Final Gesture Research Articles

Пушка, пистолет и кинжалы в драме А. Н. Островского «Бесприданница»

The complex of “weapon” motives in the Ostrovsky drama “The Dowerless Bride” is considered. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of works that reveal the semantics of these elements of the playwright's artistic world. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that the weapon motives in the play “The Dowerless Bride” are analyzed systematically, taking into account their functioning in other texts of Ostrovsky. Particular attention is paid to the episodes of the play, in which the weapons motives are presented most concentrated and directly included in the development of the main plot - unhappy love and the death of the main character. In the course of the study, it was found that most of the motives considered in the drama have a unique semantics and are not found in other works of Ostrovsky. As the analysis of the drama “The Dowerless Bride” showed, the key characters in the play, guilty of the death of Larissa Ogudalova, are simultaneously conjoined with several weapon motives: Paratov - gun and pistol, Karandyshev - ax, pistol, dagger, and the final gesture of the heroine who picked up the pistol thrown by her killer, - a sign of her involvement in her own death, an indication of her willingness to share responsibility. The authors come to the conclusion that the interpretation of weapon motives makes it possible to significantly expand the existing understanding of the poetics and characterology of one of Ostrovsky's most famous plays.

A silhouette of utopia: English School and constructivist conceptions of a world society

This article makes a comparative assessment of English School and constructivist world society conceptions. It argues neither provides a clear conception, only its theoretical relief in the analytical abstract. The argument contains five points. First, the English School often refers to the political world beyond the society of states as a world society without sufficient conceptual reasoning or evidence to justify the usage. Second, both literatures betray a limited grasp of the profundity of social transformations a world society entails. Third, this suggests the evidence of a world society is a novel cosmopolitan culture. Fourth, idealism in these literatures is undercut by identifying conflict and instability as a contributing cause of a world society’s potential emergence. Fifth, the contemporary emergence of a world society via human rights is found to be unconvincing. A final gesture of a possible ‘overlapping consensus’ on human rights is made towards a future world society.

Still Here, Writing, Trying to Be a Part of the Conversation

Feeling the pervasive power of Neoliberalism with each sentence, I trace its damage to our political landscape, to our university environment, and to my sense of personal worth. The essay, cast in the negative, offers hope with its final gesture toward the dialogic.

Effects of auditory, haptic and visual feedback on performing gestures by gaze or by hand

ABSTRACTModern interaction techniques like non-intrusive gestures provide means for interacting with distant displays and smart objects without touching them. We were interested in the effects of feedback modality (auditory, haptic or visual) and its combined effect with input modality on user performance and experience in such interactions. Therefore, we conducted two exploratory experiments where numbers were entered, either by gaze or hand, using gestures composed of four stroke elements (up, down, left and right). In Experiment 1, a simple feedback was given on each stroke during the motor action of gesturing: an audible click, a haptic tap or a visual flash. In Experiment 2, a semantic feedback was given on the final gesture: the executed number was spoken, coded by haptic taps or shown as text. With simultaneous simple feedback in Experiment 1, performance with hand input was slower but more accurate than with gaze input. With semantic feedback in Experiment 2, however, hand input was only slower. Effects of feedback modality were of minor importance; nevertheless, semantic haptic feedback in Experiment 2 showed to be useless at least without extensive training. Error patterns differed between both input modes, but again not dependent on feedback modality. Taken together, the results show that in designing gestural systems, choosing a feedback modality can be given a low priority; it can be chosen according to the task, context and user preferences.

John Stape (1948–2016)

John Stape (1948–2016) Andrew Busza I shall begin with a sad cliché. In the normal course of things, John should be giving this eulogy for me, since it is more common for the teacher to predecease his student. John was anything but ordinary or commonplace. With ironhard independence and resolve, he often went against the grain. He appears to have identified his goals relatively early and pursued them with extraordinary diligence and increasing single-mindedness. Born in Ohio, he obtained a BA Honors in English under the tutelage of Bruce Harkness, Conrad scholar and Dean of Arts. He came to the University of British Columbia with a graduate scholarship to work on his MA, also in English literature. I met John when he enrolled in my first graduate seminar on "Conrad, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky" in the fall of 1971. It soon became evident that he was one of the most promising students of an unusually gifted group, several of whom went on to pursue academic careers. Since John had already started on the Conrad trajectory, he proceeded to write under my supervision a first-class Master's thesis on Conrad. He then took what may have seemed at the time a tangential move. He went to the University of Toronto to write a PhD dissertation under Professor S.P. Rosenbaum on E.M. Forster's fascinating novel Howard's End. Significantly, John's study involved biographical, critical, and textual analysis, and from then on, these three approaches would dominate his work on Conrad. John's publications are very numerous and listing them all would fill several pages of this journal. John taught, lectured, and gave papers in North America, Europe, and the Far East. He organized various scholarly events, in particular, the extremely successful Vancouver Conrad Conference in August 2002. He was co-general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, consulting editor of The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad, and general editor of Joseph Conrad in Penguin's Classics. Dozens of his articles appeared in The Conradian and at least half a dozen in Conradiana. One could go on and on. In 2007, he published a biography of Conrad titled The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, which was subsequently translated into four languages. Given the extraordinary prolificness of his scholarly production, one is tempted to suspect that John, too, [End Page v] must have had several lives, especially as he found time to cultivate his love of music (opera in particular), literature, and other arts. Moreover, he always found time for friends. Were I to highlight one quality of John the man as opposed to John the scholar, it would be his capacity and talent for friendship. He knew how to make friends and how to retain them. His friendships were as varied as his personality. In friendship, John was generous and undemanding. He was a wonderful companion. His conversation was witty, full of humor, as well as of delightful acerbic irony. He always had something interesting or entertaining to say. Visiting him in the cancer clinic while he was receiving chemotherapy treatment was paradoxically an enjoyable occasion. We talked about current affairs, discussed and argued about Conradian issues, reminisced, and laughed a lot. The other lethargic and sullen patients must have thought that we were a pair of lunatics. Needless to say, John confronted approaching death with incredible courage and stoicism like one of Conrad's heroes—say, Jim, who walks with measured steps towards old Doramin, clutching at the flintlock pistols on his knees. As the end approached, with the meticulousness with which he edited Conrad's texts, John prepared everything. He organized his legacy, choosing younger successors to continue the Cambridge Edition project. He even selected the speakers and the music to be played at his memorial. For several years I was, in some measure, his mentor and teacher, but as time went by I came to learn more and more from John, and in the end he also taught me how to die. His final gesture was to raise his right hand as if in triumph. However, I shall give the last words to Conrad, to whose writing John dedicated...

A Gesture Recognition Algorithm Using Hausdorff-Like Distance Template Matching Based on the Main Direction of Gesture

Hand gesture of rotation, scaling and translation is the key problem of gesture recognition. This paper proposes a gesture recognition algorithm based on Hausdorff-like distance template matching of gesture main direction. Firstly, we segment hand gesture from video stream. Secondly, we calculate the main direction of gesture in the image, and build a 2D rectangular coordinate system. Then, we clockwise divide the gesture into eight sub-image area along the main direction of gesture and calculate the coordinates of target pixel points in each sub-image area in the 2D rectangular coordinate system. Finally, the algorithm of Hausdorff-like distance template matching is used to recognize the final gesture. Experimental results show that this algorithm can achieve real-time correct recognition of gestures in relatively stable light conditions. The overall recognition rate can reach 95%.

Reading the Interregnum: Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People

Reading the Interregnum:Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People Nasser Mufti (bio) There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 18. Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People famously ends with Maureen Smales running towards a helicopter whose contents may carry her “saviours or murderers” (158). The novel is set in the midst of a civil war between the apartheid government and black revolutionaries, and Maureen’s flight could signal equally the perseverance of the old regime or the arrival of South Africa’s postcolonial future. Either way, her final gesture promises a termination to what Gordimer described as an “interregnum,” a transitory stage between the two regimes. However, because of the ending’s deliberate and famous ambiguity, the text withholds the conclusion to this historical interstice. The question that the ending poses to the reader—indeed one that has troubled the novel’s critics since its publication—is how to read such an ending. The difficulty of reading in the interregnum is something that Maureen herself struggles with over the course of the novel. In an early chapter, she cannot finish reading a translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi because “the transport of the novel, a false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for [End Page 64] her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness” (29, emphasis original). Michael Neill has helpfully called this the Smales’s “temporal dislocation,” which refers to the disjuncture between epistemological and interpretive registers, where, for example, Maureen’s capacities for reading fall short because she is “in another time, place, consciousness” (73). This is not the fault of Manzoni’s novel but a symptom of the interregnum, for the narrator explains Maureen’s quandary as follows: “if [Maureen] did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here [in the interregnum] when it was finished” (28). Reading carries with it the danger that the interregnum will remain in transit and inconclusive by the time that she finishes the book. In other words, something about the interminability of the interregnum—its refusal to come to an end—calls for a way of reading that can endure how the historical interstice outlives the act of reading. Maureen’s anxiety about reading is itself dramatized for readers in the ending of July’s People, who like her must suspend the desire for resolution and endure what J. Hillis Miller has described as the “disquieting power” of “unreadability” (Reading Narrative 98). Gordimer borrows the concept of the interregnum from Antonio Gramsci—whose remarks on the term she uses for the epigraph of July’s People: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms” (276).1 The fact that the old “is dying” signals that its death is in the process, while the fact that “the new” cannot be born signals that its birth is deferred. A terminal past and embryonic future cohabit the interregnum, which suggests an impasse rather than a transition from one regime to another—much like what Walter Benjamin meant by a “present which is not a transition” (262). Gramsci’s formulation of the interregnum resists beginnings and endings, as it represents a state of paralyzed transit involving a simultaneous departure and arrival of two distinct eras. This notion is radically different than, for example, the iustituim that Giorgio Agamben discusses, which is “not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (48). In Gramsci’s interregnum, law is not at a “standstill,” but is precisely what is contested—will it apply to the old or new regime? Similarly, one can distinguish the interregnum from the openness that Slavoj Žižek sees in the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. He describes “rebels waving [End Page 65] the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing...

Bad subjects: language and interpellation in the Irish post-colony

This article explores the possibilities and limitations for a linguistic praxis in the post-colony. By deploying indigenous speech acts in strictly Anglophone contexts – i.e. by answering the British troops in Irish (Gaelic) when interpellated in English – republican/dissidents have constructed a multi-faceted resistance technique. What is or is not useful in this strategy, and what does its Althusserian architecture say about the connections between language, power, and the subject in post-colonial Ireland? Each of the three scenes analysed here (a poem and two film clips) features this technique, but only the final scene gestures towards a counter-interpellation of radical proportions, calling into question the very edifice of colonial-capitalism and enacting a means for its demise.

SVM을 이용한 동적 동작인식: 체감형 동화에 적용

본 연구에서는 다차원의 데이터 인식에 유리한 SVM을 이용한 동적 동작인식 알고리즘을 제안한다. 우선, Kinect 비디오 프레임에서 동작의 시작과 끝을 찾아 의미있는 동작 프레임을 분할하고, 프레임 수를 동일하게 정규화시킨다. 정규화된 프레임에서 인체 모델에 기반한 인체 부위의 위치와 부위 사이의 관계를 이용한 동작 특징을 추출하여 동작인식을 수행한다. 동작인식기인 C-SVM는 각 동작에 대해 positive 데이터와 negative 데이터로 구성된 학습 데이터로 학습된다. 최종 동작 선정은 각 C-SVM의 결과값 중 가장 큰 값을 갖는 동작으로 한다. 제안하는 동작인식 알고리즘은 플래시 구연동화에서 더 나아가 유아가 능동적으로 구연동화에 참여할 수 있도록 고안된 체감형 동화 콘텐츠에 동작 인터페이스로 적용되었다. This paper proposes a dynamic gesture recognition algorithm using SVM(Support Vector Machine) which is suitable for multi-dimension classification. First of all, the proposed algorithm locates the beginning and end of the gestures on the video frames at the Kinect camera, spots meaningful gesture frames, and normalizes the number of frames. Then, for gesture recognition, the algorithm extracts gesture features using body parts' positions and relations among the parts based on the human model from the normalized frames. C-SVM for each dynamic gesture is trained using training data which consists of positive data and negative data. The final gesture is chosen with the largest value of C-SVM values. The proposed gesture recognition algorithm can be applied to the interactive storybook as gesture interface.

Développement d’un système de navigation guidé par l’image, pour la chirurgie de l’épaule : chirurgie augmentée de l’épaule

This study concerns the general problem of the treatment of shoulder degenerative or traumatic lesions, based on total or partial joint replacement (shoulder arthroplasty). With baby boomers, increasingly complaining of shoulder pain, the number of shoulder arthroplasties increased by 15% each year. This surgical procedure is very difficult and limited to the expert centers. The two main challenges for this surgery are the minimal surgical incision and the limited access to the operated structures. Moreover, the success of such procedure is related to optimal prosthesis positioning. So far, the existing optimization and guiding systems are now very limited, which is no longer acceptable. Some mechanical systems may enhance the prosthetic components orientation but do not ensure an implant positioning taking into account the bone stock because it is not visible during the surgery. Only the preoperative evaluation on CT images could enhance the final gesture. To meet strong demand and meet the limitations of current solutions, we propose innovative approaches to build a navigation system easy to use and fully automatic for shoulder surgery.

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

Malamud's “Subject Matter”:

A swannish song?

The phrase 'swan song' refers to a belief dating from ancient Greece that the swan is completely silent during its lifetime until the moment just before death, when it sings one beautiful song. This incorrect belief has been frequently reiterated in poetry and art. 'Swan song' is generally used as a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, effort or performance given just before death or retirement. As my role in the SAMJ draws to a close, it seems appropriate to provide a 'swannish' song as it is possible that I and my editor colleague, Dan Ncayiyana, may in future still figure on these pages, though in much lesser roles. But firstly I (we) wish our successor, the new editor, all of the best for the future in this role!

Susan K Morrissey, Suicide and the body politic in imperial Russia, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 384, illus., £55.00, $99.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86545-6).

Susan K Morrissey, Suicide and the body politic in imperial Russia, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xv, 384, illus., £55.00, $99.00 (hardback 978-0-521-86545-6). - Volume 52 Issue 3

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (review)

3001CN0TES Spivak's planetarity, on the other hand, shares at least one salient quality with the Old Comparative Literature that she professes to reject: its centripetal and selfconscious sense of being a traditional force preserving borders—its own and its texts'—from the onslaught of globalization's coercive sameness. Comparative literature turns out to be not so easily cleaved from its nationalist origins. Thus does Spivak's "planetarity" deconstruct itself, for in order to preserve its own disciplinary borders from the apocalypse ofa globalized world literature in English, comparative literature finds itselfretreating into an argument for difference that willy-nilly preserves national identities in one form or another. Whither nationalism? Here it finds itselfreinscribed, albeit in a subtler, more "planetary" form, as Spivak circles the wagons against both English and the global. Despite Spivak's cogent and necessary arguments for comparative literature as a corrective supplement to "the apparitions ofCultural and Ethnic Studies" (70) and the facile generalizations ofmuch ofpostcolonial studies, it is perhaps unavoidable that her concluding attempt at an expansive gesture undermines itself. As Spivak stands in the place and name ofthe man who once called for comparative literature to act as "a preserver and creator ofthe highest values ofmankind" (Wellek 295), she can muster only a fuzzy, ambivalent move towards telepoiesis: In this era ofglobal capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right ofthe textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable . The "planet" is here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience ofthe impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction—the toughest task in the diaspora. (101-2) This final gesture ofSpivak's Wellek Lectures confirms one last time the recurring structure of comparative literature's brave, doomed stand against the apocalypse, which neverturns out to be quite final—yet anothermessage in a bottle, sent offto "a future reader" (93), to be read and reenacted, again and again. Alfred López77ie UniversityofMississippi BOOKNOTES KATE A. BALDWIN. Beyondthe ColorLine andtheIron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. xii + 346 pp. The period referred to in the second title ofKate Baldwin's significant and highly readable work is in and ofitselfindicative ofthe historical shifts in politics, race relations, and the place ofthe intelligentsia in Russia and the US during the first half ofthe twentieth century. For Russia, this period covers the very early days of an emerging Soviet Union through the beginnings ofthe Cold War and the controversial reforms ofNikita Khrushchev, while the US at that time moves from the era of the speakeasy to the Civil Rights Movement. In the interim both countries will Vole 28 (2004): 162 THE COMPAKATIST endure the Second World War and crises ofidentity for large portions ofthe population while minority (i.e., non-white) peoples struggle with social, political, and economic inequities imbedded in each respective country. Baldwin deftly weaves her argument and commentary around the lives and works offour brilliant AfricanAmericans who all crossed both the color line and the Iron Curtain to have an impact in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as in the US. Baldwin's choice ofClaude McKay, Längsten Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson allows her to comment simultaneously on the international import of race and society as well as to trace the Civil Rights history ofthe American Left and its place in the creation ofScviet propaganda at home and in the West. Her choice oftexts for these writers and thinkers is excellent—drawing from both High Culture and popular cultural artifacts—as she eschews the best known and most discussed works in favor oflesser known and more revealing treatises and essays published during and after the writers' visits abroad and to Russia. She does well to use the experience ofeach in another country to contextualize the writers' attitude toward race, politics, and society abroad. She does less well, however, in relating the same attitudinal mix to the US...

'The Wrong Side of the Tapestry': Hawthorne's English Travel Writing

ABSTRACT Hawthorne's period in England as American Consul at Liverpool brought him into contact with British and American eccentrics and enabled him to ramble the old towns and significant places he had known through reading, and the churchyards to which he seemed inexorably drawn. His views of the English and of English places were in some respects conventional but demonstrate his powerfully emblematic imagination and profound concern for mortality and an unease related to his feelings about sexuality, dirt, and foreignness which is seen not only in Our Old Home, but also in his English Notebooks and The Marble Faun. Some episodes are particularly disturbing: his expression of anti-Semitism (about the Lord Mayor's Dinner), and his encounters with poverty, in particular with a sickly and perhaps syphilitic child in an almshouse. ********** It was never intended to be looked at from any point of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home) The end of Our Old Home finds Hawthorne betrayed into making an address at the Lord Mayor's banquet, nervously determined he will 'save both countries, or perish in the attempt'. (1) As the book closes he remains, 'still erect in so heroic an attitude', the speech yet unmade (p. 354). This final ironic gesture, towards a tense silence, points to an issue other than the contemporary political 'chasm of discord between England and America' (p. 344) that confronted the then American Consul at Liverpool (Hawthorne served between 1853 and 1857) (2)--what is it that Hawthorne, as travel writer, really could say of his investigations into the 'Old Home' of England and Europe? That rhetorical silence reverberates in other ways too: an admission that his mind was 'absolutely empty of appropriate ideas' (p. 344), a premonition of his inability to turn the observations of his English notebooks into coherent fictions; (3) perhaps for us as later readers a precursor of his imminent death, and in any case a figure for the almost compulsive registration in his readings of England of death itself, the final 'old home'. For the role of lively cultural mediator, interpreting America to the English, and reporting back on their supposed ancestors to his readers across the Atlantic, Hawthorne was almost spectacularly unsuitable. Nor did he think himself much fitted for the role: his first published essay from these travels, 'Some of the Haunts of Burns', appeared in the Atlantic in October 1860 with the byline by 'A Tourist Without Imagination or Enthusiasm' (Our Old Home, p. xv). His observations produced more outrage than amusement when he described an English dowager promenading under full sail in Leamington, and his loyalty to the much despised ex-President Franklin Pierce almost sank the book on its publication. His cultural observations were surprisingly superficial, but his deeper insights and interests often seem more universal than local, as for example when he noted that a landscape seen from a railway must inevitably be seen amiss because 'it was never intended to be looked at from any point of view in that straight line; so that it is like looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry' (p. 140). But, again, the whole of Hawthorne's invocation of the 'Old Home', so mis-taken and conventional, and almost perversely under the spell of his own obsessive concerns, is like looking at the wrong side of a tapestry, which becomes an invitation to the pulling of a loose thread or two, to see what may be revealed. Hawthorne's position on transatlantic relations is based on the notion that England had determined American identity much as a parent shapes a child, and it is this thread that, with marked indifference to the many and various other paternities of the mid-century United States, he attempts to follow. 'After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities', he insists, 'we still have an unspeakable yearning towards England': When our forefathers left the old home, they pulled up many of their roots, but trailed along with them others, which were never snapt asunder by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been torn out of the original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles, nor severed by the edge of the sword. …

Imagine there's no woman: ethics and sublimation

Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including infamous proposition, the Woman does not exist, constituted a revision of his earlier work on the ethics of psychoanalysis. In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become key term in his ethics. To trace link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take negative proposition about woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about existence of universals, but as recognition of power of thought, which posits and gives birth to difference of objects from themselves. While relativist position currently dominant insists on difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within object I see. The popular position fuels disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention.In book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, silhouettes by young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in well-known melodrama. In second part, focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, film noir classic Laura, and Zapruder film of Kennedy assassination.

Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic

Thomas Jefferson's tombstone bears inscription he composed for it, identifying him as Author of Declaration of American Independence, of Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, & Father of University of Virginia. Of great man's many achievements and services to his country, he selected these three as ones by which I wish most to be remembered.1 Self-government, religious freedom, and public education were all fundamental to American republicanism as he defined it. Jefferson believed that disestablishment of religion, freeing mind from monkish ignorance and superstition, would firmly ground the blessings and security of self-government.2 But general history of American education between 1815 and 1848 did not confirm Jefferson's hopes; statesponsored secular education did not provide foundation for American republicanism. In principle, Enlightenment presupposed state responsibility for popular education.3 In American practice, state significantly defaulted on this obligation. On other hand, organized Christianity continued to play a much more active role in American life than Jefferson had expected. Often religious freedom turned out to -mean freedom for religion rather than freedom from religion. As a result, religious institutions sometimes proved more effective means for Americans to exercise their self-government than did political ones. THE STRANGE PASSIVITY OF THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT One of striking anomalies of American history is discrepancy between founders' grand plans for education and paucity of their actual accomplishments. This is nowhere more evident than in failure of project for founding a national university in District of Columbia. George Washington had conceived idea. As president, Washington proposed university to Congress in his first annual message, worked on various plans for its establishment, and was still commending it strongly in his famous Farewell Address-but all in vain. In a final gesture, Father of His Country willed a portion of his large estate to form a core endowment for a future national university. But Congress ignored his bequest, until in 1823 fund finally became worthless when company in whose shares it was invested went bankrupt.4 Opposition to a national university came partly from doubts about its constitutionality, partly from jealousy of existing colleges that feared being overshadowed, and partly from sheer parsimony. Washington evidently envisioned national university as a mixed public-private corporation analogous to Hamilton's national bank, so university inherited some of enemies of bank. Originally, Jefferson supported Washington's plans for a national university and had advised him to staff it with emigre professors from University of Geneva, Switzerland. As president, however, Jefferson came to conclusion that, although a national university would be welcome, a constitutional amendment would be required to authorize it.5 Given his belief that national bank had been unconstitutional, Jefferson thus protected himself against a charge of inconsistency. One portion only of Washington's plans for national higher education was fulfilled by Jefferson's administration: founding of United States Military Academy at West Point in 1802. The Naval Academy at Annapolis was not founded until 1845, by Secretary of Navy George Bancroft during Polk administration's build-up to war against Mexico.6 All of first six presidents supported a national university one way or another, but one who worked hardest for it was James Madison. Three times-in 1810, 1815, and 1816-Madison urged a national university in his annual message to Congress. The university formed a part of Madison's legislative program of Republican nationalism, along with internal improvements, a protective tariff, and a second national bank. …

Getting Out: Life Stories of Women Who Left Abusive Men

Introduction: Thinking Through the Heart Part I. The Privileged Are Not Exempt... Women from every social class are battered even those from moneyed, educated, and politically powerful families. 1. Jan: This descendant of pre-Depression Michigan farm real estate money with a doctorate herself, escaped an abusive marriage to a man ambitious beyond his intellect. 2. Netiva: This Israeli-born woman married a Jewish-American tourist and relocated to live with him in the United States. Her friendship network was critical to her escape from abuse. Part II... Nor Are Children Battering knows no age boundaries girls can fall prey to it. 3. Kimberly: This woman entered her first abusive relationship at age twelve and her abusive marriage during her senior year of high school. Her story links obesity to abuse. 4. Jessica: This is the story of a high school homecoming queen who was battered most of her high school career by the school star athlete. Part III. A Two-Timing Batterer Men batter the women in their lives differently. This section highlights that reality with the case of a man who concurrently battered his wife and his extramarital lover. 5. Rebecca: This Plains Indian woman was battered by her Euroamerican husband. With the divorce she lost custody of her children. 6. Emily: This story captures the essence of the Southern Belle mentality where gendered relationships are concerned. This woman endured premarital marital, and extramarital abuse. Part IV. Family and Friends to the Rescue Battered women can be liberated by family and friends who support and do not blame them. 7. Lee: The wisdom and patience of this woman's parents freed her from her abusive outlaw militia husband. 8. Annette: This young Hispanic woman escaped her abuser with the help of her foster family. Part V. Faces of Shelter Life Women's shelters are structured and work in different ways to assist escape. 9. Sharon: This is the story of a woman who decidedly broke the traditional edict of silence that shackles abused Black women. Her shelter experience is typical. 10. Gretchen: An underground shelter system protects this lesbian woman and her four children who remain on the run from state to state from their abuser. Part VI. When the System Works Sociopolitical structures other than shelters informal as well as formal, can help battered women leave. 11. Raquelle: This is the tale of a Mormon woman abused by a professional athlete. The case and its jury trial drew national media attention. Colorado's mandatory reporting and arrest laws helped liberate her from abuse. 12. Lucretia: This woman's life demonstrates the intersection of class race, homosexuality, and abuse. A shelter, in conjunction with food stamps, welfare, and transitional housing programs, allower her and her children to escape. 13. Colette: This woman's story includes devastating loss: a mother's suicide and a young daughter's death by accident. Her tiny community mobilized an informal network of donated services to help her leave her abuser. Part VII. Legacies of Loss and Death These are stories of women who escaped battering but at significant personal expense or with great loss. 14. Blanca: This Puerto Rican-American woman relinquished custody of her child in order to escape her Vietnam veteran husband. 15. Judy: As a final gesture of control the husband of this preacher's kid hanged himself where she was certain to discover his remains. 16. Freda: This is the story of a homeless African-American mother of five who contracted HIV from her abuser. Afterword: A Message for Battered Women

"I, the seeress, was owned by the palace." The Dynamics of Feminine Collusion in Christa Wolf's Cassandra

Hailed as a symbol of resistance and heroine, and in other instances decried for her lack of power, Christa Wolf's Cassandra remains a controversial figure. In choosing death over other alternatives, her action at once haunts and troubles contemporary interpretation. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic account of ideal love and feminine complicity in domination, this article examines central conflicts determining Cassandra's final gesture by tracing the dynamics at work in her apparent inability to survive destruction. This reading seeks to facilitate a critical understanding of Cassandra's profound identification with paternal authority and repudiation of the (m)other, as part of her collusion with patriarchal structures of domination. (ELS)

Samaritan or Scrooge? The Contested Image of Thomas Guy in Eighteenth-Century England

Upon his death in 1724, the London bookseller Thomas Guy bequeathed an enormous sum of money to the hospital which bore his name. For some contemporaries this represented the crowning glory of the life of a virtuous Christian; for others, the final vicious gesture of a self-serving and hypocritical miser. Between the 1730s and the 1770s the running battle over Guy's reputation generated a significant constellation of sculptures, paintings, and prints—a field of conflicting representations that highlight some of the larger ideological dilemmas of an expanding commercial society.