Formal Coherence Research Articles

Documentaries: Poems by Walter Hildebrandt

Reviewed by: Documentaries: Poems by Walter Hildebrandt Dale Lakevold Walter Hildebrandt, Documentaries: Poems (Edmonton: NeWest Press 2016) Walter Hildebrandt's latest and eighth collection of poetry, Documentaries, focuses on an investigation of history, whether recent or more distant history, by exposing its fault lines, more specifically those moments when oppression is met with resistance and something new is created. It is there in "dissensus" and "disjunction," we learn in the collection's first poem, "Illegal Combinations: Glasgow 1787," that the poet finds the presence of "another history." (13) The disruption of the ordered past thus enables new alignments in that history to be perceived, and new ways of thinking and acting to be engaged by this knowledge. (13) This process of recording these other histories, such as that of the Glasgow of 1787 or the Winnipeg of 1919, and of understanding our present moment in those contexts becomes the subject of Hildebrandt's book. There are seven poems in Documentaries, five of the long form variety and two shorter ones. It would be possible to call the entire work a long poem, considering the documentary approach common to each individual piece and a narrating voice that remains consistent throughout the collection as it shifts between present and past. The form of the writing, as well, with the short, broken line of projective verse connects each poem with the next, not that such formal coherence is necessary. The author could, if he were so inclined, continue to add to this collection in much the same way that Robert Kroestch did when he turned his long poem project Field Notes into a life work that spanned decades. Hildebrandt is following Kroestch in this respect by showing that the work of reading the past with an eye on the present is never complete. There are many perspectives and many obstacles to be found in this undertaking. In the collection's second poem, "Let Them Eat Grass / The Dakota Wars 1862," for example, we hear the speaker struggling to come to terms with the extent of the American betrayal of the Dakota. "Treaties / had been / the hope for both," he says, until "the ground moved / the rules changed," and coexistence on the land is transformed into violence and genocide. There are "so many windows / onto these events … hard to see it all at once." (26) The poet relies on documenting this history as a response to the amnesia that often keeps the past safely hidden and forgotten: "removals / legislated violence / humiliations / marginalization / loss of homelands / windows / onto this complex / history / documentaries." (34) The works within Documentaries lie very much within the tradition of the Canadian long poem of the past century or more, a poetry that has characteristically made history its subject. Examples of such work might include Dorothy Livesay's Call My People Home (1950), a treatment of the Japanese-Canadian internment; Armand Garnet Ruffo's Grey Owl (1996), a deconstruction of the life of Archie Belaney, an Englishman who posed famously as an Ojibwa; or Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (1976), an examination of Southwest Saskatchewan history that gives voice to Indigenous and settler experience. Hildebrandt's poetry turns decidedly toward the political, which places his work in good company with the work of poets such as Livesay. In fact, Hildebrandt may have been recalling Livesay's The [End Page 271] Documentaries (1968), her collection of six long poems, all addressing political subjects, when he conceived of his own Documentaries. The book opens with a poem set in present-day Glasgow where we are taken directly to the site of Glasgow Green, the "people's park," a "place of mass protests / public demonstrations." (9) Here in this city and in this park a "radical reform movement" would find a home in the aftermath of the weavers' strike of 1787: "on September 3, seven thousand gather at the Green / strike / demand a just solution / companies lock them out / call in police and military / desperate times / unarmed protesters / asking to talk / answered by force." (19) That day three would be shot dead and three would die later, says the speaker, and a union movement would be born. (20) In recording this...

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

<i>Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London</i>. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

Foreign Affairs Festival

Reviewed by: Foreign Affairs Festival Ralf Remshardt FOREIGN AFFAIRS FESTIVAL. Berlin, Germany. 07 5–17, 2016. It is no ordinary festival that begins by chasing its audience backwards, in pajamas, through a blocked-off street while a man in a wheelchair wielding a Steadicam shouts directions through billowing smoke. This scene of mass panic in which willing festival-goers fled an invisible swamp monster was just the first of several sequences filmed by the New York–based Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper) for a science-fiction movie named Germany Year 2071. With its mixture of relational aesthetics, giddy improvisation, and genre-bending, it set the tone for Foreign Affairs, a festival that took "uncertainty" in its various manifestations (or elisions and evasions) as its motto. What wascertain, however, was that this would mark an end for this particular festival, which, under the direction of Matthias von Hartz, has struggled to find a distinct identity within the programming juggernaut that is Berliner Festspiele. Foreign Affairs has always provided a place for political and aesthetic excess, challenging audiences' endurance and tractability with durational and site-responsive work. It presents itself as a scrappy Gesamtkunstwerk, one bent less on harmony than on productive disjunction and the exploration of the interstices of theatre, video, music, and dance. This year's festival once again offered its customary surfeit of music and visual and performing arts. Its primary focus, however, was on the playfully hybrid work of South African artist William Kentridge, the director/designer of the audacious Metropolitan Opera production of Shostakovich's The Nose(2010), whose distinctive graphic animations with their Dada-inspired flipbook look and collage sensibilities spilled into all available spaces, including windows, basements, and freight elevators. Kentridge was everywhere, onstage and off, dancing through the throngs with light-footed rotundity like some Santa Claus of postmodernity, while established artists of the international performance circuit (Needcompany, BERLIN, Forced Entertainment) mingled with fresh voices from the southern hemisphere (Nastío Mosquito from Angola, Neliswe Xaba from South Africa). Belgium's NTGent and Les ballets C de la B opened the festival with their production of En avant, marche!directed by choreographer Alain Platel, with Frank van Laeke. Platel creates "collective rituals," visceral and celebratory manifestations of emotional states in which the narrative is subsumed into moments of pure physical performance, often exquisitely suspended between rigorous craft and fluid improvisation. The plot of En avant, marche!(such as it was) concerned a band musician (Wim Opbrouck) who, after a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer, is demoted from trombone to cymbals. Unwilling to go gently into that one note, Opbrouck's nameless character danced, sang, spat, and sputtered in polyglot rage, switching from Flemish to French, German, English, and Italian (a speech about his cancer came from Pirandello's L'Uomo dal fiore in bocca). Believing that music was his life force, he endeavored to keep it going at all costs. When one of two aging majorettes confessed her love for him, she was rudely rebuffed, so much was he in thrall to fear and self-pity and in love with his own out-sized suffering. Only in a last frantic, awkward, and lumbering pas de deux with a band member did he seem to resign himself, his dance of death becoming a dance of life again. Although a complex, pathetic, and sometimes repugnant figure, Opbrouck's trombonist was vividly realized and ultimately disarming. Platel took inspiration for the piece from the brass bands still common in small Belgian towns with their proud provinciality and musical exuberance that offer a microcosm of a vanishing sort of social cohesion. And indeed, it was the production's irresistible musicality—a semi-professional orchestra from Berlin complemented a virtuosic septet onstage—that gave the evening its formal coherence and spirit. Drawing eclectically from Verdi, Schubert, Mahler, Holst, and jazz, the band endowed the surreal proceedings with an often raucously voluptuous sonic atmosphere that attested to the transformative, death-defying power of art. Platel and van Laeke's piece, in the postdramatic indeterminacy of its genre, evidenced the creative fluidity the festival was after. "Theatre," and certainly "drama," surely proved inadequate descriptors for a production...

Updating the descriptive biopsychosocial approach to fit into a formal person-centered dynamic coherence model - Part II: Applications and some more basics

There is an undeniable difference of approaches in science and humanities. Any model that claims to unify these different approaches must prove to be in accordance with both the objectivistic and the subject-oriented thinking. In the following article we first check our models applicability in two areas that belong to our individual research expertise: biochemistry (TF) and narratology (DSM). Then we try to understand how – be it on a microscopic, e. g. biochemical, be it on a macroscopic body and mind level – distinct coherences manage to survive in a partially or mostly random environment. As an example we address children who grow up in an environment that lacks coherence and hence predictability. Studies have shown that these children are forced to improve their detective “mind-reading” ability. So, with regard to even minute signs that might help them to get information about coherences within their families system their sensitivity is more than average. But on the other hand, and on the long run, these children may have a higher risk to later develop a psychic disorder such as a “borderline syndrome”. The idea behind our approach in that instance is that human beings consist of coherences and to “survive” (in a both literal, bodily and a metaphoric, mental and spiritual sense) correspondingly are in need for continuous supportive feed in form of outside coherences. Each word that could be established in a babies or child’s memory then is and acts as a little organiser to recognise and understand outside and later inside coherences. This starts as soon as it can be reliably used for attributions, and it gradually results in establishing a “narrative self”. Both the bodily and the narrative self are in permanent danger of being corrupted or even deleted by random, unpredictable and unforeseen processes. To survive, not only the material basis must be kept alive, but also the correct timing of its individual processes. To destroy an interior timing may be much easier than to destroy a material basis. One only has to interrupt internal or external communication to achieve this goal. In the following, we discuss the prerequisites and formal aspects of a successful interior and external timing. Then, we first try to overcome misleading spatial metaphors as used for aspects that are mainly time-based, and then differentiate two types of timing in information processing: a “quick and dirty” and a slow and refined one. The latter differentiation is discussed in Daniel Kahnemans well known book “Thinking, Fast and Slow. To understand how a person perceives, interprets and acts we, to our believe, need to differentiate between these two basically different systems. Doing so, we gradually come to an understanding of personhood and subjectivity that is in accordance with our basic model, and also, though taking aspects like narrativity into account, with our bodily processing.

Updating the descriptive biopsychosocial approach to fit into a formal person-centered dynamic coherence model - Part III: Personhood, salutogenesis and further topics

In the present paper the approach, as outlined in our previous articles, is applied to a range of subjects. Its main goal is to understand how human specifics such as use of language, cultural creativity, rational thinking and the use of abstractive terms interfere with human beings basic organic processes. This necessitates an examination at the level of semantics. The latter is referred to as the relationship of produced states to a meaning so that from a sender’s side they are meant to transport meaning from a receiver. Since an interaction of two distinct entities is at issue here, we have to describe the interaction in formal terms, so we talk about the hypostasising of a triggering contact of one entity’s change of states initiating a change of states of another entity. This contact can be accepted as a trigger or not as a trigger, a decision that corresponds to the most primitive form of (possibly also mutual) interpretation. With this model in mind, we can interpret different communicative settings, as the monomeric self-efficacy interpretation, or mutual interpretations in families. To interpret needs a physically memorised categorisation. Only this allows for fast and set-related attributions. Such categorisations can go wrong, especially in fast changing environments. If a higher resolution is needed, additional distinctions are implemented into the heuristic interpretative procedures. Human beings have additional tools for higher resolution in differentiation: practical segmentation and speaking. Afterwards, the products of material and logical discretisation may be re-combined into a new arrangement. The corresponding accessory potential helps to generate a world of its own, as a full-grown personhood. Human uniqueness hence is based on the individuality of each person’s material basis, as well as on its individual type of differentiation and corresponding attribution. Being aware of this, the also mental individuality allows to understand self-interpretative processes that support salutogenesis and an experience of being self-efficient, or not.

Updating the descriptive biopsychosocial approach to fit into a formal person-centered dynamic coherence model - Part I: Some few basics.

The current biopsychosocial model is predominantly descriptive and ontological semantic and formal issues need to be integrated to it in order to update this approach. Covering aspects of both human biology and human personhood requires the level of discretised facts, the level of underlying coherences and their meaning to be taken into account. For the intended and needed update to the biopsychosocial approach, the resulting model must be congruent with both science and humanities. Prevailing models of health/illness and resultant beliefs have considerable power to define which experience of sickness is valid, and who is alleviated from suffering. As a corollary, the responsibility to be as critical, and careful as possible when accepting, using, or developing, a model of human health and the development of illness is imperative. We propose that one way to address this responsibility is to formalise the most insightful and theoretically promising concept of health and the development of illness to date, George Engel’s „biopsychosocial model“ (BPS) [1]. The intention is to inform and influence healthcare research and practice towards more practicable and beneficent treatment of people within the healthcare and allied systems. The groundwork for this is presented in part I and it differentiates this paper from any other so far on the BPS. A new perspective on ancient philosophy helps to avoid separating topics that are indistinguishable, and compounding topics that should be addressed separately. Part II and part III apply this foundation to more specific issues in person-centred healthcare.

Richard Rorty and the Ironic Plenitude of Literature

When considered in relation to remarks in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rortian irony becomes a target of criticisms that see it as marred by the conflict between skeptical distance and commitment. But such critique ignores the fact that Rortian irony belongs to a broader literary intuition. In this article I trace Rorty’s concept of irony to the structural properties of a specific group of literary texts. These texts bring together diverse materials the affinity between which is precisely what is at stake in the interpretive game these texts put in motion: the formal, cognitive, and aesthetic coherence of these texts is a potentiality to be realized by readers. I treat the interpretive activity these texts depend on as equivalent to the practices by which inhabitants of democracies reexamine and recompose the materials of their networks of beliefs. Since such practices require a combination of ironic distance to the examined materials with a commitment to the interpretive process itself, they validate a Rortian model of irony.

Design Processes in Pictogram Design: Form and Harmony through Modularity

This research project aims to study and systematize design methods and procedures included in each method in order to achieve formal coherence within and between figure pictographic systems. The study focuses on two contexts included in the area of information design: Airport facilities and Olympic Games facilities. One of the intended outcomes was the possibility to propose and systematize one, or more, design methods and design procedures that aim to achieve a formal coherence in pictographic systems for use in cross-cultural facilities. Not only was it possible to obtain four different design methods and procedures, but also the opportunity to test and validate these results with a group of university students majoring in design. Of all of these, the one that ensures the attainment of formal coherence within and between figures is the Modular Standardized Grid Method. It was also considered that, when we follow a series of design procedures, which uses modular elements (formal syntactic attributes) articulated on a generating principle (grid or skeleton), the better we solve the problem of obtaining within and between formal coherence. In this paper I will mostly focus the design process through modularity. This idea came from the active research process initiated by me through the ideas originated by Otl Aicher's and Gui Bonsiepe design procedures and the way that they applied the idea of grid/pattern to the exercise of design. The results were tested in a group of 93 students. Besides the possibility to test and support the idea that a modular methods is better to obtain formal coherence, and it was also possible to get results about two different ways to use modular grids in pictogram design: Generating Grids and Regulation Grids.

Los tientos 68, 65 y 67 de &lt;em&gt;Obras de música:&lt;/em&gt; Estudio analítico de tres obras maestras de Cabezón

El presente estudio se centra en tres tientos que sin duda pueden contarse entre las obras maestras de Cabezón: los números 68, 65 y 67 de Obras de música. Este orden en particular nos permite viajar analíticamente desde un tiento largo y brillante con gran unidad modal, hasta un tiento corto e introspectivo que sin embargo incluye tres secciones, cada una de las cuales está en un modo distinto, pasando por un tiento de longitud mediana que demuestra ambigüedad estructural entre dos modos. El mundo tonal de Cabezón (y también de su tiempo) se encuentra representado en estos tres tientos en toda su riqueza y variedad. Abordamos tres aspectos de cada uno de estos tientos: organización formal, coherencia temática y relationes motívicas entre diversos sujetos, y organización modal. Lejos de ser aspectos aislados dentro del proceso musical, veremos que estos tres elementos están íntimamente relacionados en estas obras de Cabezón, y juntos constituyen y determinan las estructuras compositivas que precisamente definen estos tientos como obras maestras.

The affective sublime in Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

This paper provides a comparative analysis of Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), two recent films that engage with the sublime aesthetic. Bringing together Brian Massumi's writing on affect with Jean-François Lyotard's understanding of the sublime, we develop the notion of the ‘affective sublime’, a theoretical methodology that locates the sublime experience at the threshold between the cognitive and the corporeal. Drawing upon Lyotard's distinction between the modern and postmodern sublime, we suggest that while The Tree of Life establishes the sublime as a central absence within a nostalgic narrative, Melancholia forces a direct collision with the unpresentable. Consequently, in accordance with Massumi's delineation between emotion and affect, we suggest that the two films produce different affective responses. The Tree of Life provides absent content with formal and emotional coherence, quelling the feelings of pain and anxiety evoked by the sublime. In contrast, Melancholia refuses correct forms and actualises the potential of affective intensity through an encounter with sublime annihilation. We conclude that the affective sublime opens up new understandings of the interaction between the sublime object and spectator, one in which the visible object is less important than the sublime instant of affective experience.

GRC y el lenguaje de la forma

&lt;p&gt;Este artículo de crítica de arquitectura analiza el empleo del GRC como argumento de proyecto en vivienda colectiva, capaz de dar respuesta a soluciones de fachada que superan la planicidad, con las que demostrar la capacidad expresiva y formal de un elemento prefabricado en taller para fachada. El empleo de este sistema ha permitido dotar de una coherencia formal a las actuaciones pero permitiendo su especificidad e individualidad en el desarrollo de su piel.&lt;/p&gt;

BEYOND THE APPEREANCE OF HERITAGE: Reconstruction of Historic Areas Affected by Earthquakes in Chile

Earthquakes have progressively destroyed Chilean built heritage over the years, not only due to the initial devastation they produce but also due to the applied reconstruction approaches that follow, which has been addressed using non-specific instruments such as social housing subsidies. Moreover, it often aims only to recreate the previous built form, dwellings that look ‘as before’, but using contemporary materials and building techniques, losing the progressive and sustainable culture that used to characterize their buildings. This raises the question of authenticity and its social and normative corollaries. The objective of this paper is to explore this issue by discussing reconstruction projects that have been built in heritage areas after the 2010 earthquake, considering their formal coherence in relation to the previous architecture, as well as their applied building techniques and the inhabitants’ perception of the reconstruction process. The results indicate that the sustainability that used to characterize dwellings is not present in their replacements. This paper follows the idea that heritage should be reconsidered as a sustainable way of designing, going beyond formal approaches.

A Graded Bayesian Coherence Notion

Coherence is a key concept in many accounts of epistemic justification within ‘traditional’ analytic epistemology. Within formal epistemology, too, there is a substantial body of research on coherence measures. However, there has been surprisingly little interaction between the two bodies of literature. The reason is that the existing formal literature on coherence measure operates with a notion of belief system that is very different from—what we argue is—a natural Bayesian formalisation of the concept of belief system from traditional epistemology. Therefore, formal epistemology has so far only been concerned with one particular—arguably not even very natural—way of formalising coherence of belief systems; it has by no means refuted the viability of coherentism. In contrast to the existing literature, we formalise belief systems as families of assignments of (conditional) degrees of belief (which may be compatible with several subjective probability measures). Within this framework, we propose a Bayesian formalisation of the thrust of BonJour’s coherence concept in The structure of empirical knowledge (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985), using a combination of Bayesian confirmation theory and basic graph theory. In excursions, we introduce graded notions for both logical and probabilistic consistency of belief systems—the latter being based on certain geometrical structures induced by probabilistic belief systems. For illustration, we reconsider BonJour’s “ravens” challenge (op. cit., p. 95f.). Finally, potential objections to our proposed formal coherence notion are explored.

The dialectics of infinitism and coherentism: inferential justification versus holism and coherence

This paper formally explores the common ground between mild versions of epistemological coherentism and infinitism; it proposes—and argues for—a hybrid, coherentist–infinitist account of epistemic justification. First, the epistemological regress argument and its relation to the classical taxonomy regarding epistemic justification—of foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism—is reviewed. We then recall recent results proving that an influential argument against infinite regresses of justification, which alleges their incoherence on account of probabilistic inconsistency, cannot be maintained. Furthermore, we prove that the Principle of Inferential Justification has rather unwelcome consequences—formally resembling the Sorites paradox—as soon as it is iterated and combined with a natural Bayesian perspective on probabilistic inferences. We conclude that strong versions of foundationalism and infinitism should be abandoned. Positively, we provide a rough sketch for a graded formal coherence notion, according to which infinite regresses of epistemic justification will often have more than a minimal degree of coherence.

Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire by Michael J. Puri (review)

Ravel the Decadent: Sublimation, and Desire. By Michael J. Puri. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. [vii, 272 p. ISBN 9780199735372. $24.95.] examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.Michael Puri's marvelous book follows a spate of recent scholarship on Maurice Ravel. Collections such as Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the (ed. Peter Kaminsky [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011]) and Ravel Studies (ed. Deborah Mawer [Cambridge: Cam - bridge University Press, 2010]), as well as individual studies such as Stephan Zank's Irony and Sound: The of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009) and Roger Nichols's recent biography Ravel (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni - versity Press, 2012) have greatly enriched the field of Ravel studies over the past few years. Strikingly absent from these contributions, however, is any discussion of the relationship between Ravel's music and the Decadence, a late nineteenth-century artistic and cultural phenomenon. Ravel came of age in the era of Decadent authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde, and the composer frequently acknowledged their influence upon him. Puri's is the first text to link Ravel's music explicitly with the Decadent movement and to develop analytical techniques that examine it music in terms of Decadent aesthetics. Puri considers musical Decadence primarily in terms of time and memory, an approach that accords well with the analytical techniques he develops.Ravel the Decadent's 201 pages of text are structured into six concise chapters, in addition to an introduction on Memory, Decadence, and Music and a concluding section with the title the Footsteps of the Faun. In his introduction, Puri provides a brief overview of the Decadent movement in France and explains the more general concept of lowercase-d decadence as a style that emphasizes the detail at the expense of the whole, thereby reflecting in art the increasing isolation of the individual within modern society (pp. 6-7). Puri follows Nietzsche in identifying the dialectical nature of D/decadence: tendency towards simultaneous con - flicting impulses, such as the transhistorical and the historically contingent, the real and the imaginary, or the natural and the artificial. Later in his book, Puri identifies this conflict in Ravel's music: for example, in the dialectical relationship between the idyll and the bacchanal movements of his ballet Daphnis et Chloe.Unsurprisingly, Puri's writing is most evocative when he discusses Decadence's relationship to and desire, defining as either the past become pres ent or the ability to make the past present (p. 15). He contrasts and memory, describing the latter as unconscious and brought on by sensation rather than intellect. Evoking Baudelaire, Puri compares memory to electric shocks, entering through the body and startling the rememberer out of the oblivion brought on by the dulling effect of the mundane and the quotidian (p. 16). Thus, for Puri, memory is a decidedly Decadent experience. After a brief discussion of in Proust, Puri concludes his introduction with an analysis of Ravel's Sonatina. He sees in the second movement's Minuet, with evocation of the Verlainian fete galante, a kind of self-conscious nostalgia for the past-a form of voluntary memory-that then sets the stage for a disruptive episode of involuntary memory.The book's first chapter explores the ways that Ravel's finales wrangle with what Puri calls the fundamental ambivalence of thematic cyclicism, its potential both to foster and to undermine a sense of formal coherence (p. 32). For contextual and theoretical grounding, Puri draws upon both Proust's notion of intermittence from his A la recherche du temps perdu and Vincent d'Indy's idea of synthetic unity from the second book of his Cours de composition musicale. …

Les Recits de conjuration sous Louis XIV

Interest in revolts and representations of them in France persisted well after the Fronde and throughout the absolute rule of Louis XIV. In his well-written Les Récits de conjuration sous Louis XIV, Bruno Tribout helps to illuminate this aspect of the second half of the seventeenth century by offering a carefully researched examination of the aesthetic of some of the principal récits de conjuration written and published in the period. Tribout and the texts he analyses use ‘conjuration’ not in the earlier sense of the word dating from the twelfth century and relating to oaths, formulas, and rites for driving away the devil and evil, but rather in the political sense that appeared at the end of the fifteenth century, as a clandestine agreement sealed with a solemn promise by a group of individuals against a state or a sovereign, which is close in meaning to ‘conspiracy’ in English. The corpus of the récits de conjuration analysed in this book includes liberal translations and anonymous texts, some by less well-known authors, others by some of the most important intellectual figures in the seventeenth century, such as Jean-François Sarasin, César Vichard de Saint-Réal, and Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal de Retz. At several points Tribout expresses his debt to Jean Lafond, whose groundbreaking article inspired Tribout's research (‘L'Imaginaire de la conjuration dans la littérature française du xviie siècle’, in Complots et conjurations dans l'Europe moderne, ed. by Yves-Marie Bercé and Elena Fasano Guarini (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), pp. 117–35). Lafond's article is excellent, and I would recommend that anyone interested in conspiracies in the seventeenth century read it alongside Tribout's book, or, if one is pressed for time, just read the article, as Tribout and Lafond cover much of the same territory, although Tribout examines a larger number of texts and does so in far greater detail. This is to be expected, as Lafond's article is less than twenty pages while Tribout's book weighs in at 660 pages and is a comprehensive study based on his doctoral dissertation. However, Tribout's study also diverges from Lafond's by reconceiving and clarifying the parameters and characteristics of the récits de conjuration as a genre. Whereas Lafond argues that they form a subgenre of historiographical literature exhibiting formal coherence because of the density and brevity of their expression, Tribout founds the homogeneity of the corpus on the common efforts of the authors to exploit the borders between genres in order to bend a well-known model of history to their own uses, while maintaining an equilibrium between praising good monarchs and subjects who revolt against bad monarchs and blaming bad monarchs and subjects who revolt without good cause. Tribout's book makes a significant contribution to the study of a fascinating group of texts that have received little attention from literary scholars, and it devotes admirable care in attending to the singularity of the texts while working to define the relation among them.

The Invention of Personality in Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione

The philological segment of Valla’s De falso that is the basis for most claims about the text’s innovative and distinctly modern character is only one part of the larger oration, which includes three invented speeches – mere fiction by modern historiographical standards. But by reading these speeches in light of the text’s other anthropocentric inventions – including “Palea” the forger and the author’s own first person ethos – we can better understand Valla’s reliance on the non-logical or indirect means of persuasion and in doing so, see both the formal coherence of Valla’s decision to link fabricated speeches with applied philology and the personality-informed model of textual interpretation that results.

Global Design. Schools in Portugal

Since its very beginning, the design of educational spaces is strongly connected with issues on pedagogy, hygiene, order and discipline, collective identity (hence with history, traditions, modernity and innovation). To materialize the concept of global design, seeking formal coherence and a close functional and ideological articulation between all components, furniture design is fundamental as is the role of fine arts. Addressing the relationship with the context implies considering the links established with all other objects which form the school system in its several degrees (nursery, primary, secondary, superior) and scales (the neighbourhood, the city, the country).

What Sticks: Freccerian Lessons for a Modernist

It is now thirty-five years since I left Yale University to take up a position on faculty at University of Chicago. As I think back to my years as a graduate student in Italian Studies program at Yale, from late 1960s to early 1970s, I am amazed at how vivid lessons of John Freccero remain even today. By lessons, I am referring not only to classroom lectures he gave in unforgettable courses on Dante, Petrarca, and Modern Novel, but also to aspects of our work as literary scholars that he revealed in both direct and oblique ways, and that have stuck with me throughout my own career. As a young initiate, I may not have fully appreciated how essential and lasting Freccero 's gifts to us would be, but more than three decades later I have no doubt that his work and his being as a scholar and mentor were fundamental in shaping and directions of my own by-now long experience as a member of what we call the academic world. Having decided to write a dissertation on poetry of Eugenio Mon tale, and thus marking myself as a modernist, I chose a path that might seem to have created a radical distance between Freccero 's primary focus on Dante, and my focus on modern poetry. This is true in some sense, but what is more significant, I think, is how relevant Freccero made Dante's great poem to study of poetry tout court. As he wrote, The perennial problem in literary interpretation is problem of relationship of form to content, or of poetics to thematics (Freccero 1986, 258). Thematic coherence is result of formal coherence. We can interrogate issue of coherence of Dante's Christian faith, but it is ultimately coherence of his poem

Approximate Symmetry Reduction Approach: Infinite Series Reductions to the KdV-Burgers Equation

For weak dispersion and weak dissipation cases, the (1+1)-dimensional KdV-Burgers equation is investigated in terms of approximate symmetry reduction approach. The formal coherence of similarity reduction solutions and similarity reduction equations of different orders enables series reduction solutions. For the weak dissipation case, zero-order similarity solutions satisfy the Painlevé II, Painlevé I, and Jacobi elliptic function equations. For the weak dispersion case, zero-order similarity solutions are in the form of Kummer, Airy, and hyperbolic tangent functions. Higher-order similarity solutions can be obtained by solving linear variable coefficients ordinary differential equations.