Familiar Texts Research Articles

Latin Literature

Among this latest batch of books to review are a number whose endeavour, very much to my own taste, is intellectual and cultural history through the study of Latin literature. Cream of the crop is Craig Williams’ study of Roman friendship. Admirers of Williams’ excellent Roman Homosexuality, recently reissued in second edition, will recognize the approach; this is a theoretically informed and meticulously argued work of cultural history that also shows fine appreciation of philological, linguistic, and literary issues. In Chapter 1 (Men and Women), Williams has a simple and compelling point to make: basing their idealization of friendship on our male-authored ancient literary texts (Cicero's De amicitia, Seneca's Letters), the great thinkers of Western civilization have asserted that ideal friendship is a man's game, and even that women are by and large incapable of real friendship, at the very least being excluded from the most interesting parts of friendship's history. As Williams shows, the epigraphic evidence tells a different story; here we can gain a new appreciation of friendships between women, and indeed between men and women. In its divergence from the well-trodden literary tradition, the epigraphic material opens up new ways of understanding the ancient world, but it can also be used to bring a fresh perspective to familiar literary texts, especially when one is as open-minded and attentive to linguistic nuance as Williams. Chapter 2 explores some of the key conceptual issues and themes related to the (vexed) distinction between amor and amicitia, and then in Chapter 3 Williams turns to the close reading of particular Latin texts, bringing his new interpretative framework to Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius, Petronius’ Satyricon, and the letters of Cicero and of Fronto. The fourth and final chapter, ‘Friendship and the Grave’, turns again to the epigraphic evidence, and funerary inscriptions in particular, where friends are shown to play an important role in the commemoration of the dead, usually associated in the Western tradition with close family. Williams’ work showcases Classics as a vitally and productively interdisciplinary academic subject, where significant new readings can be achieved with the right methodologies and approach. He has some big claims to make about Roman society, of which ancient historians will certainly want to take note, but his fresh analysis of familiar literary texts is also highly illuminating and the book has many smaller-scale insights to offer as well.

Driving the Monotype

Driving the Monotype Katy Giebenhain (bio) On a Saturday in December my husband and I are headed south toward Highway 15. At a stoplight we both turn, instinctually, to glance in the backseat where a package lies strapped in bubble wrap and cardboard, labeled with our names. All is well. We've just purchased a monotype from a print gallery in Harrisburg. The show it was in had closed, so we were free to pick it up and bring it home. As far as art purchases go it isn't exactly off the charts. It is still a big deal to us. We've aesthetically agreed on something, and are giddy to now possess it. On the drive up, my husband actually checked his hair and asked me if he looked okay, as if the monotype would not be released to our guardianship should we look dubious in any way. We live in a small town. We are not transporting a Golden Retriever puppy, or a baby. The impulse to look, to check up on something precious, reminds me of one of the things I most love about poetry and faith: There are many ways to be. This is obvious, right? In this century, in this big, free, sprawling country of course there are many ways to be. But we are told at every turn what is normal and what is not, what is worthy and what is not, and what we should aspire to. Our differences are interesting, but that's not always how we treat each other, even in churches, where welcome is often talked about more fervently than it is practiced. If we could believe in and internalize 1 Corinthians 12 we'd all be much kinder and more relaxed. We would accept varied abilities and spiritual gifts of others and we would accept our own as well, as valuable parts of one body. When reading or listening to a genuinely great poem, and in the early stages of writing a poem, I come closest to the freedom of 1 Corinthians. I'm always on the lookout for work I would like to introduce Seminary Ridge Review readers to in the journal's Poetry + Theology rubric. It's a magpie task, picking out shiny bits glinting from the everyday for theologians and preachers-in-the-making. I want to show them that poetry is their ally. By this I don't mean simply using poems in sermons. That can go badly. Have you ever listened to a sermon when the preacher says he or she is going to read a poem and it feels like a decorative space-filler, and the particular poem just does not deliver the goods? Not only does it not help the message, but it also does a [End Page 247] disservice to poetry by reinforcing, to those in the pews, the notion that poetry is not interesting. Naturally, poems can be used powerfully and brilliantly in sermons. There are unexpected, wonderfully written, transformative, entertaining, relevant poems out there for preaching. Real zingers. In my experience, these are not the poems that make it into the pulpit. This is what I'm after: letting poetry into the tendons of a sermon, the inner-workings of it. I'm thirsty for sermons written with the attention and sensibility of poetry, with clarity, economy and risk, with the almost athletic attempt to carry meaning and to make a familiar text both understandable and new. I like sermons where you can feel poetry coming through in the way Jim Wayne Miller writes about political identity in his poem "The Country of Conscience," dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz: One history keeps pushing up through the otherlike the grain in wood through paint.1 Parishioners can sense it when poetry is in the grain of a sermon. They may not be able to explain why, but there is a difference. Miller was a scholar, poet, teacher, fiction writer and tireless advocate for the work of Appalachian writers. He also taught and translated German. His observations were both international and keenly regional. In "The Country of Conscience," Miller comes back, again and again, to those living dual lives, "there...

Disciplining the Vernacular: Fair Use, YouTube, and Remixer Agency

Disciplining the Vernacular: Fair Use, YouTube, and Remixer Agency

The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype by Marcy J. Dinius (review)

Reviewed by: The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype by Marcy J. Dinius Anne Verplanck (bio) Keywords Photography, History of photography, Daguerreotype, Print culture The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype. By Marcy J. Dinius. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 320, 44 illustrations. Cloth, $49.95.) This volume offers insightful analysis of the written explication of photographic images, specifically daguerreotypes, during and after their introduction in the United States in 1839. Marcy Dinius examines newspaper accounts, periodicals, and novels, arguing that these media influenced how Americans viewed photographic images. Centrally, she looks at how writers used daguerreotypy to shape readers' ideas about politics and race. Looking at familiar texts (Uncle Tom's Cabin, Melville's Pierre), she provides unusually close, contextualized readings of the deployment of daguerreotypes in written works. She makes a compelling argument that writers "Americanized" these images, and used daguerreotypes to "advance a national self-image based on principles of progress, industry, and democracy" (4). The first chapter of Dinius's narrative incorporates the vast literature on photographic history. She focuses on the fact that Americans first learned of the introduction of the daguerreotype in France through newspapers, then explicates the continued significance of written [End Page 602] descriptions of the medium. Although she departs from traditional histories of photography, she fully engages that material. The supporting information about early photographic practices and the field's historiography are so thorough that one can almost read the first chapter's footnotes as an independent essay.1 Unfortunately, the book's publication schedule appears to have prevented Dinius from utilizing Steven Pinson's Speculating Daguerre, a text that amplifies previous scholars' understanding of the timing of the invention and dissemination of photographic practices in France.2 Dinius's first case study provides fresh insights into the meanings and uses of daguerreotypy in the House of Seven Gables. She interweaves her interpretation of Holgraves's biography with that of Gabriel Harrison, a fairly obscure daguerreotypist. The romantic nature of both Hawthorne's and Harrison's work is seen as a foil for scientific and mechanical objectivity during the period. Hawthorne's use of the daguerreotype of the deceased Judge Pyncheon is profitably juxtaposed with the allegorical images that Harrison produced, such as Infant Boy Bearing the Cross. The skillful interpretation of both forms, a hallmark of each chapter, augments our understanding of the ways in which cultural products informed social and political issues. The art versus photography debate began as soon as photographic images were introduced. Herman Melville's Pierre and, particularly, Pierre's refusal to be daguerreotyped, leads the third chapter's discussions of the mechanical versus artistic perceptions of daguerreotypes. Dinius analyzes Melville's use of Pierre to address how artistic standards were applied to photographic images. She then discusses the highly artistic daguerreotypes by Southworth & Hawes of Boston. These often full plate (six-and-a-half by eight-and-a-half inches) daguerreotypes contrast markedly in terms of size, cost, appearance, and audience with more typical ones (a sixth-plate daguerreotype is two-and-three quarters by three-and-a-quarter inches). Dinius notes that Southworth & Hawes encouraged sitters' agency in shaping their images by urging people to [End Page 603] practice facial expressions in a mirror before coming to the studio. The synthesis of Melville's work and the writing and daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes is thorough and convincing, yet one wishes that periodicals such as Humphrey's Journal and the Daguerreian Journal had been brought to bear on the subject. Dinius's interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the first of three chapters that address race and politics in America. The author discusses Stowe's use of daguerreotypy to make fictional characters, particularly Tom, more real. He is represented by a daguerreotype—a familiar, middle-class, white portrayal—rather than the runaway ads that influenced so many people's pictorial perceptions of enslaved people. The life, daguerreotypes, and writings of Augustus Washington, the Hartford-area African American daguerreotypist who promoted emigration to (and lived in) Liberia, are the focus of the fifth chapter. Dinius...

On Hearing (Rather Than Reading) Intertextual Echoes: Christology and Monotheistic Scriptures in an Oral Context

While recent studies of the New Testament have found the methods of intertextuality and orality studies to be fruitful approaches, there has been insufficient interplay between the two. This article explores the capacity of hearers of texts to pick up on echoes of familiar texts, stories, and songs. Using as an example Paul's interpretation of Scripture in connection with the topics of monotheism and Christology, the article suggests that, in the absence of explicit and emphatic statements of the difference or distinctiveness of his views, Paul's allusions to key monotheistic texts would have been understood to indicate Paul's agreement with the axiom of Jewish monotheism, the Shema.

Already on the Shelf

This essay explores what it might mean to read children’s literature in elementary school classrooms through a queer lens. The authors argue that because queer theory has a history as a literary theory that destabilizes normative associations among gender, sexuality, bodies, and desire, it provides a set of analytical tools classroom communities can draw on to create alternative readings of a wide range of familiar texts. Such readings of books already on the shelves of elementary school libraries and classrooms can highlight experiences and subjectivities of nonnormative sexualities and gender identities in the hopes of making classrooms more inclusive. Specifically, we argue that four high-quality, award-winning children’s books already included in many schools and classrooms—Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, Woodson’s (2001) The Other Side, DiCamillo’s (2003) Tale of Despereaux, and Patterson’s (1977) Bridge to Terabithia—can be fruitful sites for opening up these more inclusive readings and conversations. The article offers possible queer readings of these texts as well as suggestions for how to encourage elementary-aged students to think about both books and the socially constructed norms of real life through a queered lens. By first queering on-the-shelf texts and then asking students to think about how that queering connects to larger social issues, elementary classrooms can become places where strict identity categories—categories that can marginalize queer students and families—are made visible, are questioned, are stretched, and can even fall apart.

Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period

AbstractThe increased visibility of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries has led scholars in various disciplines from sociology to economics to discuss its impact, scope, and history. Literary criticism is no exception. This essay focuses on Victorian studies, in which the effort to historicize globalization has produced new readings of familiar texts. Recently, scholars of Victorian literature have been unearthing unlikely circuits of cross‐cultural interaction, tracing cosmopolitan sentiment, and shedding light on the ideology of the capitalist world system. This essay explores how formal analysis sheds light on the history of globalization.

Anne Frank Abroad: The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature

28 World Literature Today essay K nown to the English-speaking world by its translation, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s diary marks what many regard as the seminal example of testimonial literature. Today, the international fame of the diary is well known; the number of its translations now reaches over sixty. Taking a long journey from its original Dutch, translations of the Diary reach globally into languages such as Farsi, Sinhalese, and Esperanto. Yet little has been documented about its afterlife in these numerous non-European languages. Despite the Diary’s wide circulation, most examinations only focus on the text’s proliferation throughout Europe and North America. Here, I would like to trace the Diary’s circulation outside the West, examining the text’s influence in places like North Korea, Cambodia, Bosnia, Palestine, and Algeria. Looking at the ways a familiar text is interpreted in less-familiar settings not only tells us about the transnational circulation of atrocity testimonies but also tells us something about the way world literature works. Anne Frank Abroad The Emergence of World Atrocity Literature Katherine Wilson “If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made of herself since.” – Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer photo : anne frank fonds basel / anne frank house / getty images may–june 2013 • 29 When we examine the Diary’s foreign translations , we might be surprised to discover unexpected and, at times, disconcerting interpretations of the Diary emerging from areas such as North Korea, Palestine, and Cambodia. The “Anne Frank Translation Project” in Cambodia, for example, has proven to be an important teaching tool used to combat the widespread public belief that mass atrocity is unique to Cambodia. “Genocide did not only happen in Cambodia,” cites the Diary’s Khmer translator, Sayana Ser, in an interview for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s podcast, Voices on Antisemitism. Ser’s mission is to offer Cambodians a way to make sense of the Khmer Rouge genocide within the broader framework of the world history of atrocity: “I think if [Cambodians ] know that genocide has happened in other places, they would not feel like they are the only ones that suffered.” So far, so good—right? You might be more scandalized to learn how the Diary is officially used in North Korea. In 2004 a Dutch film crew gained rare access to cover the Diary’s adoption as a required text in all secondary schools in the nation. They revealed firsthand that the Diary was being used as an allegory to paint then-President George W. Bush as Hitler and the North Koreans as the Jews. As one North Korean student explained in an interview, “According to our respected leader, Kim Jong Il, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the great classics of the world. That is why we read the diary—out of great respect for our leader.” When questioned about what they had learned from reading the Diary, one student stated, “That warmonger Bush is just as bad as Hitler. Because of him we will always live in fear of war.” Another student declared, “For world peace, America will have to be destroyed. Only then will Anne’s dream of peace come true.” The negotiation between the host culture and source culture of a work is complicated— much can arguably be lost in translation. In What Is World Literature?, David Damrosch sees this as a natural attribute of world literature: “The receiving culture can use the foreign material in all sorts of ways: as a positive model for the future development of its own tradition; as a negative case of a primitive, or decadent, strand that must be avoided or rooted out at home; or, more neutrally, as an image of radical otherness against which the home tradition can more clearly be defined.” Damrosch concludes that world literature is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about the work’s source culture.” We may believe that the Diary’s circulation will advance an accurate education about the Holocaust—a value held by...

Why the Rabbis of the Yerushalmi Called R. Judah Nesiah “a Great Man”

We can demonstrate the accomplishments and status of Judah Nesiah’s predecessors using texts that show these earlier Patriarchs exercising their powers, often apparently for the first time, and we can use specific evidence in later sources of the accomplishments and status of his successors. But Judah Nesiah’s powers, accomplishments and status must either be deduced from what we know about his successors or teased out of sources close to his time, in part by new readings of familiar texts. On these bases we find that he presented himself to both the Roman government and the Jews as the leader of the empire’s Jews; that he instituted or solidified several practices that his successors built on, such as raising funds and beginning to supervise Jewish institutions; and that he attempted even more by working to establish a relationship with the imperial government, including with the emperor himself, and unsuccessfully trying to obtain imperial recognition for the Jewish law judgments of Jewish courts.

Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic TextsLevinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts. Edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pp. x+374.

<i>Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson</i>, Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts<i>Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts</i>. Edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Pp. x+374.

Review: The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan by Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind with John Vinci and Ward Miller

Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind with John Vinci and Ward Miller. The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan . Chicago: Richard Nickel Committee, 2010, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 461 pp., 51 color and 758 b/w illus. $95, ISBN 9780966027327 In its depth and breadth of research, elegance and range of images, and quality and size of production, this book may be without precedent in historical studies of American architecture. Its creation involved extraordinary, ongoing collaboration among architects, historians, preservationists, photographers, curators, librarians, foundations, book designers, printers, and other contributors over nearly sixty years since the project’s inception. It has been so long in development that its creation bridges the prevailing midcentury consensus that Sullivan was a forerunner of the modern movement, and the renewed interest of the later twentieth century in his work’s ornamental richness, a view that coincided with the postmodern architectural movement of the 1980s. This book’s store of information will assist with ongoing efforts to preserve and restore Adler and Sullivan’s extant buildings, and it will help to clarify the original architectural context of ornamental fragments from their works that are today housed in various public and private collections. Apart from its rich documentation of Adler and Sullivan’s architecture, this volume’s images highlight how different photographers have presented the work of the architects, as the field of architectural photography evolved in the last century. The book is organized into two complementary sections. The first includes six essays by John Vinci that chronicle the development of Adler and Sullivan’s work together until their partnership ended in 1895, and their subsequent individual careers until Adler’s death in 1900 and Sullivan’s in 1924. These essays are illustrated by black-and-white photographs and some drawings integrated with the text. But each essay is also followed by a series of mostly black-and-white and some color plates that are largely but not exclusively the photographs of Richard Nickel, who began to document Adler and Sullivan’s architecture in 1952 as a student of Aaron Siskind, in a course on architectural photography at the Institute …

Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (review)

Reviewed by: Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices Deirdre Baker (bio) Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin, editors. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Ashgate. 2009. x, 244. US $114.95 This collection of essays is the outcome of ‘Education and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ a conference held at Cambridge University in 2005. As the editors state, this was an opportunity for ‘scholars from such diverse disciplines as the history of education, religion, science and childhood, of literary and book history, biography, material culture and of feminist and gender studies to exchange ideas on the history of education and to integrate their work.’ The resulting articles offer a subtle, illuminating adjustment to many previous default approaches to the history of education. They do this partly through the close reading and integration of previously unexamined eighteenth-century manuscript and print sources and partly through approaching familiar texts, such as John Locke’s and Hannah More’s writings on educational theory, in new ways. Generally, as the editors argue, we see ‘the ideas, practices and institutions involved in the teaching and learning of various groups of the young and ignorant in nation and empire come into view as far more complex than merely as one facet of the wars of ideas between major ideological opponents.’ Sophia Woodley explores how the political, religious, and ideological aspects of the debate between private and public education played out, practically, in what amounted to progressive pedagogical experiments in what we would now term ‘homeschooling.’ In this context, she argues, girls’ homeschooling was more academic and rigorous than current histories of education would have it. Anne Stott points out Locke’s influence on Hannah More’s ideas of pedagogy, arguing that in encompassing both sexes and all social classes, More’s program was not ‘oppressive, [End Page 742] antifeminist, and backward-looking,’ as it is often depicted to be, but rather open, experimental, and liberal-minded. Similarly, using Mary Bosanquet’s manuscript autobiography and other sources, Mary Clare Martin shows that Wesleyan Methodist girls’ schools were both more progressive and more child-centred than most received opinion avers. Carol Percy shows that the social class, virtue, linguistic facility, and industry associated with learning grammar allowed women teachers of grammar professional authority and, refreshingly, sometimes resulted in girls and boys competing academically on equal footing. Family conversation as a mode of teaching comes under scrutiny by Michèle Cohen: she uses women’s letters and diaries, prescriptive texts for female education, instructional dialogues, and novels to show that ‘familiar conversation’ was intellectually substantial and far-reaching, anticipating and inculcating a high degree of knowledge and acuity. Turning to boys’ education, Jennifer Mori examines evidence for how young men were educated in cosmopolitan sociability through a ‘Grand Tour,’ and Maurice Whitehead argues for the advanced science education offered in the English Jesuit schools abroad – and also for the resilience with which English Jesuit schools flourished despite repeated waves of anti-Catholic legislation. Deirdre Raftery points out the ‘mind-colonizing’ anti-Catholic, anti-Irish approach the English took to educating the Irish poor in using works by English, Protestant upper/middle-class writers as texts for monoglot Irish children. The popularity of classroom aids in the form of Rudiment boxes, pictures, and other printed materials used in the education of the English poor are the subject of Jill Shefrin’s article on the Darton family of booksellers. Finally, M.O. Grenby, with a delicate, buoyant touch, argues that through an imaginative bringing together of all possible sources, prescriptive, fictional, and pictorial – educational treatises, conduct books, novels, children’s books, pictures, inscriptions, and juvenile marginalia (among other things) – we may be able to go beyond prescriptive sources and glimpse how children’s books were actually used. In toto, this volume is refreshing and inventive, successful in engaging previous scholarship and, especially, in throwing light into hitherto shrouded and disregarded corners of educational theory, practice, and children’s experience. Deirdre Baker Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer (review)

Reviewed by: Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer Robert Scherr (bio) Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer, by Jeremy Schonfield. Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Jeremy Schonfield undertakes this study of Birkhot Ha-shaḥar and P’sukei D’zimra with a fundamental assumption: just as all sacred text is a matter of inquiry and curiosity, rather than simple acceptance, so we should encounter the familiar texts of the siddur as investigation and engagement. He writes, “Liturgy is more than a purely linguistic gesture or ‘speech-act,’ partly because it relies on physical props and performance in real time for its effectiveness” (p. 48). While worship is performative, it is also inwardly a challenging multivocal expression of poetic-liturgical narrative. Schonfield has undertaken an investigation of scriptural and rabbinic contexts for prayer texts, as well as the meaning of objects—tallit and t’fillin— to frame the opening words of daily prayer. Appreciating and engaging the background and context of the liturgy, both text and subtext, is part of the worship experience itself. Rather than presenting a p’shat reading of the liturgical texts, Schonfield presents pathways of curiosity and historical/poetical exegesis, as well as multilayered readings—which can raise the reader’s thoughtfulness and delight in the traditional texts of our siddur. Schonfield’s discussion of the siddur is a close reading of a small part of the daily liturgy. He devotes over three hundred pages to Birkhot Ha-shaḥar and P’sukei D’zimra. The author creates a particular sense of structure of each prayer, and each group of prayers. Traditional davening, then, is a matter of assembling distinctive threads into the whole cloth of the experience. He draws articulately on biblical, talmudic, and midrashic literature, as well as the recognizable commentaries of Rashi, Maimonides, and Karo. He engages the reader in thinking about the meaning of particular texts in the flow of moving from one prayer to the next. Throughout the work, this reader felt the lively imagination of one who is an engaging teacher, as well as a sincere believer. Of the very opening of the daily prayers, Schonfield observes, “. . . there is no resounding introductory proclamation such as might be expected of the beginning of a new day, and its absence [End Page 110] suggests that the moment of waking is not a point of departure for the speaker [davener] at all, but part of a continuum in which communication with God has never ceased” (p. 68). It is in these opening moments of the day that the davener renews the relationship with God that was abandoned during sleep. Of this intimate moment, Schonfield suggests that the words modeh ani can be read as “I thank God,” as if God may, or may not, grant us the kindness of returning our soul this morning. Or modeh ani can be read as “I acknowledge that God [restores my soul as an act expressing God’s beneficence for humankind].” Schonfield reads these personal prayers with communal meaning, as the departure and return of one’s soul suggests also the theme of exile and return for the Jewish people. Schonfield cites the scriptural language from Daniel and Lamentations to establish a state of mind for this prayer acknowledging one’s nighttime survival. He intriguingly suggests that this prayer upon awakening can be understood as a type of mourning the exile from the Divine, which we experience during sleep, and then ends when the soul is reunited with God upon our awakening—even as our ancestors lived in a world bereft of Jerusalem, praying for a messianic time of lasting salvation (p. 76). Various chapters bear titles that express his search for meaning in the ironic (or rather, the oxymoronic): “The Darkness of Waking” on the opening words of prayer; “The Bonds of Freedom” on the texts for wearing tallit and t’fillin; “The Silence of Language” as prayer moves from personal gestures, such as waking and dressing, to prayers recited in the synagogue. He interprets donning tallit and t’fillin as an act re-clothing oneself, as one has been re-souled upon waking. As one prays, one is transformed into a cultural entity, manipulating...

Investigating the Effect of Farsi Font Type and Font Size on the Speed of Text Reading by Gaidence School Students

This thesis intends to study the effect of size (12, 14, 16) and type (Nastaligh and Tahrir) of Persian font) on the speed of text reading. The population of this project is a number of 30 boys and girls (11-13 years old)،of Isfahan gaidance school Students who are randomly chosed from the students who have the same level of physical (with no visual and lingual defects…) and intelectual and personal (not being shy, fearful…) competence and also have the same average of 16-19. The instruments used in this study are 6 passages made in different fonts and reading comprehension tests were the other instruments in this project. After that texts were given to the students and they had 120 seconds for reading each of them. Eventually the number of read words by each student in each test were enumerated and registered. The achieved scores were entered into Spss software and after measuring the averages, using the statistical analysis paired t-test, they were compared with each other in order to be specified wether the achieved differences relating averages were meaningful or not. The speed of text reading in 12 Tahrir font and familiar texts and normal letter space were faster than Nastaligh font and had the fastest rate. In all tests, the amount of error in Nastaligh was higher than Tahrir. The overall result of the project was representative of the fact that the rate of morpheme recognition and the speed of text reading with Tahrir font and size 12 and the normal letter space cause the most speed and the lowest error.

Why the Rabbis of the Yerushalmi Called R. Judah Nesiah “a Great Man”

We can demonstrate the accomplishments and status of Judah Nesiah’s predecessors using texts that show these earlier Patriarchs exercising their powers, often apparently for the first time, and we can use specific evidence in later sources of the accomplishments and status of his successors. But Judah Nesiah’s powers, accomplishments and status must either be deduced from what we know about his successors or teased out of sources close to his time, in part by new readings of familiar texts. On these bases we find that he presented himself to both the Roman government and the Jews as the leader of the empire’s Jews; that he instituted or solidified several practices that his successors built on, such as raising funds and beginning to supervise Jewish institutions; and that he attempted even more by working to establish a relationship with the imperial government, including with the emperor himself, and unsuccessfully trying to obtain imperial recognition for the Jewish law judgments of Jewish courts.

Ancient Time - (F.M.) Dunn Present Shock in Late Fifth-century Greece. Pp. xii + 239. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Cased, US$75. ISBN: 978-0-472-11616-4.

TH E CLA SSI CA L REV IEW in particular on two works inspired by The Lysistrata Project: Marina Kotzamani’s project (2004), in which she invited Arab writers to outline how they would stage the play in their countries; and Salam El-Nisaa (A Peace of Women), an adaptation of Lysistrata by the Egyptian playwright and fi lm director Lenin El-Ramly (2004). This analysis is very well articulated and supported by appropriate bibliographic references. S.’s ‘new version’ concludes the book. It is a readable version, full of contem- porary witty remarks, adapted for the modern stage and, as said above, suitable for being performed and updated into a contemporary farce anywhere, thanks to the useful suggestions given in the footnotes. Despite a few shortcomings, above all in terms of updated bibliographic refer- ences pertaining to the question of Aristophanes’ seriousness, overall this is a book conveniently accessible for all kinds of reader, from generalists to specialists. University of Idaho ROSANNA LAURIOLA lauriola@uidaho.edu ANCIENT TIME D U N N (F.M.) Present Shock in Late Fifth-century Greece. Pp. xii + 239 . Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press , 2007 . Cased, US$75. ISBN: 978-0-472-11616-4. doi:10.1017/S0009840X1100285X D.’s compelling book offers much more than its title implies. Like Toffl er’s Future Shock, written in 1970 to describe the effect of the future crowding in on the present, D.’s work argues that in late fi fth century Athens a major shift occurred in the way that time was experienced and conceptualised. In this period, driven in part by the political and military events of 413, 411 and 403, but also by questions arising in philosophy, literature and medical texts, Athenians began to evaluate their lives not as they previously had in terms of the authority of the past, but rather through the immediacy of the present. D. argues that changes in late fi fth century Athens were ‘in their own way … just as rapid and potentially cataclysmic’ as the events of the late 1960s that inspired Toffl er’s work, leading to what he will call ‘present shock’ (p. 2). Yet although I agree with D. about the magnitude and speed of these changes and their disorien- tating effect (p. 2), the word ‘shock’ does not sum up the real tenor of this book; rather it is the qualities of indeterminacy, uncertainty and even sensitivity in the face of a rapidly-changing present that best evoke what D. describes and analyses here. A second important aspect and great strength of this book is its discussion of ancient time in general. The fi rst two chapters offer an excellent, detailed resource for the complex ways in which the Greeks of this period calculated and theorised time, encompassing a number of different subjects, from the mechanics of the water clock to the sophist’s analysis of kairos. This sets the stage for the following three chapters (and epilogue), where D. offers readings of a variety of texts, with an emphasis on the role of the present in Euripides, Thucydides and the Hippocratic author of Ancient Medicine. The result is an invigorating and rewarding book that makes us re-evaluate familiar texts and familiar moments in Athenian history through a rich conceptual framework. The Classical Review vol. 62 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2012; all rights reserved

Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915

‘Masculinity’, Joseph A. Kestner writes in his study of British adventure fiction, ‘describes the codes of male behaviour in culture that construct male subjectivity’ (p. 27). The social, historical and cultural forces that produce and problematize these constructions throughout the nineteenth century have received a substantial reassessment in Gwen Hyman's compelling analysis of the role of food, drink and drugs in structuring notions of gentlemanliness. Questions of class, social control and a developing commodity culture are central to a detailed and nuanced exploration of the politics of consumption that offers valuable new insights for scholars of nineteenth-century material culture and the medical humanities as well as for those working in literary studies. Hyman's monograph is something of a critical feast: fresh, sophisticated and entertaining. Kestner's offering by contrast is sadly unadventurous: a diligent but uninspiring overview of the ‘crucial importance of adventure literature in imprinting codes of masculinity’ (p. 1) that misses the opportunity to re-invigorate this well-established theme with a new theoretical lens or with overdue scrutiny of some less familiar texts.

Celestina (review)

Reviewed by: Celestina Joseph T. Snow Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. Translated and with an Afterword by Peter Bush. Introduction by Juan Goytisolo. Sawtry, Cambs., UK: Dedalus, 2009. 219 pp. ISBN: 978-1-903517-67-3 Many of the English translations of Celestina have long been out of print and only available through such outlets as eBay. Mack Singleton, J. M. Cohen, Phyllis Hartnoll, and Wallace Woolsey are translators whose versions of the Tragicomedia are all gathering dust on shelves. Still in print, however, are James Mabbe’s 1631 version and the L. B. Simpson translation of the Comedia (often reprinted); they are, so far as I know, the only available Celestina translations in English, the former in older English and much retouched from the original, the latter offering only the earliest version of the complete classic. For obvious reasons a new English translation is indeed welcome, and Peter Bush is a professional translator of works from modern Catalan (Quim Monzó) and Spanish (Valle-Inclán and Juan Goytisolo), as well as a former professor of literary translation (University of Middlesex and the University of East Anglia). I have a lot of admiration and approving comments about his efforts to bring Celestina to a twentieth-first-century audience. However, I think it appropriate in a scholarly journal to alert the reader to some few surprises in store. The introduction is not by Bush but by Juan Goytisolo (9–17), whose stand on the converso roots of the Celestina enterprise has been repeatedly made and will be familiar. Bush limits himself to a very brief afterword (217–19), but adopts the converso position of Goytisolo. The reader is confronted with a familiar text whose preliminary materials (here all transplanted outside the structure of the original textual placement, i.e., following Pleberio’s lament), [End Page 323] and whose twenty-one acts have been transposed into chapters (the word is employed first by Goytisolo, 9). The arguments to the acts have been silenced, as have all titles and subtitles and the general argument to the entire work; this may be a good decision as it allows a first-time reader not to anticipate events (I almost said “actions”). And last, but certainly not least, is the final nail in the dramatic coffin of Celestina: the invention of a narrator. The opening lines of the opening chapter (here the word is not used, but Goytisolo has implanted it, and it is employed in Bush’s afterword again) strike a telling effect that pervades the rest of the text: Calisto ran into the garden in pursuit of his falcon, saw Melibea and immediately felt love stirring. “Melibea, I look at you and see why God is Great”. The asides are handled much in the same way, with an authorial voice supplied. Here is Sempronio in the second scene: “‘I was half right. He is mad and a heretic into the bargain,’ mumbled Sempronio” (22). Here is another aside a few pages later: “‘What claptrap will my besotted master come out with now?’ Sempronio gnashed under his breath” (26). On display here are a few examples I can give of the “modern” language used in the Bush translation: colloquial phrases like “into the bargain” abound, and lexical items such as “claptrap” are loose but effective. Bush explains some of his philosophy of this translation in the afterword: Subsequently, Spanish academics have continued with this format [setting it out as a play to be staged] and have tended to bury the work under a mass of erudite footnotes mainly tracing sources and have failed to grasp its literary originality. . . . [I]n this translation, I have given a format that responds to the design of Rojas’s dialogue and set the work out as a narrative dialogue in chapters to be read, followed by accompanying poems and prose statements. (218–19, emphasis added). And this he has done in spades, with a flair not so much for literal translations but, rather, for an equivalent text transposed to modern and colloquial English. That said, I would like to interpose here a few passages from the Bush translation and the equivalent passages in Mack H. Singleton’s version, since they...

The Functions Of Cultural Schemata In The Chinese Reading Comprehension And Reading Time Of College Students In Taiwan

The study examined the effects of cultural familiarity with a text on Chinese students’ reading comprehension performance and reading time. In the first phase of the study, participants were required to read a culturally familiar text, write down the time they spent reading the passage, and immediately complete a cloze test without referring back to the culturally-embedded text. In the second phase, they went through the same procedure for a culturally unfamiliar text. Upon completion of the reading tasks, a topic familiarity questionnaire was distributed to them to complete in order to screen out those who were culturally familiar with both reading texts. A survey about their attitudes toward the role that background knowledge played in their reading process was administered to them following the topic familiarity questionnaire. The results showed that the students’ reading comprehension performance and reading time were both significantly affected by their familiarity with the target culture. They spent less time on and comprehended better the culturally-embedded text they were familiar with. Analysis of the survey also substantiated the claim that they relied on the facilitative role of background knowledge in reading so as to read in a faster and more efficient way. The findings suggest that a reader’s cultural schemata impacts memory, reading comprehension, interpretation and reading time. Pedagogical implications of the study and suggestions for future research are also discussed in the article.

To Hell and Back: Excessive Drug Use, Addiction, and the Process of Recovery in Mainstream Rock Autobiographies

Rock autobiographies have become increasingly popular since the 1990s. This article analyzes 31 mainstream rock autobiographies describing a wide variety of legal and illegal substances used and reckless behavior. Narrative analysis shows that books concentrate on recovering from addiction. The majority of writers have participated in some kind of treatment. Rock autobiographies use therapeutic vocabulary and borrow discursive elements from culturally familiar Alcoholics Anonymous texts recounting recovery stories. The analysis shows that drugs and alcohol are not associated with rebellion and authenticity as they once were in rock music. Surviving addiction has become a key theme of rock culture.