Famous Scene Research Articles

Un episodio pittorico del XIV secolo in Sardegna: l’incontro dei tre vivi e dei tre morti nei dipinti della chiesa di Nostra Signora de Sos Regnos Altos a Bosa

Church of Nostra Signora de Sos Regnos Altos in Bosa is one of the few Sardinian examples of a Palatine Chapel within a citadel, situated in the complex of the castle Serravale on the northwest coast of the island. The importance of this monument is determined primarily by painting cycle of the church interior, which stretches to the north, south and entrance wall. Since these paintings are unique in the island’s art corpus, the researchers sought to identify their patrons and masters, the main models and the iconographic and stylistic references. R. Sfogliano dates the cycle to 15th century, F. Bologna and P. Leone De Castris connect it to the work of Maestro di Offida, R. Serra and R. Coroneo propose the second half of the 14th century, with a range of different influences while A. Caleca assumes that a painter, active in Bosa, could have brought the Pisan and Sienese influence in the first year of 14th century. The monograph of the frescoes in Bosa by F. Poly, published in 1999, brings a historical frame and analysis of the frescoes proposing the dating and a reference framework which is still considered relevant. The most famous scene of the cycle is, no doubt, Encounter of the three living and the three dead. The presence of this theme seems closely connected with the guiding principle of the fresco decoration: memento of inevitable death united with call for reflection on the vanity of earthly existence. Painting cycle in Bosa represents different degrees of complexity. Lack of documents and accurate information lead to hypotheses such are claims by F. Poly, who has recognized in it the cycle hand of a Tuscan painter as well as a comissioner, Arbore Giovanni, brother of the future ruler of the Kingdom of Arborea, Mariano IV, resident of Seravalle castle between 1338 and 1345. However, the value of frescoes in the church of Nostra Signora de Sos Regnos Altos, which are the key part for the reconstruction of historical and artistic mosaic of Sardinia in the 14th century, is indisputable.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist NovelArt of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+252.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist NovelArt of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Ruth Bernard Yeazell . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xx+252.

The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

The neurogenetics of remembering emotions past

Even if you have not waded through all seven volumes of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1), you are probably familiar with its most famous scene where the narrator bites into a little cake called a madeleine, dipped in tea, and experiences a wash of vivid emotional memories. This literary moment has captured popular imagination (madeleines are now sold by Starbucks) because it so effectively captures the powerful and involuntary nature of emotional memory. Indeed, Proust's novels developed a distinction between voluntary and involuntary memories: The former involve more of our own efforts, but it is the latter, often characterized by emotions, that form the narrative of our life stories. Regarding his own flood of emotional memories Proust asked, “Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?” Almost a century later, memory researchers are asking similar questions about what happens during an emotional event and its later retrieval. What leads us to recall such an event with effortless vividness long afterward? Further, why are some of us more likely to remember emotional memories with Proustian vividness than others or more likely to relive traumatic events? Echoing Proust's thesis that one's emotional memories are closer to the heart than to the mind, a study in this issue of PNAS by Rasch et al. (2) suggests that individual differences in the ADRA2B gene that codes the α2B adrenoreceptor, which plays an important role in vasoconstriction and blood pressure regulation, is also related to brain activation patterns underlying heightened emotional recall.

Is Your Shower Like the Shower in the Bates Motel

Ever since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, showers have seemed potentially lethal. Janet Leigh, who played the victim in the famous murder scene at the

The death of Hector: pity in Homer, empathy in medical education

Empathy is thought a desirable quality in doctors as a key component of communication skills and professionalism. It is therefore thought desirable to teach it to medical students. Yet empathy...

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Were Walking on the Way: El Caballero Andante and the Book of Radiance ( Sefer HaZohar )

That Miguel de Cervantes was quite likely a converso and that his masterpiece Don Quixot e explores quintessential converso concerns is now widely accepted. This article extends the converso hypothesis through an examination of literary and phenomenological similarities between Don Quixote and the kabbalistic classic, the Zohar . Rather than claim direct historical influence, I offer an analysis of some shared themes, motifs, and literary strategies. In particular, I highlight the centrality of the journey motif and the high degree of self-reflexivity and self-consciousness which lie at the heart of both the Zohar and Don Quixote . I conclude with an admittedly more speculative reading of the famous scene from the Cave of Montesinos, which I suggest may well be a quixotic parody of mystical experience. The Zohar deserves a place in the literary prehistory of Don Quixote , and aspects of both works are clarified and enhanced when viewed against one another.

I Introduction: Surveying the Scene

What is landscape? Was there a concept of landscape in ancient Rome? Analysing the cityscape is now an established trend in the study of Rome and, since the 1990s, scholarship has explored the idea that thinking about the topography of the city of Rome encourages a more wide-ranging exploration of what being Roman was all about. Taking a broader approach, this Survey tackles the semiotics of a set of described, depicted, and three-dimensional landscapes where the emphasis is on a collaboration between nature and humankind. The timeframe is the late Roman Republic and early Principate, an era of change and reconstitution, when defining what being Roman meant was high on many agendas. This is also an era that offers the best possible scope for exploring a fascinating and diverse range of emblematic natural and manmade environments, taking in some of the most famous (but also some more unexpected) scenes in Roman literature, art, and architecture, closing with Hadrian's out-of-town landscaped villa near Tibur.

“The Index Nothing Affirmeth”: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce’s “The Sisters”

“The Index Nothing Affirmeth”: The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce’s “The Sisters” Murray McArthur (bio) My purpose in this essay is to consider certain aspects of the way James Joyce discovers and deploys the central semiotic resource of literary language, indexicality, to stage in “The Sisters” the–to adapt a Hollywoodism to Giambattista Vico’s writing—precorso of his literary mandate.1 “The Sisters,” of course, was Joyce’s first publication, published under the name Stephen Daedalus in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904 and much revised by Joyce in the summer of 1906 to be the first of the then fourteen-part story cycle of Dubliners. These revisions involved primarily the addition of multiple micro-indices that shaped “The Sisters” as the macro-index or riddle that stands as first text or opening frame of the Joycean canon. The history and particular textuality of “The Sisters” have always given it pride of place in the inauguration of Joyce’s literary mandate, a primacy asserted by Fritz Senn, Thomas Staley, and many others in the rich and complex critical reception of this story.2 I am using mandate in the general sense of Slavoj Žižek’s well-known adaptation of Jacques Lacan’s fourth order of “symptom as sinthome [as] a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment: it is a signifier as a bearer of jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense.”3 Specifically, I am interested in that “certain signifying formation” as it manifests itself in the disposition of the index in Joyce’s opening frame. To focus on this disposition, I want to examine closely three scenes: the first from Stephen Hero that represents directly the “certain signifying formation” of the artistic mandate and the second and third from “The Sisters.” In these scenes, the “signifying formation” disposes itself in a triune or trinitarian structure of the sign that C. S. Peirce, an American forty years older than Joyce and completely unknown to him, was defining, in his major contribution to semiotics, as the index.4 The index, as Peirce so strikingly describes it in the passage cited below, is itself the sign type that compels attention. In 1903 and 1904, Peirce was beginning the last great revision of and addition to his triadic classification of the sign, starting with his [End Page 245] Lowell Institute Lectures in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1903.5 Peirce divided semiosis or sign-making and sign-interpreting into a firstness or icon or resemblance, a secondness or index or indication, and a thirdness or symbol or arbitrariness: A regular progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol. The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. . . . [T]he index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection. . . . The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist. (2:299) In short, the iconic sign resembles its object; the indexical points to its object; the symbolic arbitrarily signifies its object by convention. The three sign types characterize all complex sign systems; but they assume especially significant patterns in artistic texts like Joyce’s, which have a high degree of semiotic or sign-making and sign-interpreting self-reference. For example, in the famous scene near the end of the “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy imagines making a complex visual and verbal text of his wife: He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off...

M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung , and: M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Kommentar (review)

Reviewed by: M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung, and: M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Kommentar Martin T. Dinter and David Sider, Professor Claudia Wick . M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 201. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004. Pp. xiv, 155. €82.00. ISBN 978-3-598-77813-1. Claudia Wick . M. Annaeus Lucanus: Bellum Civile, Liber IX. Kommentar. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 202. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004. Pp. 448. €96.00. ISBN 978-3-598-77814-8. The ninth book of Lucan's epic on the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey contains many of the epic's most famous scenes: Pompey's "apotheosis," Cato's march through the Libyan desert featuring the Medusa excursus and the infamous snake catalogue, and finally, Caesar's visit to the ruins of Troy. Since up to now only partial commentaries on book 9 have appeared, Wick's detailed study forms a welcome addition to Lucan scholarship. Besides offering Latin text, German translation, and about forty pages of introduction focusing on the main scene's sources, structure, function, coherence, and personae, for the foreign reader the value of the first volume lies in particular in some fifty pages of immensely detailed indices. A rich index locorum, a select index verborum, and a full subject index provide excellent research tools. In addition, Wick's commentary not only provides a wealth of parallels from Lucan's literary predecessors, it also cites many of his successors, epic and otherwise, thus assembling valuable material on Lucan's Nachleben. Rich in bibliography and learning, Wick's commentary remains conservative both in its approach and interpretation, eschewing postmodern metaliterary scholarly voices. Its main strength lies in the author's experience as researcher for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, which is manifested in the commentary's focus on lexicography and semantics. Since Lucan's syntax often stretches Latin to its breaking point—the word at war, so to speak—Wick illuminates it with countless enriching discussions of vocabulary and grammar. Lucan's motto could be pinned down as plus quam (BC 1.1), and an obvious desire to outdo his literary fathers permeates the Bellum Civile. Likewise, Wick's commentary suffers from avalanches of material and detail that threaten to bury even the most avid reader with more than what can be reasonably digested. Moreover, Wick's discussions are steeped in Realia—not a bad thing, and much is relevant and interesting—but to what purpose does she treat us to a wealth of herpetological detail when discussing the snake catalogue? When reading such an obviously fictitious battle of soldiers and über-snakes, I for my part am content with being pointed to literary models. Similarly, many of us may have never wondered what kind of apple-farming viper was chatting up Eve in the Garden of Eden. Wick, however, advocates the benefits of drawing parallels with zoology, resulting in an at times idiosyncratic treatment of this passage. Exemplary brief introductions precede the line-by-line discussion of each subsection of book 9. These provide valuable background information and often also address questions of structure and wider design. Wick has to be congratulated for producing such a thorough and rich commentary with such [End Page 253] high standards. Her love for her subject shines through every page and equals her love of detail. In the future, Wick's opus will surely become a point of reference for any serious Lucan scholar. Martin T. Dinter King's College London David Sider, Professor Department of Classics, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Room 503, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: david.sider@nyu.edu. Copyright © 2008 Classical Association of the Atlantic States

Francis, Thou Art Translated: Shakespeare as Inspiration for Scenic Principle in Tomás Bretón and Ricardo de la Vega's Zarzuela La verbena de la paloma (1894)

This article argues that Ricardo de la Vega, the librettist of Tomás Bretón's celebrated zarzuela La verbena de la paloma, modelled the famous Nocturno scene on Shakespeare's comic episode with Francis the drawer in 1 Henry IV, II.iv. La verbena has been praised for its urban realism, and the Nocturno, which depends on a minimum of action, takes this kind of realism to extreme lengths. Yet for all the scene's impression of being drawn from life, it derives from Ricardo de la Vega's highly perceptive reading and creative imitation of Shakespeare.

Spectacle/gender/history: the case of Gone with the Wind

The essay asserts that, since pioneering work in the 1970s and 80s (in Screen in particular), the study of classical Hollywood cinema has failed adequately to acknowledge and understand the role of spectacle therein. This essay outlines theoretical but, even more, practical understandings of particular kinds of spectacle; they are susceptible to the practice of close analysis. Seeking to discuss spectacle in precise terms and in particular contexts, I define two kinds of spectacle associated with the historical film: ‘the decor of history’ and ‘the spectacular vista’. The example of Gone with the Wind illustrates the interrelationship between these two kinds of spectacle and their associations with particular ideas of femininity and masculinity. This gendering of spectacle is related to ‘the historical gaze’, a performative gesture that exemplifies the wider rhetoric of historical films, in their seeking to address the historical knowledge of the film spectator and to uphold a vision of history as being driven by powerful men, aware of their own destiny. Over the course of the three famous hilltop scenes in Gone with the Wind, one can plot Scarlett O'Hara's increased access to this kind of foresight and fortitude coded as ‘masculine’. This character arc can also be traced through Scarlett's shifting place within the film's use of spectacle: she begins the film wholly preoccupied with the domestic world of lavish parties and beautiful gowns; however, after her encounter with cataclysmic history visualized as a vast, terrible spectacle (the fall of Atlanta), Scarlett assumes the role occupied by her broken and emasculated father.

Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China. Beth E. Notar

Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China, by Beth E. Notar. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. xiv + 193 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). For the first time, serious social researchers of non-Western societies are beginning to turn their attention to tourism, a topic previously considered too frivolous and left to management schools. No fewer than four social science conferences in 2006 dealt with tourism in Asia, and the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth is devoting its 2007 annual meeting to Thinking through Tourism. After a hiatus of nearly ten years following Tim Oakes's pioneering Tourism and Modernity in China, a series of doctoral theses on China and tourism is also emerging. Beth Notar' s Displacing Desire is the first of these to be published as a book. It uses the touristic transformations of DaIi in Yunnan (which began, like many others, as a foreign backpackers' joint, before becoming a scenic spot for domestic tourism) to shed light on China's cultural transformation. What differentiates this book is that Notar is interested in the dynamics shaping tourism, as much as in tourism's impact on local society. She begins with foreign backpackers (transnationals), who appeared in DaIi in the 1980s, and focuses on the contradiction between their pursuit of the and their desire for the familiar (banana pancakes, for example), a desire prompting the development of Foreigner Street, replete with bars and cafes. The proprietors of these establishments were concerned that their city was becoming like any other place on the backpacker circuit, that it would be overrun and ruined by foreign tourists (pp. 21, 44)-this, of course, is the familiar fear of losing the authentic also pervading the discourse of their clients, the backpackers. Homogenization took a different route, however. In 1999, taking its lead from the national government, the city decided to develop domestic tourism. This led to a spatial transformation corresponding to the Chinese ideal of a scenic spot (Jingdian): the removal of unseemly houses, the construction of new buildings in a style corresponding to tbe ethnic of the place (Bai in the case of DaIi), and the creation of tourist festivals and performances (including an order that all tourism-related personnel must wear dress). Backpackers fled in search of the authentic; those in the foreigner followed them to greener pastures. In came domestic tourists, resulting in further business and employment opportunities for locals, who now themselves could become tourists: even for a couple of retired schoolteachers, a trip to Thailand is becoming affordable. The local government's promotion of two theming projects-based on a classic 1959 film and a 1963 Hong Kong martial arts novel set in Dali-to attract domestic and overseas Chinese tourists resulted in the construction of simulacra, including a temple, a palace, a resort island and two theme parks, and entirely reshaped a tourist itinerary previously defined by backpackers. Five Golden Flowers, a popular film about a Bai love affair, serves as the basis for tours and folk songs performed by local singers, and after a tree featured in a famous scene dried up it was reconstructed from fiberglass. The fictional locations in Heavenly Dragons, Jin Yong's novel set in the 11th-century Nanzhao Kingdom, are the source of a theme park, a newly opened cave, a newly constructed temple, a palace and an island. Notar argues that Five Golden Flowers, and the screen tourism it inspires, is popular because it resonates with nostalgia for the supposedly pure and communitarian days of early Maoism, which in turn is used to critique the materialistic present. …

Hector et les principaux personnages féminins de l'Iliade

Hector and the main feminine characters in the Iliad : Study of the scholia In the Iliad, the song VI presents a very touching and famous scene, the last interview between Hector and his wife Andromaque, who shows to him their baby Astyanax (v. 344-500). The only Trojan women are mentioned by the poet, and specially when they speak to Hector ( VI 251-285, Hecube and Helene, who have an ambiguous status, XXII 19-91, Hecube). These scenes have a literary and also sociological interest. Therefore it is worth studying how the scholiasts have analysed these passages. In fact, the scholiasts have made remarks about the phonetics, the morphology, syntax and lexicology : the scholiasts, who are sometimes anonyms and of undetermined date, prove that the homeric poetry was began partly difficult to understand. If s true for grammatical reasons, the homeric language showing many artificial forms, and also because the social structures had evolved (if s necessary to explain the signification of the homeric edna). In spite of the real interest of their works, written in a heavy style, the modern reader is surprised by the narrow side with which the scholiasts study the Homeric poetry : the scholiasts don 't know the tragic scenes, don't speak of the emotional and pathetic passages (when they study them, if s always quickly). They fail to appreciate the beauty of the homeric text.

The Real Filth in American Psycho

The Real Filth in American Psycho

Remote Memory in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The present study aims at characterizing remote memory in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE); it also considers the impact of its most important variables (lateralization of the lesion, duration of epilepsy, age at onset, and seizure frequency) on remote memory. We examined the performance of 38 patients with unilateral TLE (19 right TLE and 19 left TLE) and 35 healthy subjects on six remote memory tasks. Memory for personal events was assessed by using the Autobiographical Memory Interview and the Modified Crovitz Test. Memory for public events was evaluated by means of photographs of famous faces and famous scenes, questions about famous events, and the Dead/Alive Test. Both right-TLE and left-TLE groups had impaired memory for autobiographic episodes and public events relative to normal subjects. In contrast, personal semantic memory was preserved. In addition, an effect of laterality was recorded, with right-TLE patients obtaining significantly better scores than left-TLE patients on every test. Duration of epilepsy, age at onset, and seizure frequency did not influence performance on remote memory measures. The comprehensive neuropsychological study of 38 TLE patients showed that this neurologic condition affects remote memory systems differently. We discuss the different factors that could account for this pattern of performance on the bases of both functional brain organization and memory theories.

The Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver: Satire, Secrecy, and Swift

The Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver:Satire, Secrecy, and Swift Melinda Rabb [W]hoever has . . . desire of some knowledge of Secrets of State, must compare what he hears from severall great men, or from one great man at severall Times, which is equally different. —Jonathan Swift, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift I. What is the relationship between satire, secrecy, and secret history? Jonathan Swift suggests a partial answer to this question in one of the most famous scenes in Gulliver's Travels, although its similarity to seductions in secret histories has not been sufficiently noted.1 Readers of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood will recognize the amatory conventions: the weather is excessively hot; a young woman goes to a river bank or garden and removes her clothes, unaware of the gaze of a desiring male who, inflamed by desire, catches her in a surprised embrace from which she struggles to escape. In Manley's Secret Memoirs . . . From the New Atalantis, [t]he beautiful Diana . . . passed her down into the gardens. She had nothing on but a petticoat. . . . It was the evening of an excessive hot day. . . . A canal run by which made that retreat delightful. . . . [T]he dazzling lustre of her bosom stood revealed, her polished limbs all careless and extended. . . . Rodriguez . . . stole close to the unthinking fair . . . throwing himself at his length beside her. . . . Her surprise caused her to shriek aloud."2 Gulliver, in a reverse of gender roles, reports his near-rape by a "libidinous and mischievous" would-be lover: [T]he Weather exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in the River . . . I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the Stream; It happened that a young Female Yahoo . . . saw [End Page 325] the whole Proceeding; and inflamed by Desire . . . embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could . . . whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and . . . stood gazing.3 Manley had set a precedent for reversing gender roles for the purpose of satire in the seduction scene between the Duchess (Lady Castelmaine) and Germanicus (Henry Jermyn) in The New Atalantis. Should we make something or nothing of this coincidence? Satire has been affiliated with the founding of the public sphere; participation in political debates and in other critiques of power would seem to place satiric discourse in the open. However, secrecy plays an equally crucial role in satiric theory and practice.4 What is a satirist if not a purveyor of confounding hidden truths, a restless malcontent who rakes the filth from dark corners, removes the ink from blotted lines, uncovers the "Secrets of the Hoary deep" in order to flash them before the reader's eyes or to whisper them in the reader's ear?5 From the Book of Revelation to Fahrenheit 9/11, the satiric impulse is to focus on the very things many would wish most to conceal. Secret history raises another set of contradictions. It has been affiliated with the rise of the private pleasures of domestic fiction, as well as with the public ramifications of early modern liberalism. Erica Harth, Ros Ballaster, Annabel Patterson, and Robert Mayer are among those who have begun to explore these different tendencies; various approaches and conclusions suggest the critical possibilities of this relatively neglected minor genre.6 The historical overlap between the production of great eighteenth-century satire in English and the production of myriad secret histories, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, is no mere coincidence. This essay will define the relationship between the two modes of representation generally and will argue for the specific importance of this relationship in the work of the period's exemplary satirist, Swift. Satire and secret history, I will show, share a tendency to destabilize meaning by activating contending versions of truth through such means as irony and alternative narratives of the same events. Despite evidence that increasing access to information led to the rise of democratic institutions at the end of the eighteenth century, further evidence supports the thesis that the brokering of political, social, and religious power required a clandestine "other." A treaty might be signed in one room...

Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott's Postcolonial Shakespeare

A great deal has been written already on the topic of Shakespeare and the postcolonial. A number of postcolonial writers and theorists have marked out positions vis-a-vis Shakespeare, and one can make two broad generalizations concerning this body of material. First, postcolonial theory has largely presented the postcolonial as in opposition to the classic. Salman Rushdie, in a famous phrase, referred to how the “Empire writes back,” and this implies a position of antagonism or contestation, of a critical stance toward the European/colonial past, including the literary past. 1 A major theme of postcolonial literature has indeed been to “write back” against the European descriptions of the postcolonial world, whether that be Achebe’s and other African writers’ critique of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Coetzee’s and other writers engagement with Daniel Defoe, especially Robinson Crusoe, or a variety of Indian reactions against Kipling and Forster. For writers in English, it is perhaps not too much to say that the figure of the literary past is Shakespeare, so a general stance of contestation vis-a-vis the literary past should lead directly to a stance of contestation toward him. Yet it is perhaps worth noting that the purest example of writing back against Shakespeare is not found in Anglophone literature, but rather in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which is a chilling retelling of Othello written in Arabic and set in contemporary England and the Sudan. The other key site of such a critical engagement with Shakespeare can be found in the involvement of many Caribbean writers with the themes of The Tempest, again an involvement which expresses itself in the work of Aime Cesaire and Roberto Fernandez Retamar as well as Anglophone writers such as George Lamming. 2 Nonetheless, the stress on contestation, on writing back, found in postcolonial theory does not do full justice to postcolonial literature. I would like to suggest that postcolonial theory has been far more committed to the notion of antagonism between the postcolonial and the European literary tradition than the writers have themselves. To rewrite a text means necessarily to have a complex set of attitudes toward the model one is rewriting; contestation alone in my view does not ever fully explain the traffic between the original and the rewrite. The way many postcolonial writers take off from classic texts, rewriting them with a complex mixture of motives and emotions, is in crucial respects a continuation of the heritage of modernism. 3 Joyce is a particularly useful reference point here: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus is committed to an aesthetic of ‘writing back,’ as is expressed in the famous scene with the Dean of Studies where they discuss the word tundish. As Stephen subsequently reflects when thinking about the scene later:

Should HR play home or away?

PurposeReviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.Design/methodology/approachScans the top 400 management publications in the world to identify the most topical issues and latest concepts. These are presented in an easy‐to‐digest briefing of no more than 1,500 words.FindingsBack in the early 1600s, dramatist William Shakespeare coined the immortal phrase “to be or not to be” during a famous scene in which his character, Hamlet, was contemplating taking his own life. Many of today's business leaders perhaps imagine that they often feel some empathy with Shakespeare's troubled prince. Fortunately for them, however, it is not normally suicide under consideration but issues such as whether or not to outsource some of their human resource (HR) functions.Practical implicationsProvides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.Originality/valueThe briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

British and Scottish Models for the American Genre Paintings of John Lewis Krimmel

German immigrant painter John Lewis Krimmel, America's first genre artist, was influenced, at least initially, by English artists such as William Hogarth and Scottish painters such as David Wilkie. Krimmel is documented to have painted a picture titled The Village Politicians, but in order to determine whether an unsigned canvas depicting Wilkie's Village Politicians, which was found in the New Orleans area in 2001, is Krimmel's slightly Americanized version of the famous Scottish scene, Krimmel scholar Dr. Anneliese Harding traces the Philadelphia‐based painter's development and finds direct influences of Wilkie and other British and Scottish painters' work on Krimmel's original designs.