Final Meaning Research Articles

The Dark Side of Photography: Techno-Aesthetics, Bodies, and the Residues of Coloniality in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

And perhaps it would have been better to say: a visual object that shows the loss, the destruction, the disappearance of objects or bodies. . . . That is to say, volumes endowed with emptinesses. To further specify this question: What, then, would be a that shows-in an almost Wittgensteinian sense of the term-the loss of a body? What is a conveyor volume, one that shows emptiness? How is an emptiness shown? And how does one make of this act a form-a form that gazes at us?-Georges Didi-HubermanWhat interests me about Casa negra (1904), a story by Puerto Rican writer Marta Aponte Alsina, is the moment when the Hartman family-recently arrived in San Juan shortly after the war of 1898-prepares for an excursion into the island's interior. Susan, one of the daughters, has a Kodak camera with which she plans to fill her album with photos of the landscapes and exotic inhabits of a region still unknown to its new colonists. One purpose of the trip is to pass through the town of Utuado, where a donation will be made to a school attended by white children and one of whose teachers-rather to the dismay of the tour group-is black. As a memoir of this event, Susan photographs the school's pupils and assistants together with the mayor and Governor Hunt, but the teacher is shown cloaked by a dark blanket. In the end, as the story's narrator observes, Susan's photos would constitute una sombra del verdadero suceso (a blurry shadow of the actual event).1 I would stress the double sense of Aponte Alsina's use of the word borrosa (blurry), which signifies both a distortive act of selection and an elimination, an erasure.The veiled form of the black teacher is a curious detail within a story plot that does not decide on its own final meaning. However, when read against the light and within a broader and more complex archive, this detail, this image, assumes a density that merits interrogation, precisely because it constitutes a volume that attests to what Georges Didi-Huberman would refer to as an emptying-out, a concave hollow, that gazes at us without face or eyes.2This contemporary story by Aponte Alsina serves to anchor the problematic that will occupy us in the following pages, particularly because whenever we explore ineffable and unclassifiable traces from the past we confront the theoretical question of phantasms as nonsubjects that in some way return, although to different scenarios.3 For the moment, let us examine three cartes de visite, or calling cards, dating from about the same period, between 1865 and 1870. Their images come from three very different archives: the first two are portraits of infants, Figure 1 from Venezuela and Figure 2 from England, the latter pertaining to a collection titled Hidden Mothers; Figure 3 is a portrait of a ganho slave woman4 from Brazil by the well-known photographer Jose Christiano Junior. We will focus primarily on the Venezuelan context in this essay, reserving for the end some brief comparative comments on the Brazilian and English archives.5In his article Foucault: Art of Seeing, John Rajchman summarizes Michel Foucault's basic hypothesis regarding the grammar of the gaze being permeated by a field of forces that naturalize the act of seeing. According to Michel Foucault, there is a kind of positive unconscious of vision that determines what can and what cannot be seen. Not all historical forms of visualization are possible at the same time, and we see much less than we suppose. It is probable that we liberate ourselves from certain ways of seeing in order not to become captivated by intolerable or unacceptable aspects of reality. For Foucault, Rajchman concludes, every historical formation makes visible what it obscures.6The entire question of the gaze, as the rise of material supports that become linked to seeing, must be considered historically: a particular episteme makes possible certain ways of seeing that are linked to specific social and discursive practices, thus constituting a kind of matrix that organizes specific types of relations between the observer and the observed, between the visible and the unrepresentable. …

Understanding Motherhood as Maturation: Maternity Scripts in Lois Lowry’s Son

When put together with the other parts of The Giver Quartet, Son (2012), Lowry’s recently published concluding book, emerges as an odd exception to the focus on young adult protagonists since it foregrounds the mother’s perspective and addresses the issue of motherhood. It presents the reader with at least three conceptual models of motherhood: mothers (1) as human egg incubators in the community; (2) as caring and nurturing; and (3) as abusive and neglectful. Unlike the latter familiar models, the first is intended to evoke in young readers the effect called cognitive dissonance (Festinger, A Theory of Dissonance, 1957). Employing a combination of approaches within a cognitive paradigm (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by, 1980; Schank, Explanation patterns: understanding mechanically and creatively, 1986; Zunshine, Why we read fiction: theory of mind and the novel, 2006; Gavins, Text world theory: an introduction, 2007), this essay in the first place seeks to demonstrate how Lowry creates her vision of maternity through cognitive scripting and how her young audience understands and makes sense of motherhood by resorting to the underlying conceptual metaphor motherhoodismaturation. Simultaneously, in line with the contention that people’s interpretations of phenomena are largely dependent on societal frames, we intend to confront Lowry’s models with some of the cultural scripts of motherhood that prevail in Western Europe. Finally, this essay aims at explaining how young readers potentially recuperate the final meaning of Son by tracking Claire’s and Gabe’s mental constructions and compressing them into a joint wish text-world.

Postponement and Prophecy: Northrop Frye and “The Great Code” of Yeats's “Byzantium”

The essay examines W.B. Yeats's “Byzantium” in light of Northrop Frye's ideas about the resonances of Biblical language, especially its typology and deferred revelation, in Western poetry. It argues that Yeats's effort to communicate the eternal within time by combining proclamation and enigma, revelation and ambiguity, bears deep similarities to the process of signalling and postponing revelation that drives Biblical language. By examining the role of postponed and unverifiable final meaning in “Byzantium” via Frye, the essay also points out important intimacies and differences between post-structural theories of semiotic contingency and formalist, anthropological ideas about the distinct nature of poetic, metaphorical language.

That Dawn to Be Alive

That Dawn to Be Alive Andrew Gibson, Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 326 pp, £70 hardcoverUnder long shadow of postmodernism, project of assigning any final meaning to history has come to be considered by many as naive, if not dangerous. A conception of human story which moves towards a future end point - a final totality associated with Hegel or Marx - is routinely dismissed by both critical theorists and empirical historians alike. Damning such theories at one moment, however, in next very same thinkers will replicate narratives of progress and development; statements aligned with a linear model if ever there were. Between such a linear model and pure relativity it falls to critical theory to provide some new alternatives. It is into this space that Andrew Gibson intrepidly goes with his work Intermittency.The new approach to historical reason that Gibson proposes is smuggled out of France in guise of a review of contemporary continental theorists. However, as Alain Badiou states in both a foreword and a dusk jacket quotation, it remains 'the most subtle and original study of a crucial orientation' to have been written: suggesting Gibsonian 'intermittency' may become a theory in its own right. Presented through work of five philosophers (Alain Badiou, Francoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Ranciere), 'intermittent' approach to history is to see it as a series of rupture points, crises, or Events, which shatter an otherwise concrete normality. Drawing on Jambet's conception of esoteric Islam, Gibson suggests these moments to be 'a juddering series of unpredictable and discrete singularities, the multiplied one, 1X1X1X1X1 ...' (p8). History is not linear, like a melody, it is not even staccato, as each of notes appears in middle of a profound silence, each representing a new beginning. Once new moment of history happens, one is then defined in terms of how one relates to new Event. Gibson fittingly presents each of his five readings as distinct responses to central insight of theory of intermittency.The general outline of theory will be familiar to readers of Badiou's two-part magnum opus Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds, and it is from this philosopher's works that central concept of intermittency is excavated within first chapter. Badiou 'rethinks world from ground up on basis of absolute philosophical privilege of contingency' (p24), reemerging into ethics, politics and truth through a commitment to Event. The 'exceptional value' springs from morass of 'unexceptional non-value' (p52) and it is on these rare occasions, occurring intermittently within history, that theory and practice unite in authentic response. Such a response is found in Francoise Proust's reading of Kant's 'exceptional value' of Sublime: 'Critique does not get its truth from history. The historical and critical events are rather two coincident presents' (p80). Kant enters modernity without an end in sight; his 'Enlightenment' is a process of becoming and, through Proust's encounter with Critiques, Gibson aligns it with project of historical intermittency. This early negotiation of Badiou and Proust's Kant erects banner under which Gibson will march for rest of book: History happens, get used to it.So how do we get used to it, or, in more academic terms, how is one to align one's subjectivity in response to Event? Through his readings of Jambet, Lardreau and Ranciere, Gibson suggests a number of possible responses, each of which reframes initial conception of Event in its elaboration. Christian Jambe t's study of Islamic gnosticism presents most insightful historical example of 'intermittency' in practice. In medieval Ismaili stronghold of Alamut, society lives in an 'imaginal world' ruled over by an absent God who is 'not of whole or One, but of lack'. …

Ideality, Divine Reality, and Realism

Ideality, Divine Reality, and Realism

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Full-fledged temporal processing: bridging the gap between deep linguistic processing and temporal extraction

The full-fledged processing of temporal information presents specific challenges. These difficulties largely stem from the fact that the temporal meaning conveyed by grammatical means interacts with many extra-linguistic factors (world knowledge, causality, calendar systems, reasoning). This article proposes a novel approach to this problem, based on a hybrid strategy that explores the complementarity of the symbolic and probabilistic methods. A specialized temporal extraction system is combined with a deep linguistic processing grammar. The temporal extraction system extracts eventualities, times and dates mentioned in text, and also temporal relations between them, in line with the tasks of the recent TempEval challenges; and uses machine learning techniques to draw from different sources of information (grammatical and extra-grammatical) even if it is not explicitly known how these combine to produce the final temporal meaning being expressed. In turn, the deep computational grammar delivers richer truth-conditional meaning representations of input sentences, which include a principled representation of temporal information, on which higher level tasks, including reasoning, can be based. These deep semantic representations are extended and improved according to the output of the aforementioned temporal extraction module. The prototype implemented shows performance results that increase the quality of the temporal meaning representations and are better than the performance of each of the two components in isolation.

From Living Experience to Poetic Word. Frames and Thresholds of Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i>

This article concentrates on the functional duplicity of incipits and explicits in the articulation of the planes of living experience, memory, cognition and word in the Divine Comedy . The analysis of beginnings and endings at different structural levels of the poem demonstrates that they work, on one side, as modelizing and universalising frames which delimits the diegetic space conferring a final and stable meaning to narrated events; and, on the other side, as singularizing thresholds which, letting trespass the narrating instance into the diegetic space and the diegetic experience into the narrating instance, problematizes both the separateness and the adequate, harmonious articulation of living experience and poetic word. The article thus unravels Dante’s orchestration of limits and openings, totality and excess, sayable and unsayable across incipits and explicits of the Comedy and sketches a new possible research framework for the study of the mise-en-scene of the spatio-temporal distance/dialogue/tension between the embodied experience of Dante-character and the conceptualizing/poetic efforts of Dante-author and its role in the construction of the narrative strategy and the ideological structure of the poem.

<em>Teza</em>: A Review

Close-Up:Teza: A Review Nubia Kai (bio) Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima is internationally renowned as one of the most innovative and radical writers/directors of African and African Diaspora films. His corpus of films dating back to his first film Hour Glass (1971), the highly successful Sankofa (1993), to his last documentary film, Adwa (1999), all display a continuity of sociopolitical relevance, collective memory, history, psychological introspection, and a relentless commitment to liberate the human spirit. Haile Gerima's most recent film Teza / Morning Dew, which was fifteen years in the making, is a cinematic masterpiece that has won over twenty international awards, including the coveted Etalon de Yennenga Grand Prize Award at FESPACO (2009), the Carthage African Festival Grand Prize (2008), and the Venice International Film Festival Special Jury Award (2008). Exploring a constellation of human behavior and ideas—civil war, imperialism, communism, nationalism, class struggle, racism, emigration, male-female relationships, generational ruptures, ideological conflicts, sibling rivalry, cultural practice—the inner and outer workings of a virtual universe are ingeniously compressed into 140 minutes of film. Tackling such a diverse range of topics is a formidable task, yet Gerima manages to make it work with his complex cinematic approach to filmmaking in which the cinematic technique itself is integrated into the text. Like impressionist painters whose free flowing strokes form part of the image, or Ethiopian muralists who fill every inch of space with a seamless, symbolic narrative, Gerima employs a semiotic filmic style that amplifies the meaning and beauty of the narrative by using the camera like a paintbrush to capture the mood, rhythm, color, iconic content, and deep emotion expressed in the pensive, transparent gaze of the protagonist, Anberber. A subjective camera mimics Anberber's eyes, the mirror of the soul, follows his wary footsteps across a contemplative landscape marred by civil war, conscription, murder, chaos. [End Page 134] Set in an Ethiopian village, Addis Ababa, and Cologne, West Germany, during the peak of the "Dergue" era, Anberber returns to his native land from Cologne where he has spent years studying medicine, world revolutionary movements, and Marxist-Leninist thought with a community of African intellectual expatriates. His dreams of a new socialist government and a medical career to help rid the country of diseases are soon shattered when the contradictions between theory and practice are shockingly exposed. The communist oriented social order under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam had replaced the three-thousand-year-old Solomonic monarchy with a system more brutal, corrupt, and dogmatic than their predecessors. Anberber's shattered idealistic world is reflected in the cross-cutting and jump-cut editing creating the illusion of dislocation, disruption, fragments of exploded reveries of an idyllic childhood. Haunted by hallucinations, nightmares, pastiches of memory, he envisions himself as a boy who fades into the backdrop of his village. There he embraces a monument on Mussolini Mountain where his father, a war hero who fought valiantly against the Italian invaders before he was killed by poison gas, is commemorated. Mussolini Mountain, an obvious symbol of European conquest and colonization of Africa that would forever change the political economy of the continent is, nevertheless, surmounted by the names of the freedom fighters who resisted, and this metaphorical mise-en-scène intimates the final meaning and outcome of the film. Anberber is a legitimate heir of this heroic legacy, but he has lost memory of his childhood, his youth, the college years in Germany; and neither his mother or the elders in his village understand his alienation and inner turmoil. Teza is about the recovery of memory, both historic and personal memory which in African epistemology is inextricable. While Anberber recovers from a near fatal beating, he is simultaneously reconstituting his memory, claiming and interpreting his past so he can recover and redefine his future. The entire film subverts linear chronology as Gerima constructs the narrative through the process of involuted montage, a series of repeated short shots and flashbacks strategically arranged in order to convey a great deal of meaning in a short span of time, and at the same time, probe the depths of the protagonist's psyche in an expressionistic exegesis. Anberber's stoic...

Paradise and Politics in the Music of Blind Willie Johnson

I investigate the politics of paradises in the 1920s African-American gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson. His recordings are apocalyptic vignettes which juxtapose and conflate paradises, using many different voices. I describe the theological and political paradises in Johnson’s songs: the Old Testament journey to Canaan; the post-death heaven in the New Testament; Christ’s kingdom on earth in Revelation; freedom in Northern cities or Canada; and a utopian dream of political emancipation of African-Americans and transformation of society in the South. I outline the various voices present in Johnson’s recordings: vocal styles; accompanying singers; the guitar; grammatical, textual and lexical voices; and the silent voices of technology and time. I suggest traces of a subtle political activism in these voices and paradises, and explore uses of these voices in linking paradises, arguing that the complex transitions enhance the force of signification and frustrate attempts to finalise meanings. Many interpretations of Johnson’s recordings, however, seek to determine final meaning, and I discuss the limitations of such attempts, limitations which not only underestimate the richness of the recordings but deny Johnson any political awareness or agency. In cautioning against this kind of project, I call for a hearing open to plural interpretations, and suggest political potential not only in coded messages, but in radical indeterminacy itself.

Chopin Dreams: The Mazurka in C# Minor, Op. 30, No. 4

Abstract This article views Chopin's Mazurka in C# Minor, op. 30, no. 4, as akin to a dream that is open to analysis from a Lacanian perspective. After a discussion of Jacques Lacan's famous orders of subjectivity (the imaginary, the symbolic order, and the Real), the article turns to his idea that a symptom is a message from the Real that demands interpretation. As such, strange moments in Chopin's Mazurka are like symptoms that require multiple interpretations in order to approach their hidden and overlapping meanings. The article proceeds to view Chopin's Mazurka through nineteenth-century notions of Orientalism (alterity), nationalism (nostalgia), coming to life (the automaton), tuberculosis (the boundary of life and death), and the uncanny (fragmentation of the body/mind). But just as Lacan argued that we can never reach a final meaning for a symptom, the article concludes that there can be no transcendental signified for the various symptomatic moments in Chopin's Mazurka. In the end, the Mazurka becomes what Lacan calls a sinthome, a form of subjectivity that is made up of the very symptoms that the subject strives to understand.

Erratum to: DRT with local contexts

Under the section 3.1 Quantified statements, the last paragraph ‘‘DRT cannot derive the nuclear scope case, as we already noted. But with respect to the restrictor, it does just fine—intermediate accommodation into the restrictor yields a final meaning akin to No student who is incompetent and knows it applied for this job; this seems about right.’’ should be replaced by ‘‘DRT cannot derive the nuclear scope case, as we already noted. But with respect to the restrictor, it does just fine—intermediate accommodation into the restrictor yields a final meaning akin to No student who is incompetent and knows it applied for this job; this seems about right. By contrast, the present approach does fine in the nuclear scope case, but it replicates Heim’s predictions for the restrictor (because only local indexing is available) — and these appear to be too strong.’’ Under the section 3.4 Multiple indexing, the paragraph starting Heim (1983, 1992)... the last sentence ‘‘A strengthening mechanism is needed to get inference (i)’’ should be read as ‘‘A strengthening mechanism is needed to get inference (ii).’’

A structural model of the bio-psycho-socio-spiritual factors influencing the development towards gerotranscendence in a sample of institutionalized elders

This paper is a report of a study to determine the bio-psycho-socio-spiritual factors influencing the development towards gerotranscendence in institutionalized older people. Physical ability, depressive symptoms, social network support, meaning of life and life satisfaction were examined through a structured equation modelling approach. Older people's pursuit of gerotranscendence is believed to facilitate successful ageing and late-life growth. Although a few Scandinavian studies have identified the relationship between psychosocial factors and the development of gerotranscendence, there is little trans-cultural study of the model, which limits the ability of the gerotranscendence theory to be applied worldwide. Cognitively intact older residents (N = 195) from six long-term care facilities in southern Taiwan participated in a structured interview using the Gerotranscendence scale, Barthel's Index, the Geriatric Depression Scale short form, the Inventory of Socially supportive Behaviour, the Life Meaning scale, and the Life Satisfaction scale. Data were collected over a 6-month period in 2008. The model-fit indexes of the final model (χ2) = 32.08, d.f. = 14, P = 0.004; CMIN/d.f. = 2.29; GFI = 0.97, AGFI = 0.89, TLI = 0.94, NFI = 0.96) exceeded acceptable levels except for χ2 . In the final model, social support, life satisfaction and meaning of life had direct effects on gerotranscendence (standardized regression weight 0.54, 0.43, and 0.76). The gerotranscendence model of healthy ageing is congruent in the Taiwanese population. Findings of this study can guide nursing and other health professionals in planning implementation of best practice in older people's care.

Restructuring Latin American Art: the Constellation Model

Since the 80’s, a great number of art critics and curators have developed different theoretical and curatorial models to analyse and exhibit Latin American art. This paper analyses the curatorial model explored in two exhibitions that were organized by the art historian Mari Carmen Ramirez and the writer Hector Olea: Heterotopias: Medio siglo sin-lugar: 1918-1968 (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2000-2001), and Inverted Utopias. Avant-garde in Latin America (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004). The constellation model is presented as a different way to the traditional display models used by institutions in the US and Europe to explore and display Latin American artworks. One of the cognitive values of this model is that it criticises the historicism that characterizes many narratives and art exhibitions from Latin America and other regions. The constellation model also offers an artwork concept where the artwork appears without a final meaning and so is able to participate in different structures of meaning.

Phonological, Orthographic, and Syntactic Awareness and their Relation to Reading Comprehension in Prelingually Deaf Individuals: What Can We Learn from Skilled Readers?

This study seeks to provide new insight into the phonemic, orthographic, and syntactic awareness of individuals with prelingual deafness and the way those contribute to reading. Two tests were used: one designed for the assessment of phonemic/orthographic awareness (PO/OA) and another examining reading comprehension (RC) in contexts where prior knowledge was either helpful or not. Participants were 83 prelingually deaf individuals (DIs): 21 primary school, 36 high school, and 26 university students. The control group consisted of 85 hearing individuals (HIs) from parallel education levels (29 primary school, 29 high school, 27 university). Contrary to predictions made by current reading theories, findings imply that the failure of DIs to develop sensitivity to the phonological properties of words may not underlie their reading difficulties. Rather, this weakness seems to reflect a processing deficit at the supra-lexical (sentence) level where the final meaning of single words is elaborated by its integration based upon syntactic (structural) knowledge.

Identifying Different Meanings of a Chinese Morpheme through Semantic Pattern Matching in Augmented Minimum Spanning Trees

Galmar and Chen (2010) introduced the first corpus-based computational approach to the problem of identifying the different meanings of a polysemous Chinese morpheme embedded in polymorphemic words. The approach is based on the successive application of a dimensionality reduction method - Latent Semantic Analysis, a graph-theory algorithm - Prim’s algorithm and a semantic pattern recognition search used for meaning inference. Our present work adds major changes and contributions to Galmar and Chen (2010). Firstly, we theoretically defined and detailed what are the Chinese semantic patterns to be searched in the augmented minimum spanning trees. Then, we modified the computational approach to include the use of Nearest Neighbors lists. This change allows for a major contribution: a proof is given that all the possible outputs of Prim’s algorithm in our experiment - the minimum spanning trees contain all the same amount of semantic information to be used for meaning inference. Thus, our final meaning inference results are optimal. Practically, this work could serve as a first step to add a new feature to current Chinese Wordnets: the listing of all the Chinese words embedding a certain polysemous morpheme with a fixed identified meaning. Finally, future directions are sketched.

Narrating the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Narrating the Holocaust David Brauner (bio) Andrea Reiter . Narrating the Holocaust. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Continuum, 2005. 311 pp. ISBN 0-8264-7768-2, $34.95. Over the past thirty years, countless books have been written on the subject of Holocaust literature. Most of these have focused on fictional works (novels, short stories, poems, plays), some on autobiographical writing (memoirs, journals, diaries, etc.), some on both. The difficulties of generic definition are omnipresent in these works. How much do works that represent camp experience explicitly, like Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl and Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, have in common with those that do so allegorically, like Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, or obliquely, like Martin Amis's Time's Arrow? Should works that concern themselves with the Nazi regime but not with the camps per se, such as Marcie Hershman's Tales of the Master Race and Emily Prager's Eve's Tattoo, be classified as Holocaust literature? What about the poetry of Sylvia Plath or Tony Harrison, in which metaphors drawn from the Holocaust become key tropes? Or a novella such as George Steiner's The Portage to San Crisotobal of A.H., which imagines the pursuit and eventual apprehension of Hitler in South America after the war? Furthermore, there is the thorny issue of the relationship between fiction and autobiography, and between fictionalized autobiography and autobiographical fiction. Some authors who are also survivors, such as Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel, have written fictional and autobiographical works dealing with their experiences as camp inmates. There are also hybrid works that combine and conflate different genres. Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example, is a biography of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, who experienced Auschwitz. It is also an autobiography, in which Spiegelman deals with the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the writing of the book, and in the second volume, by the commercial and critical success of the first volume. Finally, it is an allegory, in [End Page 751] which Jews are depicted with the heads of mice, Germans with the heads of cats, and Poles with the heads of pigs. In Narrating the Holocaust, Andrea Reiter breaks new ground in two ways. First, she focuses on a wide range of testimonies written by survivors, most of which have not been available to a general, English-speaking audience, and which would not be conventionally classified as "literature" of any sort, and subjects them to literary analysis, rather than dealing with them as historical documents. Second, she classifies these works systematically according to the different "linguistic devices" and generic strategies that they employ (2). Her opening chapter, "Communication," is concerned with the ordering and selection of material in these texts, and identifies "four especially dramatic events: arrival, release, death and torture" as the staple ingredients of survivors' testimonies (20). In her second chapter, "Genre," Reiter discusses the influence of two very different generic categories—the Hasidic tale and the travel report—on these texts. The third chapter of the book, "Coming to terms with experience through language," discusses some of the rhetorical tropes and recurring metaphors that these texts employ. In the fourth chapter, "The narrative of lived reality," Reiter concentrates on the struggle of camp authors to find literary forms that could accommodate and articulate experiences unprecedented not only in their own lives but anywhere in recorded history, and on the therapeutic importance of storytelling in the camps. In the final chapter, "Text and meaning: from experience to report," Reiter explores the motivations of the authors of these texts; this chapter is the least original section of the book, tending to retread familiar ground. Finally, the epilogue on the representation of the Holocaust through the eyes of children seems more like a prologue to a new project than a conclusion to this book. There are three problems with the book, all of them consequences of the circumstances of its publication. First of all, Patrick Camiller's translation from the German, though generally lucid, is at times rather awkward—for instance, "[t]he discussion of genre has already brought out the weak impetus to originality" (85)—and because Reiter deals almost exclusively...

The Meaning of Religious Practice by Emmanuel Levinas: an Introduction and Translation

Published for first time in 1937, Emmanuel Levinas's short article Meaning of Religious Practice is perhaps best characterized as pre-Talmudic. At this time, Levinas had not yet met prestigious master M. Chouchani, under whom he would undertake a serious study of Talmud. Although he cites mitzvot in an example, Levinas's reflection on religious practice in Judaism is not applied to categories of Halakha but rests instead on a phenomenological description of execution of ritual. In contrast to reformers of Judaism, Levinas does not conceive of ritual in purely utilitarian terms, that is, as good for personal hygiene, moral discipline, religious symbolism, and mental and emotional arousal. Nor does he understand it as expression of a purely subjective or private religious life, situated on margins of universal order of reason and nature. Levinas, this modern interpretation gets its plausibility only from nonessential features of ritual. The true meaning of Jewish religious practice lies elsewhere. Levinas argues that execution of a ritual constitutes an interruption of the natural attitude that we habitually adopt in our everyday dealings with things. The ritual suspends our natural tendency, for example, to eat indiscriminately, giving us moment for pause and benediction. In so doing, it makes world and everything in it exotic, altogether strange, and miraculous. What Greeks experienced at very heart of philosophy, namely, (to thaumaston [Wonder is feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in (Plato, Theatetus 155d)]), Levinas finds in world revealed by Jewish ritual: For Jew, by contrast, nothing is entirely familiar, entirely profane. To him, existence of things is something infinitely surprising. It strikes him as a miracle. He experiences wonder at every instant at fact-so simple and yet so extraordinary-that world is there. In final analysis, then, meaning (signification) or essence of Jewish religious practice is to be found in event

El amancebamiento como falta al sistema incipiente de disciplinamiento social: Talca en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII

Starting with the concept of illicit union (cohabitation), as it was understood juridically and morally in the XVIIIth century, this text examines the intimate imbrication between divine law and civil law as a form of social coercion. Using testimonies from judicial causes of the time, we show how the adaptation of the spirit of the law on drawing up resolutions relating to cases of adultery, bigamy, concubinage, etc., has as the only objective the regulation of the private world of the popular sectors. From this moment on, sin, in the Christian sense, is a transgression of the law. The final meaning of this particular form of applying the law is to limit and even to prevent the geographic mobility that was generated as a product of the affective relationships outside of marriage.

Under the Nation-State: Modernist Deterritorialization in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano

In manner that anticipates the hybrid modes of identity explored by many postcolonial writers, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano presents deterritorialized and nomadic self: self to which all boundaries appear both permeable and contingent. (1) Directly challenging the nation-centered model that informs not only British imperialism but also the political cultures of decolonized states, Lowry employs as his main character the alcohol-dazed Geoffrey Firmin, nominally British whose words, actions, and desires have long since ceased to be clearly tethered to any state-based territorial formation. Although Lowry conflates Firmin's identity with his institutional function by repeatedly referring to him throughout the novel as the Consul, the ultimate effect of this blurring of name and function is to dissociate the word consul from the task of representing specific national state. In many respects, Lowry's Consul thus embodies those fantasies of free-floating authenticity and autonomy that inform much of the existentialist thought in the post-World War II period in which Under the Volcano initially appeared; the novel can be read as textualized battle between the belittling demands of contingency and desire to avoid the inauthenticity of bad faith. And, indeed, this is Lowry himself implies in his 1946 letter to the publisher Jonathan Cape, letter in which, in the course of pleading that Cape's readers give his book second chance, he suggests that what profundity and final meaning there is in [the Consul's] fate should be seen also in its universal relationship to the ultimate fate of mankind (Selected Letters 85). As we will see, however, the book is less concerned with the concept of universal humanity than with the growing irrelevance of national citizenship as source of identity and solidarity. In exploring this postnational dimension of Lowry's work, will attempt, as much as possible, to avoid the pervasive tendency to substitute gossip about Lowry's alcoholism and sexual dysfunction for critical engagement with the historical and political implications of his writing. Still, do wish to acknowledge that Lowry, in his daily life, does not appear to have succumbed to the profound blurrings of national identity that afflict the lives of the major characters in Under the Volcano. In 1946 letter detailing the passport problems that he and his wife had experienced during visit to Mexico, Lowry emphatically declares I am an Englishman, resident in Canada. My wife is American (Selected Letters 91). He then goes on to describe how, over the course of series of nightmarish encounters with Mexican authorities, he and his second wife, Margerie, had found themselves accused of violating the terms of their tourist visas by working as writers. Given the extent to which, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, modernist literary production was being conducted primarily by tourists and expatriates, one wonders would have happened to modernist literature if such standards had widely applied. Like many modernist writers, Lowry is, as Hugh Kenner remarks of Ezra Pound, a frequenter of Elsewhere Communities (82): communities predicated on the notion that special and unparalleled way to know is to go where you've never been (3). In order to enjoy this experience of expatriate knowing, one must first negotiate the patchwork of passport and visa regulations that, by the 1930s and 1940s, had grown dangerously complex. At first glance, the unpleasant episode with the Mexican authorities seems to be merely Lowry imagines it to be: an unusually absurd instance of government indulging in an overly narrow application of official rules. But this episode provides profoundly immediate demonstration of the extent to which Lowry was implicated in the nationalist confusions that he wrote about. Lowry imagines the nation-state from the perspective of someone who has personal knowledge of the complications that stem from visa restrictions. …