Fundamental Metaphors Research Articles

Experimental Translation: Techniques, Forms, Metalanguages

The aim of the article is to introduce a new series of studies on theoretical, methodological, analytical, and interpretive issues concerning “translation anomalies”. Functioning as a medium of artistic innovation and creative cognition, experimental literary translation can be compared to a laboratory, both for translators as well as literary and cultural scholars. It enables us to highlight the fundamental problems of artistic creation, the theory of literature, the theory of artistic translation and the theory of intercultural communication. On the one hand, experiments in translation confirm the necessity of using interdisciplinary research instruments; on the other hand, they show translation as a fundamental metaphor that describes the innovative and dynamic nature of technology.

Pandemia COVID-19 jako źródło modyfikacji polskiej historiografii medycznej

The article discusses possible inspirations for medical historians resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The author analyzes the role of the history of medicine in the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation is understood as an opportunity for changes in Polish medical historiography in its non-classical sense. The author also investigates the narrative structures, showing how, in the context of a pandemic, such fundamental metaphors as pathogenesis, salutogenesis or pathocenosis could be used. The attention is also given to public discourse, inspiring the historian of medicine to address such notions as breakthroughs in science, the process of validating new medical knowledge during a pandemic crisis, or anti-science. The concept of pathocenosis as a theoretical framework for the scientific and public ‘COVID-related’ discourse was analyzed as a case study. The author treats this reflection as an invitation to discuss the changes in Polish medical historiography in the face of a medical crisis.

Przekład eksperymentalny: techniki, formy, metajęzyki

Experimental Translation: Techniques, Forms, Metalanguages The aim of the article is to introduce a new series of studies on theoretical, methodological, analytical, and interpretive problems of “translation anomalies”. Functioning as a medium of artistic innovation and creative cognition, experimental literary translation has a laboratory meaning both for translators and translation, literary and cultural scholars. It allows to highlight the fundamental problems of artistic creation, the theory of literature, the theory of artistic translation and the theory of intercultural communication. On the one hand, translation experiments confirm the necessity of using interdisciplinary research instruments; on the other hand, they show translation as a fundamental metaphor that describes the innovative and dynamic nature of technology.

Metaphorics of "critique of pure reason"

An attempt is made to apply metaphorical analysis to certain aspects of the Kant’s work. In other words, can we look at the transcendental teaching of the German thinker using the same method that he himself proposed (or at least used in his work)? A metaphorical reading of Kant's transcendental teaching made it possible to reveal some patterns and trace the linguistic boundaries of his work. With great caution, we only tried to express the idea that Kant's metaphorics is a well-thought-out semantic boundary of its transcendental logic. First of all, we are interested in the field that usually eludes philosophical research – the military metaphor of «Critics of Pure Reason». In our opinion, the metaphorical series is most representative in this work. It was important for us to show that Kant's transcendental method is a fundamental metaphor that stands over arguing philosophers (skeptics, relativists and dogmatists) and makes it possible to give precise and clear laws (boundaries) to a chaotic philosophizing mind. In this approach, the reflexivity of Kantian discourse is revealed (as the eternal debate between the logic of discourse and the metaphysics (metaphorics) of dialectics). That is, in essence, we tried to discover that the transcendental criticism of the mind is just another metaphorical approach that allows us to go beyond the classical (dogmatic and skeptical) mind to find a place for a new (deeper, in par-ticular, phenomenological) the method of immersion in the mind (through the awakening of classical consciousness from "sleep"). It was also important for us to reveal that the metaphorical approach leads to an understanding of the new semantic boundaries of the thinker's creativity, to the understanding that Kant turned out to be not only a outstanding logician, metaphysician and fine connoisseur of dialectics, but also a thinker who perfectly felt the semantic series of formation concepts and was close to the linguistic interpretation of pure reason. Also we seek to show that the metaphorical approach used by Kant allowed him to weigh (foresee) many of the philosophical events of XX century culture. In this context, Kant was not only a critic, but also a visionary of many modern philosophical events.

Heirs of the revolution: X-ray diffraction and the birth of the Mineralogical Society of America

AbstractThe founding of the Mineralogical Society of America (MSA) in 1919 followed so closely on the heels of the discovery of X-ray diffraction (XRD) in 1912 that one might hypothesize a causal link. Was MSA born out of this scientific revolution? The formation of our Society conventionally is attributed to the desire for a professional journal and the need to emerge from the shadow of the Geological Society of America, but these issues were not new in 1919. This review argues that MSA's birth can be understood by an exploration of two historical strains: (1) Although modern notions of atomism traditionally are associated with the emergence of the kinetic theory of gases in the late 19th century, mineralogists had invoked ordered atomic spheres as the fundamental metaphor for crystalline structures over a century earlier, leading directly to W.L. Bragg's discovery of the atomic design in halite; and (2) in contrast to the broader chemistry community, mineralogists were uniquely poised to embrace X-ray diffraction and the revolution in crystallography that attended it. This revelation gave rise to a sense of distinct identity.An examination of MSA's early records unambiguously reveals that U.S. mineralogists were closely attuned to the crystallographic insurgency as it took place across the Atlantic. In particular, Edgar T. Wherry, one of the organizers of the American Mineralogist and of the Society, actively dis-seminated information about the new discoveries to his colleagues in the United States. Other founders of MSA similarly championed the transformative character of the new crystallography, thereby warranting the establishment of a specialized professional society. The continuing force of the revolution is revealed in a counter-reaction a century later, as mineralogists have renewed their focus on phases at the boundary between crystals and glasses, leading to reconsiderations of the meaning of crystallinity.

SONIC BOOMS IN BLANCHOT

Blanchot’s rejection of vision as the fundamental philosophical metaphor is well known: “Seeing is not speaking” (The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 25). Furthermore, his central idea of the limit-experience (borrowed from Bataille) is a “detour from everything visible and invisible” (210). As part of his Heideggerian heritage, the increased importance of hearing (and aurality in general) lacks the critical appraisal it deserves. Pari passu for voice. Blanchot’s investigation of voice, spoken, interior, literary, is extensive. Various works of fiction, notably The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, explore the meme, which is intensified in critical essays on Hölderlin, Kafka, Rilke, and Valéry, where the voice’s musicality is given to performance. The studies exemplify the operation of “pure voice,” voice no longer in relation to and under the constraints of the interlocutor: its rhythm, tempo, and melody. His clearest, though lapidary, remarks on voice appear in discussion of the Narcissus mythomeme. There, voice is related not only to Narcissus’ love of an (unrecognized) self but also to the intrigue of Echo and her mimetic reproduction of voice. I give a close reading of Blanchot’s rendition of Ovid’s story to show the central role that voice plays in his “great refusal” of philosophy and concomitant opening to the outside, the “beyond being,” its nomadism and messianism.

"Жіноче письмо" у постмодерній драматургії (на матеріалі п’єси Ірени Коваль "Лев і Левиця")

article analyzes the characteristics typical for the kind of postmodern literature that creates the discourse of the so-called women’s writing. play of American playwright of Ukrainian descent, Irena Koval-Saletska, The Lion and the Lioness (2001) belongs to some of the most illustrative examples of postmodern drama, the text of which provides the opportunity to analyze the characteristics of Women’s Writing. An example of such characteristics would be the fundamental metaphors included in the creative model: the female voice metaphor and the metaphor of the concave mirror.

Thinking globally, acting locally

AbstractThe aim of this study is to show how trans-national right-wing linguistic strategies and global xenophobic attitudes are reworked at national levels, and how, as a result, specialized country- and culture-specific coercion and legitimization strategies arise. Using a detailed, quantitative-qualitative method of analysis, we look at the Greek Cypriot extreme-right party ELAM to see how the party’s anti-migration rhetoric construes any foreign presence as threat, by proximizing it linguistically as ‘invasion.’ This strategy allows the conflation of the current ‘Other’ (migrants) with archetypical adversaries, such as Turkey. Indeed, anchoring the migration issue in the main national narrative, i.e., the long-standing Cypriot conflict, gives their xenophobic language conceptual coherence and strengthens its textual cohesion. In particular two figures of speech are the basis of this invasion script, the wordmetanasteftiko‘the immigration phenomenon’ conceptualized as thekipriako(the Cyprus problem, i.e., the political division of the island). This parallelism opens the way for a number of inferences, while it also enables a conceptual shift from therealphenomenon known asglobalizationandmulticulturalismto the imagined idea of a (white/Western) genocide. Data include comments responding to ELAM followers’ YouTube videos and mainstream press representations. Methodology includes corpus linguistics and discourse analysis focused on the fundamental metaphors found in the data such asmigration as unbearable weightandmigration as dirt.

Metaphors in Vytautas Kavolis’s Sociology

This article deals with the question of what place do metaphors hold in Vytautas Kavolis’s sociology. By following Lithuanian researcher Algimantas Valantiejus, who first inquired into the question, it is asked whether Kavolis’s sociology is poetical entirely, or do the poetical means of expression play a limited role in it. It is argued that the last case is involved. Poetical images do not overly control the sociologist’s expression of thoughts and his construction and use of means of cognition in any of his field of research. It is stated that the only way to overcome the non-poetical features of Kavolis’s language and to declare his sociology poetical in nature is to presuppose that all scientific concepts are but developed metaphors and that they never lose relationships with their metaphoric origins. An acceptance of such a presupposition opens the possibility to look for poetical images behind any abstract concepts. It is stated that Valantiejus uses this possibility in poetizing the overall sociology of Kavolis. According to him, all non-poetic features of its language, as well as poetic ones, have their origins in the metaphor of painting. It is argued that Valantiejus’s choice of the fundamental metaphor of Kavolis’s sociology hasshortcomings. The image of painting cannot explain the whole scope of Kavolis’s sociological research and the variety of its theoretical presuppositions adequately. It is stated that these shortcomings can beeasily eliminated by expanding Valantiejus’s conception of painting and by including three additional poetical images into the list of the fundamental metaphors of Kavolis’s sociology – mechanism, drama and organism.

English

One of the concerns of Cognitive Poetic critics has been with the issue of how literary authors make meaning by means of metaphor. Building on the Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor, the field of Cognitive Poetics has been concerned, among its many diverse areas, with the studying of metaphor in literary texts. Proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped. In addition, they claimed that the metaphoric linguistic expressions are the manifestation of the fundamental conceptual metaphors forming individuals' cognitions. Conceptual metaphors were defined as the underlying structures of these expressions by means of which people comprehend intangible concepts through more tangible ones. Using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the present essay explores the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A PLAY in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross. In these plays, Mamet depicts a world in which performance, in its theatrical sense, becomes the characters' survival strategy and a manner of living. As one of the most influential playwrights of his time, Mamet has always been concerned with the issues which most afflict America. He finds the ills of his society manifested in the relation among people. An attempt is made to explain the ways in which life-as-play finds expression both linguistically and thematically in the different contexts of these works. Keywords: cognitive poetics; metaphor; conceptual metaphor ;David Mamet; Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Glengarry Glen Ross DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2202-05

“Grotesque things carved by a besotted pagan for his temple:” Charlotte Brontë’s Figural Articulations of the Creative process

100 Victorians Journal "Grotesque things carved bg a besotted pagan for his temple:” Charlotte ©ronte’s Figural tlrtieulations of the Creative process by §usan ©. Taylor Charlotte Bronte figured the writing process in multiple and complex ways, invoking metaphors rooted in the natural world, in theologies, and in conscious and unconscious confrontations within the psyche. In a number ofthese instances, Bronte imagines literary creativity and writing’s labor as physical acts of carving, sculpting, molding, assembling, animating, and worshipping. Envisioned as the creation of and interaction with embodied concepts and characters, Bronte’s models of literary creativity connect with the specific medium of sculpture. In Villette (1853), these explorations ofliterary productivity and their relationship to sculpture are taken up by Lucy Snowe as she composes French essays; she calls the “creative impulse” an “intractable ... deity,” “all cold ... all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eye-balls” that she must somehow “compel into bondage, and make it improvise a theme” (445). She subsequently describes how she, writing from research, “laboriously constructed a skeleton out of the dry bones of the real, and then clothed them, and tried to breathe into them life, and in this last aim I had pleasure,” ensuring “properly [jJointed” facts for “correct anatomy” (494).1 These renditions of the creative process as appeasing and controlling a god or assembling a body build upon two of Bronte’s earlier formulations: an 1840 letter to Hartley Coleridge describing the writer’s creations as “grotesque things carved by a besotted pagan for his temple” {Letters 1:240); and an 1843 Brussels devoir comparing a “mechanic” studying a “device” to a writer “dissecting” a text (Lonoff 240). Tracing Bronte’s earlier explorations of the implicit and explicit connections between writing and sculpture,1 1 In the Penguin edition, the word “jointed” (from the 1853 first edition) is replaced with “pointed,” but there is no editorial note explaining the change. I have kept the word “jointed” in this quote. Victorians Journal 101 including sources ofinspiration and the dynamics ofcreator-and-creation, reveals that these instances in Villette are the culmination ofa continuum of ideas about writing’s relationship to the self and to the arts. According to the OED, ideas of sculpture as both the artistic “production of figures in the round or in relief’ and as an object, the “product ofthe sculptor’s art,”2 are central to Bronte’s investigations of creativity in Villette and elsewhere.3 She draws upon both literal and figurative understandings ofsculpting and sculpture. Philip Rawson summarizes some differences in sculptural methods and effects ofthis artistic medium: Modeling builds the image from nothing, whereas carving takes away excess material enveloping an image that may seem already there, “hidden” inside. These two methods illustrate how sculptural procedures have often been taken as fundamental metaphors for processes of Creation by God. Metaphors, depending as they do on analogies, work both ways; and sculptural processes have gained special value and dignity from association with these metaphors. Philosophical traditions may later hide the physical side of such creation metaphors in abstract terms. (28) A crucial implication of Bronte’s invocation of sculpture as a metaphor for literary creation, then, is the power, even divine power, such creation can involve; the idea of the writer as god-like that she and her siblings explored in their juvenilia persists in her adult writing.4 In Bronte’s multifaceted ideas about writing, however, authorial power is also called into question, casting the writer as a supplicant approaching a deity embodying the “creative impulse.” Her concept ofthe writing process as mental interactions with figures imagined as statues of gods to be worshipped suggests that the writer’s mind is a sort of temple enclosing a god that cannot predictably be controlled. Housed in the mind, this god is part ofthe self, thus creativity is an innate, divine part of the writer’s psyche; and yet, she argues, we cannot know what will 2 OED: sculpture, definitions la and 2a. Definition la includes ways of producing sculpture, “either by carving, by fashioning some plastic substance, or by making a mould for casting in metal.” 3 See also Susan Taylor, ‘“The toad in the...

Diagnosis and Metaphor.

Human beings rely on metaphor as a primary cognitive device for interpreting the world around them. Metaphors figure especially strongly in discourse around health, illness, and medicine. It is not just that patients use metaphors to describe their personal experience of being unwell, or that medical professionals employ metaphor to convey a diagnosis, describe a treatment, or explain the function of an organ to their patients. Metaphor, it is argued, lies at the heart of the process of diagnosis. Moreover, diagnosticians employ competing metaphors in the early stages of diagnosis to speculate on alternative ways of viewing a puzzling set of symptoms. Diagnosis is often defined as a process of ordering and classifying, while metaphor is a device for playing with classifications. The medical systems of different cultures depend on different sets of fundamental metaphors. Modern Western biomedicine is organized around a series of basic metaphors: the body as machine, the body as the site of battle, and the body as a communication system. Traditional Chinese medicine, on the other hand, uses images of flow and blockage, balance and imbalance, and works by analogy with five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Psychologists are sometimes able to detect from a patient's own use of metaphor, or inability to use or recognize metaphor, clues to a diagnosis of psychosis or autism. With conditions such as anorexia nervosa, therapists may actually work to modify the dysfunctional metaphors by which patients depict themselves, with the purpose of establishing positive metaphors for envisaging recovery.

The viral marketing metaphor explored through Vegemite

Purpose– Viral marketing draws heavily on the success of a few mythic campaigns. However, the viral metaphor limits previous perspectives as to why consumers engage with content and importantly, why they pass it on. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approach– The authors explore why consumers engaged with Kraft’s “How do you love your Vegemite?” campaign using multiple sources of evidence including interviews, blog post comments, and firm market research.Findings– The choice to engage with content is driven by consumers’ desire for self-authentication, in particular the desire to express one’s identity through an authenticating act, and express membership of a collective via an authoritative performance. In so doing, the authors identify the limits of adopting an epidemiological metaphor for campaigns reliant on consumer agency.Originality/value– This study is unique because it proposes an alternative focus to a fundamental metaphor and has both conceptual and practical value.

Excess Baggage? Regulatory Heritage in New Contexts

The evolution of regulation of, on and even by the Internet clearly demonstrates the influence of ‘cultures of regulation’ on interventions and the ‘fitness’ of technological and behavioural innovations. These cultures – and the associated stovepipes - complement the formation of conventions of service provision, investment, business models and enterprise coordination, individual (customer or end-user) behaviour and technology development. This leads to punctuated equilibrium; each period’s gaps and slack create the conditions for the next phase. These phases are not simply defined by adoption of new models or regulatory tools; instead they are marked by often dramatic changes in: the allocation of power and flow of information among government, business and civil society; the participants in each domain and the objectives or challenges to which they pay attention; and the effects of laisser-faire policies. This suggests at least two reasons why it is no longer sufficient to respond to new challenges as they come along. At crucial moments, change may be too fast or complex for effective response. More importantly, the information needed to identify governance challenges and to formulate, assess and implement interventions (or decide that no response is possible) may be unobtainable, impossible to interpret or unreliable. Especially on the Internet, where almost everything can be observed but very little may be worth the effort of collection and analysis, these twin problems of informational complexity and endogeneity may call for approximate (rather than light-touch) forms of intervention, principles-based and reliant on self-organisation to a much greater extent than even today’s ‘smart regulation.’This paper combines evidence from the coevolution of advanced telecom-based services and new forms of regulation with a simple model of strategy choice in a complex adaptive network to develop a framework for adapting regulation to an environment in which networked information is faster and more extensive, by taking into account the persistence of regulatory cultures and their influence on the way new problems are recognised and dealt with.For instance, a formerly dominant model of telecom regulation combined a technological focus (e.g. efficient use of spectrum and network capacity) and an economic perspective based on natural monopoly regulation (e.g. of network infrastructures) and the ex-ante economic efficiency of competition (e.g. regulatory approximations to Ramsey pricing and facilitated entry) with limited societal regulatory objectives (e.g. Universal access/service and discrimination in favour of local call access). This was reasonably well-adapted to telephony and analogous binary content exchange services (e.g. Fax). Indeed, the forms of ‘slack’ it created facilitated the emergence of new services, technologies and business models, especially Internet-based services focused on content access and distribution. This gave rise to the period of ‘converged regulation’ either around content and communication (UK’s OfCom, with its additional heritage of societal content regulation and extended vertical market power concerns) or network industries (Germany’s BNetzA, with its additional attention to network and cross-network externalities and to system resilience). These in turn led to different architectures and models for e.g. network provisioning, QoS and access pricing and to different ways of tackling new issues associated with this change e.g. privacy, DRM and net neutrality. At the same time, existing regulatory tools (e.g. spectrum allocation processes and licence forms) began to change. Further changes now in train (linked to e.g. the Internet of (sensor and actuator) Things and computer-based financial trading) are forcing redefinition of terms like QoS and privacy, and causing fundamental metaphors to shift from content to interaction, from informed consent to emergent or herd behaviour and from ‘prudential’ (entity-based) to ‘macroprudential’ (structure-based) market surveillance and intervention. The paper defines a modelling and evidence framework for policy formulation and assessment.

Holy Heathen Rhapsody by Pattiann Rogers

Anzhelina Polonskaya Paul Klee’s Boat Andrew Wachtel, tr. Zephyr Press Since leaving the world of professional ice dancing, Anzhelina Polonskaya has become Russia’s rising poetic star, with several of her individual pieces appearing previously in WLT. Her latest work of haunting beauty, Paul Klee’s Boat, features her elegant, heartbreaking masterpiece “Kursk: An Oratorio Requiem,” an elegy paying tribute to those aboard the Russian submarine that tragically sunk in 2000. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes Richard Vallance, ed. Friesen Press A groundbreaking anthology of poetry presented in six languages, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes accomplishes a perfect revival of the sonnet. Divided into themes but without a formal table of contents, this artistically rendered collection provides readers with a sense of both choice and surprise. The 315 sonnets on display counter the popularly held notion that the sonnet is outmoded. Nota Bene advantages and dangers that learning poses to original poetic expression . What a fabulous book of poetry. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Pattiann Rogers. Holy Heathen Rhapsody. New York. Penguin. 2013. isbn 9780143123880 Pattiann Rogers’s poems in Holy Heathen Rhapsody inspire a feeling of transcendence in using language to create a riotous sense of abandon and a joyous pleasure upon experiencing blooming, burgeoning nature at all sides. The art of a poet who uses nature and natural processes to express a condition of beingness and to explore states of mind is often measured in the precision and concreteness of the objects and events used as a foundation for the poetics. By that measure , Pattiann Rogers succeeds and also puzzles, for her poetry contains descriptions that are both concrete and elusive, and it is punctuated by stirring dissonances of scientific and sacred discourses, as in “The Doxology of Shadows” as well as others. ThepoemsinHolyHeathenRhapsody contain a precision of description that at times echoes the form of an Anglo-Saxon catalog poem while also invoking the blending of the natural and the spiritual in Romantic aesthetics. However, the literary antecedents are overshadowed by the way she brings together religious forms and a natural spirituality, blending the sacred with the secular in restless, surging energies evocative of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Her ways of describing the blossoming meadows and the damp, richscented forest include the use of the language of geographical information systems and of geometry. In “Hail, Spirit,” the processes result in selfconsciousness : the poem describes a spider weaving her web and her daily work, which centers on “the reading of her soul.” Beingness is a celebration of sensuality and sensation, effected in the motion of swirling in the poems and the release of emotions with the relinquishing of the reins of rational control. In “Young Melchior Takes the Evening Air (Spatial Positioning),” weeds, wild rye, and the memory of swimming fish come together to create an overwhelming sense of motion. Melchior is “three degrees northwest of madness,” and in such a state, he is in a condition of becoming and coming into being and beingness. “The Earth Without a Spiritual Dimension” also contains a deeply textured poetic description constructed of prairie grasses, woodland twigs, and the mosses and flowers. Beingness and the process of becoming have paused for a moment as the mind becomes aware of a kaleidoscopic array of states of mind. Here, Rogers embraces the power to invoke and evoke reawakened perception “as if I were a wild and divine thing myself.” May–August 2014 • 117 118 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Rogers’s poems propose a mechanism to rediscover an essential, compassionate regard of self and nature. For example, in “Vulnerable and Susceptible,” how one encounters animals in the wild and then learns something about oneself is a fundamental metaphor to hold fast in order to overcome the “blindness caused / by the absence of light.” Such a process is regenerative, and the experience of reading the poems in Holy Heathen Rhapsody creates an emotional and intellectual impact of rare depth. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Grzegorz Wróblewski. Kopenhaga. Piotr Gwiazda, tr. Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2013. isbn 9781938890000 So-called immigrant literature remains a popular read, even though the stories have become more and more predictable in their plots. Usually...

The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair

118 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Rogers’s poems propose a mechanism to rediscover an essential, compassionate regard of self and nature. For example, in “Vulnerable and Susceptible,” how one encounters animals in the wild and then learns something about oneself is a fundamental metaphor to hold fast in order to overcome the “blindness caused / by the absence of light.” Such a process is regenerative, and the experience of reading the poems in Holy Heathen Rhapsody creates an emotional and intellectual impact of rare depth. Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Grzegorz Wróblewski. Kopenhaga. Piotr Gwiazda, tr. Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2013. isbn 9781938890000 So-called immigrant literature remains a popular read, even though the stories have become more and more predictable in their plots. Usually , the author traces the protagonist ’s physical journey from one country to another, along the way tapping into the worn repertoire of cultural mishaps, ethnic and religious tensions, and political misunderstandings . Doubtless, there is much to learn from any immigrant story, but the genre’s homogenization has caused it to lose some of its luster. To everyone’s benefit, however , Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga, expertly translated from the Polish and introduced by poet Piotr Gwiazda, fits the category only partially. In fact, it restores our faith in immigrant literature by insisting that the story be necessarily fragmented, both stylistically and thematically. This isn’t to suggest that Wróblewski (b. 1962), who testifies to being terrified by homo sapiens, doesn’t describe his adopted homeland’s alleged idiosyncrasies, which he does. To this neurotic newcomer from the Other Europe, the Danes appear overtly pragmatic (“Virtual cemeteries”) and bent on living out their days under the umbrella of the welfare state, where “everything is well researched and prearranged .” Likewise, the humiliation he endures on daily basis (“suffered so much trying to speak Danish”) is standard fare here. Suspended in a spiritual limbo, the narrator of these prose poems and brief reflections bemoans the fact that “a life goes on without him.” The power of positive thinking professed by his neighbors seems foreign to him, heightening the alienation he already feels, but ironically it doesn’t preclude him from engaging in some wishful thinking himself, believing as he does that “something will come along in the end.” Copenhagen may be the world’s most livable city, but we wouldn’t know it from Wróblewski’s prose. Punctuated by “rain, the sound of ship horns, smoked mackerel,” the land of Lego drives the speaker into “renewed conflicts with [his] surroundings,” which in due course include his “rebellious , increasingly foreign body.” Consequently , he talks to potted plants, a dog, and at least one wasp—all parts of his existential constellation. Attempting to connect the dots on his literal and figurative maps may be an exercise in futility, but it also forces the speaker to realize that “you always return to the starting point,” which for him, as for many an immigrant , is some other place altogether, an elusive elsewhere. “When I close my eyes, I can see much more clearly,” writes Wróblewski, and the effect of his prose on us is no less spellbinding or revelatory. Piotr Florczyk Santa Monica, California Miscellaneous Julene Bair. The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning. New York. Viking. 2014. isbn 9780670786046 In this memoir, Julene Bair attempts to weave multiple kinds of love and reckonings together as she informs readers of the rapid depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, a life-giving but vulnerable source of water for the central high plains. Bair’s perspective is a critically important one, for she writes from the perspective of a farming family that for many years earned its living from crops irrigated by wells draining the aquifer. LikeJanisseRayandWilliamKittredge , Bair sets herself the difficult task of braiding together an evocation of family, a beloved home place, and environmental devastation, adding a love story that only sometimes connects the other strands. Ward, a Kansas rancher, seems to offer the author an oasis in the desert of high Sohrab Sepehri The Oasis of Now Kazim Ali & Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, tr. BOA Editions The Oasis of Now, the first publication of Sohrab Sepehri’s work in...

How is teacher knowledge shaped by the professional knowledge context? Minding our metaphors

This paper compares two theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between individual narratives of experience and the wider social and cultural narrative context. The two frameworks are the narrative landscape model of Connelly and Clandinin and a tool-based framework derived from a neo-Vygotskyan perspective that draws particularly on the work of Wertsch. The paper explores the effects that the fundamental structuring metaphors of landscape and tool have on how we might think about the relationship between individual narratives and social and cultural narrative context. The paper argues that we need to be critically reflective about the metaphors we use and not allow them to become naturalized. It also argues that this is best achieved by exploring alternative metaphors.

(Un)dressing the interface: Exposing the foundational HCI metaphor “computer is woman”

Two fundamental (and oftentimes opposing) metaphors have directed much of HCI design: HCI is communication and HCI is direct manipulation. Beneath these HCI metaphors, however, is the unspoken metaphor of computer is woman. In this paper we expose this foundational metaphor. We begin by identifying the origin of computer is woman in the early history of computing. Drawing upon postmodern feminist theory, we then explore how this metaphor has resulted in the feminization of HCI is communication and second person interfaces. We show how images of femininity proliferate, becoming the projected images of male fantasies and ideals of womanhood. In becoming these idealized images, the interface is revealed as man in female drag. Finally, not only do we undress the interface to uncover how HCI is communication wraps the computer’s difference from human being within the more basic metaphor of computer is woman, but we also disclose dangers that can arise when this metaphor goes unacknowledged and unexamined.

Assia Djebar's La femme sans sépulture as Postcolonial Primer

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. I am indebted to Dominique Fisher for calling my attention to the importance of reading Djebar's novels interculturally. 2. for a sustained analysis of the palimpsest as a fundamental metaphor informing Djebar's work, see Donadey. 3. See, for example, Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

Insects and Institutions: Managing Emergent Hazards in the U.S. Southwest

A range of institutional systems exist to manage and mitigate environmental problems, yet the quickly changing, ecologically surprising, and spatially complex qualities of ecological problems create new challenges for institutional learning. The rapid and nearly uncontrolled recent outbreak of West Nile Virus in the U.S. Southwest, and the associated risk of other mosquito-borne diseases, typifies these sorts of challenges. How are management authorities adapting to the changing conditions presented by mosquito-borne diseases? What bureaucratic structures condition and limit their responses? Using archival research and interviews, this paper analyzes the recent track record of mosquito management in southern Arizona, specifically examining county health programs and municipal water authorities in Pima County and Tucson. Results suggest that bureaucracies develop fundamentally different practices. While health officials collect data and manage problems based largely on citizen complaints, water management authorities are occupied with managing emerging problems in artificial wetland environments. Both bureaucracies are encumbered by disciplinary specializations that fragment learning, thwart interagency interaction, and decrease response times. These differing systems of management and understanding also lead to spotty and inconsistent data collection and abatement. By addressing the fundamental analogies and metaphors that lie at the heart of persistent institutions, adaptation might be better facilitated.