Formal Demands Research Articles

Loop and Life: A False Start into Protocinematic Photographic Representations of Movement

Eadweard Muybridge and Ottomar Anschütz are regarded as predecessors of cinema. Both produced series of chronophotographs that would create the impression of a moving image when set in motion. In both cases the series of images were mounted as loops on disks or drums similar to those used for optical toys throughout the nineteenth century. As the loop makes certain formal demands on the images used for it, the photographic series had to meet them. Yet, when the disks or drums with them were spun, the movement created would appear to be repetitive, colliding with notions of temporality and truth attributed to photography. Under these conditions the shift from photographic animation to cinematic film appears to be a break more than a smooth transition.

Four Translations of Dante's Inferno

Four Translations of Dante's Inferno J. T. Barbarese (bio) Dante Alighieri , Inferno, translated and annotated by Elio Zappulla. Pantheon, 1998. 314 pages. $42; Dante Alighieri , Inferno, a verse rendering by John Ciardi. Mentor, 1954, 1982. 288 pages; Dante Aligheri , The Divine Comedy, a verse translation with introductions and commentary by Allen Mandelbaum. University of California Press, 1980. 430 pages; Dante Alighieri , Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. Doubleday, 2000. 672 pages. $40. When John Ciardi translated The Inferno, over fifty years ago, he approached it through a poet's sensitivity to the limits of translation and an amateur Dante scholar's sense of the scholarly headaches. The bulk of theological, political, and historical information is a problem for both Italian and English readers. Ciardi's solution was to produce endnotes that are not only lucid but so appealingly down-to-earth that the notes might alone justify the translation. The larger problem, though, is represented by the formal demands of terza rima, which you cannot just ignore. Nothing comparable exists anywhere in our English narrative verse aside from Shelley's last great lyrics—isometrics carried out against the example of Dante's great original. This is not the place to argue the inextricable dependence of form on idea, or how form in poetry really is ideology. Had Shelley finished The Triumph of Life, he might have left an English terza rima suited to the verse narrative of such a rhyme-poor and uninflected language as ours. As it is, the form comes down to us intact in wonders like "Ode to the West Wind" or in distant homages to its tensile strength such as Stevens's "Auroras of Autumn." It is hard to approach Elio Zappulla's elegant, dignified, and altogether faithful version of Inferno without finding it in the shadow of Ciardi's. Zappulla's scholarship is satisfying, and his notes, from the vantage of amateur Dantisti, probably better—less interpretive, perhaps a richer source of cultural detail. Take, for instance, Ciardi's note to the heroic political figure whom Dante calls only the "Greyhound" in canto 1. As he often does, Dante refuses to enlighten his readers; that's part of the spiritual test. Ciardi tells you only that the reference is almost certainly to Can Grande, Dante's patron; Zappulla, however, reminds you, cannily, that Can Grande was not just Dante's literary godfather but a powerful political boss whose name meant Big Dog. Zappulla's scholarship seems sturdier, less chatty, and on the whole more dependable, with an inevitability that is satisfying if you read the notes only for information. [End Page 647] Nevertheless you easily warm to Ciardi's way of buttonholing you in those bibliographic alleyways that scholarship reserves for unimpressive but useful data. Take this one example (among dozens) that occurs in a note to canto 21 dealing with Dante's "coarseness . . . [which] has offended certain delicate readers": "It is worth pointing out that the mention of bodily function is likely to be more shocking in a Protestant than in a Catholic culture. It has often seemed to me that the offensive language of Protestantism is obscenity; the offensive language of Catholicism is profanity or blasphemy: one offends on a scale of unmentionable words for bodily function, the other on a scale of disrespect for the sacred." "The difference," he goes on to say—the full note runs for two paragraphs—"is not national, but religious"; to illustrate his argument Ciardi refers to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. In something as small as a note to a single canto Ciardi's sensibility is ranging as he pulls all the loose ends together, organizing out of all the data, even seeming incidentals, the substance of a worldview. It is what contributes to Ciardi's translation's lasting charm, and what makes the Norton company's dropping Ciardi's for Allen Mandelbaum's relatively lifeless translation (in the most recent edition of Norton's World Masterpieces) difficult to justify. Yet Zappulla's choice of the English blank-verse line may have been a mistake. Blank verse comes to readers of English covered with Shakespeare's and Milton's fingerprints. What we hear are...

American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth (review)

Reviewed by: American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth Sergio Perosa Peter Rawlings. American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth. London: Routledge, 2006. xii+171 pp. $23.95 (paperback). This is a complex and finely structured work of criticism. It brings together for discussion three complementary and at the same time different American theorists of the novel on the ground that “[t]he ethics of reading and writing and the moral consequences of formal and technical decisions are central concerns” for them: “James, Trilling and Booth focus not only on what texts are, but also on how they are brought together or on what it is about their organization that makes them tick” (3). Rawlings avers that they “occupy common ground; but they often do very different things in it” (112). [James] made at least two enduring contributions to the theory of the novel: he succeeded in establishing it as a worthy object of critical attention by lifting it to the level of an art; and . . . he helped to initiate discussions about structure, narrative method, representation, moral thinking, and interpretation that continue to exert a powerful influence on contemporary literary criticism. Lionel Trilling built on the moral and social dimension of James’s writing to foster a role for himself as a cultural critic at a time when the New Critics were becoming obsessed with form and technique. These are the two strands that Booth attempts to re-unite in The Rhetoric of Fiction. (129–30) This conclusion is reached through a meticulous and perceptive discussion of their general views and their “key ideas” on such topics as realism and representation (sect. 2); authors, narrators, and narration (sect. 3); points of view, and centers of consciousness (sect. 4); readers, reading, and interpretation (sect. 5); and moral intelligence (sect. 6). James’s critical and theoretical work is rightly seen as “the culmination of later nineteenth-century explorations of the craft of fiction and the beginning of twentieth-century ways of thinking about the novel” and as “one of the progenitors” of Trilling and Booth (119). In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) he challenged dismissive views of the [End Page 291] novel and advocated its status as one of the “fine arts” (a far from accepted view at the time): giving the novel an “air of reality” would allow it to “compete with life.” This was James’s response to the contemporary debate on realism: an adherence to social aspects combined with imagination and formal awareness would provide the necessary “illusion of reality.” Fiction was based for him on the organic principle (“A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism,” he wrote in that essay). While needing no externally imposed or conscious moral purpose, the cultivation of intelligence in author and readers would provide its moral quality and foster responsible behavior. Fiction would thrive on selection and rearrangement of the data of experience, on impersonality, and benefit greatly—but not always—from the perspective of a restricted, rather than omniscient, point of view: a center of consciousness or narrator involved in the action, with all its good and frustrating consequences, including uncertainty and unreliability of meaning. In particular cases, such as “The Turn of the Screw,” Rawlings writes, “misunderstanding is the very fuel of action” (69). “The old certainties were giving way to considerable uncertainty” (84): James himself had warned that centers or “vessels of consciousness” should not be “too interpretative of the muddle of life” (qtd. in Rawlings 84). James’s 1907–09 prefaces are extensively presented as acts of repossessing and revitalizing his novels and tales and as a monument to the writer’s need of aesthetic control in balancing “realism, the illusion of realism, and the formal demands of art” (89), whose implied achievement of a “moral” sense, as James famously wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady and similarly elsewhere, depended “on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it” (106). He defined “moral consciousness” as “stirred intelligence” and equated it with the artistic sense (115). For him, Rawlings writes, novels “should not transmit moral principles and rules...

Scientific Innovation and Non-Western Regional Economies: Cuban Biotechnology's ‘Experimental Milieu’

A good deal of research within the cultural turn in economic geography has sought to understand the relationship between economic activity and regional culture. This work encompasses an increasingly heterodox set of approaches to regional economic activity, from innovation studies to processes of embedding to accounts of regional learning and clustering, and an increasingly broad set of empirical cases through which these issues are regularly discussed. Only recently has the literature had much to say about the relationship between scientific knowledge and regional culture, however, or about the empirical experience of non-Western regional economic activity and forms of innovation within this. This paper seeks to further develop these two recent strands by bringing them together. Firstly it transposes the study of high-technology regional cultures to a developing world and socialist country context. I examine, as a case study, Cuba's Science Pole, a biomedical growth pole on the outskirts of Havana comprising some forty-two interlinked institutions and 14 000 scientists. I show how a space for biotechnology was created and maintained outside of the capitalist milieu with which the industry has come to be associated in the West. More specifically, I reveal how the formal demands made by the Cuban state of this biotechnology endeavour paradoxically encouraged the development of a suite of informal and innovative scientific practices. To account for how this very different approach nevertheless resulted in a similar ‘regional culture’ of innovation to that found in high-technology regions in the West, I suggest we need to consider not just the structural components of regional cultures (labour mobility, attitudes to risk, etc) but also the forms of rationality that underpin such factors themselves. In order to do this I turn to some of the insights of the science-studies literature as to the epistemological foundations of processes of innovation and knowledge production, to argue that regional cultures of innovation are never just economic spaces, they are also epistemic spaces.

Unsettling boundaries in making a space for research

In engaging in research we draw upon and develop meanings and concepts that help to frame what we do, how we do it and the meaning we make of it. In the process of framing, we exclude other possibilities from our research practices. To do research, then, is to engage in the fashioning of conceptual boundaries. This article explores the dilemmas of boundary‐making in the context of a research project aimed at exploring the border literacy practices of students in UK further education, those boundary‐crossing practices which relate to the everyday and more formal demands of the curriculum. This discussion is related to wider debates in the social sciences on the significance of boundaries and borders and their powerful effects on identities and actions.

Neural Activity in Monkey Prefrontal Cortex Is Modulated by Task Context and Behavioral Instruction during Delayed-match-to-sample and Conditional Prosaccade—Antisaccade Tasks

Complex behavior often requires the formation of associations between environmental stimuli and motor responses appropriate to those stimuli. Moreover, the appropriate response to a given stimulus may vary depending on environmental context. Stimulus-response associations that are adaptive in one situation may not be in another. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been shown to be critical for stimulus-response mapping and the implementation of task context. To investigate the neural representation of sensory-motor associations and task context in the PFC, we recorded the activity of prefrontal neurons in two monkeys while they performed two tasks. The first task was a delayed-match-to-sample task in which monkeys were presented with a sample picture and rewarded for making a saccade to the test picture that matched the sample picture following a delay period. The second task was a conditional visuomotor task in which identical sample pictures were presented. In this task, animals were rewarded for performing either prosaccades or antisaccades following the delay period depending on sample picture identity. PFC neurons showed task selectivity, object selectivity, and combinations of task and object selectivity. These modulations of activity took the form of a reduction in stimulus and delay-related activity, and a pro/anti instruction-based grouping of delay activity in the conditional visuomotor task. These data show that activity in PFC neurons is modulated by experimental context, and that this activity represents the formal demands of the task currently being performed.

Animal experimentation

Millions of animals are used every year in often times extremely painful and distressing scientific procedures. Legislation of animal experimentation in modern societies is based on the supposition that this is ethically acceptable when certain more or less defined formal (e.g. logistical, technical) demands and ethical principles are met. The main parameters in this context correspond to the "3Rs" concept as defined by Russel and Burch in 1959, i.e. that all efforts to replace, reduce and refine experiments must be undertaken. The licensing of animal experiments normally requires an ethical evaluation process, often times undertaken by ethics committees. The serious problems in putting this idea into practice include inter alia unclear conditions and standards for ethical decisions, insufficient management of experiments undertaken for specific (e.g. regulatory) purposes, and conflicts of interest of ethics committees' members. There is an ongoing societal debate about ethical issues of animal use in science. Existing EU legislation on animal experimentation for cosmetics testing is an example of both the public will for setting clear limits to animal experiments and the need to further critically examine other fields and aspects of animal experimentation.

Indigenous Conception of Intelligence, Ideal Child, and Ideal Parenting among Ethiopian Jews in Israel

A community’s conception of child development, “native theories” of socialization, the meta-communicative framework, the cultural meaning and value system—including the parent-child dyadic relationship—as part of the wider historical and cultural process significantly influence the construction of a person. It includes reference to literacy events, parents’ conceptions of the ideal child, their educational objectives, and indigenous conception of “intelligence,” all of which can influence the academic progress of Ethiopian children. Although these cultural practices, native theories of development, and conceptions of “schooling” are “functional” and valued within the group—especially in their Ethiopian socio-cultural and economic milieu—the group’s encounter with the Israeli schools and other social systems has created a conflict that works to the disadvantage of Ethiopian children. The data presented here show the rift between school ethos and home environment of Ethiopian children, which inadequately prepares them for formal demands of the Israeli school system. There is a discontinuity between home and school, non-existent among middle class Israeli children.

Dream poetry as dream work.

This paper explores the relationship between dream poetry and dream work by presenting a representative dream poem, along with the text of the dream that inspired it; examining some of its poetic qualities and showing how these figured in the writing of the poem; and comparing the dream writing process to dream interpretation and to Jungian active imagination work. The formal demands of poetry introduce a unique type of critical thought into the creative process that develops the dream material in ways different from other forms of dream work. Writing dream poetry differs from both dream interpretation and active imagination in important ways, but can be viewed as a form of non-interpretative dream work. These observations are probably generalizable to all forms of dream writing and dream art.

Neuronal correlates of context-related behavior

Everyday behavior is typically more complicated than a one-to-one mapping between a stimulus and a response; the same stimulus can lead to different behaviors depending on the situation, or different stimuli may induce the same behavior. In such cases, knowledge of the formal demands of the actual task is required. These formal demands depend clearly on the context in which the subject is placed. This paper provides an overview of such context-related behaviors, including perception and action and some of their basic neuronal correlates in the central nervous system.

Preparing for Primary School in Singapore - Aspects of Adjustment to the more Formal Demands of the Primary One Mathematics Syllabus

This paper reports some findings from the project: A study of children in transition from pre to primary school: cognitive, language, and socio-emotional adjustments. The longitudinal study focuses on children's transition to primary one. It is noted that although attempts are made by selected pre-schools to ease the entry to primary school by preparing children and their parents to bridge the gap, many find the differences they encounter daunting. Expectations of primary schools are high, and parents are anxious about preparation. Furthermore, many studies have highlighted the strong support networks which Asian parents provide for their children and the implications for later learning in school, especially in mathematics. This paper will identify the nature of this support for numeracy development as far as a group of parents in Singapore is concerned. It will be evident that Singaporean parents invest much time and effort in preparing children for primary school. They see this as essential for accessing entry to a meritocratic education system geared towards raising global economic competitiveness through an ability-driven curriculum. They are resourceful and competitive in securing a sure start in pre-school, where parental involvement is not always encouraged (Sharpe, 1991). Hence, it is concluded that Singaporean parents' numeracy support strategies result in a special kind of agenda for their children.

Art as Dramatization

Dramatise, dramatise! was insistent cry that haunted Henry James's artistic genius.' celebrated novelist knew himself a failure in theatre; his plays were almost all rejected for production, and one of only two produced was roundly booed on London stage. Yet James realized, with brave honesty, that basic principle of drama nonetheless held key to artistic greatness. Distinguishing nicely between terms Theatre-stuff' and Dramastuff'-between concrete stage performance and what he called deeper divine principle of Scenario (equally realizable in novels, films, and television), James turned that essential dramatic principle more consciously to work in composing later works of fiction that crown his great career: The scenic method, he wrote, my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation. That salvation is evident in his posthumous dramatic success, in frequent adaptations of his fiction into TV dramas and films, and even into two operas by Benjamin Britten.2 James's assertion of drama's superiority could have rested on ancient philosophical authority, but it was also not uncommon in his own time, and after. Nietzsche, for example, just a year younger than James, was quick to affirm Richard Wagner's recognition that the greatest influence of all arts could be exercised through theatre.3 Some generations later, James's native countryman and fellow Anglophile, T. S. Eliot, would reaffirm supremacy of drama the ideal medium for poetry. Combining power of meaningful action with beauty of musical order, poetic drama could capture two exquisitely precious and different kinds of aesthetic value not easily synthesized in a single form. And through its theatrical performance, Eliot further argued, drama enabled poet to reach as large and miscellaneous an audience possible.4 Eliot therefore made his own sustained efforts to write for theatre, where, however, he enjoyed only little more initial success than James. (The Broadway hit Cats, though based on Eliot's light verse, is a posthumous dramatization of poetry that he in fact never intended for theatre, let alone musical theatre.) Considered from point of view of practicing artists (rather than that of philosophers), drama's preeminence derives not only from its presumed ability to reach more people and move them more powerfully and completely than other arts (something that may be truer today for cinema than for theatre). There is also (dare I say it an American) charm that a successful theatre play could bring in quickest (if not always, ultimately) greatest income to its author. We know from private correspondence that money was certainly one motive for James's interest in writing for theatre. But presence of this motive in no way falsifies sincerity of his adulation of drama, which he praised the of arts, long before he ever seriously thought of a career in playwriting. James thought drama was noblest because it was most challenging-combining gravest formal demands of masterly structure with highest requirement of significance of subject.'5 In this paper, I want to go beyond these more familiar assertions of drama's preeminent influence and nobility in order to suggest that concept of drama embodies and unites two of deepest, most important conditions of art

Task-specific neural activity in the primate prefrontal cortex.

Real-world behavior is typically more complicated than a one-to-one mapping between a stimulus and response; the same stimulus can lead to different behaviors depending on the situation, or the same behavior may be cued by different stimuli. In such cases, knowledge of the formal demands of the task at hand is required. We found that in monkeys trained to alternate between three tasks, the activity of many neurons in the prefrontal cortex was task dependent. This included changes in overall firing rate, in firing-rate profiles (shape of responses over time), and in stimulus and response selectivity. These findings support the hypothesis that a major prefrontal function is the acquisition and implementation of task context and the "rules" used to guide behavior.

Doctors on tribunals. A confusion of roles.

Mental health review tribunals are required to apply legal criteria within a clinical context. This can create tensions within both law and psychiatry. To examine the role of the medical member of the tribunal as a possible mediator between the two disciplines. Observation of tribunal hearings and panel deliberations and interviews with tribunal members were used to describe the role of the medical member. The dual roles imposed on the medical member as witness and decision-maker and as doctor and legal actor create formal demands and ethical conflicts that are hard, in practice, either to meet or to resolve. The structure for providing tribunals with access to expert psychiatric input and advice requires reconsideration.

"Work without Hope": Anxiety and Embarrassment in Coleridge's Sonnets

love Sonnets; but upon my honor I do not love my Sonnets. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge PERHAPS BECAUSE FROM A FORMAL STANDPOINT HE WAS SO DOGGEDLY unconventional, Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems an unlikely sonneteer. Fourteen lines, it would seem, hardly could contain his expansive imagination. Coleridge's muse, unlike Wordsworth's, naturally would fret at the narrow confines of its convent. While not as prolific a sonneteer as Wordsworth or even Keats, Coleridge, however, did play an important role in the romantic-era sonnet revival, beginning in 1788 when he composed To the Autumnal Moon and continuing through 1796 when he published a volume of his own sonnets as well as the pamphlet Sonnets Various Authors, with its prefatory essay, one of the few coherent statements of the theory and practice of the romantic-period sonnet. The essay is also where Coleridge credits Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles with reviving the English-language sonnet, deducing its laws, he says emphatically, from their compositions instead of Petrarch's.(1) Bowles's early influence on Coleridge has been the subject of much curiosity and study, wonder even, but few scholars have studied Coleridge as a sonneteer or have considered his sonnets in light of the romantic-era sonnet revival, particularly in the decade prior to Wordsworth's serious adoption of the form.(2) Doing so puts into sharper focus his complex attitude towards the sonnet during the 1790s, the period of his most active involvement with the form. As a sonneteer, Coleridge, not surprisingly, is deferential to Bowles, his model; but he also is curiously defensive about the sonnet itself. His active participation in the sonnet revival, his preoccupation with the form, and his admiration for Bowles's sonnets reveal that the sonnet is the source of anxiety and embarrassment for Coleridge. As he wrote to fellow sonneteer John Thelwall in 1796, love Sonnets; but upon my honor I do not love my Sonnets.(3) The form itself becomes for Coleridge a locus of considerable angst, troping his personal worries in sonnets that are, in fact, the most intimate poems in his oeuvre. The sonnet, with its considerable formal demands, becomes, moreover, the site of Coleridge's most self-conscious and deliberate poetic composition and ultimately of his self-perceived inadequacies as a poet. Coleridge's sonnet writing is, as he later would call it, work without hope. 1. So tender, and yet so manly The anxieties of form Coleridge associates with the sonnet are complicated by the embarrassments of gender. Considering Coleridge's participation in the female-dominated sonnet revival sheds new light on the ways in which male poets, such as Coleridge, Bowles, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, followed directly Charlotte Smith's lead. First published in 1784, Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, as Coleridge's praise indicates, revived the sonnet form and became part of the cultural consciousness during the 1780s and '90s.(4) Smith's feminization of the sonnet also became somewhat of an embarrassment for the sonnet tradition. The sonnets are not themselves defective; rather, their popularity and influence made them perfect targets for parroting and parody.(5) Even Coleridge published, in 1796, an imitation of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets in subject, tone, and form, the sonnet To the Autumnal Moon: Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night! Mother of wildly-working visions! hail! I watch thy gliding, while with watery light Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil; And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high; And when thou dartest the wind-rent cloud Thy placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky. Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair! Now dimly peering on the wistful sight; Now hid behind the dragon wing'd Despair: But soon emerging in her radiant might She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight. …

Before The Raising of the Cross: The Origins of Rubens's Earliest Antwerp Altarpieces

This essay argues that a design for a triptych whose authenticity has previously been rejected is both Rubens's original program for the high altar of the Antwerp church of St. Walburgis and the source for two of his best-known altarpieces—The Real Presence in the Holy Sacrament and The Raising of the Cross. It also advances the hypothesis about the evolution of these works which provides a new perspective on Rubens's response to the formal and iconographic demands of the Post-Tridentine Flemish altarpiece as well as new insights into his process of invention.

Before The Raising of the Cross: The Origins of Rubens's Earliest Antwerp Altarpieces

This essay argues that a design for a triptych whose authenticity has previously been rejected is both Rubens's original program for the high altar of the Antwerp church of St. Walburgis and the source for two of his best-known altarpieces—The Real Presence in the Holy Sacrament and The Raising of the Cross. It also advances the hypothesis about the evolution of these works which provides a new perspective on Rubens's response to the formal and iconographic demands of the Post-Tridentine Flemish altarpiece as well as new insights into his process of invention.

Precise spike synchronization among monkey motor cortical neurons related to the specification of movement direction and reaction time

Everyday behavior is typically more complicated than a one-to-one mapping between a stimulus and a response; the same stimulus can lead to different behaviors depending on the situation, or different stimuli may induce the same behavior. In such cases, knowledge of the formal demands of the actual task is required. These formal demands depend clearly on the context in which the subject is placed. This paper provides an overview of such context-related behaviors, including perception and action and some of their basic neuronal correlates in the central nervous system.

Heidegger's formal indication : A question of method in Being and Time

For Heidegger, phenomenological investigation is carried out by “formal indication,” the name given to the methodical approach he assumes in Being and Time. This paper attempts to draw attention to the nature of formal indication in light of the fact that it has been largely lost upon American scholarship (mainly due to its inconsistent translation). The roots of the concept of “formal indication” are shown in two ways. First, its thematic treatment in Heidegger's 1921/22 Winter Semester course, “Phenomenological Investigations into Aristotle,” is examined to make clear what Heidegger silently assumes in Being and Time. Second, Heidegger's adaptation of Husserl's use of the term, “indication,” is outlined to clarify the concept even more. The enhanced understanding of formal indication granted by these two points leads to a better grasp of Heidegger's concept of truth, for formal indication and truth are mutually implied for Heidegger. Finally, it is suggested that the reader of Being and Time, on the basis of what formal indication demands, approach the work not as a doctrine to be learned but as a task always requiring further completion.

A Researcher's Privilege: Does Any Hope Remain?

Scholars and subpoenas coexist uneasily. For at least a half century, formal demands for discovery of research results, or research in process, have posed an acute dilemma for the scholarly community. A scholar's unique academic research can, through judicial action, be wrested from the scholar and involved in often-lengthy litigation. Courts have struggled to balance the contending interests, particularly during the last quarter century. Sometimes the demands are granted, and sensitive material is required to be turned over to litigants. Other times, scholars have prevailed-usually on rather narrow, fact-based principles. The research topics that have triggered such demands by the judicial system have varied with the issues of the times. Perhaps the first such dispute involved FBI threats to subpoena highly sensitive material on sex research held by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Since the Institute had pledged confidentiality to many of its research subjects, its officers insisted it could not comply with the FBI demand and would, if necessary, accept the consequences of such defiance. In the end, the FBI backed down and a legal resolution was not required.1 In the 1960s and 1970s, several research issues that reached the courts grew directly out of the Vietnam War.2 The years since then have brought cases involving demands for disclosure of research on subjects as varied as unsafe automobiles,3 medical devices,4 and employee morale in large public utilities.5 The 1990s have seen the focus of such litigation shift to research on cigarettes and their effects. Mounting pressures on the tobacco industry, chiefly through damage claims by former smokers or their families, or by states seeking to recover the costs of treating smokers, have intensified the potential importance of