Aesthetic Grounds Research Articles

"A Silent Partner Long Enough": Phelps Rewrites Gaskell's North and South

"A SILENT PARTNER LONG ENOUGH": PHELPS REWRITES GASKELL'S NORTH AND SOUTH Jill Bergman University of Montana Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1871 labor novel, The Silent Partner, met with mixed reviews from the beginning. A review in Literary World praised the novel in its day for its "superior realism," but the New York Times criticized it for its "slight story" and its "extremely unsatisfactory and discouraging conclusion."1 The mixed reviews have continued as modern scholars seek to assess literary works on ideological as well as aesthetic grounds. Specifically, recent reception of The Silent Partner has found it difficult to reconcile the novel's pro-labor, anti-capitalist rhetoric with the scene in which protagonist and reformer, Perley Kelso, uses her sway with the mill workers to persuade them to accept reduced wages rather than going on strike. In their afterword to the 1983 edition of the novel, Florence Howe and Mari Jo Buhle credit Phelps with trying to cross the "rigid boundaries of social class," yet they identify as "problematic " "Perley's ability to foreclose [rather than support] the strike near the novel's end." They see this moment as "a sign of the limited political vision of the young novelist."2 Judith Fetterley in 1986 noted inconsistencies in the novel. She convincingly argues that although Phelps's protagonist comes to identify with laborers due to their shared status as outsiders to language, this same protagonist shifts her position in the strike scene to side with the mill owners, "advocating her own silence" and effectively silencing the workers .3 Amy Schräger Lang in 1994 offered an explanation for the novel's incongruities, asserting that the "politics of representation, the imperatives of the novel form, and the reformist intent of the author require radically different interpretive frames."4 In short, scholars seem agreed that the novel is of at least two minds, and have tried to make sense of that. Nina Baym's introduction to Phelps's spiritualist novels may offer an explanation for this reception. Discussing Phelps's life and work, Baym places her among her late-nineteenth-century writing contemporaries and points to the "[nostalgia] for antebellum ideals of Christian domesticity and homogeneous community life" that 148¡ill Bergman caused these women writers to struggle "to situate women like themselves —white, Anglo, genteel, idealistic, socially conscious—in a world constantly outrunning their efforts to grasp it." This struggle, and the work arising from it, says Baym, "has been especially difficult for contemporary critics to appreciate on its own terms."5 We can better appreciate The Silent Partner "on its own terms" by placing its "struggle to situate women" within its transatlantic literary context. Scholars to date have overlooked the striking similarity between Phelps's novel and Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel, North and South; nevertheless, Phelps's novel borrows directly from Gaskell's in its basic plot, as well as in specific scenes—notably, the troubling strike scene.6 If we assume an intentional borrowing (and indeed I do not see how we cannot), an examination of the ways Phelps rewrites Gaskell illuminates her goals in the novel and explains her treatment (or neglect) of class tensions. In responding to and rewriting Gaskell's novel, specifically her treatment of a woman's acceptable role in business and marriage, Phelps responds to a previous generation of women writers, the generation of her own mother, author Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815-1852), writing at roughly the same time as Gaskell. In North and South, Gaskell ultimately proposes the model of a silent partnership for women in business via marriage, a model Phelps explicitly rejects. By rewriting this Victorian novel, Phelps challenges what she judges to be outdated expectations for women, expectations that she encountered in her youth and grappled with in much of her work. Let me begin by highlighting some of the striking similarities between these two novels: In North and South, protagonist Margaret Hale—a gentleman's daughter who has recently relocated to the industrial town of Milton—has taken a keen interest in the labor tensions in the town. She befriends one of the mill workers and his daughter, who is ill due to her work...

Thomas Wolfe's Civil War ed. by David Madden (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS David Madden, ed. Thomas Wolfe's Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004, 224 pages. Paperback. $19.95 When Maxwell Perkins accepted the manuscript for what would eventually become known as Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe's first novel, one of the major cuts he required to reduce the novel by 90,000 words was the book's opening scene, which recounted W. O. Gant's boyhood experience of watching Confederate soldiers march into Pennsylvania on their way to the Battle of Gettysburg. While many allusions to the Civil War pepper the bildungsroman, none offer a sustained depiction of the war's effect on the Gant family, the autobiographical counterpart of Wolfe's own. Even though cutting this material made a more tightly structured novel, Perkins' intention, it also concealed a major theme of Wolfe's, which explores the effects of the Civil War on his own life, on the Southern character, and on America's post-bellum destiny. This important but rarely published episode makes up the first of nine selections included in Thomas Wolfe's Civil War by David Madden, well-known Civil War novelist, scholar, and professor at Louisiana State University, who edited the volume wanting to offer a fresh examination of Wolfe "as a major contributor to Civil War literature". While the texts collected support Madden's thesis that Wolfe's "Civil War pieces might be counted among his greatest achievements," the wide range of genres included also illustrate the extent of Wolfe's range and versatility as a fiction writer. Besides episodes from the novels Of Time and the River, The Web of Earth, and The Good Child's River, Madden also includes sections from the author's last completed play, Mannerhouse, as well as four short stories: "The Four Lost Men,"""His Father's Earth,"""Chickamauga," and The Plumed Knight." While all of Wolfe's texts receive full biographical and critical discussion in the book's fifty-page introduction, Madden offers especial insight into the experimental complexity of "The Four Lost Men," which "no distinct genre exists to accommodate" (25), and Act Four of Mannerhouse, an early work that presents more than any other Wolfe's "lifelong preoccupation with the Civil War" (19). While most critics have traditionally maligned these pieces on aesthetic grounds, 76 Madden offers fresh biographical readings within an historical context that may lead a critical reassessment of both works. What is most exciting about Thomas Wolfe's Civil War is that it offers a short yet diverse collection of the author's fiction at an affordable price for students. Those teachers who have neglected Wolfe because the length of his novels are unfriendly to classroom time constraints or because the 600-page'Collected Short Stories costs too much to justify course inclusion now have a reader-friendly text that can be adopted for a wide range of American literature and history courses. The lay-reader will find the same rhetorical gusto, youthful enthusiasm, and modernist vision that have kept Wolfe's work in print since their initial publication over seventy years ago. Madden's book offers a fresh perspective from which to read Wolfe, a contribution to American literary scholarship that, along with Rob Ensign's "Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe's Greener Modernism, may spearhead the author's canonical revival. —Shawn Holliday 77 ...

Fellow Traveler: The Cinematic-Political Consciousness of Judd Ne'eman

The peculiar trajectory followed by Ne'eman in his post-1977 political films reveals the characteristics of the political consciousness of a large group of Israeli artists, academics, and left-oriented activists. Their passive political resentment at the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip that followed the 1967 War took a radical shift following the political overturn in the 1977 elections, which brought to power the right-wing Likud party, leading the group to politicize Israeli culture and to denounce the Israeli occupation and the repression of the Palestinian people. However, this altruistic stand was based upon a dead-end, pessimistic, and ultimately ethnocentric viewpoint. We find in the films of Ne'eman and other Israeli filmmakers after 1977 a contradiction between an explicit moral critique of Israeli politics and the aesthetic grounding of this critique within a cinematic reality of persecution and hopelessness. Ne'eman, however, in his last film, Streets of Yesterday, brings to light the conflict submerged in his prior films and in all the films produced by the group. Having revealed the futility of the group's political consciousness Ne'eman abandoned his cinematic political activism in favor of research and teaching.

Simulating traffic engineering solutions to predict changes in driving behaviour

Abstract The growth in motorised traffic on rural lanes in the UK has increased the dangers of, and dissuades people from, walking, cycling or horse riding on roads in the countryside. A UK Government initiative, “Quiet Lanes”, aims to address this contra-sustainability development and make rural lanes safe and attractive for non-motorised users. Although traffic calming measures have been employed in urban areas, their translation into more environmentally sensitive rural areas has been problematic, largely on aesthetic grounds as they often have an urban appearance. Innovative solutions are necessary to reduce traffic speed but it would be prudent to assess experimentally the likely effectiveness and acceptability of any new measures before they are built. This paper discusses the use of simulated environments by means of manipulated colour photographs to predict changes in driving behaviour associated with changing road environments. It was found that respondents were able to differentiate between the different simulated engineering solutions and their suggested driving behaviour accurately reflected that associated with road use under similar conditions elsewhere.

The aesthetic appreciation of nature, scientific objectivity, and the standpoint of the subjugated: Anthropocentrism reimagined

In the following essay, I argue for an alternative anthropocentrism that, eschewing failed appeals to traditional moral principle, takes (a) as its point of departure the cognitive, perceptual, emotive, somatic, and epistemic conditions of our existence as members of Homo sapiens, and (b) one feature of our experience of/under these conditions particularly seriously as an avenue toward articulating this alternative, the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. To this end, I will explore, but ultimately reject philosopher Allen Carlson's ecological aesthetics, and I will adopt with modification aspects of the work of Ronnie Hawkins, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway. My central claim is that, equipped with a better understanding of our interdependent relationship to/within human and nonhuman nature, an understanding made especially available to those who occupy situations imbued by subjugation, we can come to understand our human-centeredness not as a justification of entitlement, but as an opportunity for critical self-reflection upon those actions which endanger the ecological conditions of human and nonhuman being. I suggest, then, that developing criteria for an aesthetic appreciation ground in such a centeredness can make a vital contribution to a more ecologically defensible moral and political activism.

La figuración española en la década de 1980: el equipo "Costus". Una lectura simbólica de su serie "Valle de los Caídos" (1980-1987): la iconografía de la Virgen

In this article we are going to discover the foundation of aesthetics and the iconographic out comes from this inspired religious series, created during the so called Movida Madrilena which meant a fundamental change in the contemporary Spanish art world.

Raw, Ripe, Rot: Nineteenth-Century Pathologies of the American Aesthetic

The primary pitch of this article centers on the heated debate taking place throughout the nineteenth century between American art lovers, who were struggling to formulate an updated aesthetic grounded in Truth, Goodness, and Beauty worthy to express the ideals of the newly formed nation, and their often hostile opponents in the fields of physical sciences, whose fierce commitment to the rules of rigorous scientific inquiry disdained intellectually trivial pursuits such as the creation and evaluation of the plastic arts. I like what Charles Darwin had to say at the conclusion of Chapter 14 in The Origin of the Species: is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us (Darwin 174; emphasis added). As we know, the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin caused both fret and excitement. It threatened established philosophical positions, whereby science was defined by its ability to confirm a universe governed in its physical and spiritual sense by a priori absolutes; it wrenched open scientific inquiry to methods that stressed the randomness of process and nullified the monolithic certainties of progress. Nonetheless, the Crayon, the first art journal published in America and a major proponent of German Idealism, had nothing but praise for the quotation descriptive of that entangled bank: There is a grandeur in this view of life... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved (May 1860, 150).' However much Darwin's notions might shake previous notions of how one responds to the science of God's natural

The Meta-Orchestra: research by practice in group multi-disciplinary electronic arts

Group multi-disciplinary projects face difficult challenges in social collaboration, diverse technologies and aesthetic grounds. Combining sound, image and space into a sufficiently malleable set of materials for creation is a complex task. As such projects lack a common ground from which to start, an experimental, practical approach is suggested, with a non-hierarchical, informal group structure. The Meta-Orchestra project, tackling these problems since 2000, re-engaged with the issues in a fourth meeting in Maastricht in 2004. This paper lays out the context of multi-disciplinary work, influenced by developments in computer technologies, by outlining the changed roles of the orchestra, the score and audio-visual theories. The Meta-Orchestra is described against a theoretical frame of social, technical and aesthetic considerations. Although the project will not be forced into this framework, descriptions of the palette, the strategies to create common grounds, the areas opened up by wireless network technologies, aesthetic issues of layering sounds and images, and the development of a central score system, illustrate the layered complexities of the Meta-Orchestra.

Kierkegaard's Aesthete and Unamuno's Niebla

What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The conclusion is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self.

Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Consumption: Dialogues with the Swadeshi Movements and Gandhi

This article attempts to create the space for rethinking the politics and ethics of consumption by initiating dialogues with Swadeshi movements and Gandhi in order to transform the spaces ofproduction transcending the concern for consumption choices. Analysing the history of Swadeshi movements in pre-independence India, especially Bengal, and drawing inspiration from Gandhi 's Swadeshi movement and his principles of swaraj and satyagraha, an attempt has been made here to provide an aesthetic, ethical and spiritual foundation for the present version of the Swadeshi drive in India, which is substantively immersed in the logic of market capitalism and mindless consumption. The article explores pathways of improvement of quality of life, experi ences in happiness and fulfilment, both individual and collective, by creating a culture of self-development, responsible consumption and community building efforts on the basis of sharing and concern for others.

Looking to the 21st century: have we learned from our mistakes, or are we doomed to compound them?

First I would like to dedicate this talk to the memory of my beloved friend, Dennis Slone, who died much too young, and much too unrecognized, in 1980. I missed him then, I miss him now and I will miss him for the rest of my life, as I know will a handful of other people present today. Next, I would like to thank the organizers, particularly Sam Lesko, a colleague and friend with whom I had the pleasure of working for many years, for inviting me to give one of the keynote addresses at this conference. The invitation was particularly gracious, since it is no secret that at its inception I opposed the establishment of a pharmacoepidemiological society, and that I have always questioned the need for pharmacoepidemiology as a discrete discipline, on esthetic, political and conceptual grounds. To be gracious in return, I will not discuss my esthetic or political objections until the coffee break; the conceptual objection I will return to at the end of this talk. I must confess that when I selected my topic, I did not appreciate that I had bitten off more than I could chew. When I began to think about it, I realized that the subject matter is exceedingly varied and complex. In Figure 1, I list some of the domains in which I believe there is a need to come to grips with serious limitations to the way in which some approaches have been applied, or misapplied, to the evaluation of drug effects – and that list is by no means exhaustive. If one is to be serious about covering everything, a monograph, rather than a single lecture, is needed. In 1967, Richard Doll published a sponsored monograph, introduced by a public lecture, on the prevention of cancer. I suggest that an analogous model may be needed, and this, if you like, is my public lecture in which I will concentrate only on Item 1, skepticism as a scientific principle. A bit of history first. This conference is taking place just short of 37 years since I arrived in the United States in September 1967 and switched from clinical medicine to epidemiology, more specifically to the exploration of epidemiological methods that could be applied to drug surveillance, then an ‘almost virgin’ subject. When I arrived, the first colleagues with whom I was associated in that effort, Herschel Jick and Dennis Slone, had only been at it for a year or two and at the time that I joined them all three of us were still learning epidemiology, ‘on the road’, as it were. And when it came to the application of what we were learning to drug surveillance, we were for the most part not only groping in the dark, but also groping in the wrong place. We were studying hospitalized patients while the main public health issues concerned drug safety in the population at large. Like the fabled drunkard, we were not looking for the penny where it dropped but where the street-lamp cast some light. Then, to labor the metaphor, as we sobered up and as dawn approached, we began to look further by adding casecontrol methods to our armamentarium and we succeeded in finding a penny or two, after all. I must quickly add that we also found a slug or two. I have described that experience at length and in rather less florid language elsewhere. But what is relevant here is that as we gained experience, Jick on one hand and Slone and I on the other came to differ more and more about how epidemiology should

'.. Und Gassen enden schwarz und sonderbar': Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s

.Und Gassen enden schwarz und sonderbar5: Poetic Dialogues with Georg Trakl in the 1930s and 40s MARK ELLIOTT Jesus College,Oxford Georg Trakl's drug addiction, mental illness and eventual death from a cocaine overdose arguably made him a prime target in theNational Socialist witch-hunt for 'degenerate' Expressionist writers and artists that took place in the 1930s. This cultural pogrom broadly censured all Modernist art as 'eine Art j?disch-bolschewistischer Kulturverh?hnung' [a kind of Jewish Bolshevistic cultural travesty].1 In exile, the conservative aesthetics of Socialist Realism and the prevailingly anti-Modernist voices within the 'Expressionism Debate' of 1937-38 likewise seriously threatened to impair Trakl's reception. Expressionism was condemned byMarxist exiles as an ideological precursor of fascism and rejected on aesthetic grounds as 'the helpless stuttering, whimper ing and blubbering of untalented hotchpotchcubofuturoconstructivists' ? a derisive evaluation ofModernist art distincdy reminiscent of Nazi propa ganda.2 Existing studies have argued thatTrakl was 'barely tolerated' and that his reception was 'at best subliminal' within theThird Reich; in exile this pro cess has yet to be substantially explored.3 His work, however, never appeared on theListe des sch?dlichen undunerw?nschten Schrifttums [Listof Dangerousand Undesirable Writing issuedby the Reich Ministry forLiteraturebetween 1935 and 1943,4 and he was never publicly vilified to the extent that some other writers were.5 By the same token, Trakl was never openly denounced in the 'Expressionism Debate' or elsewhere in the exile press. 1 AdolfHider, Die Reden HitlersamParteitag der Freiheit(Munich, 1935),p. 33. 2 Alfred Durus, 'Abstrakt, abstrakter, am abstraktesten', inDie Expressionismusdebatte. Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption, ed. by Hans-J?rgen Schmitt (Frankfurt a. M., 1973), pp. 142-56 (p. 155). 3 Walter Methlagl, 'Wirkung und Aufnahme des Werkes von Georg Trakl seit dem ersten Weltkrieg', inUndoner Trakl-Symposion, ed. by Walter Methlagl and William E. Yuill (Salzburg, 1981), pp. 13-32 (p. 31), and Diana Orendi Hinze, 'Wandlungen des Trakl-Bildes: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Georg Trakls' (unpublished doctoral thesis,Washington University, 1972), p. xiii. 4 See Anon., Liste des sch?dlichen und unerw?nschten Schrifttums. Stand vom 31. Dezember 1938 und Jahreslisten 1939-1941 (Leipzig, 1938-41; repr. Vaduz, 1979), and Anon., Jahresliste 1942 des sch?dlichen und unerw?nschten Schrifttums (Leipzig, 1942). 5 See Egon Schwarz, 'Rainer Maria Rilke unter dem Nationalsozialismus', in Rilke heute. Beziehungen undWirkungen, ed. by Ingeborg H. Solbrig and Joachim W. Storck, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M., i975-76)> h 287-313 (pp. 294-96). MARK ELLIOTT 8l Trakl's work did find, however, widespread and lively reception among poets of the period, notably Franz Baermann Steiner, Paul Celan, Josef Weinheber, Stephan Hermlin and Karl Krolow. This selection reflects a broad cross-section of poets representing a range of backgrounds, experi ences and political standpoints. The reception ofTrakl's work in their poetry shows continuity in aesthetic discourse across political and geographical divisions in the era ofNational Socialism, as well as important historical links to the poetry of theModernist period. What ismore, the highly conscious and stylized engagement with tradition exhibited by these poets suggests a reception process thatwas everything but 'subliminal'. Rather itwas shaped by a 'learned' and theoretical awareness of the relationship between poet and tradition. What emerges is a more nuanced and coherent model of the poetrywritten in the 1930sand 40s thatextendsbeyond the rigidpolitical and period boundaries of this problematic epoch. Within the Third Reich, Trakl's reception in the regime-controlled realm of literary histories, journals and newspapers was mixed. A few were brutally censorious in line with the prevailing anti-Modernist ideology, such as Adolf Bartels's condemnation ofTrakl as the 'softest and most spineless' of Expres sionist poets.6 The majority, however, were ambivalent or even positive, appraising the poet's work, for example, as One of the purest poetic testa ments of recent times'.7 Similarly, the prominent Nazi critic Helmut Langenbucher was forced to concede that Trakl's 'talents [were] way above average',8 and even the V?lkischerBeobachter ran a brief piece commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 1944.9What ismore, those aspects of Trakl's work and life that were incompatible with Party ideology were not flady condemned but reinterpreted accordingly. Trakl was...

From Narrow Complaint to Broad Celebration: A Conversation with Charles Johnson

One 0f America's pre-eminent writers and thinkers, Charles Richard Johnson, a PhD in Philosophy and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of four novels Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (1998); two collections of short stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986) and Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001); a work of aesthetics, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988); Tunaing the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003); two collections of comic art, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972). He co-edited Black Men Speaking (1997) with John McCluskey Jr.; Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (1998), the companion book for the influential PBS Television Series, with Patricia Smith; and King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., (2000), with Bob Adelman. He received the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage, becoming the first African American male to win this prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953. Johnson teaches creative writing at the University of Washington, Seattle where he holds the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence in English. Most recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has honored him with its award in literature. The interview was conducted in Seattle during meetings with Johnson in the academic year 2003-2004. He was extremely generous with his time and shared his thoughts freely. I accompanied him to his various lectures and story-reading sessions and was overwhelmed by the tremendous audience response he generated with his forceful ideas and lucid language and expression. With an intense fellow feeling for all sentient beings, he reflected on America at the dawn of the New Millennium and explicitly foregrounded the imperatives of a completely new outlook toward the racial question by his statement that half of the country is going into the twenty-first century with something of an identity crisis because America is very much a pluralistic society.... In other words, America really is the point where so many cultures are crossing. And so the large questions that will be carried into the 21st century will be questions of who are we as Americans. And who we want to be as Americans. But it won't be a black/white dialogue in that respect anymore. Through the corpus of his fictional and non-fictional writings, Johnson combines philosophy and folklore, martial arts and Buddhism, for his incisive insights into the new frontiers of the African American experience that calls for an amalgamation of multidisciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives. He not only loves to address the symptoms of change in terms of acute identity crisis but also tries to prepare the aesthetic ground for such a change. NG: In a long journey that has seen you excel in diverse roles: cartoonist, novelist, teacher, scholar, orator, philosopher--with awards and accolades standing out as significant landmarks--how does it really feel to end up being so famous? CJ: I don't really think about being famous. I don't think about it at all. I still have an image of myself as a younger writer. I am always surprised, humbled, and shocked when I learn that anyone has read something I've written. An author really never knows who is reading him (or her), or if they're reading one's work at all. If you are an actor on stage, you see the audience, you hear their applause but as a writer you don't. You may get the sales figures but you don't sometimes know who is reading your books until they tell you. And I've never been the kind of artist who is comfortable chasing publicity--I just try to let my creations speak for themselves. NG: The range and versatility of your creative output is almost overwhelming. Do you approach your writing as a kind of mission? CJ: Every true artist's goal is, I believe, to produce so many works in his (or her) lifetime, that one's creations ultimately become inescapable in the culture (or at least for serious readers). …

Foundations for offshore wind turbines.

An important engineering challenge of today, and a vital one for the future, is to develop and harvest alternative sources of energy. This is a firm priority in the UK, with the government setting a target of 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2010. A component central to this commitment will be to harvest electrical power from the vast energy reserves offshore, through wind turbines or current or wave power generators. The most mature of these technologies is that of wind, as much technology transfer can be gained from onshore experience. Onshore wind farms, although supplying 'green energy', tend to provoke some objections on aesthetic grounds. These objections can be countered by locating the turbines offshore, where it will also be possible to install larger capacity turbines, thus maximizing the potential of each wind farm location. This paper explores some civil-engineering problems encountered for offshore wind turbines. A critical component is the connection of the structure to the ground, and in particular how the load applied to the structure is transferred safely to the surrounding soil. We review previous work on the design of offshore foundations, and then present some simple design calculations for sizing foundations and structures appropriate to the wind-turbine problem. We examine the deficiencies in the current design approaches, and the research currently under way to overcome these deficiencies. Designs must be improved so that these alternative energy sources can compete economically with traditional energy suppliers.

Obesity rates, income, and suburban sprawl: an analysis of US states

In a decade of economic growth and rising income, obesity has risen dramatically. This is puzzling when researchers have found that there is an inverse relation between income and obesity. This paper argues that new location patterns produced by suburban sprawl are an important cause of rising obesity rates. New location patterns are such that work, school and social activities are not as easily accessible by foot. Changes in sprawl then drive changes in the causes of obesity identified by medical researchers (e.g., low activity levels). We define sprawl as increases in the amount of developed land, holding population constant. Determinants and outcomes are analyzed on a population basis. We use state-level data from the 1990s on obesity to show that states that increased the amount of developed land (holding population constant) showed larger increases in obesity. As a result, town planning efforts to reduce sprawl may be justified not only on aesthetic grounds but also based on efforts to reduce the costs associated with treating medical conditions related to obesity.

Schopenhauer dans le roman. A propos de Sixtine de Remy de Gourmon.

The subject of the paper is the mode of presence of Schopenhauer's philosophical thought in Remy de Gourmont's 1890 novel entitled Sixtine, roman de la vie cerebrale. The pessimistic premisses of the main character's extreme subjectivism are accompanied by an attempt to escape from Schopenhauerian omnipotent will to live (vouloir-vivre) through art, in this case through literary activity. Here originates the characteristic and innovative on the aesthetic ground motif of the novel in the novel in Gourmont's work.

Schopenhauer dans le roman. A propos de Sixtine de Remy de Gourmon.

The subject of the paper is the mode of presence of Schopenhauer's philosophical thought in Remy de Gourmont's 1890 novel entitled Sixtine, roman de la vie cerebrale. The pessimistic premisses of the main character's extreme subjectivism are accompanied by an attempt to escape from Schopenhauerian omnipotent will to live (vouloir-vivre) through art, in this case through literary activity. Here originates the characteristic and innovative on the aesthetic ground motif of the novel in the novel in Gourmont's work.

Discourses with the past: Tourism and heritage in South-East Asia

This special issue is intended to explore in some empirical detail the relationships between culture (including ethnicity) nature, tourism, development, and political action, and in this connection to focus specifically on what is widely called ‘heritage’ and its conceptualization and representation in South-East Asia. Heritage is both a narrow concept, literally ‘what is or may be inherited’ (Little Oxford English Dictionary, 1996: 294), and a broader one pertaining to notions of ethnicity and nationalism, and even global identity. Heritage has become something which the state and its agents, as well as tourists and local communities appropriate and create as an object worthy of touristic attention, though only certain items are selected for this purpose and others are discarded. It has been remarked upon frequently that the concept of heritage is difficult to define and that, in popular discourse, its meaning is very wide and flexible. A useful starting point is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which designates World Heritage Sites as of either ‘cultural’ or ‘natural’ or ‘mixed’ (both cultural and natural) importance. According to the World Heritage Convention, 1 which was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, ‘cultural heritage’ embraces a group of buildings or a site of historical, aesthetic, archaeological, scientific, ethnological or anthropological value’. In contrast UNESCO defines ‘natural heritage’ in terms of outstanding physical, biological, and geological features; habitats of threatened plants or animal species and areas of value on scientific and aesthetic grounds or from the perspective of conservation. We are using the term heritage here to refer primarily to tangible and concrete elements of the past which are presented and re-presented in the present: archaeological finds, historical sites, monuments and buildings, urban and rural landscapes, and material artefacts (usually housed and displayed in museums). What is more ‘the sites selected to represent the country’s heritage will also have strong implications for both collective and individual identity and hence the creation of social realities’ (Black and Wall, 2001: 123). We also recognize that the term is used in a wider sense to refer not just to ‘traditional’ material objects but also to ‘traditional’ ways of life (often such overt, sensory and ‘aesthetic’ cultural forms as dance, drama, music, and the visual and plastic arts), which are usually brought into association with the material evidence of the past. The importance of these cultural forms as heritage is enhanced precisely because governments in promoting tourism tend to focus on those which are immediate, accessible, colourful, and visible to the ‘tourist gaze’, and which can be more easily shaped and constructed (Wood, 1997: 10). The concept of heritage therefore shades into the more general concepts of culture and tradition, and it is bound up with issues of national and local identities. However, as we shall see, even the natural environment can be defined and sanctioned as heritage and moulded in particular ways for the tourist market, although it is usually presented and given meaning, as is cultural heritage, as ISSN 1363-9811 print/ISSN 1469-8382 online/03/890003-13  2003 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World

Sullivanesque: urban architecture and ornamentation

offers a visual and historical tour of a unique but often overlooked facet of modern American architecture derived from Louis Sullivan. Highly regarded in architecture for inspiring the Chicago School and the Prairie School, Sullivan was an unwilling instigator of the method of facade composition--later influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell, and George G. Elmslie--that came to be known as Sullivanesque. Decorative enhancements with botanical and animal themes, Sullivan's distinctive ornamentation mitigated the hard geometries of the large buildings he designed, coinciding with his follows function aesthetic. Sullivan's designs offered solutions to problems presented by new types and scales of buildings. Widely popular, they were also widely copied, and the style proliferated due to a number of Chicago-based interests, including the Radford Architectural Company and several decorative plaster and terra-cotta companies. Stock replicas of Sullivan's designs manufactured by the Midland Terra Cotta Company and others gave distinction and focus to utilitarian buildings in Chicago's commercial strips and other confined areas, such as the downtown districts of smaller towns. Mass-produced Sullivanesque terra cotta endured as a result of its combined economic and aesthetic appeal, blending the sophistication of high architectural art with the pragmatic functionality of building design. Masterfully framed by the author's photographs of Sullivanesque buildings in Chicago and throughout the Midwest, Ronald E. Schmitt's in-depth exploration of the Sullivanesque tells the story of its evolution from Sullivan's intellectual and aesthetic foundations to its place as a form of commercial vernacular. The book also includes an inventory of Sullivanesque buildings.

Henry Cowell, bohemian

In this first full-length study of Cowell, Michael Hicks shows how the maverick composer, writer, teacher, and performer built his career on the intellectual and aesthetic foundations of his parents, community, and teachers--and exemplified the essence of bohemian California. Author of the highly influential New Musical Resources and a teacher of John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Burt Bacharach, Cowell is regarded as an innovator, a rebel, and a genius. One of the first American composers to be celebrated for the novelty of his techniques, Cowell popularized a series of experimental piano-playing techniques that included pounding his fists and forearms on the keys and plucking the piano strings directly to achieve the exotic, dissonant sounds he desired. Henry Cowell, Bohemian traces the venerated experimentalist's radical ideas back to his teachers, including Charles Seeger, Samuel Seward, and E. G. Stricklen, the tightknit artistic communities in the San Francisco Bay area where he grew up and first started composing, and the immeasurable influence of his parents. Mining the published and unpublished writings of his mother, a politically motivated novelist from the Midwest who carefully monitored the pulse of her son's creativity from birth, Hicks provides insight into the composer's heritage, artistic inclinations, and childhood. Focusing on Cowell's formative and most prolific years, from his birth in 1897 through his incarceration on a morals conviction in the 1930s, Hicks examines the philosophical fervor that fueled his whirlwind compositions, and the ways his irrepressible bohemian spirit helped foster an appreciation in the United States and Europe for a new brand of American music.