Exeter Academy Research Articles

Le cœur d'un père par Josselin Guillois

Reviewed by: Le cœur d'un père par Josselin Guillois Joseph A. Reiter Guillois, Josselin. Le cœur d'un père. Seuil, 2022. ISBN 978-2-02-149543-0. Pp. 224. In this fictional 1661 diary, Titus Rembrandt, son of the great Dutch master, records six harrowing days in life with his father. The artist has one week to settle his debts, or else his possessions, studio, and artwork will be seized, plus he will lose custody of his sixteen-year-old son who would be sent to an "orphelinat," clearly Dickensian in nature. Rembrandt is unaware of the situation, for Titus, without his father's knowledge, deals with creditors and even represents him in a court hearing. And so begins Titus's quest to avoid disaster, save his father's legacy and perhaps, finally, receive the expression of paternal love he so craves. The latter is a leitmotif in the journal entries. Titus's life is intertwined with his father's. He is errand boy, studio assistant, uncomplaining companion, and ever faithful and adoring son, but the artist seems to ignore his son's love and dedication. Must artists necessarily neglect family and loved ones in the service of art? This is a question Guillois often addresses, and the response will be multi-layered. The author has carefully researched Dutch societal history and laws, as well as Rembrandt's biographies and works, and the reader will appreciate his insights and their clever use in the work. The Dutch Golden Age has a disturbing underside, which also finds its depiction in the novel. A stroke of fate seems to promise a solution. On day two of the journal, Rembrandt, although fallen out of vogue, receives a commission to paint the largest canvas he has ever undertaken, a heroic depiction of a scene from Tacitus, the Oath of the Batavians, that would hang in Amsterdam's new city hall; the caveat being he has to use the sketches of the originally commissioned artist who has unexpectedly died, employ members of the painters' guild as models, and complete the work within the week for the festive inauguration of the hall. The reader immediately knows Rembrandt will ignore these constraints, and that Titus will have to play a major part in the completion of the canvas. In personality and susceptibility Titus is not unlike Candide, but only needs a week to be disabused of his naivete. He realizes an erotic tryst, albeit under self-portraits of his father; gets drunk for the first time and sleeps through a precious day; he is almost killed; he meets Cosimo de Medici who has traveled from Florence to inhale the air of the master's studio; he confronts dissatisfied patrons; discovers who is the model in what would be termed an X-rated sketchbook he hides under his bed, and more. Guillois packs quite a bit into this short novel. It is above all a homage to the originality of Rembrandt's creations. The artist depicts and elevates the old, infirm, and societal outcasts in sharp contrast to the stereotypical, black-suited, white-collared gentry depicted by his contemporaries. Of course, Rembrandt's monumental canvas will be rejected by the censors but parts of it survive and have a central place in the history of figurative art. [End Page 237] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Review: Louis Kahn: The Importance of Drawing and Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn

Review: <i>Louis Kahn: The Importance of Drawing</i> and <i>Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn</i>

Chemistry Olympiad study camp begins

Twenty high school students selected by the American Chemical Society–sponsored US National Chemistry Olympiad program are attending the Chemistry Olympiad study camp June 5–18 at the University of Maryland, College Park. The students are competing for a place on the four-member team that will represent the US at the 54th International Chemistry Olympiad, to be hosted virtually by China from July 10 to July 18. Representing 15 ACS local sections and 11 states, the students are Anantshri Asthana, John Foster Dulles High School in Texas; Luke Chen, Blue Valley North High School in Kansas; Yufei Chen, University High School in California; Neil Chowdhury , Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire; Nipun Dour, Mira Loma High School in California; Mingwen Duan, East Lyme High School in Connecticut; Alexander Gu, Gunn High School in California; Canaan He, Carmel High School in Indiana; Brian Li, Acton-Boxborough Regional High School in Massachusetts; Alice Liu,

Le territoire sauvage de l'âme by Jean-François Létourneau

Reviewed by: Le territoire sauvage de l'âme by Jean-François Létourneau Joseph A. Reiter LÉtourneau, Jean-FranÇois. Le territoire sauvage de l'âme. Boréal, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7646-2675-7. Pp. 144. This homage to the Inuit people and culture also celebrates the wilds of the province of Québec, family, fatherhood, storytelling, and (perhaps not surprisingly) hockey. Largely autobiographical, the author successfully employs and alternates two modes of narration—the singular tu, with an effective use of the present tense, to chronicle alter ego Guillaume's first years of teaching in Nunavik, and the third-person il, to recount family life with his wife and three children a decade or so later in their forest home in southern Québec. Readers might google maps to follow Guillaume's movements. Air travel was and remains the sole manner to reach Nunavik's towns, since no connecting roads exist, and once landed it is difficult for an outsider not to feel isolated or exiled. Add to this language—the Inuit of Kuujjuaq, old and young alike, communicate in Inuktitut, which Guillaume discovers during his initial flight from Montréal with a large group of teenagers. He earnestly wants to understand the conversation—"Tu aimerais leur parler, ne peux que leur sourire" (11)—but he can only guess the meaning, and over his four years in Kuujjuaq he will many times misinterpret what he hears, at times even when spoken in French. This of course will make for humorous tales he relates to his children in the prospector's tent erected in the woods behind his home. Guillaume was raised by a widowed father in the last house on a rang in a village in les Cantons de l'Est, now referred to as l'Estrie. The father told stories, sang—"un air traditionnel pour chaque moment du quotidien" (14)—chopped wood, worked the land, loved nature, and imparted that ethos to his son. Guillaume, to pay his way through college, planted hundreds of trees during summers in northern Ontario, where his yearning for the far North took hold: "Tu as voulu le Nord comme un vide à combler" (35). He does not make much headway with his students nor feel at ease for months after arriving. One Saturday night he heads to the hockey arena (Jean-François Létourneau was a champion hockey player) with skates and equipment and manages to be invited to play. His prowess stuns the players and crowd and opens the door to friendships and acceptance by the community. He will experience life with extended families, hunt caribou, camp on the tundra, learn legends, read the stars, and intensify his love for the environment and for traditional ways. Guillaume realizes he has learned much more than he was able to impart in his courses, perhaps expressing what many teachers feel: "J'ai l'impression de vous avoir pris quelque chose sans rien laisser en retour" (131). His decision to return to l'Estrie is viewed as a betrayal by the town and at departure he cannot adequately express his gratitude nor say farewell. Létourneau's poetic and poignant novel beautifully accomplishes that task: "Votre pays est magnifique, vous êtes magnifiques […] vous m'avez appris à rire. Vous m'avez appris à vivre" (131). [End Page 251] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Sans intention de nuire by Michèle Terdiman

Reviewed by: Sans intention de nuire by Michèle Terdiman Joseph A. Reiter Terdiman, Michèle. Sans intention de nuire. Mercure de France 2021. ISBN 978-2-7152-5594-4. Pp. 128. Alternating fictionalized diary and interior monologue, this debut novel effectively and imaginatively takes up the subject of memory, and at the same time points out the complexities of Belgian society. Terdiman presents Madame Lepire, a septuagenarian, who wants to forget the past, concentrate on the present and not revisit memories. For example, she has an absolute aversion to photos. Although healthy and alert, she has surprisingly chosen to live in a retirement home on the outskirts of Brussels, far removed from the sites that marked her life which include a childhood in a post-World War II Flemish village, student days in Paris, some years in the Congo, a hippy sojourn in Afghanistan among others. The grounds of the home are bucolic and seem to promise respite, but no sooner there, the sight of the trees and the scent of lilacs, like Proust’s madeleine, reawaken long forgotten events, “le plus léger parfum ranime un fracas de souvenirs” (7). Some are pleasant—Sunday mornings with her father, her son as a child, hikes in the Lozère. Others painful—the prejudices her father endured: “Le clan maternel isole Lucien [...] dans l’arène de ses complicités malsaines. Ils sont flamingants et citadins, il est wallon et villageois” (14); her mother’s nervous breakdowns; visits to a frequently imprisoned uncle whose crimes are whitewashed by the family. She realizes, too, that memory may not be accurate or trustworthy. In addition, it seems that the institutional administration feels that memory coaching is positive therapy for the residents, perhaps an Alzheimer inhibitor. The employee, Nadja, sometimes gently, other times pointedly, probes into Madame Lepire’s past. Initially the resentful narrator responds with half-truths and seems to enjoy having the upper hand, but gradually she reveals more than she intends. It is, however, outside interference that forces her to confront and analyze an event that occurred fifty years earlier. An official arrives to inform her that the investigation into the unsolved death of Doctor Raymond Delou would be reopened, and that she would certainly be called upon to testify. Delou, a psychiatrist who had treated her mother, became a family friend and a frequent presence in the Lepire home. Improbably, and the sole weak point in this otherwise fascinating tale, there is the presence of Delou’s son, now in his fifties, as coiffeur at the home. Though Madame Lepire tells herself, “Je ne veux pas ouvrir une porte que je ne saurai refermer” (18), the repressed memories of details leading to the doctor’s drowning are unavoidable. The title of the book is ironic, for Madame Lepire at one point had every intention to harm, but as the reader discovers, she is not the perpetrator of the crime, and Terdiman handles the unraveling of the mystery adeptly. The reader will find interesting and informative, as well, how Madame Lepire’s recollections often reflect a Belgian collective memory, on topics such as colonialism, racism, the monarchy, right-wing sympathies, and ethnicity. [End Page 259] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Announcements

Announcements

Rien pour demain par Bruno Remaury

Reviewed by: Rien pour demain par Bruno Remaury Joseph A. Reiter Remaury, Bruno. Rien pour demain. José Corti, 2020. ISBN 978-2-7143-1234-1. Pp. 174. Remaury, anthropologist, professor, editor, and fashion historian, has constructed a narrative that challenges categorization. It begins like a traditional World War I novel: four young Frenchmen off to the front, passing through destroyed villages and trying to survive the horror of trench warfare. Their story is continued in short episodes over the course of the book. After the first twenty pages their tale is interrupted, and multiple literary genres come into play: social history, scientific writing, essay, reportage, prose poem, art theory, and more. The digressions and transitions are sometimes seamless and other times jarring; the associations at times logical and other times random. The author employed this structure in his 2019 Le Monde horizontal, awarded a Prix Wepler, precisely for its innovative composition. That text treated the topic of the evolution of mankind's vision of the world moving from the celestial to the terrestrial. Rien pour demain takes up the mystery of time. Is it cyclical or linear? Infinite or finite? Slow or rapid? And so on. Fascinating speculations and musings are presented. The reader, too, meets a host of historic figures in addition to the author's creations: Nicolas Poussin, whose allegorical 1635 painting of the seasons, Dance to the Music of Time, depicts (according to Remaury) the conception of time until the Renaissance, "un monde qui tournait calmement au rythme des astres, de la fortune et des saisons, ronde des destins, sable qui s'écoule, bulles de savon" (30); Arthur Eddington, philosopher of science, popularizer of the theory of relativity and time's arrow, "cette flèche du temps, et qu'on l'appelle événement, devenir, progrès ou modernité ne change rien à l'affaire" (36); Louis Renault, who introduces the assembly line in France and whose vehicles launch the contemporary view of time, "Vitesse. Progrès. Monde glisse et glacé. Monde pressé" (66). We also find Daguerre, Monet, Baudelaire, the astronomer Herschel, the last empress of China, futurist artists, Chronos, and even Alice in Wonderland. Proust, however, deserved more than only being mentioned once in passing. Many of the episodes are very effective: the failed 1913 Renault factory strike, survival in the trenches, imperial etiquette in the Forbidden City, a character's fascination for crowds and flânerie, and the recurring attention to photography, "qui à ses débuts avait pour vocation de fixer le présent et qui était devenue très vite le théâtre de la mémoire" (100). The title of the book is the first element of the Dadaist mantra: "Rien pour demain, rien pour hier, tout pour aujourd'hui." The last pages of the book present Peter Pan, who has conquered time, who is "le visage même de la modernité […] il refuse le temps qui passe […] il ne veut pas vieillir […] il est amnésique, comme elle, il vit tout ramassé dans un point unique, celui d'un éternel présent" (150). Remaury's book is a collage that engages, instructs, amuses, and at times will puzzle the reader. Its structural inventiveness, wealth of information, and evocative prose do merit a reader's time. [End Page 239] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles par Claude Louis-Combet

Reviewed by: Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles par Claude Louis-Combet Joseph A. Reiter Louis-Combet, Claude. Toutes les bêtes sont mortelles. Corti, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7143-1248-8. Pp. 173. Animals have populated literature and imagery from the very beginnings of artistic expression, revealing a fascination, awe, and fear of the many species inhabiting the planet. Some creatures have taken on religious and symbolic meanings. Others mirror or satirize human behavior. In this collection of ten narratives, written between 1997 and 2021, Louis-Combet paints a world where animals are mostly victims of human cruelty and insensitivity. The tales are probing, nightmarish, erotic, filled with guilt and self-loathing. Some are from the world of fantasy. Others are autobiographical, mostly from the seminary years of the author. Louis-Combet abandoned a religious vocation but, as one sees in his writings, not an intense spiritual life. He studied philosophy, which he went on to teach, and is a prolific writer of fiction, and of art, literature, and photography criticism. He also developed pedagogy courses for troubled youth, perhaps influenced by his own adolescent conflicts, and continues to write at age eighty-eight. The first tale of the collection, "Le bœuf et la grenouille," misleads the reader, who expects a Rousseauist reinterpretation of fables. Louis-Combet invents an epilogue to La Fontaine, where the bœuf envies the size, color, beauty, and voice of the frog, resulting in his demise as he tries to imitate the amphibian: "il cria si fort qu'il en creva" (13). The second story, "Les larmes d'une truie," clearly states the intent and direction of the texts: "L'animal vivait dans la simplicité de sa nature. L'homme dans sa complexité de sa nature, dans sa dualité et sa duplicité. Lui seul avait le pouvoir de faire du mal" (18) and with that an intense feeling of sin, guilt and self-loathing, precisely what Louis-Combet experiences at the seminary. He desperately strives for purity and innocence through prayer, self-harm, walking, and through literature. Louis-Combet details his encounters with cats, insects, rabbits, or snakes, including the serpent represented in the statues of the virgin Mary. He recounts the slaughter of the seminary's pig, César, who had become the postulants' pet. The butchers, his priest teachers, have compelled him to collect the animal's blood, "tout au long du rituel de la mise à mort, le corps avait rayonné" (78). Equally disturbing and sadistic is a scout initiation scene, also overseen by a cleric, which includes the forced eating of a roasted snake, after which Louis-Combet is dubbed, ironically as the reader sees later, Cobra pacifique. The most fanciful piece in the collection is a dictated letter to the eccentric and mythomaniac English poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) by the chimpanzee he claimed to have seduced. She, named Bloody Mary, recalls his Pygmalion-like efforts to humanize and beautify her, and thereafter the sorrows of abandonment: "Quand j'ai compris que vous ne reviendriez plus et que, plus jamais je ne vous verrais, je me suis mise à vieillir à toute allure" (135). The collection concludes with a previously published essay, fittingly, on the topic of writing about animals, a creative process, argues Louis-Combet, that inevitably exposes the truths of human existence. [End Page 269] Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Book Reviews

Robert William Fogel and G. R. Elton. Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. Pp. vii, 136. Cloth, $14.95. Review by Stephen Kneeshaw of The School of the Ozarks. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. The Mind and Method of the Historian. Translated by Sian Reynolds and Ben Reynolds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. v, 310. Paper, $9.95. Review by Richard Harvey of Ohio University. John E. O'Connor, ed. American History/ American Television: Interpreting the Video Past. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1983. Pp. 463. Cloth, $17.50; Paper, $8.95. Review by D' Ann Campbell of Indiana University. Foster Rhea Dulles &amp; Melvyn Dubofsky. Labor in America: A History. Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1984. 4th edition. Pp. ix, 425. Cloth, $25.95. Paper, $15.95. Review by Robert W. Dubay of Bainbridge Junior College. Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman &amp; Allanheld, 1984. Pp. viii, 182. Cloth, $24.95; Paper, $12.50. Review by John T. Reilly of Mount Saint Mary College. Kevin O'Reilly. Critical Thinking in American History: Exploration to Constitution. South Hamilton, Massachusetts: Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, 1983. Pp. 86. Paper, $2.95. Teacher's Guides: Pp. 180. Paper, $12.95; Kevin O'Reilly. Critical Thinking in American History: New Republic to Civil War. South Hamilton, Massachusetts: Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, 1984. Pp. 106. Paper, $2.95. Teacher's Guide: Pp. 190. Paper, $12.95. Review by James F. Marran of New Trier Township High School, Winnetka, Illinois. Michael J. Cassity, ed. Chains of Fear: American Race Relations Since Reconstruction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984. Pp. xxxv, 253. Cloth, $35.00. Review by Ann W. Ellis of Kennesaw College. L. P. Morris. Eastern Europe Since 1945. London and Exeter, New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. Pp. 211. Paper, $10.00. Review by Thomas T. Lewis, Mount Senario College. John Marks. Science and the Making of the Modern World. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc., 1983. Pp. xii, 507. Paper, $25.00. Review by Howard A. Barnes of Winston-Salem State University. Kenneth G. Alfers, Cecil Larry Pool, William F. Mugleston, eds. American's Second Century: Topical Readings, 1865-Present. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/ Hunt Publishing Co., 1984. Pp. viii, 381. Paper, $8.95. Review by Richard D. Schubart of Phillips Exeter Academy. Sam C. Sarkesian. America's Forgotten Wars: The Counterrevoltuionary Past and Lessons for the Future. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984. Pp. xiv, 265. Cloth, $29.95. Review by Richard Selcer of Mountain View College. Edward Wagenknecht. Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1983. Pp. viii, 192. Cloth, $17.50. Review by Abraham D. Kriegel of Memphis State University. Morton Borden. Jews, Turks, and Infidels. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Pp. x, 163. Cloth, $17.95. Review by Raymond J. Jirran of Thomas Nelson Community College. Richard Schlatter, ed. Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing Since 1966. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Pp. xiii, 524. Cloth, $50.00. Review by Fred R. van Hartesveldt of Fort Valley State College. Simon Hornblower. The Greek World, 479-323 B.C. London and New York: Methuen, 1983. Pp. xi, 354. Cloth, $24.00; Paper, $11.95. Review by Dan Levinson of Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts. H. R. Kedward. Resistance in Vichy France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Paper edition 1983. Pp. ix, 311. Paper, $13.95. Review by Sanford J. Gutman of the State University of New York at Cortland.

Le tarot de Cheffersville by Felicia Mihali

Reviewed by: Le tarot de Cheffersville by Felicia Mihali Joseph A. Reiter Mihali, Felicia. Le tarot de Cheffersville. Hashtag, 2019. ISBN 978-2-924936-09-2. Pp. 243. Québec author, publisher, and educator Felicia Mihali terms this work a docuroman. The docu half of the book chronicles a year of teaching at an Innuit reservation school in the far north of Québec on the Labrador border. The town in the title is an obvious anagram of Schefferville, once prosperous due to extensive mining, but now reduced to a population of 600 from the high of 8,000 in the late 1970s. Four instructors from Montreal have signed on for a year at the Kanata school. Augusta, the French teacher, whose Romanian past and trajectory mirror the novelist's, recounts the ordeals involved in striving to educate the thirty high schoolers who have little interest in study and learning, and almost none for the proscribed curriculum. The teachers are absolute strangers to the lives of the Innu(sic) community, where unemployment, alcohol, drugs and domestic violence make for uncontrollable situations. The history teacher has reverted to showing movies, the math teacher is heckled, the ethics instructor feels physically threatened. Augusta, however, does not give up and retains the belief that she can somehow reach her students. Obstacles seem insurmountable—inhospitable weather, rare fresh produce, disinterested parents, teenage pregnancy, a non-supportive principal and unruly adolescents. Little by little, through her efforts to learn the culture, history and language of the Innus, and leave behind dominant societal values, she succeeds in engaging, and more importantly, understanding her students. The structure of this docu-roman is highly inventive. It opens in a realm completely different from an academic setting, where we meet the ancestral Innu [End Page 258] hunter god, Tshakapesh, who has left the moon and now roams the forest and tundra surrounding Cheffersville. Why he is in the company of Cerise, a Romanian gypsy, is a mystery. She insists in reading a tarot card, illustrated in the text, followed by an explanation of its meaning. The action then flips to the present—to school and town life. Each of the eleven chapters will follow this pattern—Tshakapesh's universe juxtaposed with Augusta's world. Other unlikely characters arrive at the hunter's lodge, and he educates them, and the reader, to Innu myth, the secrets of nature and the tundra, the importance of the caribou and spruce trees, and the art of respectful and joyful co-existence. The group now includes Augusta's mother Florica, the gypsy petty thief Pâris, two prostitutes, a coiffeuse, an old East European Jew—all persons (ghosts?) from Augusta's past. This eccentric society disbands in the last chapter as the Arcane tarot card is read and Augusta, with trepidation, prepares to return to city life. In a 2014 interview, when asked about her reading preferences, Mihali responded: "What I like is when a book deals with more than simple, soap-opera stories, books made up of layers of magic, history, wisdom, mythology […] books that make me forget surroundings. It's fantastic when a story and the style in which it is written, challenges me." The reader will find all this, too, in Mihali's docu-roman. Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH), emeritus Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Review of The Socratic Method Today: Student-Centered and Transformative Teaching in Political Science

I first heard of the Socratic method on a tour of Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the elite boarding schools in the US (Martin and Browning 2015) and in the world (PrepPreview.com 2019). With huge ...

Profile of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth

Field studies in Africa over the past four decades by ethologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have uncovered a trove of insights into the behavior, communication, and social cognition of nonhuman primates. The pair’s research further reveals evolutionary antecedents of the human mind. University of Pennsylvania professors emeriti, Cheney and Seyfarth are both elected members of the National Academy of Sciences. For her Inaugural Article cowritten with Seyfarth, Cheney strengthens the hypothesis that many primate vocalizations shape social interactions. Factors driving the early stages of language evolution may therefore be associated with primate social challenges. Dorothy Cheney and baboons. Image courtesy of Keena Roberts (photographer). Robert Seyfarth and baboons crossing water. Image courtesy of Dorothy L. Cheney. As youths, Cheney and Seyfarth enjoyed travel and nature. Cheney’s father was in the US Foreign Service, so her family moved to a different place every few years before returning to Washington, DC. “My parents’ rather laissez faire approach to child-rearing allowed my sister and me to travel alone around India in our teenage years,” says Cheney. “We were given complete independence, for which I’ve always been grateful.” Seyfarth’s father was a Chicago-based businessman. “He also loved the outdoors, and on fishing trips to Canada and the Caribbean, taught me how to enjoy the wilderness even when we didn’t catch fish,” Seyfarth says. Cheney and Seyfarth were not initially drawn to science. Cheney preferred history at her preparatory school in Massachusetts, Abbot Academy, and Seyfarth at first struggled with science. He says, “I found science courses difficult and unappealing until, in my senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, I took a course on Darwin. The theory of evolution brought everything into focus and made all that memorization seem worthwhile.” Cheney’s “Darwin moment” happened in the spring term of her Wellesley …

L'insoumise de la porte de Flandre by Fouad Laroui

Reviewed by: L'insoumise de la porte de Flandre by Fouad Laroui Joseph A. Reiter Laroui, Fouad. L'insoumise de la porte de Flandre. Julliard, 2017. ISBN 978-2-260-03041-6. Pp. 131. The reader follows a young woman's physical and psychological trajectory from her Moroccan neighborhood in Brussels (Molenbeek) to the city's center, where she finds uncommon freedom. A brilliant student, Fatima has often made clear to her professors that she is a modern and liberated Belgo-Marocaine. Suddenly, however, she abandons her university studies and takes to wearing both djellaba and head scarf—surprising, since neither religious nor cultural reasons drive her. As we surmise quickly, her dress is to spare her the constant stares and disapproval of the men in her street: "Ceci, dit-on, est mon quartier, dans ma commune. [...] Mon quartier? Plutôt le leur. Celui des hommes" (8). As Fatima heads to work over the canal and through the porte de Flandre, she meets taunts from motorists and others. One calls her a corbeau, which causes her to smile hearing a word play and musing that her immense djellaba indeed covers un corps beau. This is a prelude to what is to follow. Laroui cleverly uses the topography of Brussels to mirror Fatima's transformation, from her North African bazar-like neighborhood, through a street of political billboards, and then across a city which becomes steadily more elegant. At one moment she disappears in a side street at a friend's house and emerges in stylish European fashion. And she continues to walk past shops, pausing before a lingerie boutique, and passes the nude statues hugging the Brussels Bourse, and others further on. Finally she enters"une espèce de sex-shop" (71) and goes to work. One day, Fatima does not realize that she is being followed. Fawzi Stitou, cell-phone shop owner in Molenbeek, has proclaimed himself her fiancé, is very proud of her recent submission to Islamic dress, and very curious of her destination. He arrives at rue de Malines and uneasily pays his entry fee for a peep show. Immediately afterward he dashes frenzied to Molenbeek, arms himself with a knife and is intent on killing Fatima:"[L]'honneur se lave dans le sang" (89). The same streets are traversed, and the billboards and statues seem to mock and jeer Fawzi. Fatima is no longer there when he reappears, but uncontrollable rage and frustration lead him to kill nonetheless. Police squads arrive, and Fawdi shouts "Allahou Akbar!" (95) before being shot dead. The novel takes a detour here, and attention is turned to this latest attentat terroriste. Experts at a Brussels forum (actual scholars and citations from their written and spoken commentaries) speculate on the reasons for the radicalization of yet another Belgian-born Muslim. Irony abounds, and along with it Laroui [End Page 214] masterfully satirizes press, government, and academics. The resolution in the last chapter might seem strained, with the author overly eager to have his "insoumise" transcend "le contrôle social" (33) and the world of men in general, but this does not detract from an otherwise fascinating and very timely tale. Joseph A. Reiter Phillips Exeter Academy (NH) Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French

Present at the Founding

Present at the Founding Clifford Weber It must be that, as an undergraduate at Harvard College in the early 1960s, I was present at the founding of the Harvard School. At the time, though, I was quite unaware of any such thing coming into being. Indeed, the label itself I first encountered only many years later. If the putative founders of the Harvard School had in common anything beyond, in most cases, their connection with Harvard University, the bond that [End Page 120] united them may have been above all a shared sympathy with the New Criticism. If the Harvard School broke new ground, privileging the text as the New Criticism enjoined, that is likely to have been the critical point of view that led to a more positive assessment of Virgil as a poet, and to a different evaluation of the Aeneid in particular. Fifty years on, it is easy to forget how wrongheaded opinions of Virgil's poetry could be in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ronald Syme's big book (1939), widely read and influential, made of Virgil a cheerleader for Augustus. Writing in 1970, Allen Mandelbaum lamented that some years had to pass before he could break free from the "tenacious resonance" of Mark Van Doren's "tag line," as Mandelbaum called it, that "Homer is a world; Virgil, a style" (1981: v). In 1952, concerning the final episode in the Aeneid, a colleague of Van Doren's at Columbia could write, "all bitterness and all passion was [sic] now laid at rest, and all could now join hands as comrades and together walk to meet the shining future" (Hadas 1952: 159). If such declarations are no longer taken seriously, the Harvard School deserves much of the credit. As Willem de Kooning said of Jackson Pollock, the Harvard School "broke the ice," though Pöschl's book, appearing in America in 1962, surely played its part as well. Arriving in Cambridge in 1961, I had already read the first half of the Aeneid under a notorious martinet at Phillips Exeter Academy. Years later, astonished, Wendell Clausen would exclaim, "You studied with him?" Terror though that teacher was, he taught us a lot. My senior paper on intratextual repetitions in the Aeneid now seems, fifty-five years on, simply too sophisticated to be the work of a senior in high school. That is entirely to the credit of Exeter, where many of today's luminaries, classical and entrepreneurial, also read Virgil for the first time. Nevertheless, well trained though I was, nothing could have adequately prepared me for reading Horace with Steele Commager and, later, the Aeneid with Wendell Clausen. Clausen's lectures on the Aeneid were nothing less than revelatory, even for someone so naïvely self-confident as I was then. Their philological rigor combined with consummate aesthetic tact has remained a potent influence ever since. I have been asked, though, to write about Virgil, not about Clausen, whose extraordinary qualities as scholar and pedagogue others have documented with insight and eloquence. At the same time, it can be said that Professor Clausen would have had little patience with an analysis of the Aeneid as narrowly pro- or anti-Augustan, or with the equation that this entails between Aeneas and Augustus. "It is this perception of Roman history," he wrote, "as a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit that makes Virgil [End Page 121] his country's truest historian" (1964:146). This well-known formulation has little to do with the Rome of Augustus in particular. In the same paper, Clausen writes that "Aeneas is always aware of the fate that draws him irresistibly on towards Italy, but rarely happy about it" (141), and he details what he calls "the sorrows of Aeneas" that pervade the poem (143). In such assessments of the hero of the Aeneid, it is hard to find anything that could be deemed pro- or anti-Augustan. Hoping to provoke a reaction (though rarely with success), I used to tell my students that what a poet says interests me less than how he says it. In retrospect, this could be only a more tendentious version of Clausen's insisting to...

The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Book Review| January 01 2015 The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Tom Simpson Tom Simpson Tom Simpson, PhD, teaches religion, ethics, and philosophy at Phillips Exeter Academy. His current book projects are Authority, Ambition, and the Mormon Mind: American Universities and the Evolution of Mormonism, 1867–1940 and All We Have Left, essays and poetry about postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Mormon Studies Review (2015) 2: 139–144. https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.2.2015.0139 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tom Simpson; The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Mormon Studies Review 1 January 2015; 2 139–144. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/mormstudrevi.2.2015.0139 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Haircut

The Haircut Larry I. Palmer (bio) It was a Wednesday around 8:30 p.m., a week before Thanksgiving, 1958, when I strolled down the third floor corridor of Bancroft Hall towards Ted Bedford’s faculty apartment. He was on duty that night—thus the open door. Jef, one of my fellow preps (what ninth graders were called at Phillips Exeter Academy), had invited me and his roommate, Brink, to spend the holiday break with his family in Salem, Massachusetts. It was the first time I had visited Bedford’s faculty office, a space sealed off in the back foyer of his family living quarters by a mahogany door exactly like the one I lingered just outside of now, in the dorm hallway, an unsigned permission slip from the Dean of Students in hand. Bedford sat at his desk, facing away from the hall and poring over some papers as I waited for him to notice me. He turned his head towards me with a glance that asked, “What’s up?,” his eyebrows becoming question marks as he peered over his glasses. I handed him the slip and asked him to sign it because my adviser was out of town. Bedford pushed his chair away from his desk and spun to face me, his smile so wide it seemed to touch his sideburns. “Well, I got a deal for you. Before I’ll sign, you must get a haircut.” Get a haircut? There was nothing in the Exeter rulebook about the length of students’ hair, only that coats and ties were required at all classes, chapel, church, and meals. I figured I had left behind this kind of concern about what Mom referred to as my nappy hair when I left St. Louis three months before. Was Ted Bedford, a young history teacher and the junior faculty member in the dorm, making up his own rules? I looked around distractedly for a moment, and considered whether I should bring up the rulebook. I noticed that on the right edge of Bedford’s desk, the only space uncluttered by stacks of papers and books, sat a framed picture of his preschool boys—hair neatly trimmed, parted on the side. I decided it wasn’t smart to challenge him on the rules. He had my permission slip in his hand and gave no indication he was going to give it back to me. I knew from previous conversations with Bedford that he was at once the most intimidating, gregarious, and argumentative adult among the three faculty members living in Bancroft. Without much effort, he could have played the role of a lawyer in a movie. I regretted that I hadn’t been able to get the signature I needed from my adviser, a bachelor who taught French and barely spoke to me (or anyone else) other than to say “good morning,” and who would have signed the slip without question. Instead I was caught wondering how I could explain [End Page 147] to Bedford why my hair was so long; how I could tell him that I was acutely aware of the fact that all the adults at Exeter—from the janitors to the principal to the academy barber to this grinning, twenty-eight-year-old, prematurely balding guy sitting in front of me—were white. How seriously I doubted any of them could possibly understand the complexities of my Negro hair. In my fourteen years I had never been to a barbershop. Starting when I was about four, every two weeks or so Dad would order me to take a seat in a chair in the kitchen or find a spot in the shade of the backyard, drape one of his old shirts backwards over me like a large bib, and take out his hand-operated clippers from a canvas bag. “Hold still!” he’d bark, grabbing the top of my head with his left hand. With his right he’d place the clippers against the side of my head and squeeze the shiny metal handles, compressing the heavy spring separating them, causing the teeth of the top blade to ratchet back and forth across the stationary teeth of the bottom...

Ada Louise Huxtable (1921–2013)

W hen Ada Louise Huxtable began her career at the New York Times in 1963, she was the first full-time architecture critic on an American newspaper. When she departed in 1981 for the next phase of her career—she was a member of the first class of MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellows—almost every major newspaper had an architecture critic either as a full-time staff member or as a regular contributor, and architecture had become a more conspicuous part of the broader cultural and civic discourse than ever before. Huxtable did not, to be sure, invent her profession, or single-handedly put architecture in the public eye. But no commentator on architecture, before or since, has had her degree of influence over the profession, or her impact on the public’s perception of the built environment. Huxtable’s years at the New York Times coincided with the growth of the historic preservation movement, to which she lent frequent support in the newspaper’s pages, giving preservation what was, in effect, the validation that would help it move into the cultural mainstream. At the same time, she was a passionate advocate of the new, and gave the general public what was, in many cases, its most cogent introduction to the work of architects she admired: I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, and Kallmann and McKinnell, to name several. She praised their work in memorable phrases such as her description of Meier’s Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, as “a gleaming white structure that is as radical an addition to the American heartland as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie was to the French countryside at Poissy half a century ago.”1 Kahn’s library at Phillips Exeter Academy, she wrote, emerged out of “the architect’s remarkable, extremely personal, and very passionate love of all that is logical and beautiful …

Building the Portes ouvertes CD-ROM

The Portes ouvertes CD-ROM was produced as an integrated part of a first-year method for elementary French of the same title. The method itself was created by a five-person authoring team including Margaret Haggstrom of Loyola College in Maryland, Judith Frommer and Marie- France Bunting of Harvard University, Laurent Patenotte of Philips Exeter Academy, and Christopher M. Jones of Carnegie Mellon University and published in 1998 by Holt, Rinehart. This article details the design and production of the CD-ROM with reference to video and textbook elements where such reference is indispensable to an understanding of pedagogical foundations.

“The first case of scientific time‐study that I ever saw...”

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the merit of Fred Taylor's claim that he did not conceive the notion of time study on his own. He insisted that he acquired it while a student at Phillips Exeter Academy and identified the particular individual to whom, he claimed, he owed his earliest exposure to time study – George A. “Bull” Wentworth.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on archival material, including a recently discovered letter by Taylor, this paper substantiates Taylor's claims regarding his association with Wentworth. By corroborating existing and new evidence of the Wentworth‐Taylor link, it probes into the nature and the scope of the influence of the “Old Bull” of Exeter on the father of scientific management.FindingsTaylor did not conceive of time study on his own but acquired it early in his life via traceable socialization influences, many of which came from Wentworth. Such influences were both substantive and lasting: the residue of Wentworth's methodology is distinct in Taylor's early and later time study work. Taken together, both internal and external consistency of the evidence has led me to assert that it is plausible that Wentworth had a traceable and lasting socialization impact on Frederick Taylor.Originality/valueThis paper is a rare inquiry into the part of Taylor's life history that precedes his pioneering of the industrial, managerial, and economic applications of time study. It grounds the matter of Taylor's conceiving the time study idea into the context of his early‐in‐life socialization – an important subject left largely unexplored by Taylor's biographers and the historians of the scientific management movement.

Obituary: Douglas J. Pritchard MD (1937-2011)

Obituary: Douglas J. Pritchard MD (1937-2011)