Familiar Genre Research Articles

Mixed Mother Tongues: Memoirs of Interlingual Childhoods

Childhood involves entering “a stage which we did not design” and playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (in the words of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre). What happens when the script of the “drama” a child is born into is spoken in more than one language—when the main players, one's parents, come from different, even mutually hostile speech communities? While mixed race memoir is an increasingly recognized field, memoirs of mixed mother tongue families are a less familiar genre of life writing. This article considers Irish author Hugo Hamilton's memoir The Speckled People and Algerian-born French writer Leïla Sebbar's Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père as compelling examples of the mixed mother tongue genre, which explore how parental languages may be imposed or withheld, and the effects of this on children's lives.

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers: Icons of Marginalization in Post World War II Narrative

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers: Icons of Marginalization in Post World War II Narrative

‘GHOSTS, SCARS AND GODS’: BRINGING THE ITALIAN SPECTATOR INTO VIEW

In contention with the contradictions of poststructuralism, and as a kind of commentary to an article published contemporaneously by Roland Barthes in France, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote of political engagement, ‘‘‘Sospendere il senso’’: ecco una stupenda epigrafe per quella che potrebbe essere una nuova descrizione dell’impegno, del mandato dello scrittore’. For Barthes, the writer should construct meanings (‘construire des sens’), but leave them open (‘ne pas les remplir’), thus allowing the completion of the meaning (signifiO) to take place beyond the author. Restricting ourselves to cinema, rather than literature (though not coincidentally Pasolini writes this in his noted article, ‘La fine dell’avanguardia’, where he exposes the intrinsic capacity of film to reflect the real, thus transcending literature), this ‘epigraph’ offers a very provocative revision of how engagement works, categorically shifting the attention away from the writer (or at least her mandato). The significance of this suggestion is well illustrated by the return made to this part of the essay by scholars of impegno more recently: in Fragments of Impegno, Jennifer Burns quotes Pasolini directly, reading his work more explicitly in terms of the need to shift the functioning of impegno ‘from an author-centric towards a reader-centric paradigm’ (p. 35). Almost ten years later, the same point (this time in citation of Burns) is picked up by Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug in the volume Postmodern Impegno, once again calling directly for a greater authority for the reader (or, in our case, spectator). In relation to cinema d’impegno specifically, ‘sospendere il senso’ is no doubt a highly tense and problematic process, first and foremost because, for Pasolini and Barthes, it appears contradictorily to remain an authorial act (‘il mandato dell autore’). Moreover, this is a process which does not lend itself to any familiar historical logic: when the models of engagement that we know in the Italian case are the paternalistic auteur films of directors likeFrancescoRosi, it appearsuncomfortable, albeitnot impossible, toarticulate in any obvious terms how the spectator could ‘bring’ the engagement theoretically to just any text. In other words, films such as those of Rosi come with explicit political aims, and their signifiO is relatively well established, with little room for interpretative manoeuvre. The sheer volume of possible films that could be considered ‘impegnati’ when ‘sospendendo il senso’ would moreover become overwhelming, and perhaps insulting to our familiar genre of Political Cinema: suddenly La classe operaia va in paradise (Elio Petri, 1971) and Il caso Mattei (Francesco Rosi, 1972) could go hand in hand with, for instance, Ti amo in tutte le lingue del mondo (Leonardo Pieraccioni, 2005), an episode of Un medico in famiglia (1998–present), or the video for Meno male che Silvio c’O (2008). The Italianist, 34. 2, 265–267, June 2014

Moll Flanders and the Bastard Birth of Realist Character

This essay applies genre theory to the 1722 Moll Flanders in order to outline a new history of character, reinterpreting the accepted division between early modern, “flat” characterization and the ostensibly more complex psychological practice of later realism. In the last fifty years, this contradictory text has become an important site of contention for critics examining narratorial unreliability, the origins of the novel, and nascent modernity. Critics have interpreted its inconsistencies as the result of deliberately designed irony, as the expression of the emerging ideologies of the modern world, or as simple incoherence. At base, however, Moll’s contradictory nature is an exaggeration of the kind of generic process common to many of the narratives of early print culture, a process emphasizing both formulaic repetition and fragmented generic mixture. Moll Flanders is only a more intense, more thoroughly mixed version of these ephemeral narratives, the product of an endemic bastardization of genres that lasts from the 1590s through the 1730s and beyond, particularly inhabiting the lower registers of mass culture. Yet at the same time, the text prefigures the structure and complex ethical and psychological dynamics of later realism. This confluence suggests that the later form of characterization, usually understood as a more concrete representation of individual and social life, is actually a naturalization of the fragmented generic mixtures of the earlier field of narrative. What we see in Moll Flanders , in other words, is the generic instability of early print culture transforming itself into modern character. This text also illuminates the familiar genre theory I use—one that sees genres as variously institutionalized sets of reader expectations—by displaying irony as a kind of generic negotiation.

De Bibliothecis Syntagma by Justus Lipsius: innovations and confirmations for the history of libraries

The De Bibliothecis Syntagma Justus Lipsius (1602) was the starting point of the libraries' modern history, influencing Federico Borromeo for the foundation of the Ambrosian Library and inspiring Gabriel Naude for his Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque . A close comparison between the chapters devoted to the libraries of ancient Rome and the writings of Encyclopedists, Antiquarians and Italian and German Scholars - who discussed the same topic - shows which were the methodological and conceptual innovations introduced by Lipsius in the history of libraries, that is critical analysis and philological sources, accompanied by their rational organization. Using a very well known and familiar genre, just like the antiquarian treatise is, Lipsius showed in Syntagma a profoundly innovative idea of Library, represented by the Museum of Alexandria and its characteristics of universality and freedom of thought and expression.

The Murmurings by Carly Anne West (review)

Reviewed by: The Murmurings by Carly Anne West Karen Coats West, Carly Anne. The Murmurings. Simon Pulse, 2013. [384p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-4179-8 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-4181-1 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–10. Living under the shadow of her sister Nell’s alleged mental illness and suicide, Sophie imagines that everyone is waiting for her to lose her mind as well. The problem is that she seems to be doing just that—that is, she hears the same kinds of insistent but unclear vocalizations that her sister heard, and she sees glimpses of wavering beings in mirrors and darkened windows. She keeps all this to herself, though, and tries as best she can to appear normal. That’s harder when Evan, a new boy in school, takes an interest and begins asking her out. Oddly, he seems connected to the place where her sister’s body was found, and as they learn to trust each other, he reveals that he is searching for his cousin, who has been suffering the same symptoms as Nell. As they piece together clues about what actually happened to her sister, Sophie unwisely decides to make a secret visit the clinic where Nell was being treated; there she is captured by the doctor, who is performing experiments on patients like Sophie and Nell for his own gruesome purposes. West pulls together a lot of familiar genre elements—the heroine’s bad choices, the mad doctor and his evil assistant, and the one perfect boy who understands it all—in support of an enjoyable outing with some genuine originality in the premise and the details. Horror fans, especially those chilled by that age-old literary trope of helpless confinement in a mental institution, will find this satisfyingly disturbing. Romance fans will appreciate the relationship with good-guy Evan, a hero who values not only his girlfriend but also his lost cousin, and mystery lovers will appreciate the subtle clues available to alert readers. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

William Apess, the “Lost Tribes,” and Indigenous Survivance

William Apess, the "Lost Tribes," and Indigenous Survivance Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) In January 1836 William Apess, Pequot writer, orator, public intellectual, and Methodist minister, delivered his now famous Eulogy on King Philip at the Odeon Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts.1 This eulogy, which marks the end of what we know of Apess's career as an orator, offers a powerful challenge to Anglo-American accounts of colonial New England history and concludes with a broader commentary on the treatment of Native peoples from the colonial era to the present time. He relates his own personal history to the larger story of the New England tribes. "And although I can say that I have some dear, good friends among white people," states Apess, "Yet I eye them with a jealous eye, for fear they will betray me" (Eulogy 310).2 This fear stems from the fact that white Christians, suggests Apess, have continually betrayed Native peoples and looked upon them as objects of curiosity, refusing to recognize their common humanity and, in the case of Christian Indians, their shared faith. He urges white listeners to acknowledge that American Indian wants are the same as their own and argues that all should be equal before the law. Participating in the familiar genre of the jeremiad, or political sermon, Apess, like many Protestant ministers before him, drew on the authority of the Old Testament prophets (like Jeremiah himself) and exhorted white audiences to remember their position as a supposedly "chosen people" and keep the terms of their covenant with God. As the intellectual and cultural descendants of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, Anglo-New Englanders would have been sensitive to the rhetorical tradition in which Apess was working and the spiritual authority his eulogy invokes.3 As a Methodist minister, Apess was well versed in the jeremiad tradition as it was practiced in New England, and his sermons and political [End Page 1] writings constitute what might be called American Indian jeremiads, arguments that frame American Indians as a chosen people with a covenantal relationship to the Christian God by linking them with the biblical narrative of the Israelites.4 In his 1831 sermon Increase of the Kingdom of God and a companion essay entitled The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes, both of which take up the theory that American Indians are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, Apess argues for a shared past for Native peoples and asserts their continuing presence on the North American continent. He exhorts white audiences to acknowledge American Indians' political, cultural, and spiritual rights and suggests that respecting these rights was key to the fulfillment of the covenant in which white New Englanders imagined themselves to participate. The lost tribes theory of American Indian origins also is discussed at length in the appendix to Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829 and 1831). Taken together, Apess's references to the lost tribes function as a warning to the "great American nation" that it should indeed fear the "judgments of heaven" for the poor treatment of American Indians/Israelites (Increase 106). Blending the secular and the spiritual, he argues that the connection between Indian and Jewish peoples has profound implications for contemporary arguments about Native sovereignty and their political relationships with the United States. Apess further links the lost tribes rhetoric and Indian land claims during his efforts on behalf of the Mashpee people in their legal battles with the state of Massachusetts in 1833-34, documented in his book Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835).5 Apess's strategic reworking of the lost tribes theory constitutes an act of what Gerald Vizenor calls "survivance," a term that he describes in Fugitive Poses as "an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry" (15).6 First proposed by seventeenth-century Europeans, the lost tribes theory of American Indian origins represented American Indians as descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, the original inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who apparently disappeared from the historical record after they were attacked by Assyrians as punishment for turning away from the Hebrew...

Comparative Communist History and the ‘Biographical Turn’

AbstractThe historiography of European communism has enjoyed a new lease of life since the opening up of communist archives in the early 1990s. There now exist major monographic studies of most European communist parties in the period of the Communist International (1919–1943). New perspectives have been provided on concepts like stalinism and stalinisation. A more recent body of work looks at the construction of communist identities and the communist politics of memory. This review article focuses on what has been described as the biographical turn in communist historiography. The currently prolific interest in biography of historians of communism may in part be regarded as a historiographical catching‐up exercise; it allows the provision of a familiar genre of historical writing which was hitherto little explored due to lack of appropriate sources. While the value of conventional biography is recognised here, possibilities for further development are identified with more innovative conceptions of the biographical framework. These include comparative or collective biography, the political uses of biographical capital and the construction of communist life histories and ‘work upon the self’.

Zaia, and: The House of Dancing Water (review)

Reviewed by: Zaia, and: The House of Dancing Water Andy Lavender Zaia. Written and directed by Gilles Maheu. Cirque du Soleil, The Venetian Macao-Resort-Hotel, Macau. 13 February 2011. The House of Dancing Water. Written and directed by Franco Dragone. Franco Dragone Entertainment Group, Dancing Water Theater, City of Dreams, Macau. 14 February 2011. As I was on the TurboJet ferry from Hong Kong, before I had even reached the Macau Maritime Ferry Terminal, I received four unsolicited text messages. The first read: "Macau Govt Tourist Office welcomes you! Choose licensed hotels and inns for your visit, don't stay at illegal accommodation." A tourism hotline number followed. The rest were from casinos, offering me opportunities to "Spin for a Million!" (City of Dreams) or "SPIN 2 WIN" (Grand Lisboa). If the texts indicated the blithe grip of the gambling industry on Macanese culture, it is also worth noting that the government got in first. I was traveling to see two super-spectacular shows in a location where a certain sort of theatre—international, intermedial, and (up to a point) intercultural—is a bargaining chip in an ongoing commercial and cultural cleanup operation. (You are free to understand "cleanup" in both senses of the term.) Cirque du Soleil's Zaia premiered on 28 August 2008, joining a stable of shows permanently housed in casinos (Cirque has seven such productions in Las Vegas). Along with Zed in Tokyo, Zaia is one of the company's two resident productions outside of North America and is a vehicle for its ongoing corporate engagement with China. Relatively hot on its heels, The House of Dancing Water is the brainchild of Franco Dragone, a former Cirque du Soleil director whose resume includes a number of Vegas mega-hits. The show opened on 17 September 2010 and comfortably wears a billing as "the world's largest water-based extravaganza." Both productions belong to that familiar genre of populist spectaculars that set high-grade circus skills amid high-end production values. They must also be seen as a function of their setting in casino developments on the Cotai Strip—an extensive land-reclamation project in the Pearl River Delta—where both have a strategic place in the consolidation of Macau's civic and geo-political identity. A former Portuguese colony, Macau became a Special Administrative Region of China in 1999, two years after its neighbor Hong Kong. Long positioned as a meeting point between East and West, the region is the only area in China where gambling is legal, and it is now home to the most profitable concentration of casinos in the world. In February 2002, seeking to revitalize and re-legitimize Macau's lucrative gambling industry, the government awarded franchises to three operators, including two Las Vegas-based conglomerates. Macau now turns over four times the gaming revenue of Las Vegas, the result of 25 million trips made to the region, mostly by residents of mainland China. The Macanese government required investors to commit to "diversification": namely, the development of a wider range of leisure offerings and entertainment experiences. In this environment, theatre must be accessible, chic, and consumable, which is where Cirque du Soleil and Dragone come in. The resulting productions, commissioned by the casino corporations to run for years, are located in bespoke venues integrated within larger leisure developments. An 1,800-seat theatre was built for Zaia, its round proscenium apparently modeled on Indian and Mayan architecture. The venue is located within Macau's lavish version of The Venetian: a hotel, mall, and casino complex modeled not so much on the Italian city as on The Venetian in Las Vegas, except that the Macanese iteration is three times the size of its US counterpart. Directly across the road is the City of Dreams complex, described in its marketing material as an "integrated entertainment resort" that includes three hotels and an apartment complex with 2,200 rooms, a casino with 400 gaming tables, and a shopping mall featuring leading Western designer brands. The House of Dancing Water was conceived, according to a press release, as "the iconic entertainment centrepiece of City of Dreams' leisure . . . offering." Its dependence on corporate subvention was exemplified...

José Cardoso Pires's Balada da Praia dos Cães, Historiographic Metafiction, and the Detective Novel

This article examines the ways in which José Cardoso Pires's novel A Balada da Praia dos Cães uses the postmodern techniques of what Linda Hutcheon calls 'historiographic metafiction' in order to revisit and review the social conditions prevalent at the height of the Salazar dictatorship. For Hutcheon, the principal characteristic of historiographic metafiction is the way in which it both installs and subverts official history. In Balada it is the real-life murder of an opponent of the regime that is fictionalized or, in the words of Brian McHale, turned into 'apocryphal history' in order better to investigate what Cardoso Pires calls the 'social crime' of the Estado Novo. It is argued here that one of the main ways in which Cardoso Pires challenges the historical is through a parodic reworking of the generic conventions of the detective novel. As well as permitting a multiple view of the socio-political situation of the country and a flâneur's-eye view of the city of Lisbon in the early 1960s, Cardoso Pires's parodying of familiar genre figures such as the detective, the suspects, the perpetrators, and the victim allows the author to depict a country and a time in which there was nothing just about justice.

Joseph Bruchac’s “Dark” Novels: Confronting the Terror of Adolescence

Joseph Bruchac’s “Dark” Novels: Confronting the Terror of Adolescence Michelle Pagni Stewart (bio) Adolescence is a strange time: adolescents’ bodies are changing in ways over which they often have no control; their hormones often direct their actions without their understanding why; the relatively safe, comfortable world they have known thus far suddenly seems to be full of temptations and dangers they are both frightened by and drawn to. Abenaki Joseph Bruchac, a children’s author best known for historical fiction novels such as Hidden Roots, The Winter People and the recent March Toward Thunder, provides an outlet for the conflicting, alluring emotions of adolescents in his novels The Dark Pond (2004) and Whisper in the Dark (2005), novels that wed frightening situations within the novels with the terrifying angst of adolescence. Yet Bruchac also acts as a trickster in writing these novels that seem, on the surface, to have more in common with Edgar Allan Poe than with Sherman Alexie, with Anne Rice than with Louise Erdrich, with Stephen King than with Thomas King. Adding to the genre of horror fiction so popular with adolescents, he creates stories for an audience that is more likely to seek entertainment than edification within the text, the kind of audience who reads purely for pleasure without consideration of other “lessons” to be found in literature, such as learning about other historical periods or people from cultures that differ from their own. The Dark Pond and Whisper in the Dark on one level do seek to entertain, to thrill and frighten young readers as they share in the experiences of Armie and Maddy, but the novels also introduce young readers to characters and cultures with which they may be unfamiliar. In so doing, they make a connection between the horror story and adolescence, despite one’s cultural background. [End Page 84] In these two novels, Bruchac incorporates notions of the uncanny: he deconstructs the familiar genre of the horror story to make it unfamiliar by incorporating American Indian mythology, and he deconstructs the less familiar American Indian coming-of-age story to make it the more familiar narrative of an outsider to the group, one who also is enthralled with the fearful. In these “dark” novels (so-called because of the titles as well as the content), Bruchac uses the popular genre of horror fiction to explore themes of adolescence as well as significant American Indian themes. Through the familiar genre of the horror story, he subtly introduces adolescent readers to American Indian literature, culture, and history, taking them from the known (horror story) to the unknown (American Indian story), benefiting both in the process. Bruchac’s novels thus work as a means to “reinvent” American Indians and to subvert the stereotypes, using his storytelling Abenaki roots to provide an outlet and insight into the adolescent mind.1 The Adolescent as Uncanny As Nicholas Royle explains in The Uncanny, we associate the uncanny with things that are ghostly, strange, mysterious, weird, and supernatural, but the uncanny is more complex than that. For most people, the notion of the uncanny begins with Freud’s famous essay in which he explains, “The subject of the ‘uncanny’…is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general” (217). Postmodern discussions of the uncanny often associate it with notions of deconstruction since one can readily see how the uncanny deconstructs, making signifiers and signifieds difficult to pin down, which is, in part, what keeps the reader uncertain and uneasy, all the while marking a return of the familiar in the love/hate relationship we find in being frightened, thrust out of our comfort zones and into the midst of the unfamiliar. That the protagonists of Bruchac’s novels are adolescents seems particularly apropos of the uncanny, for what can be described as familiar yet unfamiliar better than adolescence? It is a time when one’s body, something one has “lived” intimately with for at least a decade, becomes something foreign, when the adolescent himself or herself may be...

The Uninvited (review)

Reviewed by: The Uninvited Deborah Stevenson Wynne-Jones, Tim. The Uninvited. Candlewick, 2009 [352p]. ISBN 978-0-7636-3984-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–12 A little cottage-cum-studio in rural Ontario turns out to be the crossing point for several lives. Jay, who grew up nearby, has been staying there for a few years, working on his music, and then Mimi turns up there to escape a pursuing, possibly stalking, ex; they’re shocked to discover they’re half-siblings, both given permission to use the place by their father, who’s more successful at art than at parenting. They’re both unsettled by the repeated incursions into the cottage by somebody who seems to come and go as he pleases, and who seems to be getting bolder, but it’s hard to tell where, amid the various seeming threats, the real danger lies. Wynne-Jones offers a classic horror-film setup, with a beautiful young woman in an isolated location [End Page 424] beset by aggressive and yearning men, and polishes it up to make a rewarding and complex genre entry. The red herrings aren’t entirely fishy, as they’re all genuinely menacing, especially Cramer, who turns out to be yet another undiscovered half-sibling, who has been shadowing Jay out of jealousy and Mimi out of longing (misplaced, but he doesn’t know that), and who has his own danger at home with his crazy, cruelly demanding mother. The third-person narration shifts gracefully between Cramer’s and Mimi’s points of view, offering that familiar genre sense of a disastrous pending convergence; there’s a clever use of genre tropes also in the final twist. Overlaying it all is the implication that Mimi’s heedless father has sown the seeds for the tragedy with his cavalier use of people, but at heart this is enriched suspense, enjoyable for its mounting tension as the flammable events draw closer to their expected explosion. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

RIDICULING THE ‘WHITE BREAD ORIGINAL’

The 1994 US Supreme Court decision in Luther Campbell et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., written by Justice David Souter, reversed a lower court decision and argued in favor of the rap group 2 Live Crew's playful critique of Roy Orbison's ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ by its function as parody. This essay seeks to contextualize that decision by showing the roots of 2 Live Crew's recording in the practice of ‘covering’ – the re-recording of an existent popular composition – and thus the possibilities for redefining authorship that arose with the advent of digital technology. The compositional techniques allowed by computer programs led to the proliferation of sampling in the hip-hop community, thereby liberating sounds from the original content and reconfiguring them in new songs. The technique allowed a critical, and in some cases adversarial, stance to be taken towards long-standing Western definitions of authorship and ownership. 2 Live Crew added to this rich stew of possibilities the familiar and time-tested genre of parody. Their piece took what one judge referred to as the ‘white bread original’ of the Roy Orbison record and twisted about the implicit point of view with regard to gender and sexuality. Discussion of the legal complications that followed upon the suing of the group by the holder of the copyright in the Orbison song, Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., includes the apparently sanctioned use of the song in the Disney-produced film Pretty Woman as well as the use of other Orbison material in director David Lynch's Blue Velvet. The essay concludes with suggestions as to how the language of Justice Souter's decision allows not only for future parodies but also a reinvigoration of speech, one which calls into question power relationships codified in US copyright statutes.

Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amour by Hélisenne de Crenne, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu

i io8 Reviews and for the humanistic learning of the Renaissance, and it can now be studied both as awork in its own right and as part of the cultural life of its time. UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL GLYN S. BURGESS Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'amour. By HELISENNE DECRENNE. Ed. by JEAN-PHILIPPEBEAULIEU. (La Cite des Dames) Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Universitede Saint-Etienne. 2005. 38I pp. Eio. ISBN 2-86272-368-I. The firstwork ofMarguerite Briet, known asHelisenne de Crenne, was themoralizing prose narrative Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procedent d'amour, and it is,with good reason, recognized as one of themost significant texts of the early French Renaissance. Published first in I538 (Paris: Denis Janot) and frequently re-edited up to I560, it is awork on which critical attention has, quite rightly, focused over the last few decades as it is highly significant to an understanding of the narrative genre's development. The present edition appears in a recently established (and highly promising) collec tion directed by Eliane Viennot with the aim of facilitating access to important texts by women of the ancien regime. It complements very well the highly scholarly one by Christine de Buzon (Paris: Champion, I997), which reproduces the first edition of I538. This latest edition provides us with the I543 version (Paris: C. Langelier), which purports to have been revised by the author. The complementarity between the two modern editions, the one for the specialist and the one for the non-specialist, is usefully pointed up by Beaulieu in his introduction, where he directs us to the Buzon edition formore ample notes and discussion of the text. Gratifyingly, the modest price of the book and the fact that it is clearly aimed at non-specialists do not reflect a compromise on academic standards by Beaulieu, a noted scholar of de Crenne: he edited Epistres Familieres et invectives de ma dame Helisenne (Montreal: Presses de l'Universite de Montreal, 1995), and the first col lective volume of articles on her, Helisenne de Crenne: V'ecriture et ses doubles (Paris: Champion, 2004). The detailed notes, critical apparatus, and modern punctuation and orthography make it an ideal edition for non-specialists, particularly undergraduates. In this latter respect particularly, this edition will usefully serve to redress a frequent imbalance ensuing from the absence hitherto of such an edition: undergraduates of French Renaissance programmes are usually acquainted with Marguerite de Navarre but not with de Crenne. TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN SARAH ALYN STACEY Dialogues sacres/Dialogi sacri (premier livre). By SEBASTIEN CASTELLION. Ed. by DAVID AMHERDT and YVES GIRAUD. (Textes Litteraires Francais, 571) Geneva: Droz. 2004. 264 pp. SwF 42. ISBN 2-600-00930-2. Castellion ( 5 I5-63, also Castalio and Chateillon) is best known as an early advocate of religious toleration and freedom of conscience (De haereticis an sint persequendi, I554, and Conseil a la France desolee, I562). A Reformer, but opponent of Calvin, and Professor of Greek at Basel, he also aroused controversy with his translations of the Bible into Latin and French. The Dialogues sacres represent a less polemi cal aspect of his career and a familiar genre of humanist pedagogy. Although the second edition of I545, four books in Latin, became the standard text republished well into the eighteenth century, the editors have opted to reproduce the first book ...

Interactive influence of genre familiarity, star power, and critics' reviews in the cultural goods industry: The case of motion pictures

Academic research pertaining to the marketing of cultural products such as Broadway shows, books, music, and movies has identified a product's genre (or type), star power, and critics' reviews as important factors influencing the market performance of an individual product. Prior research, however, has not investigated the joint influences of these factors. The current study extends previous research by empirically investigating the managerially relevant interactive influences of these factors within the context of the motion-picture industry. For example, should producers of more familiar genre movies, such as dramas and comedies, feature popular, but expensive, stars? Real-world data from two distinct time periods are used to test the hypotheses. The findings are consistent across the two time periods and reveal that for more familiar genre movies, star power and the valence of critics' reviews have less impact on the movie's performance in the market. In contrast, for the less familiar genre movies, stronger (vs. weaker) star power and more (vs. less) positive reviews have positive influence on the market performance. Further, for movies with less star power, the valence of critics' reviews has no impact on the performance. In contrast, for movies with greater star power, more (less) positive reviews have positive (negative) influence on movie performance. Managerial and theoretical implications, along with limitations of the findings and directions for future research, are offered. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Smullyan's Vizier Problem

Smullyan poses a problem in the familiar genre of knights (who always tell the truth) and knaves (who never tell the truth). Although a solution of sorts is presented, evading the difficulty without confronting it, the central difficulty is by no means resolved. In this paper, I will analyze the problem and present two solutions, one of which I prove to be the most efficient algorithm to solve Smullyan's problem. Though it will later be necessary to alter the problem, for the moment let me present it exactly as Smullyan originally gave it with the following excerpt from Satan, Cantor and Infinity, in which the character Alexander meets with King Zorn after deducing the location of his kidnapped love, the princess Annabelle.

Rubble Canyons: Die Morder sind unter uns and the Western

Introduction The premiere of Wolfgang Staudte's Murder sind unter uns on October 16, 1946, was a cinematic event unlike perhaps any other in German film history. It was not only the opening act of postwar German filmmaking and the first feature film of the newly founded DEFA, it was a test of the medium.2 The cinema was rightfully subjected to the controlling gaze of the occupying forces in Germany who were at best skeptical of Germans' relationship to film. What stories Germans would seek to tell in film and how they would go about doing so were topics of considerable interest and debate among the Allied censorship authorities, filmmakers, and the press.3 While all these players disagreed on the scope of influence German cinema should assume in the wake of its misappropriation by the National Socialists, they did agree on at least one point: that filmic narrative was compelled to provide moral guidance. The idea that cinema should assume a functionalist character was not novel. Certainly, during the war, cinematic production everywhere mobilized itself in the service of one national narrative or another. But narrative cinema had played such a notorious role in the Nazi regime that Germans more than others had to interrogate their relationship to filmmaking. Many of cinema's generic and narrative codes had been so thoroughly delegitimated, it was unclear what cinematic language filmmakers would be able to call upon once they were in a position to resume production. Harald Braun, a filmmaker in the Third Reich whose career would blossom in the postwar years as well, noted sarcastically in November 1945 that German film had fragwirdigen Vorzug gehabt, sick der besonderen Aufmerksamkeit and 'Betreuung' der diktatorischen Stellen zu erfreuen.4 Braun goes on to propose making a virtue out of this Filmpause imposed on German cinema for over a year. Die Ordnung des freien kunstlerischen Spiels will erarbeitet sein [...] die Selbststandigkeit der Entscheidung will neu begriindet sein.5 Braun is exemplary of many in the film industry who posed the primary question that Morder sind unter uns had to address, namely does one make a film in postwar Germany? In many cases it was accompanied by a moral query such as, can one redeem this tainted medium? As Braun put it, niemand kann heute so tun, im Leben nicht, im Theater nicht, im Film nicht, als habe es die Schuld, die Wirrnis, den Tod and die Angst der letzten Jahre uberhaupt nicht gegeben.6 Braun's commandment begs a question for us over fifty years later when approaching the first German film of the postwar era: How would a German filmmaker address the crimes of the Nazi past? What is the film's response to the questions of guilt and responsibility for the crimes committed during the Third Reich? These are questions its original audience was also asking of the film, questions that constituted a crucial part of public discourse in 1946. I will argue that Morder sind unter uns seeks a solution to these problems through cinematic generic structures, among others, the narrative outlines of the Western. The presentation of the landscape, the hero, the heroine and much of the plot are analogous to Western codes. A lone, troubled man is lost in a wasteland. He struggles against his own troubled past as well as against his lawless surroundings. These are conventions with which, as I will show, Staudte would have been familiar. However, Morder sind unter uns is obviously not a Western. It works with another familiar genre, the domestic melodrama, in which the drive is toward the subject's integration with community values and social harmony. This conflict, namely a counter-narrative creating internal narrative tension, often occurs within Westerns. Understanding the complex interplay of the Western with the domestic melodrama will go a long way towards explaining the film's relation to the Nazi past. The Story A young woman, Susanne, returns to Berlin from a concentration camp at the end of the war to find a man living in her apartment. …

Editor's Column

Editor’s Column Suzanne Poirier (bio) The articles in this issue of Literature and Medicine engage history in a variety of ways. Some explore possibilities of literary-medical influence or the literary-medical lives of great personages, approaches that have long been of interest to readers of Literature and Medicine. Other articles follow approaches more recently developed by such interdisciplinary fields as women’s studies, African American studies, American studies, and cultural studies. All of these articles, however, pose similar, fundamental questions about the evolution of medicine and medical thought—and their effects on the people they serve. I have chosen to bring them together in this general issue because, while they address a wide range of topics, they give us a special opportunity to consider how history contributes—and has probably always contributed—to the more narrowly identified field of literature and medicine. History is a silent partner of literature. It is a relationship that we in literature and medicine often overlook in our effort to establish a vital connection between the two disciplines—and professions—we seek to unite. In fact, one of the arguments we have offered most convincingly to medicine is the timelessness of literature in addressing the human condition. We argue, for example, that Sophocles’s Philoctetes has as much to teach us about the isolation and degradation of suffering today as it did in ancient Greece. Likewise, we recognize Ivan Ilych’s despair and search for meaning as he faces death alone, even though surrounded by his family and physicians. Many of us have found, however, that understanding early Greek notions of state and service brings a political dimension to Philoctetes’s desire to die that is quite different from debates about autonomy in the play Whose Life Is It, Anyway? “The Death of Ivan Ilych” takes on added depth, as does, more recently, Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle,” when students recognize the social-political critiques that underlie the characters’ search for a meaningful death (many editions of these two stories, in fact, provide footnotes that parse the historical allusions). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can only be understood fully (or, perhaps the better word is fairly) within the broader picture of the social and medical views of women in the late-nineteenth-century United States. [End Page vii] In short, however timeless the emotions and questions literature represents, it is also grounded in the time and place of its writing. Underscoring past literature’s relevance to today’s issues in health and illness need not deny the value of its historicity. The historical context of a literary work and its author provides insight into the politics, cultural biases, and economic forces that shape character and event. Historical sensitivity to literature needn’t distract from the text; rather, it will often enhance as it renders a text more complex and, in turn, actually more relevant to the complex mix of politics, medicine, culture, and personality that underlies every present medical situation. History, likewise, is a close cousin to literature. As literature is situated in time, history is grounded in narrative. In recent years historians have become increasingly aware that “the past” is no one thing; that events are the result of complex interplays of people, ideas, and circumstances; and that past and present are always in uneasy tension in time’s movement into future. Historians who bring a literary consciousness to their work will write histories that recognize contingency, diversity, and ambiguity. Allen W. Grove’s article, “Röntgen’s Ghosts: Photography, X-Rays, and the Victorian Imagination,” offers an excellent example of literature registering both advances in scientific technology and a public curiosity that incorporates technology into popular discourse. Beginning with the advent of photography and ending with the discovery of the X-ray, Grove shows how the images created by these devices contributed to reshaping the familiar genre of the ghost story. This reshaping reflects the changes that the new technologies forced people to make in the way they viewed the unseen—both from beyond the sentient world and within the now-permeable boundaries of their own bodies. Examining literature such as Henry James’s The...

The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches November 1640–July 1642

‘No member of this House’, proclaimed Bulstrode Whitelocke in February 1642 ‘ought to publish any speech or passage of this House, though it be very frequent.’ Very frequent it was; by this stage of the Long Parliament more than 100 purported speeches of named members were in printed circulation. Orations attributed to 45 M.P.s had been published, at a time when only ‘75 M.P.s made the motions, spoke to the issues, and delivered the reports of conferences and committees’. Printed speeches must have become a familiar genre to the customers of London booksellers. Invariably they were quarto in format; typically a pamphlet consisted of a single address, between three and eight sides in length and carelessly printed. Titles were informative and unpretentious: Mr. Thomas Pury his Speech upon the clause, the which concerns Deans and Chapters is a representative example. Most gave the date, or alleged date, of delivery, and the name of the printer responsible. There was nothing surreptitious, in other words, about the phenomenon. The chronological Thomason catalogue shows that speeches were significantly more numerous than any other kind of ephemeral tract, at least until March 1642, and that during the first session they were the only source of printed information about parliamentary debates. After March 1642 the flow of publication dried up. Large-scale publication of individual parliamentary speeches is therefore unique to a particular fifteen month period. Their importance, as historical sources, hardly needs stressing. The purpose of this article is primarily to explain the nature, and limitations, of the evidence this material can provide.

Legal Research Guides As Bibliographic Efforts

Legal research guides are a familiar genre to law librarians and attorneys. They often contain bibliographic information which can be invaluable to the researcher. The author examines the history of legal research guides and the degree to which they have functioned as legal bibliographies