Final Book Research Articles

Charles Livesey Walton (1881–1953): from marine to veterinary to agricultural zoology

Charles Livesey Walton (1881–1953) was born on the Isle of Man, but moved in childhood via Yorkshire to the south coast of Pembrokeshire (Wales). Later, having become a man of private means, he relocated to Devon. He was associated with the Marine Biological Laboratory of the United Kingdom in Plymouth from 1907 until 1912, where he developed expertise on sea anemones. His first publication was on these animals, in 1907 with Professor Herbert John Fleure of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he eventually gained employment in 1912. There, he changed course to work on various aspects of veterinary and agricultural zoology, themes he pursued at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. He considered his major contribution to have been his work there on “liver rot” (fasciolosis) in sheep, carried out from 1919 and during the economic depression of the 1920s. As a marine zoologist, he is probably best known for his co-authorship of The biology of the sea-shore (1922) with Frederick William Flattely. He moved from Bangor in 1927 to the Long Ashton Research Station, University of Bristol, as an agricultural entomologist. As part of a multidisciplinary team there, he developed and tested chemical treatments against a wide variety of plant pests and diseases. Retiring to St David's, Pembrokeshire, he catalogued plants of the peninsula. Walton apparently never married. The comprehensive bibliography presented here constitutes an appropriate memorial alongside his influential final book, Farmers' warfare (1947).

What are Bunin’s Dark Avenues [Tyomnye allei] about?

The article deals with the topics and poetics of Bunin’s final book Dark Avenues [Tyomnye allei].The study is polemically charged: the author argues with a number of Bunin scholars who described the meanings and artistic uniqueness of the writer’s later works. Meskin believes that it was Bunin’s intention to narrow down the theme and the meaning of his best book. All that the author decided to refer to as love is merely part of a superficial plane of content of the stories; this plane would lack in aesthetic value were it not for another, inner, plane, which does not immediately catch the eye. Following in the polemical mode, the author is particularly keen to demonstrate how Bunin’s philosophy is manifested in the novellas, including his attitude towards life and death and his ambition to show a full range of relationships between a man and a woman, as well as his idea to write an elaborate answer to the question ‘What really is a woman?’ The author finds that Dark Avenues is not so much an encyclopaedia of love but of female characters: from attractive ‘predators’ to equally alluring ‘prey.’

Divine Action and the Human Mind

Divine Action and the Human Mind

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Subject-material ontology in “Doctor Zhivago”, the “final book” by Boris Pasternak

The article is addressed to the problem of typological characteristics of a number of novels distinguished by a long-term, large-scale conception and genre "proteism". Conventionally referred to as the "final books", these works represent an attempt to create a "universal text" of cultural memory. Such a text is intended to reveal the "totality of being", to answer the main questions of life. Through the prism of signs of the "final book", this article examines the novel "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak. The main attention is focused on the study of the ontological aspect of the objective, material world of the work, in particular, household objects and interior components. In descriptive fragments, the frequency lexemes "thing" and "object" are highlighted, which act as a reduced description. Their "collective" semantics creates conditional, generalised images of material and ideal objects that realize the idea of contact between the existential (sacred) and the ordinary and the idea of restoring unity (integrity). The lexeme “thing” acts as an actualiser of meanings associated with the concept of a way of life, an order of things, harmonious to a greater or lesser extent. The lexeme “object” is most often marked by the state of “ontological uncomfortableness”, “alienation” of objects of the external world from a person, which arose as a result of the disintegration of “living” connections, the absence of “contact” and decline in general. The opposition “thing-object” implements in the narrative “ready-made / code” philosophical generalisations, which are differentiated depending on situations, and it expresses the assessment of reality given by the narrator, whose worldview in many cases is extremely close to the position of the protagonist.

Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit by Joseph Stanhope Cialdella

Reviewed by: Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit by Joseph Stanhope Cialdella Tom McCarthy Joseph Stanhope Cialdella. Motor City Green: A Century of Landscapes and Environmentalism in Detroit. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Pp. 246. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Hardcover: $35. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella's fine book, Motor City Green, relates a surprising tale that is perhaps not so surprising. Across the 130-year rise and decline history of America's archetypal industrial city, Detroiters—even [End Page 121] the most economically challenged among them, immigrants and African Americans—insisted on relationships of various kinds with the natural world. Time and again, these efforts involved growing favored plants and food in their backyards and in neighboring vacant lots. "These gardens in the machine of industrial capitalism," he writes, "were where residents and city leaders through their outdoor spaces invented, contested, and defined ideas about urbanism, nature, and each other." (12) Cialdella relates a series of episodes in five loosely connected chapters, beginning with Mayor Hazen S. Pingree's attempt to combat unemployment and poverty among Detroit's immigrant and working-class residents during the depression 1890s with a city program to use vacant lots for truck gardening. His second chapter looks at the Detroit Urban League's program in the 1920s to encourage residents of the city's African American neighborhoods, many of them recent Great Migration arrivals from the rural South, to acculturate to northern urban middle-class norms—and to win the respect of white middle-class Detroiters—by beautifying their homes and neighborhoods through more formal gardening. Whites often saw more black than green in these efforts, and many African Americans pursued their own alternative aesthetic and functional relationships with nature. In the early 1930s the Detroit Urban League and the Children's Fund of Michigan created a summer camp outside the city for African American children. For three decades, the camp organizers incorporated nature into activities designed to impart middle-class lessons to children in order to foster socio-economic mobility in their otherwise urban lives. Chapter four explores the problematic relationship between Detroit and the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority (HCMA). Detroiters supplied the bulk of the funding to create nine regional parks in the suburbs between 1940 and 1970. Yet none of the parks were conveniently accessible to the city's residents, and the HCMA built no parks within the city. Meanwhile, the city struggled to maintain its own Belle Isle Park, a park used, not just by city residents, but by people from throughout the greater Detroit region, a telling reminder of the pervasive underlying racism that characterized relations between America's cities and suburbs in the postwar period. Cialdella's final focus is on the rise of urban farming in Detroit, as the deindustrializing, depopulating city relinquished ever-larger amounts of the built-environment back to nature, which residents then converted to food production. This story is the most evocative of his examples, as twenty-first century urban visionaries, residents among them, reconceived the postindustrial city as a juxtaposition of city and country. "Gardens [End Page 122] served as a starting point for imagining a new idea of the city," he writes, "where residents' gardening reconciled the devastating social and environmental effects of deindustrialization." (147) Throughout the book, the evolution of Detroit's Frederick Olmsted-designed Belle Isle Park serves as an on-going reminder that relationships between city residents and nature were not all about city parks. "My aim," Cialdella argues, "is … putting urban gardening and agriculture into conversation with more widely studied topics in cultural and social history such as park building, city planning, and the politics of metropolitan development." (10) He succeeds. Indeed, one of the virtues of the book is the deft integration of perspectives from environmental, social, cultural, and political history. Race is an important part of Cialdella's narrative, as it must be, and he addresses it forthrightly, but it never overpowers his primary focus on people expressing their ideas of community through nature. He shows us that these ideas, and the actual relationships that resulted, came from the top down, the bottom up, and from the middle; compelling, but perhaps...

Optic Flow: Perceiving and Acting in a 3-D World.

In 1979, James Gibson completed his third and final book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”. That book can be seen as the synthesis of the many radical ideas he proposed over the previous 30 years – the concept of information and its sufficiency, the necessary link between perception and action, the need to see perception in relation to an animal's particular ecological niche and the meanings (affordances) offered by the visual world. One of the fundamental concepts that lies beyond all of Gibson's thinking is that of optic flow: the constantly changing patterns of light that reach our eyes and the information it provides. My purpose in writing this paper has been to evaluate the legacy of Gibson's conceptual ideas and to consider how his ideas have influenced and changed the way we study perception.

Review

Review

National Fantasies about the Self

National Fantasies about the Self Rebecca Wanzo (bio) In my last exchange with Lauren Berlant, they asked me if I had read Patrisse Cullors's memoir written with asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist (2017). It was one of those out-of-the-blue messages you might get from Lauren about a book, art exhibit, film, television show, or in recent years, comedy routine, that you might find intellectually generative. And Lauren, queen of the "hated archive," negotiator of the pleasures and irritations of high, middle, and low, always saw that texts engendered something for someone. 1 We often did not agree on what that was, but the conflict was part of the pleasure, and much of the use. It took me some time to see a way to diverge from Berlant's ideas, as their ideas on sentimentality and citizenship were the scaffolding upon which I began to build an understanding of how so many fictions about the US, particularly fictions about the self, were constructed. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture are meditations on how white subjects integrate discourses of victimization into citizenship narratives, and how the phantasmagoric constructs of ideal intimacies shape possibilities for everyone else. Over two decades after its publication, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City has a breathtaking explicatory force when examining conservative discourses of subjection. Berlant describes the "rage at the stereotyped peoples who have appeared to change the political rules of social membership," and a "desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal, an order of what was felt to be a general everyday intimacy that was sometimes called 'the American way of life'" (2). Patrisse Cullors and Black Lives Matter are changing the rules. But their stories of suffering are often discarded because they challenge lies about the American Dream. Cullors learned early on that Black children are outside of what Berlant called "infantile citizenship models"—representations of the nation's innocence and futurity in which young white bodies become signs of the nation's future goodness. In contrast, Black children "become the thing that's no longer cherished," and a "thing to be discarded" (Cullors and bandele 25). If Tamir Rice was "out of time" at twelve, it was because he was born out of sync with his space, one riddled with cultural ghosts depicting white male violence as innocence and Black existence as inevitable villainy ( Cullors and bandele 28). Berlant's origins as a nineteenth-century literary scholar informed their observations of how subjected people of color were often the peripheral shadows to [End Page 5] contemporary frustrations with the absence of the promised "good life." Over the decades, Berlant's work on citizenship, sentimentality, and victimization shifted to discussions of precarity, perhaps reflecting how discourses of suffering remain central in mainstream politics but the troubled project of sympathy for subjected others does not. Donald Trump did not even vaguely gesture toward George W. Bush's facile "compassionate conservatism," but he did depict himself as a long-suffering victim. Slavery has remained a point of reference, but it and the Holocaust have become omnipresent referents for depicting white victimization. Berlant's work teaches us that there are always suffering citizens at the center of America, but in the twenty-first century, some people have skipped over recognizing the oppression of others, instead simply beginning with the narcissism always possible with the sentimental mode. But if Berlant's career began with interrogating the ways that "nations produce fantasy," they consistently focused over time on what it means when fantasies cannot be maintained (Anatomy 1). Even some of us who do not expect to be vulnerable to cruel optimism are. As Cullors explains, after the election of Donald Trump, she became angry "at her own naiveté" for not realizing "how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are" (246). Berlant's final book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, works through people living with failure and what often seems like the impossibility of living with others, and attempts to imagine some other way to understand...

Парадокс Менона, когнитивная пустота и иерархия знания: Г. Файн об эпистемологии Платона

The article provides an overview of that parts of G. Fine's books – Essays in Ancient Epistemology (OUP, 2021) and The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno's Paradox from Socrates to Sextus (OUP, 2014) – which deal with Platonic epistemology. Our task is to show the main epistemological problems that are formed around the Meno's paradox or directly depend on it, and also to present the formulations of these problems in Fine’ own version in order to make these problems well recognizable in ancient philosophical discussions for the reader. The article examines the structure and the problematic content of Menon's paradox, and the technical vocabulary of G. Fine, which allows her to formulate the problematic content of ancient epistemology. As well it examines the number of epistemological problems: the propositionality of perception in Plato, the theory of two worlds in Plato and Aristotle, as well as certain parallels between Menon and Sisyphus, which all together make it possible to show that Meno's problematics is basic, shaping the epistemology in ancient philosophy both in Plato himself and after Plato.

Upon the Altar of Work: The North-South Divide over Child Labor, 1850–1939 by Betsy Wood

Reviewed by: Upon the Altar of Work: The North-South Divide over Child Labor, 1850–1939 by Betsy Wood James Marten Upon the Altar of Work: The North-South Divide over Child Labor, 1850–1939. By Betsy Wood. University of Illinois Press, 2020. xiv + 243 pp. Cloth $110, paper $28, e-book $19.95. Work has always been a moral issue, even when we are unwilling to admit, recognize, or think about it on those terms. Children working has been one of the trigger points for debates over child welfare, capitalism, and culture since at least the rise of the factory system in the early nineteenth century. Historians of children and youth have long been interested in the nature of young people's work and especially in the campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to regulate, limit, and even eradicate it. Betsy Wood offers an interpretation of the campaign to regulate child labor that makes at least two original contributions to the long and storied historiography: extending the chronology back to the 1850s and rooting the issue firmly in the long sectional conflict that not only caused the Civil War but also shaped (and continues to shape) American politics and social welfare reform movements. Just as the campaign against human bondage had often drawn its force from images of enslaved children, the post–Civil War debates over the nature of capitalism, government authority, and welfare reform often revolved around the role of children in the economy and the responsibility of society to children. It was relatively easy for reformers to find new targets to blame for child labor, but an issue that to reformers in the North seemed to be a no-brainer raised hackles in other parts of the country and among other interest groups. Wood organizes her book chronologically and thematically, as reformers altered approaches and shifted targets. They first sought state and then federal legislation; then a constitutional amendment ratified by only a tiny handful of states; then, again, federal legislation that finally led to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. The perpetration of child labor also evolved, from the padrone system of recruiting cheap workers from Italy to the emergence of cotton mills in the southern Piedmont, recalcitrant capitalists, and increasingly conservative politicians. Although at times reform transcended sectional divisions, northern and southern activists were increasingly divided by attitudes about the necessity of work to the development of useful adults, the slippery slope of government regulation, and the importance of free enterprise in keeping the American economy strong. In these and other cases, child labor became [End Page 464] a surrogate for contentious larger issues. Wood effectively incorporates the ways in which abolitionist rhetoric blended into post–Civil War attacks on capitalism, on the waxing and waning of the Social Gospel idea, and on the ways in which patriotism and preparedness actually helped propel anti-child labor rhetoric after 1918. She also features rural and urban divisions, as throughout the decades covered by the book, the labor of farm children and youth was rarely addressed—except by opponents of child labor regulation, who used the specter of families not being able to control their own children's work as a kind of misinformation campaign, especially during the debate over ratifying the child labor amendment to the Constitution. Scholars from a number of fields will find uses for this fine book. Historians of the Civil War, Gilded Age, and Progressive eras in America will find familiar markers and personages framed in new and interesting ways. Historians of children and youth might find the core material more familiar, but they will also discover new approaches and chronologies. Wood's most useful contribution, in this reviewer's mind, is the connection made between the hyper-sectionalism caused by the issue of slavery to the post-emancipation campaigns against child labor that Wood convincingly argues became central to the new sectionalism that developed over the decades following the Civil War. Despite its brevity—the book runs about 210 pages, with nearly 30 percent of it taken up by footnotes that display the author's deep dive into primary and secondary sources—this is an ambitious...

Un manuscrit parisien et ses énigmes: Le livre d’heures des Le Tellier (Paris, c. 1460)

The Le Tellier manuscript, book of hours, use of Paris (c. 1460) in Latin and French ; from a private collection in South Carolina, Unites-States ; (172 × 118 mm), Vellum ; A-D + 222 + E-H. This manuscript is written by several hands in gothic liturgical, in dark brown ink with rubrics painted in red, between two verticals and 16 horizontals, on a velum ruled in red. The text capitals are touched in yellow, and the prayers are highlighted with one-line initials and line-endings in burnished gold on grounds of pink and blue patterned with white tracery. Along the manuscript, hundreds of two- three- and four-line initials in blue or pink, patterned with white tracery and foliate infills on burnished gold grounds mark the offices and prayers. An unusually rich cycle of decoration adorns this colorful Parisian book of hours, including hundreds of panel borders in left margin of fine burnished gold leaves and disks on hairline tendrils and stems among acanthus leaves in gold and blue and sprays of colored flowers and fruits. The center of this artefact remains the twenty-six large miniatures in full color and gold placed in arched compartments with ornamented baguettes frames and full decorated borders. These highly detailed paintings result from the meticulous work of several artists, they depict various traditional scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary and the passion of Christ. While the illumination and the texts indicate that the manuscript was intended for use of Paris, several details deserve attention, in particular regarding its production. In this paper, we intend to give a brief description of this amazing manuscript mainly produced in Paris ; and to point out some textual and iconographic features which are of particular interest for the understanding of medieval methods of « mass production » of fine Books of Hours in the second half of the fifteenth century Paris.

М. ГОРЬКИЙ. «РАССКАЗЫ 1922-1924 ГОДОВ»: ПРОБЛЕМЫ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ПРОЧТЕНИЯ («РАССКАЗ ОБ ОДНОМ РОМАНЕ»)

The article comprehensively examines the "Story of a novel" – one of the most read and underestimated in the stage cycle of M. Gorky "Stories of 1822-1924" - on the writer's way to the final book "The Life of Klim Samgin". At first glance, a humorously ironic story reveals a complex of conceptual problems, helps to identify the features of the writer's creative laboratory in his attitude to historical reality, to the laws of artistic creativity, the peculiarities of revealing the inner world of a person, his gender component, and socio-cultural status.

Revisiting the Plague in the Age of Galileo

Revisiting the Plague in the Age of Galileo

Duvall's "The heart of revelation: Understanding the 10 essential themes of the bible's final book" (book review)

Duvall's "The heart of revelation: Understanding the 10 essential themes of the bible's final book" (book review)

Dépasser la survie pour atteindre l’ordinaire: Destiny de Pierrette Fleutiaux

Destiny, the final book of acclaimed French author Pierrette Fleutiaux, is a plight for the migrants cause and an invitation to the return of the value of hospitality. Step by step, the eponymous protagonist’s fragmented journey is unveiled, taking on monomythic qualities: her exile from Nigeria, her perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, the traffickers’ lies, the forced prostitution, and her successful escape to France. All the battles she had to wage to survive elevate her to a mythical figure whose gaze holds power over men and whose name defy the odds. While brushing Destiny’s portrait, Pierrette Fleutiaux gives a voice and offers visibility to the migrants by bringing light to their aspirations. Destiny strives for an ordinary life in France. She wishes for a life of security where she could heal from her past traumas, build solid ties of solidarity with a community, and dream of a better life for herself and her children. Through her resilient protagonist, the author emphasizes the migrants’ strength in their fight to survive the violence and exploitation on their journey.

Tattooing: Imprinting the Self

Τhis is a fine book on modern tattooing and tattoos, looked at through the perspective of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity as sociological support to enhance the meaning-making potential for the study of social semiotics. The research took place in Canada, and the ethnographic data and socio-cultural context are Canadian. As the author explicitly states at the beginning of Chapter 1, it is “about the cultural resources individuals use as they go about creating and expressing meaning in their everyday lives through body art practices.”

A Conversation

A Conversation

The “Last Word” in Pictures: Enhanced Visual Interpretation of Revelation in Luther’s High German Bible (1534)

For the last twenty-five years of his life, Martin Luther and his associates were active in Bible translation, publishing first the New Testament, from 1522 onwards, and by 1534—at roughly the mid-point of these endeavours—the whole Bible in German. Across this entire period, until his death, Luther continuously offered reader-viewers of the final New Testament book, Revelation, not only verbal commentary—in a preface (1522), or replacement preface with accompanying marginal notes (1530)—but visual exegesis, in the form of successive series of woodcut engravings designed to illustrate the text. A set of images commissioned for Luther’s 1534 German Bible was the crowning achievement of this visual interpretation: the 1534 Bible even extended pictorial illustration and adornment to the Gospels and Epistles, as well as Old Testament texts. From the perspective of art history, to regard these acclaimed illustrations as “the last word in pictures” represents no novelty, for the 1534 Luther Bible has long been counted among “the finest things that the art of printing produced in the Reformation period” (Schramm 1923, 22–23; my translation). However, to make the same assertion about the Revelation illustrations specifically, from an explicitly exegetical standpoint—and in English—is new and requires substantiation through supporting evidence. I will provide this through close analysis and evaluation of the interpretative moves that the 1534 images make, in conjunction with Luther’s translation and comment, over and against the visual exegesis of their predecessors created, from 1522 onwards, for Luther’s German New Testament.

The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India. By Supriya Gandhi (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 252 pp. $29.95

Drawing from an impressive range of sources in several genres and languages, Gandhi has persuasively reconstructed, engagingly narrated, and insightfully analyzed the significance of the ideas, life, and times of prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), would-be heir to the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). Because each of these genres had its own conventions of exposition and bodies of reference, interdisciplinary historians like Gandhi must master the appropriate methodology to analyze each source individually and then to combine the evidence through intertextual synthesis.The Mughal imperial court sponsored detailed Persian-language histories of the dynasty as well as philosophical and literary works in prose and poetry. Many of these diverse sources contain evidence about the Dara himself and the context in which he was born and in which he developed intellectually, which Gandhi skillfully extracts and weaves into her biography. Additionally, imperial painters constructed images that include Dara, his contemporaries, and their architecture and environment; Gandhi knowledgeably reads and explains this colorful visual language (although the eighteen images included in the book are rendered only in grayscale).Throughout, Gandhi argues that Dara and his closest sister, Jahanara (1614–1681), even more than others in the imperial dynasty, devoted themselves to exploring and mastering Sufi mysticisms, theologies, and philosophies, written in Persian and Arabic. Indeed, both of them wrote esoteric works within these genres. Further, Dara incorporated Indic (“Hindu”) religious traditions through personal meetings with ascetics and through written sources in Sanskrit and Hindi (via Persian translations that he sponsored) in order to prove that the highest truths of Islam could also be found in Indic mystical traditions. Gandhi’s history of Dara’s religious quest for the ultimate truth shows its culmination in Dara’s final book Sirr-i Akbar (“The Greatest Secret,” completed in 1657). While Dara concentrated on the “continued refinement of his inner self and his intellect” in order to make himself “a perfect ruler, one who was also the perfect philosopher” (179, 182), his three rival brothers more successfully mobilized financial and military resources for the inevitable war of succession that only a single victor would survive.Gandhi continually remains in dialogue with other historians, many of whom have characterized Dara as the ecumenical antithesis of Aurangzeb, his Islamicist younger brother (1618–1707), who militarily defeated and executed Dara for heresy, succeeding as the last of the “great” Mughal Emperors. Gandhi’s scholarship demonstrates the oversimplification of that binary argument about the brothers’ influences, instead showing how Dara’s ideas emerged from strong Indic as well as Islamic strands already long present at the imperial court, most famously but not exclusively developed by Emperor Akbar, his great-grandfather (1556–1605). Much of Gandhi’s explicit historiographical discussion appears in her fifty-eight pages of endnotes, about one-quarter of the book (the volume has no bibliography).The accomplished interdisciplinary methodology of Gandhi’s book should make it attractive to a wide readership. She writes in a style and with an authority that makes her work accessible to general readers as well as edifying to specialist scholars. Future writers about the Mughal Empire specifically, and histories of Islam and India generally, will gain much from Gandhi’s work.