligence

Transformational leadership was once thought of as a trait-based approach to leadership rather than something that could be taught and learned, and that the process itself somehow lacked clarity. This essay sets out to demonstrate both points to be false, all the while identifying the value of educating Christian leaders on the essence and process of transformational leadership. The Momeny communication process theory explains process clarity as it relates to transformational leadership, its communication, and education.

Law, memory, and priestly office in Rome, c.500

This essay sets the development of Christian thinking about law and clerical office in the wider context of the discussion of office in the later Roman empire. It offers a reassessment of the work of Dionysius Exiguus, a well‐known translator from Greek into Latin of the Acts of the fourth‐ and fifth‐century church councils, and a compiler of papal decretals. The essay attempts to place Dionysius’ work in its immediate Roman context, in the context of fifth‐century canonical activity, especially in North Africa, and in the more general context of the political culture of office‐holding in the late Roman polity. Central here is the tension between bureaucratic regulation and autocratic room for manoeuvre. Dionysius did not attempt fully to resolve this tension, though he did attempt to contain it.

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States by Michael E. Heyes

Reviewed by: Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States by Michael E. Heyes Justin Mullis Michael E. Heyes, Justin Mullis, United States, Europe, Monster Studies, Medieval, race, religious studies, Middle Ages, gothic michael e. heyes, ed. Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States. Lanham, Md. and London: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. xxii + 268. In his introduction to Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, editor Michael E. Heyes states three objectives he aims to achieve with this new collection of academic essays. The first is to continue expanding the field of monster studies by moving it beyond the Middle Ages; the historical period it is most commonly associated with. The second is to move the field of monster studies beyond the discourse of the dominant social class, giving greater consideration to the voices of minorities. The third and final is to incorporate the subject of religion into the field of monster studies—a component which Heyes speculates is lacking due to the fraught relationship between religion and modernity. One way of evaluating an anthology like Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques is to ask how well it accomplishes these stated goals. Despite the expressed desire to move monster studies out of the dark ages, exactly half of the ten essays presented in this collection concern the medieval period. However, it is also these chapters which do the best job of meeting the second and third of Heyes's stated goals. Minji Lee's "The Woman's Body, In-Between" looks at the monstrosity of childbirth in medieval medical texts and considers how female writers at the time responded to such conceptions, often using the holy figure of the Virgin Mary as a counterpoint. Thomas S. Franke's "Miracles and Monsters" examines the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas, a map detailing the Christian apocalypse. Because the maker of the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, was Jewish, Franke considers how this particular atlas uses various coded symbols to critique the rampant anti-Semitism of Christian eschatology. In a similar vein, John Block Friedman's "Dressing Monstrous Men" reflects on a set of Danish church wall paintings, which depict traditional monstrous races—Cynocephalus, Monoculus, Scipodes, etc.—wearing the clothes of the oppressive landsknechte, as a not at all subtle critique of these mercenary foot soldiers. More conventional is Susanne Margarit McColeman's architectural [End Page 480] examination of the role played by humorous grotesques in otherwise solemn church spaces. Finally, Cathleen McKague's "Twelfth Night's 'poor monster'" looks at the hermaphroditic character of Viola/Cesario as an unexpected messianic figure. Though limited in historical scope the majority of this first set of essays does a commendable job of finding ways to bring both minority voices and religion into the discussion of monster studies. Conversely, the second set of essays concerning "Monstrous Modernity" drift further afield. William Shakespeare proves to be a figure that straddles the boundary between the Middle Ages and the modern world, as John W. Ellis-Etchison's essay opens this section with a consideration of how the Bard and other writers depicted corrupt political power as monstrous. Etchison's subject's relevance to the stated goals of this collection is tenuous—he briefly touches on the idea of corrupt rulers as religious portents—but it is not as out of place as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's "Lovecraft's Things," which examines how the influential early-twentieth-century American writer reinterpreted the classic tropes of Gothic literature for his sci-fi horror tales. While this is a good piece of literary criticism, what exactly it is doing in a collection aimed at addressing Lovecraft was both a racist and an atheist is a mystery. Also featured are two essays dealing with contemporary horror television series. Linda C. Ceriello looks at the identity-politics of the overanalyzed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while editor Heyes's own work examines the Buffy-like Sleepy Hollow. Heyes's exploration of the themes of American civil religion in Sleepy Hollow—a show that conflates the American Revolution with the biblical Book of Revelation—at least meets one of the anthology's...

An Appalachian Heritage Interview

An Appalachian Heritage Interview Margaret Renkl and Jason Kyle Howard The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin," Margaret Renkl writes in the opening pages of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, her memoir-in-micro-essays that was released earlier this year to glowing reviews. These wise, bracing words underpin the entire book, which bears witness to the majesty and worth of the dogs, bluebirds, butterflies, and snakes, as well as the humans, in Renkl's orbit. [End Page 55] As her tender, complicated reflections build in weight and power, the reader becomes subsumed in Renkl's world and memories, a place where beauty and destruction co-exist and even harmonize. For several years, the Alabama native has also served as a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, where she offers her thoughts on the natural world and the South in weekly essays that are eagerly anticipated by her faithful readers. A former high school teacher and editor of Chapter 16, the daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, Renkl now works as a full-time writer from her home in Nashville. She chatted with Appalachian Heritage in between book tour dates and column deadlines. ________ JASON KYLE HOWARD: I read Late Migrations with an enormous lump in my throat and sometimes even tears on my cheeks. It weaves together so many themes in beautiful and poignant ways. How did the book begin? MARGARET RENKL: What kind words for a book that began completely by accident! Not long after my mother died very unexpectedly, my mother-in-law entered the final stages of Parkinson's disease and my father-in-law also needed open-heart surgery. My husband and I found ourselves in the depths of grief and caregiving at the same time. I was describing those challenges to a writer friend, and his response was, simply, "Would you ever want to write about that?" Though I'd spent twelve years working as a full-time writer earlier in my life, I was working exclusively as an editor by [End Page 56] then. I hadn't given any thought at all to the idea of writing about what I was going through. But as soon as my friend said those words, I understood that writing was exactly what I should be doing. JKH: I'm so interested in the structure of the book. The essays are micro essays—short and compact—and yet you manage to fit so much depth and emotion into each one. And instead of the book feeling disjointed, the essays all work together to create a moving, powerful whole. That's hard to pull off. How did you do it and how did it all come about? MR: The truth is that I was never certain, right up until the first readers started responding to the book, that anyone else would see those connections—not because I don't trust readers but because it took me so long to see the connections myself. For at least a year I believed I was writing two different sets of essays: one set about my family, and one set about the natural world of my backyard. But then another writer friend said, "You know you're writing a book, right?" (Clearly I owe everything to my writer friends!) I wasn't at all sure about that, but gradually I came to understand that a childhood spent playing in the woods had given me a kinship to the natural world that felt very much like family. I came to see, too, that losing my beloved elders was as much a part of the natural order as anything that happened in my backyard. Once I understood that connection, I began to think of the whole project differently. JKH: These essays are so steeped in place—it's such a Southern book in how land and storytelling are all tangled [End Page 57] up together in these pages. I'm wondering how important nature and land were to you growing up in Alabama in the 1960s. Click for larger view View full resolution Margaret Renkl [End Page 58] MR...

Beavató gondolatok a Harry Potter újraolvasásához

This essay sets out to reread the Harry Potter series as a text of initiation and draws attention to its textual self-consciousness by revealing the self-reflexive patterns of the books. It gives an analysis of The Tale of the Three Brothers and shows that the last chapters of the first book can be read as a summary of the whole series. The essay also examines how the structure of the novels mirror the traditions of alchemical initiation ceremonies by creating symbols out of the objects and phenomena of the wizarding world.

Wet Ontology, Moby-Dick, and the Oceanic in Performance

This essay sets out the possibility for a politics and aesthetics in performance that it calls "oceanic." The essay moves from Kant's gaze across an instrumentalized ocean into the generative work of Caribbean scholars and others thinking with the ocean and its histories. The ocean is de-instrumentalized into a force of de-containerization, the explosion from the hold, the collapse of epistemology and representation, black philosophical production, the obscure and the errant, new temporalities, new forms of global affinity, interspecies being, the displacement of exchange value by use value, and maybe even a new communism. Building its case on Melville's Moby-Dick, especially through Orson Welles's theatrical adaptation and the author's own adaptation and direction of Welles's text, and through engagements with the work of three black choreographers, Cynthia Oliver, nora chipaumire, and Ligia Lewis, the essay searches for an aesthetics or dramaturgy of performance that can be said to be sea-bred, that gathers new collectivities, and invents new political ideas.

Calculating Shylock: Commerce, Captivity, and the Free-Born Subject

This essay argues that George Granville's adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1701) exploited the significance of imperiled liberty to Shakespeare's original play. The drama around Shylock acquired both a new shape and sharpened significance, the essay proposes, in relation to changing ideas about individual and collective freedom—questions that recent developments supplied with both acutely personal and more broadly politicized significance for early eighteenth-century theatergoers. Building upon precedents including John Dryden's Amboyna (1673) and Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1695), the adaptation of Shakespeare's play that held the stage for the opening decades of the eighteenth century appeared at a moment of expanding global commerce as well as the pervasive unfreedom, bondage, and violence that was the corollary of that trade. At a moment when appeals to English liberty were ever more trenchantly asserted, even as unfreedom became more pervasive and stringently enforced, the adapted play channeled the dynamics of Shakespeare's drama, this essay sets out to show, into an affirmative staging of the English subject, in which freedom appeared as an undisputed but precariously maintained birthright in ways that looked back to Magna Carta and ahead to the American Declaration of Independence.

The Urgent Need for Legal Scholarship on Firearm Policy

Restrictions on federal funding for research pertaining to firearm policy have stymied academic inquiry by social science and public health researchers for over two decades. As a result, most researchers agree that our public discourse about this urgent issue is woefully under-informed, or even ill-informed, on both sides of the debate. Legal academia, which does not operate under the same grant-writing regime as most other disciplines, can and should help fill this gap in researching and theorizing the unresolved questions related to firearm policy. In fact, theoretical development and clarification from the legal academy is often a necessary antecedent for empirical researchers in other fields to frame and develop their own studies properly, especially about the real-world effects of competing policy approaches to firearms. This Essay sets forth a plea to law professors to undertake much-needed research in this area and offers suggestions of understudied topics with low entry barriers for legal commentators. Recommendations for interdisciplinary collaborative efforts round out this discussion. A brief conclusion reaches the endgame issue: ensuring access to the work we produce.

The Analytic that Flesh Makes Possible. A review of Fred Moten Stolen Life

The Analytic that Flesh Makes PossibleA review of Fred Moten Stolen Life Janet Neary (bio) Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018. Stolen Life is the second book in Fred Moten's recent series, consent not to be a single being, published within a year by Duke University Press. Like the other books in the series, Black and Blur and The Universal Machine, Stolen Life is a set of interrelated essays in which Moten uses blackness as an analytic to propose open-ended ways of being in the world that sharply cut and exceed the seeming wholes and totalities that form the commonplace understanding of the modern world. In this aleatoric collection that resists collection (xii), Moten presents his inimitable and endlessly generative mode of thought in encounters with a wide range of primary and scholarly texts. From the opening essay, "Knowledge of Freedom," which draws on Winfried Menninghaus, Olaudah Equiano, David Kazanjian, Ronald Judy, and Bryan Wagner (among others) to produce a sustained analysis of the foundational disturbance of blackness in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, to the concluding essay, "Erotics of Fugitivity," which thinks alongside Sora Han's "Slavery as Contract" to present a fierce and beautiful re-thinking of consent as refusal in order to dismantle the terms of liberal statism, Moten illuminates what he has called the "improvisational immanence" of blackness to show how—as concept, radical aesthetic, political tradition, and mode of being—it precedes and disrupts the regulative discourses that enshrine notions of sovereignty. Situating himself as student and teacher, Moten is both frank pragmatist addressing concrete realities of life in the academy and among subjects who imagine themselves to be sovereign and sonic theorist performing devotional acts of analysis. The dynamic essays collected in Stolen Life enact the black radical tradition, recursively unfolding a reclamation of the antenormative (what he terms the "insistent previousness" of blackness in In the Break), dispatching "normative individuation," "judicial ownership," and "legislative priesthood" in ways that entail a rethinking of every aspect of epistemology and of human relations. If the collection is a kind of intellectual ensemble that returns often to Moten's primary interlocutors (Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nahum Chandler, Hortense Spillers, and Nathaniel Mackey), the essays are predominantly dialogic, each taking flight from a particular intellectual point of departure, drawing in and from many voices but moving by way of a devotional agonism in which one principal text becomes the grain against which Moten thinks. This method of critical close reading is the foundation of Moten's powerful critique of the academy's abetting of liberal individualism, even while he thinks out loud about how to be inside these structures without acceding to their terms. To describe Moten's fugitive engagement with continental philosophy, one could do worse than to cite his comment that in Kant's writings he finds an "unruly sociality, anarchic syntax, extrasensical poetics" (2). Stolen Life extends and amplifies the work of In the Break, presenting us definitions of blackness as boundless, dynamic, and vital, as "non-performed performance[,]…the surrealization of space and time," against the notion of blackness as "death-driven epiphenomenon…[either] bound by [or] originating in the white/nonwhite binary" (33). In Stolen Life, as in his other work, blackness is, rather than is not, and Moten recruits DuBois (via Chandler's reading of his early work) to present "blackness as that which is before the binary that has been said to define our existence" (35). In so doing, Moten presents a temporal and logical challenge to the notion of "blackness as an effect of the color line, which is to say the white/nonwhite binary which orients it and by way of which it is plotted" (33). Moten argues that to imagine that blackness is reducible to this axis is to accede to the very terms of the negation, which, in "its most extreme development," refuses "the idea of blackness as a form of life" (33-34). One consequence of this intervention is the philosophical distinction between blackness and black people. Though Moten is clear that "black people have a privileged relation to blackness" and "that black cultures are (under)privileged fields for the transformational...

Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire

Reviewed by: Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire C. Richard Booher Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire (eds.). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxiii, 411. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880222-8. Lifschitz and Squire have assembled a set of essays on Lessing’s Laocoon, in honor of the 250th anniversary of its publication. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, art history, classics, literature, and philosophy. This volume serves as a useful resource for those interested in Lessing’s work and its contributions to aesthetics. This volume’s strengths are many. For anyone approaching Laocoon for the first time, it offers an excellent entryway into the central issues in Lessing’s text and the debates that have arisen between scholars over the past 250 years. The book’s organization makes it easy to read selectively, according to the interests of the reader. Yet this strength is also one of the book’s weaknesses. It is better read piecemeal than as a whole. When it is read as a whole, there tends to be an excess of repetition. Lessing’s text is framed and placed in context over and over again. This can be tiresome when encountered in nearly every chapter. Lessing’s Laocoon is itself a strange work, whose peculiarities are often overlooked due to its status as a canonical work of aesthetics. Lessing himself describes it as “more of a disordered collectanea for a book, than a book.” The work’s title is derived from Lessing’s discussion of the difference between the [End Page 240] representation of the Laocoon myth in the famous sculpture held in the Vatican and in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lessing’s central question concerns what each of these forms of representation can do most effectively. What can sculpture, or the visual arts more generally, do that cannot be done as effectively in poetry, or the literary arts? That is, as the subtitle of Lessing’s book asks, what are the proper Grenzen (limits or borders) of poetry and sculpture? One lesson that runs through many of the essays (such as those of Luca Giuliani and David Wellbery) is that Lessing’s account of the boundaries of the arts can only be made compelling if we generalize from sculpture and poetry to a broader set of categories. Some contributors (Frederick Beiser, Avi Lifschitz, and W. J. T. Mitchell) keep their focus on the fine arts, and work out accounts of the accuracy and usefulness of Lessing’s conception of the difference between the visual and literary arts. Jürgen Trabant goes even further, using Lessing as an occasion to reflect on the difference between linguistic and imagistic cognition as such. For those interested in these issues, the volume offers much of value. There are a few issues that could have been more fully addressed in the volume. The first is the adequacy of Lessing’s own theory for forms of art that combine the literary and the visual that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as film and Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk. The second is an oddity of Lessing’s own work: he never actually beheld the sculpture that is given pride of place in his essay. This matter is mentioned a few times, but its potential significance is not explored in much detail. The arc of Lessing’s argument, as several contributors note, tends to defend the superiority of the literary over the visual arts. One wonders if his lack of interest in seeing the Laocoon statue evidences a merely personal proclivity for language over and against the visual arts, rather than his ranking of them being the product of careful reflection on each medium. One final concern is this volume’s inclusion in Oxford University Press’ Classical Presences series. The justification for it seems to be that Lessing’s text discusses the Laocoon statue, as well as works of Greek and Latin literature. However, Lessing’s work seems to be at its weakest when read...

Completing the Final Volume of The Writings of Herman Melville

Completing the Final Volume of The Writings of Herman Melville Robert A. Sandberg [Correction] Published Poems (2009) “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings (2017) Though Harrison Hayford passed away in 2001, the foundation he laid down while editing and publishing thirteen of the fifteen volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry (NN) The Writings of Herman Melville enabled the editors who survived him to complete the publication of the remaining two volumes. This foundation consisted of the editing and bibliographical procedures that he, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle devised and implemented to produce reliable and definitive texts and of the capacity to follow these procedures that he fostered in the many students, colleagues, and scholars that he mentored or inspired to participate in the enterprise. The completion of the entire Northwestern-Newberry series, aptly characterized as a “mandate fulfilled” by Hershel Parker in his contribution to this set of essays, involved some fifty-two years, many more than the number originally estimated for the project’s completion. Some of the unanticipated delays can be explained in terms of expired grants and subsequent searches for support and funding, but others were due to the editors being unwilling to proceed unless the work could be done according to established editorial and bibliographical procedures and standards. By 2010—nearly thirty years after I had first begun working with manuscripts that would be included in the final volume—all but one of the fifteen volumes of the NN series had been published. It was then that I joined the other editors in a seven-year effort to complete the last volume of the series to be published, “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings. Hayford was my mentor in the years when I first began to study Melville’s writings and work with the manuscripts; in the years following his death, as we worked to complete the final volume, he was my inspiration. I first met Hayford when taking a seminar on Melville while I was a graduate student in the department of English at Northwestern University (1979–83). Taking courses with Hayford had some unique benefits. When other Melville scholars were in town (often staying at Hayford’s home), he would [End Page 34] invite them to make a guest appearance in a class he was teaching; memorable among these visits were those paid by Viola Sachs and Howard P. Vincent. I will never forget my first visit to the Melville Room that Hayford had established for the Northwestern-Newberry project. Located in Chicago’s Newberry Library, it housed more than a score of file cabinets containing offprints of essays on Melville and his writings, a section of shelves containing dissertations on Melville, locked glass cabinets containing first editions of Melville’s writings, and, off in a corner of one of the rooms, the Hinman collator that was used to compare early editions, letter by letter, comma by comma. The Newberry Library—designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb and completed in the fall of 1893—with its grand architecture and collections of rare books, maps, music, and manuscripts was a fitting home for the Melville Room. I will always remember the tour of the Newberry Library given me by Richard Colles Johnson, a Newberry librarian and Associate Editor of the NN series. Sometime in the winter of 1981 I joined with other Northwestern graduate students of Hayford—including Mary K. Bercaw and Robert D. Madison, who went on to contribute to many volumes in the NN series—to do research for the NN edition and catalog the offprints, dissertations, and books that were continually being added to the Melville Room. It was also around this time that I first met Alma MacDougall—the NN editor who was to oversee the production of so many NN volumes—when we spent late afternoons and evenings proofing galleys of Israel Potter. Towards the end of Spring quarter 1981, there came an unexpected offer that I could not refuse: Hayford invited me to assist him on a research tour of selected libraries in New England to look for undiscovered papers related to Melville. Those who knew Hayford know that he did not drive. In return for...

Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten

Reviewed by: Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten Hoyt Long (bio) Media Theory in Japan. Edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2017. xvi, 423 pages. $114.95, cloth; $30.95, paper; $28.95, E-book. When future cultural historians look back at this moment in humanistic inquiry, they will almost certainly point out its decisive "media turn." The genealogies of this turn will be traced to still earlier moments, whether the rise of postwar communication studies and catalyzing figures such as Marshall McLuhan; the deeply materialist strain of Freidrich Kittler's media archaeology; or the collapse of all media into "new media" through the common denominator of the digital screen, à la Lev Manovich. Wherever its origins are located, our current media turn will stand out as the moment when various past strains of media studies achieved critical mass in the North American academy, combining to form a common language legible across diverse fields and areas of study. As W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen declared in 2010, "We are, it seems, all practitioners of media studies, whether we recognize it or not."1 Media Theory in Japan, a set of essays originating in a film theory conference in 2012, reminds us that this is only more true today, highlighting in particular how far media studies as a new academic lingua franca has penetrated area studies. It also reminds us of all the ways this language remains a tower of babel. As it has risen in prominence, a fundamental concern of media studies has been how to delimit the study of media when all aspects of social and cultural interaction come to look mediated. Does one focus on media as an empirical and technological form? Does one look to the representational worlds that different media create? Or are media best viewed ontologically through the social relations they knit together and the knowledge formations they make possible? While not entirely independent, an emphasis on any one approach yields different insights and requires different methodologies to demarcate the horizons of interpretive possibility. This task of demarcation [End Page 490] is the first challenge that editors Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten confront in their introduction. For them, the potentially infinite array of objects that media studies addresses is reframed as the twin problems of how media have been thought about over time (i.e., media theory) and how this knowledge is mediated by space, specifically the "technological, historical, institutional, and cultural practices that form the ground" (p. 3) of the space called Japan. Of primary concern are not media objects as they coconstitute the human condition but the thinking of media as itself an effect of shifting "medial conditions of production" (p. 7). That this volume will strictly be a meta-history of media is reinforced by the editors' warning that the essays "do not treat individual media as a set of channels or technologies to be covered each in turn. The reader will not find a procession of media commodities or institutions, from woodblock prints to newspaper to film to radio to film to video, and so on, each afforded a distinct chapter" (p. 25). Every book must choose a frame, and media theory certainly demands our attention as much as the study of media objects. The implication that the two frames do not belong together, however, is a curious one. The same media turn of which Media Theory in Japan is a part has also generated important new histories of channels and technologies, commodities and institutions, by Japan studies scholars, including monographs by Michael Bourdaghs (music), Seth Jacobowitz (stenography and writing), Thomas Lamarre (television), Paul Roquet (music and sound), Atsuko Sakaki (photography), and Kerim Yasar (sound). This is an equally lively, and equally theoretical, wing of the current media studies tower of babel. So why provisionally cordon it off? Or rather, what definition of "media theory" is proposed by this act of division, and what are its implications for the future study of media in Japan? While Steinberg and Zahlten frame the volume as a collective engagement with media as epistemology (albeit a materially conditioned one), the contributors address this...

The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form ed. by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok

Reviewed by: The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form ed. by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok Michael Calabrese The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form, ed. Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2018) xii + 276 pp., ill. If I wax rhapsodic about this collection of essays, it’s because it’s one of the best I have ever reviewed or read in my 30 years in the profession and comes at a time when literary study—and the entire field of medieval studies—seems imperiled from so many different forces. The majestic work here dramatically affirms the perpetual modernity and relevance of the texts and cultural works of our period. By studying literary “form,” variously manifested in words, sounds, images, and manuscripts, this series of case studies of a diverse range of texts mounts an implicit manifesto for the dramatic way that medieval creative arts speak deeply to the aesthetic, ethical, and moral concerns of modern readers, scholars, and students. The editors introduce these issues with a critical overview of what been written about “form” in recent decades and how the current project hopes to contribute. Challenged frequently is the false distinction that one might make between the instrumental (the useful, functional, practical, didactic) and the literary (the affective, creative, imaginary, artful), which are often—and in dynamic ways—actually inseparable in the texts at hand. In an elegant, clear, and accessible essay, Clair Waters writes about Marian texts, which are prime candidates for the accusation of being simplistic, facile, and non-literary. Waters exposes the distinction between the instrumental and the aesthetic as artificial and anachronistic when it comes to these particular texts, which work purposefully and dynamically by generating an audience’s affective response and spiritual engagement. This work will be of particular interest to those who are professionally or personally devoted to Mary. Ingrid [End Page 235] Nelson then also exposes the false dichotomy between the instrumental and the aesthetic in certain grammatical texts, exploring how they are situated and glossed in manuscripts in what she calls a process of “dilation,” that is, a process of engagements and elaborations which, as Waters had argued for the Marian texts, is dynamic and generative. The featured text in this richly detailed and innovative essay is the lyric poem “Erthe toc of erthe,” which functions like a series of puzzles or “equivoca”—full of ambiguity and complexity of meaning. Nelson then applies the notions of equivocation and dilation to a 13th-century French equivocal grammar, a genre that bridges the didactic to the aesthetic, exemplified by the witty and “very “literary” Tretiz of Walter de Bibbesworth, intended to teach the French language to English speakers. Jessica Brantley then explores keenly the understudied genre of the “metrical or versified calendar” (67) as composed by the prolific John Lydgate in his “Kalandre,” a poeticized version of the catalogue of saints days. Even though Lydgate’s text is found exclusively in poetic collections, its form reflects a “Latinate layout. . .that offers the text as a vernacular entry into the liturgy” (75). “Readers of Lydgate’s poem,” Brantley continues, “understood the ways in which [the poem] both mimicked liturgical forms and enabled literary ones” (77), as she examines the marginal treatment of the text in its manuscript setting. Lydgate’s semi-liturgical efforts were rewarded, so to speak, when in 1523 Wynkyn de Worde printed the Kalandre, the start of a Book of Hours, and so “Lydgate’s vernacular poem ultimately does find a home in precisely such a [liturgical] volume” as had sparked its genesis and form (80). The next set of essays entitled “Form Performed” begins with Katherine Kirby Fulton’s and Andrew Klein’s essay on the poem King Horn, written in aabb rhyming couplets but depicted in various ways on the page (in half lines, as long lines of two verses together, in an inconsistent mix, etc.) indicating how scribes struggled with how best to present the text formally to account for its various hybrid poetic features, gesturing in an archaizing impulse toward the past forms of alliterative poetry and forward to more contemporary forms and rhyme. The next part of the essay fascinatingly explores the...

Anthropology as Respair: Anthropological Engagements with Hope and its Others

Anthropology as Respair: Anthropological Engagements with Hope and its Others Lorena Gibson Jarrett Zigon, Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 208 pp. Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg, eds. The Economy of Hope. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 198 pp. Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak, eds. Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope, and Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018. 212 pp. How do we navigate between hope and disappointment when political change doesn’t make a difference? How is hope differentially distributed within societies along lines of class and citizenship? What do we do when we are compelled to wait in the uncertain space between hope and doubt? Understanding the relationship between hope and its others [End Page 575] (despair, disappointment, waiting) is a growing trend in contemporary anthropological scholarship, as the three books discussed here illustrate. In this review essay, I use the term “respair” to describe the rise of hope in social theory and its implications for anthropological thought and practice. Respair, meaning the return of hope after a period of despair, caught my attention when a March 2017 article in The Economist discussed how it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary only once, in 1425, and described it as one of those words “that English-speakers decided they could happily live without” (Johnson 2017). I do not take the optimistic stance that we are beyond despair; far from it. Instead, I suggest respair is an apt way to describe how hope has become a prominent concept within anthropology. This essay focuses on recent literature that engages with hope not necessarily as a way of moving beyond anthropology in “dark times” (Cantero 2017)—although that is certainly a goal for some—but that mobilizes hope and its associated concepts as frameworks for interrogating how people experience the spaces between probability and possibility. In this essay, I draw on three recently published books to sketch some parameters for anthropology as respair. In Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding, Jarrett Zigon (2018) outlines the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of what he terms an anthropology of potentiality, which offers an answer to the question: when our worlds become unbearable, how can we imagine and act for an otherwise? The Economy of Hope, edited by Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg (2016), brings together a diverse set of essays that collectively consider the theoretical and methodological implications of using hope as a framework for the study of economy and society. In Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope, and Uncertainty, editors Manpreet Janeja and Andreas Bandak (2018) present a carefully curated set of chapters that examine the politics and poetics of waiting in different ethnographic contexts. A thread connecting all three books is that hope and its others, as well as being generative analytical concepts, revitalize anthropology as a discipline. I became interested in hope in the mid-2000s when undertaking research with community-based NGOs organizing grassroots development initiatives in India and Papua New Guinea. Kleist and Jansen (2016:373) describe this period of time as having a “veritable explosion of writing on hope,” including seminal work by Crapanzano (2003, 2004), Harvey (2000), Hage (2003), Miyazaki (2004), and Zournazi (2002). Scholarly interest in [End Page 576] hope is usually traced to the early 1990s, when the entrenchment of global capitalism and neoliberalism (which, it should be noted, was viewed by many as a project of hope) following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a worldwide shrinking of hopes for political and economic alternatives, and a corresponding crisis of confidence in theories of social and political transformation. I view this period as the beginning of anthropology as respair; a turn to hope as an analytic that reflects the concerns of the time and offers a “‘method of knowledge’ for scholarly renewal” (Reed 2011:528; see also Miyazaki 2004, Kleist and Jansen 2016, Knauft 2018). Anthropological work on hope has shown that it is a complex phenomenon, difficult to discuss in isolation from its associated concepts (including anticipation, desire, disappointment, doubt, faith, fear, optimism, waiting) and without taking ethical and moral considerations into account. Navigating the terrain between probability and possibility—which is how Isabelle...

Can semiotics be used to drive paradigm changes in medical education?

This essay sets out to explain how educational semiotics as a discipline can be used to reform medical education and assessment. This is in response to an ongoing paradigm shift in medical education and assessment that seeks to integrate more qualitative, ethical and professional aspects of medicine into curricula, and develop ways to assess them. This paper suggests that a method to drive this paradigm change might be found in the Peircean idea of suprasubjectivity. This semiotic concept is rooted in the scholastic philosophy of John of St Thomas, but has been reintroduced to modern semiotics through the works of John Deely, Alin Olteanu and, most notably, Charles Sanders Peirce. I approach this task as both a medical educator and a semiotician. In this paper, I provide background information about medical education, paradigm shifts, and the concept of suprasubjectivity in relation to modern educational semiotic literature. I conclude by giving examples of what a suprasubjective approach to medical education and assessment might look like. I do this by drawing an equivalence between the notion of threshold concepts and suprasubjectivity, demonstrating the similarities between their positions. Fundamentally, medical education suffers from tensions of teaching trainee doctors the correct balance of biological science and situational ethics/ judgement. In the transcendence of mind-dependent and mind-independent being the scholastic philosophy of John of St Thomas may be exactly the solution medicine needs to overcome this dichotomy.