Gentle Reader Research Articles

:Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy

1. Towards a material history of reading 2. Impressions from a 'scribbling age': Gestures and habits of reading 3. Framing 'gentle readers' in preliminaries and margins 4. Noting readers of the Arcadia in marginalia and commonplace books 5. Consuming readers: Ladies, lapdogs and libraries Epilogue Appendix Bibliography Index.

‘Who are You Gentle Reader?’: John Updike—A Month of Sundays (1975)** Paper presented at the Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, October 2004, in Uppsala, Sweden.

This essay revisits a novel that became a locus classicus for interdisciplinary study of literature and theology in the late twentieth century. In 1975, Updike anticipated readers who would recognise references to both The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century analysis of America's Puritan inheritance, and Paul Tillich's life and theology. The witty, blasphemous and sad, Doubting Thomas cleric, whose story this is, claims that 'bodies are us', and ventures the view that adultery represents the superabundant work of grace. How can a novel that, for reasons of topical satire, represented women as voiceless sexual objects, be read in 2005? 'Who are you gentle reader?' is a question posed in the first chapter of John Updike's A Month of Sundays1 by the priapic Rev. Tom Marshfxeld, who, finds himself, at his bishop's behest, on a desert retreat in a sanatorium for variously dysfunctional White Protestant American clergymen. For 'sole therapy' he has the prospect of 'sullying' the blank sheets left in his motel room. The puns, innuendos and theological jokes that gush from his pen announce a highly self-conscious writer, turning this way and that before the literary mirror of his 'gentle reader' so as to achieve his desired effects. The address to the 'gentle reader' is itself one of these writerly tricks: it hovers between being an arch reference to one of prose fiction's oldest narrative conventions and an insinuation that the unknown reader for whom he postures will be of the 'gentler' sex. But behind Marsh stands John Updike, a writer equally self-consciously adept in composing the clues aimed at flattering and seducing his following into recognizing his position in the great American tradition. The averagely educated reader will swiftly pick up the more obvious * Paper presented at the Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, October 2004, in Uppsala, Sweden. Literature & Theology © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org I The Author 200 j. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:40:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Past Unearthed: New Reading of Ruskin Bond's Supernatural Tales

I know that only the more gentle kind of person is likely to care much for my ( 9), wrote Ruskin Bond in the Introduction to the Penguin India anthology of his works, Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories. When he wrote this line in 1988 he appeared to be fairly conscious about three things: his own spirit and mood that was embodied in his works; the attributes of a gentle reader, given the reading habits of the consumer; and that he had never in the past, or would in future, compromise his attitude to life and storytelling even it did not bode well for his success in the changing times. Perhaps this was one of many factors responsible for his popularity as a children's writer, despite many of his stories being addressed to the child in the adult. Ironically, the adventurous pranksters who constitute the child community anything but gentle. Yet to this day Bond is still (mis)recognized as primarily a children's writer. What is appropriate for children is determined by the discretion of the adult. Jacqueline Rose (45) considers children's literature as a form of colonization and Perry Nodelman (29-35) equates Rose's view with Edward Said's description of orientalism as an ideology of domination. Jonathan Culley (59-73), in his Levi- Straussian approach to Roald Dahl, shows how the mythic dimension in the author transcends all age limits. Career graphs of Louisa May Alcott, C.S.Lewis, Russell Hoban, A.A.Milne et al. evince shared indecisiveness about when and how they slipped in and out of generic territories of children's, adolescent, and adult literatures. The very idea of isolating the categories, contends Michael Steig, entails a risk of reifi cation if we do not keep in mind just how arbitrary, how conventional, and to some extent how market-driven (the terms) are (36). Critics like Roberta Seelinger Trites, Roderick McGillis, Robert Cormier, and Patricia Head—all votaries of Steig's belief—have come forward to probe the postmodern interpretive possibilities of what is conventionally branded as children's or young-adult fi ction.

Adam Smith's Campaign Against the Sublime

Previous articleNext article No AccessAdam Smith's Campaign Against the SublimeAnne JanowitzAnne Janowitz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 35, Number 1Winter 2004Natural Knowledge in the Romantic Age Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24046033 Views: 4Total views on this site © 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Marble Mother: Hawthorne's Iconographies of the Feminine

To participate in critical discourse on Hawthorne is to step into fast-rushing stream, crowded with fishermen of varying orientations, all in hot pursuit of specimen that, no matter how many times it is caught, always ends up back in water. Thus sport of Hawthorne criticism has its pleasures and short-lived rewards, but perhaps most characteristic aspect of catch has not been its flesh, but its slipperiness, accompanying sense that canonical big one always gets away. Textually well-supported arguments, often diametrically opposed--we might want to call them studied and elaborate fish stories--are advanced with great regularity, but only seem to incite further discourse. The famously ambiguous Hawthorne has maintained his claim on critical attention by just this capacity of his work to sustain widely disparate readings. As preamble to my own--perhaps similarly foredoomed--reading, I would like to suggest that undecidability we are faced with in Hawthorne's work was deliberately cultivated by author himself, and that equivocal qualities of Hawthorne's writing are better understood as manipulations of highly subtle and self-conscious artist who knows only too well what he is trying to say, yet feels he must not say it. But why would Hawthorne dissimulate his views in his romances? We should consider nature of romance itself, genre that author claimed for his work, in explicit opposition to novel. As Hawthorne's prefaces assert, indirection is soul of romance, both representationally and in its moral. It is impossible not to note this prefatory Hawthorne's rather extreme aversion to being pinned down by his Gentle Reader. The keynotes everywhere are unease, circumspection and an insistent, even combative, modesty. This passive-aggressive mode is reflected even in his syntax. Observe Hawthorne as he simultaneously avers and defers in preface to The Marble Faun: Therefore, I have little heart or confidence (especially writing as I do in foreign land, and after long, long absence from my own) to presume upon existence of that friend of friends, that unseen brother of soul, whose apprehensive sympathy has so often encouraged me to be egotistical in my prefaces, careless though should skim over what was never meant for them. (1) A major author more sensitive to influence of these unkindly eyes may never have written, and it is in this habitually defensive mode, I contend, that Hawthorne gravitated toward romance over more nakedly moralizing and topical domestic and sensationalist novels then ruling marketplace. These novels Hawthorne tended to lump together as trash, and associated--rightly or wrongly--with famous damned mob of female authors whose sales dwarfed even The Scarlet Letter, his most commercially successful work. (2) This is not to say, of course, that Hawthorne rejected self-expression in his fiction. Nina Baym has suggested that Hawthorne's career-long tendency to put himself forward as an author who declined engagement with issues of moment, was strategy that differentiated this writer of romances from participants of sphere he saw as dominated by women. (3) Not many issues were more clearly of public moment in Hawthorne's time than proper role and place of woman herself, and problem unquestionably glared at Hawthorne as writer of imaginative fictions. Michael T. Gilmore has recently suggested that Hawthorne wrote against the of knowing, championing distanced and guarded forms of disclosure in time when a continuum of [antebellum] social, political, and cultural practices insisted on legibility and transparency. (4) The novel, for Hawthorne, exemplified this tyranny in literature, and in powerfully gendered way. The prefaces depict novel as participating in kind of gross literary materiality, whether in too-solid or literal representations of everyday realities, or in unyielding and artless moralizing. …

Metaphors of the Book as Garden in the English Renaissance

ABSTRACT This article surveys the metaphor of the book as garden in English Renaissance printed collections. It includes as an appendix a listing of every Pollard and Redgrave title using the terms 'garden', 'posy', and so on. The primary emphases are on the paratextual features of these volumes, and on the authors' self-conscious musings on the literal sense of the anthology as a gathering of flowers. Ye haue here (good readers) a gardeyn or a paradyse rather of nette, propre, quicke, and graue sayenges of renowmed persons, in which to recreate your selfes, it shalbe as I iudge no les profytable, then pleasaunt vnto you. Richard Taverner, 'To the gentle readers', The garden of wysdom (1539) Pardon, I pray thee, my presumption, and protect me from those Cavelling finde-faults that never like well of any thing they see printed, though never so well compiled: What I have here done, I have done to the pleasure of my friends, and thee, and not to make any profit by them; wherefore my gentle Reader accept kindly, I pray thee, of all, and be not (as hard Censurers) hastie to blast young springing Blossomes in their tender Bud. Samuel Pick, 'To the Reader', Festum Voluptatis (1639) Eiz to' n leimv na kahisaz e[degrees]drepen eteron e Q' e1/2ter v airo menoz a[degrees]creum' a nhevn a1/2 domena. yuca. -- Francis Turner Palgrave, after Euripedes, epigraph to The Golden Treasury (1861) In his Moral Epistle 84, Seneca employs a metaphor that we find reflected in numerous early modern collections of apothegms, prayers, meditations, poems, epigrams, and elegies, and which is embodied, through its etymology, in the anthology: (1) Apes, ut aiunt, debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores ad mel faciendum idoneos carpunt, deinde quicquid attulere, disponunt ac per favos digerunt. [...] Nos quoque has apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diversa lectione congessimus, separare. (2) Erasmus echoes Seneca, more than fourteen centuries later, under the heading 'Ratio colligendi exempla' of his De Dvplici Copia Verborum (1528; STC 10472): 'Itaque studiosus ille velut apicula diligens, per omnes au[c]torum hortos volitabit, flosculis omnibus adsultabit, vndique succi non nihil colligens, quod in suum de ferat aluearium' (sig. [T5.sup.r]). (3) In Palladis Tamia (1598; STC 17834) Francis Meres includes his own version of Seneca's passage under 'The vse of reading many Bookes' ('Bees out of diuers flowers draw diuers iuices, but they temper and digest them by their owne vertue, otherwise they would make no honny: so all authours are to be turned ouer, and what thou readest is to be transposed to thine owne vse' (sig. [Mm4.sup.v])), (4) but Meres alters Seneca's subjunctive recommendation (we ought to imitate the bee), to a more pointed exhortation: texts are meant to be mined; their choicest selections are to be appropriated by the lector diligens. This labour of the compiler/apicula provides the material for a class of texts that has persevered for more than two millennia. The precursors to the enterprise of selecting, extracting, and recombining material, and the horticultural metaphors for that enterprise, can be traced to ancient Greece. What we today call the Greek Anthology is an assembly of several collections of elegiac epigrams, foremost among them the Garland, or SteQanoz, of Meleager (c. 100 BC); Meleager's collection lives up to its title by assigning each author a specific flower, and encodes his critical assessments of the poets in the characteristics of each author's flower, from the lily, rose, and iris to the crocus, pine, and myrtle. W. R. Paton emphasizes that Meleager's 'collection comprises no poems (as far as we know) of [his] age except his own'; (5) falling chronologically and, in MS Palatinus 23 (the primary source for much of the Greek anthology), (6) physically after Meleager, the Garland of Philippus tries, by contrast, to mediate the taste for the old with an interest in the new: 'Plucking for thee flowers of Helicon and the first-born blooms of the famous Pierian forests, reaping the ears of a newer page, I have in my turn plaited a garland to be like that of Meleager. …

The Resourceful Patient by J.A. Muir Gray

<i>The Resourceful Patient</i> by J.A. Muir Gray

Stop, thief!

Recently it came to my attention that I'm an inveterate thief: a depraved criminal without a conscience, unleashing a trail of cheating and larceny for over two decades. The scary part is, I'm not alone. You, gentle reader, are probably as corrupt as I, if not more. Our accuser, Mr. Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, made a clear and compelling case in a recent interview published in CableWorld.

The Vulgata Latina as Sacred Text: What Did the Council of Trent Mean When it Claimed Jerome's Bible was Authentica?

The crisis caused for the Roman Catholic Church by what has been termed, by historians, the Northern Renaissance can hardly be overestimated. The popular notion that the formal breakaway of the Protestant Reformation, and the activities of Luther and Calvin, were the decisive factors in Rome's fall does not fully capture the truth. It was Erasmus who had inspired both branches of the Reformation movement (and that third flank known as the 'radical Reformation'), and so it was Erasmus who received the most severe disapprobation in the Tridentine Index. It was, after all, Erasmus's impudence in producing a rival Greek text of the Bible (from manuscripts produced by that schismatic Greek Church in the East) as superior to the ancient Vulgata Latina that lit the original conflagration which would become the Protestant revolution. Hence, one of the primary tasks appointed to the Council of Trent (1544-63) was to reaffirm, in the clearest way possible, the dominical sanction of the Latin Bible over either the Greek or Hebrew versions. It was, in any case, these newly published Greek and Hebrew editions of the Bible that were seen to be the cause of all the folly that had fallen on the sixteenth-century Church. But just what did the Council mean when it claimed that only the Vulgata Latina could be considered 'authentica'? The authorial intent of Trent was uniformly clear enough to its contemporaries and to all who followed. As of the mid-twentieth century, however, a modern papal encyclical altered the Council's original meaning. This article surveys the history of the Council of Trent on this point and attempts to provide the reader with enough data to recognize the historical revisionism that has taken place since its original pronouncements. Now to give thee also intelligence in particular, most gentle reader, of such thinges as it behoueth thee specially to know concerning our Translation: We translate the old vulgar Latin text, not the common Greeke text, for these causes ... It is not only better than al other Latin translations, but then the Greeke text itself, in those places where they disagree. (Preface to the Rhemes New Testanzent, 1582)

A Homeric Allusion in Swift’s A Modest Proposal

76 like ‘‘Yet it is more complicated than that.’’ Mr. Bogel turns a breezy line of Byron ’s—‘‘But verse is more in fashion—so here goes!’’—into a conundrum: it is ‘‘an energetic launching into the verse-writing project, but also a commentary ontheephemerality of the present.’’ The confusing effect of such overingenuity combines with Mr. Bogel’s opaque style to render the book less inviting than it should be. For example: ‘‘In consequence, it is certainly possible to imagine the Augustans exploiting at once the satiric potential and the penchant for political quietism that the Miltonic example offered, thereby reinforcing the difference between the established order and the deluded and inevitably parodic rebel as well as the difference between the Miltonic precedent and the subsequent tradition of satire.’’ Most troubling is Mr. Bogel’s failure to acknowledge the labors of those who have prepared the way. True, they are Swiftians, not all of them ‘‘formalists.’’ True, Swift is a ‘‘singular’’ writer. Among them, however, they anticipate most of Mr. Bogel’s theoretical ideas: the satirist satirized, satire of the reader, the ‘‘doubleness’’ of satire, the spuriousness of ‘‘personae,’’ the absence of satiric norms. The slighted precursors include, at the very least, W. B. C. Watkins in Perilous Balance (1939), Henry W. Sams in ‘‘Swift’s Satire of the Second Person,’’(1959), Irvin Ehrenpreisin‘‘Personae’’(1963) and in his discussion of An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1967; Vol. II of the biography), W. B. Carnochan in Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror for Man (1968) and in ‘‘Swift’s Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony’’(1971), and C. J. Rawson in Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (1973). Nora F. Crow Smith College A HOMERIC ALLUSION IN SWIFT’S A MODEST PROPOSAL Robert E. Jungman In his short analysis of the first paragraph of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Martin Price observes that one of Swift’s favorite satiric techniques involves ‘‘the play on the emptiness of stale terms’’ by the essay’s speaker, an author who clearly likes ‘‘refined jargon.’’ A good example of this jargon occurs when the persona uses the phrase ‘‘this great town’’to set up the later reference near the end of the first paragraph to a ‘‘dear Native Country.’’ This ‘‘dear Native Country’’ is the homeland that Irish children must desert in order to find a living later as mercenaries or indenturedservants, unless, of course, they choose to stay in Ireland to become thieves.1 That such a homeland could be called ‘‘dear’’ by the speaker is a good example of Swift’s vivid and most obvious irony. A further dimension of irony in ‘‘dear Native Country’’ is perhaps not so obvious. As Irish children grow up, says the narrator, they must ‘‘either turn Thieves for want of Work; or leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell 1 Martin Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (New Haven: Yale, 1953; repr.Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois, 1953), p. 72. 77 themselves to the Barbadoes.’’2 Here, the juxtaposition of ‘‘dear Native Country’’and ‘‘to fight for the Pretender in Spain’’ is not accidental. Normally, one should be fighting for one’s native country, not leaving it to fight elsewhere. Fromtheclassicalperiodon,thestandardheroicidealhasbeentodiefighting in defense of one’s country, like Hector at Troy. The locus classicus of this concept is Horace’s ‘‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,’’ which he took from Greek sources like Homer and Tyrtaeus. Swift, however, does not mention dying, but rather leaving one’s native land to fight overseas for someone else, a situation described exactly in Homer’s Iliad, when Athena rouses the Greeks to battle at Troy: ˆ ’ ␧␯ ␦` ␧ ␴␪‘ ␧␯␱␵ ’ ␻␳␴␧␯ ‘ ␧␬´ ␣␱␶␻¸ ’⬘ ␬␣␳␦␫␩ ␣␭␭␩␬␶␱␯ ␲␱␭␧␮␫␨␧␫␯ ’ ␩␦` ␧ ␮ ´ ␣␹␧␴␪␣␫. ’⬘ ␶␱ˆ ␫␴␫ ␦ ⬘ ␣␾␣␳ ␲´ ␱␭␧␮␱␵ ␥␭␷␬´ ␫␯␯ ␥´ ␧␯␧␶⬘ ´ ␩` ␧ ␯‘ ␧⑀␴␪␣␫ ’ ␧␯ ␯␮␷␴` ␫ ␥␭␣␾␷␳ ˆ ␩␴␫ ␾␫␥␩␯ ’ ␧␵ ␲␣␶␳␫␦␣ ␥␣ˆ ␫␣␯. and in the heart of each man she roused strength to war and to battle without ceasing. And to them forthwith war became sweeter than to return in their hollow ships to their dear native land.3 Swift reverses the fighting/returning sequence of Homer’s phrasing, but the Greek is nevertheless an exact equivalent of Swift’s words. There is thus not only a sharp similarity in ideas between the Greek and English texts, but a close...

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. A Novel Versification by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin by Douglas s&gt; Hofstadter (review)

REVIEWS 3 I 3 very good degree in physicsis much botheredby the problem of a photon, but the contradictionbetween historyas historyand as fuel for fiction strikesany educated reader,and Niels Bohr is not much help here. Evdokimovaexplores the role of Peter the Great in Poltava, Mednyivsadnik, ArapPetravelikogo with great intelligence and verve, just as she takes apart very neatly Pushkin's responseto Radishchev (thejourney fromMoscow to St Petersburg),to arrive at a plausibleview of a Pushkinbalancingnecessityand accident, tyrannyand revolt to arrive at some sort of liberal conservative nationalism. She is very well read on the theoryof historicalfiction and in historicalfiction of the early nineteenth century. What is missing in this work (wheremuch space is taken up by painstaking translation from French and Russian into English), is a considerationof the most glaringcontradictionsin Pushkin'shistoricallyrics. How could a man write Anchar,a profound poem which takes the most modern, anarchic and despairing view of history, and then denounce supporters of Poland as 'slanderers of Russia'? Or how could he portray himselfgalloping to Erzerum,shouting Ver banaatat any unfortunatepeasant he encountered, and yet let his Grinev expound a view of progressive humanization of power? Like Lermontov, Pushkin appears capable of maintaining two completely incompatible ideas in his head. To the rights of man, as Camus did, Pushkinwould have to add the right to walk away and the rightto contradicthimself.The lapsesof historicalimagination arejust as impressiveas the imagination itself. PerhapsSvetlana Evdokimovawill write a second volume? The Athlone Presshasreissued,withbibliographyupdatedto I997, Tatiana Wolff's compilation of all Pushkin'sutterances on literature. This is a work that has evolved over half a century and, although based on a Soviet model, not only ismore accessiblethan itsRussianpredecessors(thereis a good index and an excellentbibliographicalappendix),but thetranslationis so exemplary that, even to professional Russianists,it remains an essential vade-mecum. All we now need is more of Pushkin'spoetic texts in poetic English for Tatiana Wolff's compendium to accompany. 'They use the snaffle and the curb all right,Butwhere'sthe bloody horse?' Queen.lary College DONALD RAYFIELD University ofLondon Hofstadter,Douglas (ed.). Eugene Onegin. A Novelin Verse. ANovelVersification by AlexanderSergeevich Pushkin.Basic Books, New York, 1999. lxvi + I37 pp. Notes. Illustrations.?15.50: $22.00. IT may well come as a surprisethat a new attempt to anglicize Pushkin's masterpiece should appear so soon after the publication of James Falen's excellent version (Oxford University Press, I998). Douglas Hofstadter (a distinguishedcognitive scientistand winner of the Pulitzerprize for an earlier book) is a relativelynew but immensely enthusiasticadmirerof Pushkin,and he has produced, whatever else, a version of EvgeniiOneginwhich is distinct from its predecessors. In his garrulous Translator's Preface, Professor Hofstadter not only gives a blow-by-blow account of how he learned (some) 314 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 Russian for the purpose of popularizing Pushkin's novel in verse (many readers may choose to skip this very leisurely exercise in autobiography), but also makes comparisons with other translations (into English) and offers a critique of his own work vis-A-vis those of Oliver Elton (revised by A. D. P. Briggs), Walter Arndt, Charles Johnston, James Falen, and Hofstadter's nemesis Vladimir Nabokov. This he does mainly on the basis of Chapter 4, Stanza 20 where even the much admired Falen, whose translation had inspired this new enterprise, is below his best or, as his admirer puts it, 'to tell the truth, a rather run-of-the-mill effort for him' (p. xxix). The present reviewer gives the same fourteen lines as an illustration of the Hofstadter style, rather than choosing an exceptionally felicitous or, indeed, inept passage (the standard is uneven, perhaps not surprisingly, as the translation was produced at the rate of one stanza a day): Hallo, hulloo, my gentle reader! And how'reyour kinfolk,old and young? Praylet me tellyou, asyour leader, Some scuttlebuttabout our tongue. WAhat's 'kin'?It'srelativelysubtle, Butyou'll tune in if I but scuttle: Our kithand kinwe're meant to love; We dish out kisses,tokensof Our high esteem;we pay a visit Each Christmas -it's a Russianrut Or else send notes in greeting,but... It isn't out of fondness,is it? It'sall so they'llforgetforthwith Us...

Guardians of Democracy or Cultural Storm Troopers?: American Catholics and the Control of Popular Media, 1934–1966

In 1936 the Nation attempted to warn its readers about an insidious infiltration of American culture. the New York Times hired a lieutenant of Hitler's to blue-pencil its European news, there would be cries to high heaven; if the Soviet Government should presume to decide that no books criticizing the Russian revolution could be sold in the United States, the air would be filled with thunder. If in 1936 these were not yet quite the fighting words they would be fifteen years later, they were nonetheless strong stuff. What dire threat deserved comparison to the century's worst villains? The Nation was reacting to the 1934 establishment of the Catholic Legion of Decency, which by 1936 had achieved considerable influence over the making of motion pictures.What the non-Catholic moviegoers are entitled to decide, the editors asserted,. is whether they wish to have their films censored in advance by the Catholic church.1 A similar alarm was raised less than a decade later by Drew Pearson in his Post column, this time about another Catholic group, the National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL).Efficient General Frank Walker, Pearson wrote in his Washington MerryGo-Round on March 25,1943,has got himself into a situation whereby certain zealots of the church to which he belongs have become unofficial censors of American magazines. And Frank is playing into their hands. The column goes on to detail the requests from the NODL that Walker investigate whether certain publications on its disapproved list should be deprived of second-class mailing privileges. Postmaster General Walker, Pearson notes, . indignantly denied that members of his own religious faith were influencing his policy in barring magazines from the mails. However, the Acolyte [sic], organ of the National Organization for Decent Literature, gives him full credit.2 These warnings exhibit already old but persistent American fears that Catholics were intent on infiltrating and controlling crucial social and cultural institutions. In organizing opposition to certain kinds of popular entertainment, Catholics were often accused of stepping over an implicit boundary demarcating the sphere of influence acceptable for a partisan group. At the same time they were eliciting such protest, however, Catholics were also gaining allies in their efforts from among the very Americans whose boundaries they were supposedly transgressing. The existence of both critics and allies suggests what was in fact the case-on the issues in question, no cultural consensus existed, and the field was open for action. Multiple, often competing, groups contributed to defining attitudes toward censorship and control of media. The differences among these groups, while many, were perhaps never so marked as in their differing beliefs about the nature and function of art. As a variety of recent work has suggested, the first half of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented growth in and differentiation among the institutions of culture and entertainment, and their various stewards and guardians.3 The emergence of the middlebrow, the persistence of the genteel, the demise of the gentle reader, the disillusion of the avant-garde-a bewildering interplay of critical narratives attempted to render an account of artistic and cultural phenomena burgeoning beyond the ken or control of any one viewpoint. While modernists asserted a new freedom for art in both form and subject, middle-class reformers sought new mechanisms to implement old values in the perplexing realm of mass media.4 While left-wing defenders of American democracy sought to maximize American freedom as a safeguard against the growing threat of totalitarianism, conservative defenders of the same system hoped to temper freedom-or license, as they would have said-with moral safeguards against the relativism that they believed permitted totalitarianism to take root. In this volatile atmosphere, Catholic efforts at controlling motion pictures and magazines, not surprisingly, elicited mixed reactions. …

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. By John Seelye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xv, 699. Illustrations. $39.95.) Forefathers' Day is a holiday no longer observed by vast numbers of individuals calling themselves Americans. For a good portion of New England's years of hegemony in national political culture, however, annual observation of much-disputed landing at Plymouth Rock attracted erudite orators-ministers, statesmen, writers, and historians-whose task of day was to interpret Pilgrims' errand to those gathered in this Cape Cod town. These yearly orations-some two centuries' worth-form chief body of evidence collected and analyzed by author John Seelye, whose eloquently wrought Memory's Nation provides ample-even daunting-evidence that he be considered latest celebrant of Forefathers' Day. Seelye's task is to interpret those orations, amongst other visual, material, and textual evidence, to reveal historical meanings of Rock. This Seelye does, in exhaustive detail. Memory's Nation is a weighty tome, and those readers expecting publisher's standard of 350 pages with abbreviated notes, select bibliography, and scanty index will be surprised, even dismayed. More is pity. Gentle reader, where is your courage? Seelye provides an occasion for reader to share-indeed, indulge-in type of investigation, rumination, and curiosity-sating that all scholars desire. Seelye's is a meticulous and subtly witty style. Once reader surrenders to pleasure of reading author's divagation into personalities, literary criticism, and other seemingly incidental and accidental asides, Plymouth Rock becomes less a symbol or myth and more a touchstone by which to chart ambiguities and authenticity of politics and patriotism, evidence and anecdote, history and memory. Memory's nation is New England, and Memory's Nation chronologically charts fate of region from its early, liberty-seeking political and moral hegemony in defining first revolutionary and then national culture to its conservative denouement in early twentieth century. By 1769, Plymouth inhabitants had created an Old Colony Club through which improvement and ancestor worship could be achieved. Meeting annually on (erroneous, it turns out) anniversary of Pilgrims' landing, club members ate a meal that supposedly reenacted plain foodways of Forefathers and toasted ancestors and contemporaries. Quickly, members settled into a yearly ritual that added a military parade followed by an address celebrating ideals and suffering of small band. Just as quickly, Old Colony Club disbanded; by 1773, majority of members were Loyalists, and few Patriots amongst them left. The next year, with Lexington and Concord already in memory, Forefathers' Day became an exercise in patriotism. Although Benedict Anderson, in his oft-invoked Imagined Communities (rev. ed., 1991), asserts, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 makes absolutely no reference to Christopher Columbus, Roanoke, or Pilgrim Fathers, nor are grounds put forward to justify independence in any way `historical,' in sense of highlighting antiquity of American people (193), Seelye implies that significance of New England need not have been stated. The Patriots' genealogy of liberty already had been established through rituals such as those at Plymouth. The majority of book's twenty-five chapters are dedicated to antebellum political and religious leaders, writers, and reformers who took Plymouth Rock as a symbol of their various causes. …

Go with the flow

In a recent article, Wann and Land cast rhetorical aspersions upon the idea that optic flow is used to guide human locomotion1. They were especially critical of the notion that the perception of heading (one's instantaneous direction of translation) from optic flow is required for locomotor control in general, and for the task of steering a curved trajectory in particular. Their argument strikes us as full of straw, for to our knowledge no one has actually proposed that heading is required for all locomotor tasks, and researchers have already identified other variables that could be used to steer a curved path to a goal. In this reply we urge the gentle reader not to be swayed by the authors’ disputation, and we bring to bear some empirical evidence that rules out their data-free conjectures.

Bitter and twisted.

‘Bitter-and-twisted’ individuals are found in all academic institutions. The people most susceptible to this syndrome are those with high intelligence and deep personal aspirations to accomplish something important. The age of onset is quite variable; serious cases may first appear during graduate school, only to worsen over time. More mild cases may only develop after the age of 50. One of the early warning signs of the bitter-and-twisted syndrome is the tendency to comment in seminars that you have already done (but not necessarily published) what the speaker is describing. Another symptom is the compulsion to spend hours with Science Citation Index looking at who is citing (and not citing) your work. In more serious cases, individuals repeatedly write angry letters to journals, editors and other scientists, threatening severe recriminations if the writer’s work is not cited.At the root of the bitter-and-twisted’ syndrome is the tendency to feel underacknowledged, unloved and underappreciated; it’s hardly surprising that such feelings are common in academia. When I was in college, I remember a professor saying that the Iliad is a tale about the scarcity of honor. We scientists also live in a world where honor, glory and recognition feel scarce. Like soldiers, we are part of a collective enterprise that depends on collaboration and cooperation, yet rewards individual achievement. We live in a world that measures the impact of our papers (reliably or not), accords status not only on the basis of the quality of a paper (however this is judged) but according to the perceived excellence of the journal that published it, and rewards acknowledged achievement with the financial resources that facilitate additional achievement. We all wish to be scientific equivalents of Achilles, or even Michael Jordan, but most of us must content ourselves with the personal satisfaction of a job well done.Our sporting heroes expect to live in a world in which the accomplishments of yesteryear do not protect against the dire consequences of a bad season. We however, delude ourselves that our accomplishments have more lasting impact than they do. Work that time finds insignificant will be soon forgotten by all but a few. Even work that is truly significant soon passes from the purview of citation, in which the accomplishment is attributed to the individual, to being ‘general knowledge’. The first demonstrations of an important or paradigm-changing finding are often forgotten. The pioneer, as often as not, must be content with only the personal satisfaction of having changed the way people think, and not expect continued peer recognition of the achievement.The bitter-and-twisted syndrome is sometimes a symptom of a related disease: the paralysis that can result from perfectionism. The individual with ‘perfectionism paralysis’ will have endless reasons why an experiment isn’t worth doing because it won’t answer all of the questions in the universe. He or she will be unable to finish and publish any study for fear that it isn’t good enough (whatever that means). The inevitable consequence of this is that when someone else publishes the same results — often many years later — and receives credit for the work, the individual displays bitter-and-twisted behaviors.My husband and I have a serious disagreement about the diagnosis of bitter-and-twisted syndrome. He maintains that this diagnosis should be limited to those with incurable cases that pervade their entire approach to science and life. I have appropriated the term for symptoms that could affect all of us unless we are vigilant. Like many academic disagreements, we leave it to you, my gentle readers, to decide which definition you find most useful. He maintains that those with the incurable form of bitter-and-twisted are so because of early life experiences, and academic life only provides the opportunities for the scars of childhood and adolescence to reveal themselves. I am far more concerned with the, hopefully, milder form that could afflict most of us as we age. I believe that we all must guard against pernicious tendencies to slip into short bouts of bitter-and-twisted; if recognized and treated in time, these can be cured.What should you do if you find yourself displaying the symptoms? The first line of defense should be a close personal friend who, after 30 minutes of listening to you feeling sorry for yourself, will tell you to “rise above it”. Being able to laugh at yourself is necessary. Remembering why you wanted to be a scientist helps. Above all, the best preventive medicine is to attempt to emulate the grace and dignity with which some of our most senior and respected scientists support and encourage their junior colleagues.

Is There A Straight Line in This Text?: The Homo-erotics of Tristram Shandy

This article examines the intimacy in Tristram Shandy formed between the narrator, Tristram, and the constructed reader, the Gentle Reader (this reader is gendered within the text as male). Traditionally, the erotics of the text have been read heteroerotically and autoeratically, but never homoerotically. Critics have eagerly explored all possible sexual connotation in this novel except same-sex sexuality and innuendo. The desire to read a text “straight” is what I have termed “hetero-glossia;” hetero-glossia is a reading practice which posits homoeroticism (and homosexuality) as “different” and “other” while assuming heteroeroticism (and hetero-sexuality) to be the standard or norm. In doing so, it repeatedly omits/misreads passages or texts which it defines as being different or other, namely reading the homoerotic elements in texts it wishes to read straight. Thus, my reading of Tristram Shandy looks at the relationships between Tristram and his Gentle Reader and between Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim and the jokes and innuendoes within the text dealing with same-sex sexuality. Furthermore, Tristram gives the penis a position of primacy in his own narrative and in the narratives that he tells his reader; thus, the penis, via stories, is exchanged between men. The purpose of this article is not to “out” Sterne, but to reveal that his text revels in all forms of sexuality and play.

Oysters Rubinstein: An Afterword

An Afterword When Gavin Campbell first shared this vivid anecdote with us at Southern Cultures, it touched off a mixed response. Some of us saw it as a funny story in the vein of southwestern humor, popular from frontier days through Mark Twain and on down to Hollywood's fling with Gomer Pyle and The Beverly Hillbillies. Nobody disagreed with that, and Campbell's apt introduction makes clear that Jud's ambivalence about classical music was not a private idiosyncrasy but a real historical experience for many southerners of his own and subsequent decades. But a couple of us thought there was something else at work in Bagby's energetic sketch, and much discussion ensued. The fact that the lead essays in this issue debate Gone with the Wind as part of an ongoing crisis in southern gender relations only made the conversation livelier. So, Gentle Reader, we leave it to you to decide. Is George William Bagby another southern author who is hiding something in plain sight? The case for a double meaning in How Rubenstein [sic] Played starts with the problem of how to make longhair music seem palatable to southern countrymen. The author sets up the situation by eavesdropping on the conversation of Jud Brownin, cracker barrel philosopher, talking with a group of friends. Since this is 1873, the middle of Reconstruction, the men are undoubtedly ex-Confederate soldiers, still smarting from defeat. Jud has just been to New York to hear Anton Rubinstein, the great Russian concert pianist, and the good ole boys want to know what it was like. In popular stereotype, however, the artist and his music are effete, and the last thing these boys want to hear is another northern-inspired invitation to give up more of their war-wounded manhood. Even so, Jud liked the concert, and wants to say so without sounding like a sissy britches. What's his narrative strategy? Jud decides to tell his story as the tale of a powerful man, a feminized piano, and a listener who is almost feminized too. starts off with the lyrical beauty of the concert, so exquisite it moves him to womanly tears. The brief appearance of Cupid (the little white angel boy) hints at what is to come, and makes Jud [want] to love somebody. But this pastoral prelude is really just deceptive foreplay, for the onset of tender desire triggers a violent mood swing in the pianist. He got mad, Jud tells us, and turns on his instrument in a shocking reenactment of domestic violence. Sir, just went for that old pianner, Jud remembers. As if to punish his partner for tempting him with softness, he slapt her face, boxed her jaws, pulled her nose, pinched her ears and scratched her cheeks, till she farly yelled. …

"Gentle Reader, I Fain Would Spare You This, but My Pen Hath Its Will like the Ancient Mariner": Narrator(s) and Audience in William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch"

"Gentle Reader, I Fain Would Spare You This, but My Pen Hath Its Will like the Ancient Mariner": Narrator(s) and Audience in William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch"

"It is Dangerous (Gentle Reader)": Censorship, Holinshed's Chronicle, and the Politics of Control

"It is Dangerous (Gentle Reader)": Censorship, Holinshed's Chronicle, and the Politics of Control

Poe's "Diddling" and the Depression: Notes on the Sources of Swindling

In recent article for Poe Studies, John E. Reilly discusses the possible sources for Poe's satire on swindling, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.(1) Disputing previous assumptions, Reilly argues that Poe's story may be derived from actual newspaper reports rather than from James Kenney's 1803 farce Raising the Wind. I would like to bring forward additional evidence concerning the background of Poe's tale and the representation of swindling in antebellum American culture. pertinent texts appeared in the Corsair and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, publications with which Poe was generally familiar. Tales in these two magazines help to clarify the popular meaning of such terms as diddling and the wind, and they also provide further evidence about the composition date of Poe's tale and its possible debt to Kenney's play. More importantly, these texts serve to enlarge the frame of reference for Poe's tale, thereby facilitating the crucial transition from literary source to the full context of literary production. Corsair was short-lived New York weekly founded by Timothy O. Porter and N. P. Willis; as suggested by its name, the sailing orders dictated that the magazine overhaul every craft on the literary seas - ransack her lading - take out of her what is valuable, and send her on her voyage.(2) On January 25, 1840, the Corsair published The Romance of Day: A Passage in the Life of an Adventurer. story is important because it translates elements of Kenney's farce into form more suitable to mass-circulation magazines and newspapers. central character is named Dick Diddler, distant connexion, by the mother's side, of the famous Jeremy, immortalized by Kenney. Unlike Kenney's somewhat bumbling rogue, Dick is described as a shrewd, reckless adventurer, gifted with an elastic conscience that would stretch like Indian-rubber, and genius for raising the unsurpassed by AEolus himself (p. 733). Penniless and beset by creditors, Dick convinces Priscilla - rich, ancient virgin - to elope with him at the end of the story. Reilly points out that Kenney's play ends with about the need for poor idle rogues to engage in honest industry.(3) The Romance of Day, however, eschews such didacticism, concluding instead with very different kind of moral lesson: he who at nine o'clock in the morning was an adventurer without sixpence in his pocket, by the same hour in the evening was gentleman in possession of woman worth eight hundred pounds per annum! - Gentle reader, truth is strange, - stranger than fiction (p. 736). On the one hand, then, the Corsair provides further substantiation for Reilly's rejection of Kenney's farce as source. The Romance of Day demonstrates that Diddler and the wind were sufficiently well known to appear without annotation in the popular press. On the other hand, however, the story demonstrates that concepts in transition simultaneously look back to old sources and forward to new connotations. Since The Romance of Day borrows so heavily from Kenney's Raising the Wind, Poe might have known something about the plot of the original farce even if he had never seen it performed. This in turn would have made Poe aware of the differences between the original Jeremy and the contemporary association of diddling with crime, financial panic, and the breakdown of order.(4) Thus it is difficult to say if ignorance or opportunism inspired Poe to make these differences even more extreme - and more extremely rational - in Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences. Corsair is important for other reasons. August 10, 1839 issue, for example, contains Richard Johns' The Raven, bad gothic poem about flesh-eating bird (p. 337). Other issues contained such titles as Robbery of Love Letters (p. 731), Cursory Cogitations Concerning Cats (p. …