Gift Of Language Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Jason Kyle Howard In May, on the heels of a cold snap, Appalachian literature lost one of its finest poets with the death of Ron Houchin. I mention the chill in the air because when I think of Ron and his work, winter comes to mind—or at least a brisk day that calls for a thick, woolen cardigan to brave the elements. A grey Irish sky, dimming at the close of the day and speckled, perhaps, with a murmuration of starlings. Always, stillness. He had a way of suspending time in his poems—of directing his readers' vision with his own keen eyes and gift for language toward something worth witnessing, worth remembering. [End Page 6] As an editor, it was always a pleasure to publish his writing. I knew that whenever I opened one of his submissions I was in for an encounter that would see his words ring through my head the rest of the day. I will miss those emails, and I know our readers will miss his work. In this issue, we are proud to announce the winners of the 2021 Denny C. Plattner Awards. Our fiction section features "Eviction Notice," a layered short story from Kasia Merrill, and we have the pleasure of introducing you to Leo Coffey, a promising young writer who contributes "Orange Soda." In her essay "Where Do You Come From," Rachel Kesselman takes the reader from Appalachian Pennsylvania to Paris and then to Washington, D.C. Quincy Gray McMichael, a nonfiction writer and poet who runs a farm in West Virginia, offers an evocative reflection on how the music of Paul Simon has carried her through life. Award-winning poet Kathleen Driskell transports us to other places and realms, and pays a moving tribute to her friend Claudia Emerson, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, while Bill King contributes resonant poems steeped in the natural world. We're also proud to feature an interview with Neema Avashia, author of the much buzzed-about memoir Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, and an insightful craft essay on the work of Toni Morrison by Daniel Kennedy. As autumn begins its approach, I'm reminded of one of Ron's poems, "Unrequited Everything," of his absence—and his continued presence: The day hugged emptiness, the familialsound of raw rain, a close echo of metaland sighs. No sun distracted from the mysteryof coming darkness. A namehung like an answered prayer. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2022 Berea College ...

The gift of language: An anthropological approach to child language brokering in Barcelona

AbstractThe phenomenon of child language brokering (CLB), that is, translation and interpreting tasks children take on to facilitate communication for their parents and other adults, is often invisible or neglected. The present article seeks to study CLB in the province of Barcelona (Spain) through the theoretical lens of Marcel Mauss's anthropological concept of the ‘gift’. The authors employ interviews with child language brokers, young mediators and parents to show that children's language competences circulate as a gendered gift that produces and reproduces social ties of different kinds—family, extended family, community, the public—and with different levels of reciprocity.

Esther Webman, 1947–2020

Esther Webman, 1947–2020 Dina Porat (bio) Dr. Esther Webman, a dear friend for decades and an outstanding scholar (who was on the advisory board of this journal, among others) passed away suddenly on June 16, 2020. We find ourselves in deep mourning, and with the certainty that Esti—as she was fondly called by her many friends and colleagues—has left behind a void that cannot be filled. Esti's research was well-known internationally and highly acclaimed. She stood at the forefront of scholarship on antisemitism and perceptions of the Holocaust in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Her leadership in this field was evident in her many publications and numerous conference papers and lectures. She distinguished herself by her original thinking, sharp and critical eye, and deep understanding of the political and social realities in the Arab world at large, whether today, or in the recent past. Esti's writing was always lucid and well balanced, and she shied away from any sort of exaggeration or extremism. Born in Cairo, Esti grew up speaking Arabic and French as a child. She had a gift for languages and later in life wrote impeccable English. After being driven out of Egypt, her family immigrated to Israel. She grew up in Migdal Ha'Emek, a small town in the Galilee, and was educated in an excellent boarding school, always standing at the top of her class. She served as a lieutenant in an elite IDF intelligence unit that later became known as 8200. [End Page 388] Upon completing her army service shortly after the Six Day War, Esti embarked on a brilliant academic career at Tel Aviv University, winning the highest praise of her professors. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Photo of Esther Webman. Reprinted with permission of Esther's family. Esti served as a senior researcher and editor-in-chief of publications at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. She was a staff member at the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism, and at the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, all housed at Tel Aviv University. Among her many publications are From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, co-authored with Meir Litvak. This book won the gold prize of the Washington Institute for Middle Eastern Policy in 2010. She authored the sections on the Arab world for the reports on antisemitism that were published annually by the Stephen Roth Institute, and then by the Kantor Center beginning [End Page 389] in 1994. Those texts were exemplary in their accuracy, depth of analysis, use of a multitude of sources, and were characterized by their courageous assessments. Esti will be best remembered because of the steadfastness she displayed in defending the findings she reached after delving into a variety of primary sources. She insisted that in recent years, if one listened carefully, one could hear new voices in the Arab and Muslim worlds that deviate from the well-known antipathy toward Jews and the Jewish State, especially among intellectuals and political analysts. These bold individuals highlight the damage caused to the reputations of Arabs and Muslims in the West when The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the idea that Jews use blood for ritual purposes are hailed as absolute truth along with other ludicrous notions about Jews. Esti had high hopes that these moderate voices would pave the way to at least a modest reconciliation between Israel and its neighbors. Those hopes matched her political and social convictions, which always led her to champion the rights of others, minorities, and the weak and disadvantaged. She leaves behind a son Oded, a daughter Adi, and a grandson Adam who was the apple of her eye. Her memory will definitely be a blessing. [End Page 390] Dina Porat Dina Porat is head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and incumbent of the Alfred P. Slaner Chair in Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. She is also chief historian of Yad Vashem. Her most recent book is Vengeance and Recompence are Mine: The Yishuv, the Holocaust and...

Language aptitude: Desirable trait or acquirable attribute?

The traditional definition of language aptitude sees it as “an individual’s initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language, and probable facility in doing so given the presence of motivation and opportunity” (Carroll, 1981, p. 86). This conception portrays language aptitude as a trait, in the sense of exhibiting stability over long periods of time and being immune to training. The trait view of language aptitude tends towards the notion that it is innate, and indeed language aptitude has often been associated with the popular notion of a “gift for languages” (cf. Rosenthal, 1996, p. 59). The view of language aptitude as an innate trait has, however, long been questioned (see e.g., Neufeld, 1978). Recently, this questioning has intensified (see Singleton, 2014), especially since the development of a widespread consensus that working memory needs to be recognized as an important component of language aptitude (see Wen, 2016). Working memory was also once thought of as a trait, but is now recognized as susceptible to the influence of experience and instruction (see e.g., Williams, 2012). The present paper will track the trajectory of the above theoretical discussion and will explore the implications of the stage it has now reached.

Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews by Ted Geltner

Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. By Ted Geltner. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 414. $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4923-7.) Most people can't deal with chaos. They can't deal with blood and bone and pain. They think that once you're hurt, you're hurt forever. And of course, you are if you're a wimp. Immodest as it is of me to say so, I ain't a wimp. I get down sometimes, but I always get up again (p. 232). These words were spoken by famed writer and University of Florida professor Harry Crews during one of his frequent periods of personal turmoil. With their mixture of gritty resolve, macho posturing, and resigned fatalism, they offer a fitting microcosm of the particular worldview and gift for language that made Crews such an important and controversial figure in southern literature in the twentieth century. The quotation also captures the central thesis of Ted Geltner's engaging and well-researched biography, which offers a detailed look at Crews's journey from deep poverty to worldwide renown. With its evocative and unflinching narrative, Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews is an important addition to our understanding of a crucial and complex figure. Framed by conversations that the author had with Crews during the final years of his life. Blood, Bone, and Marrow feels simultaneously epic and intimate. Geltner--a veteran journalist and journalism professor--blends a crisply drawn narrative with illuminating context. Geltner is particularly skilled at addressing the many intersections between Crews's life and written work without resorting to lazy, tortured-artist tropes or the essentialist cliches that often taint presentations of the South's artists. For example, Crews's difficult upbringing in Bacon County, Georgia, is an important touchstone for Geltner, just as it was for Crews himself and the biographer returns to this motif throughout the book. But Geltner also resists simplified or exotic presentations of southern deprivation by describing the various ways that these early years inspired Crews's stories and memoirs. Geltner follows a similar tone throughout the biography, demonstrating the varied life experiences (from military service to palling around with Madonna and Sean Penn) that Crews incorporated into the creation of his deeply ambivalent characters. No character was more ambivalent than Crews himself, and Geltner admirably avoids hagiography by presenting his subject as a difficult, alienating, and even harmful man. …

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

Ecological Civilization and the New Enlightenment

On Charles Vernay and his ‘DIVAN’

Starting with the nineteenth century, European interest in the literature of the Middle East began to increase. Ottoman Turkish poetry, from territories that expanded into Europe, was an object of special study – as evidenced from the works of Sir William Jones, James Clarence Mangan and Elias John Wilkinson Gibb, on the one hand, and poets like Lord Byron and Thomas Moore, on the other hand. A young Frenchman, Charles Vernay, who had a gift for languages, taught himself Persian and Turkish and published a Divan – a collection of classical Oriental poetry – in Paris while still in his teens. The article traces the life and analyzes the Turkish poetry of Charles Vernay.

T. H. Rigby Remembered

T. H. (Harry) Rigby (1925-2011) was the Sovietologist that everybody liked, regardless of political, national, of any other kind of dividing lines. It was easy to see why: he was such a benign person, friendly and unassuming, with a sly sense of humor, nonpolemical but willing to argue, generous in sharing his remarkable knowledge of Soviet politics. Everybody knew him, too, despite the fact that for most of his career he was based in Canberra, far away from the main centers of Soviet studies. An Australian with a gift for languages and a love of empirical research, he was a political scientist in the British tradition rather than the American. The words he wrote of his mentor, Leonard Schapiro, could equally be applied to himself he remarks how English Schapiro was (despite not being English by birth), with his suspicion of vague abstractions,... distrust of panaceas,... respect for hard facts, common sense and practical judgement and tooted attachment to tolerance, fairness and diversity. (1) Rigby's scholarly work was so universally approved that one might have expected it to be bland and middle-of-the-road, but not at all: in his own quiet and reasonable way, he was a trailblazer. Harry Rigby was born in Coburg, a working-class suburb of Melbourne, and educated in state schools, where his bent was toward languages. He worked briefly as a clerk in the Australian Taxation Department before being called up into the Australian Army. Serving in New Guinea and Morotai, he was a base wallah, assigned to clerical rather than combat duty, but consoled himself with the thought that it would probably be more interesting than the Taxation Department. Sympathetic to socialism and the Soviet Union on the basis of Soviet wartime achievements and his reading of Hewlett Johnson's The Socialist Sixth of the World, Rigby was one of many young Australian soldiers who briefly joined the Australian Communist Party before deciding its dogmatic tone was uncongenial and dropping out. (2) The low-key approach was typical of Harry--no breast-beating about Gods That Failed; no cutting-off of communist friends like the Australian political scientist and Soviet expert Lloyd Churchward; just a prudent silence about one aspect of his biography for the duration of the Cold War. Typical also (of Harry, not the Cold War) was the fact that it never caused him any real trouble. British Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency seemed not to care; Australia's Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) cared only marginally, and the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) was perhaps not even informed about it by the Australian Communist Parry, which after Harry's letter of resignation to the Coburg branch in 1947 seems to have forgotten all about him. A beneficiary of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (the Australian equivalent of the GI Bill), Rigby went to the University of Melbourne after the war, studying Russian with Nina Christesen and Politics with W. Macmahon Ball. As a political science student, he found both Marx and Max Weber appealing, although the Weberian influence was probably the deeper. (3) Equally important as an event of the postwar years was Harry's marriage in 1947 to Norma, a Coburg schoolmate who shared not only Harry's background but also his unusual ability to appreciate and adapt to all sorts of strange milieux, from Oxford to Moscow; for the next 64 years, they were to be inseparable. Their son Richard was born in 1948. In Harry's time--and in mine, too, a couple of decades later--what you did after taking a good Melbourne degree was to go overseas, preferably to Oxford or Cambridge. Harry went to London, a more sensible choice, and immediately met everyone in the then very small world of Soviet studies, which accommodated both the academic and intelligence communities of specialists. George Bolsover, director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, was a man with a foot in both camps; in my time, 20 years later, he seemed like a sworn enemy of all types of intellectual activity, but Harry's memoir shows him in a slightly different light. …

The Signs of a Savant: Language against the Odds (review)

The Signs of a Savant: Language against the Odds, by Neil Smith, IanthiTsimpli, Gary Morgan, and Bencie Woll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 219 pp., ISBN 978-0-52185-227-2)THIS BOOK PRESENTS a case study of a middle-aged man named Christopher, an autistic savant who demonstrates an incredible ability to master multiple languages despite a below-average general IQ.The crux of this new book centers on a crucial question: How will an autistic man with a gift for languages and severe apraxia perform when taught signed language? As the study unfolds, we gain valuable insight into the modularity of the mind, particularly the cognitive and linguistic structures, which are intertwined.Based on nearly twenty years of empirical observations and psychometric tests of the subject's abilities, the first chapter introduces us to Christopher, whose early diagnosis revealed developmental difficulties that would produce delays in speech fluency and motor coordination. Christopher exhibited an extremely low nonverbal performance, with artistic IQ ability in the 40-60 range. However, his linguistic IQ in English - 120 - stands in stark contrast. Moreover, his severe apraxia results in poor performance in the copying of nonrepresentational gestures. Although he was able to recognize conventional gestures (e.g., brushing teeth), he was not able to make the appropriate movements when prompted. Such severe motor limitations in the face of his savant linguistic abilities have led the authors to investigate how Christopher will perform when given an opportunity to learn British Sign Language (BSL). After laying out important theoretical assumptions based on Chomskyan linguistics, modularity, and Baddeley's memory model, the chapter ends with well-specified predictions about how Christopher will perform in BSL. The authors predicted that Christopher's limited cognitive ability to tie iconic signs to their referents would hamper his acquisition of lexical signs. He was also expected to perform better on the comprehension of lexical signs and grammatical devices than with facial expressions and sign production due to his inability to maintain eye contact with the signer, his apraxia, and his linguistic savant abilities.The second chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the linguistic structure of BSL, covering the gamut of phonological, morphosyntactic, and facial elements of signed languages, as well as giving examples of signs that might be problematic for someone who avoids social eye contact (e.g., boss and god are distinguished only by direction of eyegaze) . The chapter tackles most of the critical literature on sign modality, iconicity sign language acquisition, and sign topography. Aside from a few references to Christopher's performance in digit-span recall using signed stimuli, the entire chapter appears to stand independently of the study of Christopher's foray into signed language learning.The third chapter, the methods section, details the training and data-collection phase of Christopher's signed language learning experience. Two hours a month of sign language learning for twelve months may not be an adequate training period for most learners, but it was more than twice the amount of time Christopher needed to master his other spoken languages. His training included morphosyntactic structures of signed languages such as topic markers, aspect morphology, nonmanual markers, verb locative agreement, and narratives involving multiple characters. Then he was tested at five different intervals for his comprehension and production of lexical signs and manual grammatical devices, as well as his performance on facial markers. To compare Christopher's BSL learning to normal second language learning of BSL, forty hearing volunteers were recruited to learn BSL using the same curriculum as Christopher's, albeit in onehour sessions over a twelve-week period.Chapter 4 evaluates Christopher's lexical and syntactic development and that of the comparison group. …

Of Pain: The Gift of Language and the Promise of Time

This essay attempts to think anew the relationship of pain with finitude and language. If man is that finite, mortal being whose being is essentially linguistic and being-in-communication, where language is not seen as mere attribute, property, or instrumental means of appropriation, then language cannot be understood in its cognitive disposal as categorical grasp of the "entities presently given," but must be understood in a more originary manner as opening of the coming into presence, as the event of this coming itself. If a certain dominant ontology, in its innermost ground, understands pain as the very grounding work of logos, then it is necessary to open up the closure of this logos of metaphysics to another, more originary experience of pain in relation to mortality that dispropriates us beforehand, and thereby grants us language itself as gift and promise which welcomes the incalculable event of the "not yet." This essay reads Heidegger, Schelling and Benjamin to think of the promise of this redemptive, messianic language in relation to an originary finitude, outside the metaphysics of subjectivity, insofar as this metaphysics subsumes language to its cognitive disposal, to its categorical grasp of entities' "given present."

The Book’s Two Fathers: Marco Polo, Rustichello da Pisa, and Le Devisement du Monde

The Book’s Two Fathers: Marco Polo, Rustichello da Pisa, and Le Devisement du Monde F. Regina Psaki Le Devisement du monde of Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa owes an immense debt to trade, on many levels. Patently, Marco traveled to Asia in the first place because the Polos were merchants, so that in the very broadest sense trade is the founder of the feast that is his book. But trade, both literal and figurative, plays two much more detailed and less evident roles in creating the book (or books) of Marco Polo that we have today. This essay will argue that trade in the figurative sense of cultural exchange, mediation, and influence accounts for the very shape of the book, which was composed in the French of Italy in close collaboration with Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of chivalric romance. Everyone who studies Marco Polo acknowledges that Rustichello’s fiction-writing techniques and habits show up in the book, but critics writing in English tend to stop with a very few observations that are repeated faithfully from one study to another. I aim to go beyond these, using the episode of how the Great Khan crushed a rebellion, to show what Marco really owes to Rustichello. I will then argue that trade in the literal sense of commercial ambition, initiative, and activity accounts for the very genesis of the book, as well as for its suspension; it is unfinished. Everyone who studies the book also acknowledges that literal trade accounts for its content, and in at least half of its chapters dictates the template that organizes that content.1 But trade is rarely connected to the critical question not of what kind of book they were writing, but of why Marco wanted to create the book in the first place. It is impossible to overstate how very unprecedented the book is, how odd and unobvious a collage of treatise, merchant manual, and romance.2 I will close by examining what might have motivated such a novel initiative as writing a hybrid book describing distant Asia, and offering a hypothesis for Marco Polo’s purpose. [End Page 69] An Uncertain Artifact, an Uncertain Collaboration Despite its enormous fame and influence, among moderns the book of Marco and Rustichello is more known about than known. Its textual tradition is singularly complicated, and its narrative program singularly novel. I will briefly recapitulate the book and its contents in order to discuss how the two fathers’ contributions inform and pervade each other. The first nineteen chapters tell us that in 1260 Marco Polo’s father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo traveled to the court of the Great Khan and won his favor. They stayed there for some time, and in 1268 returned to the West. They carried with them the Khan’s request to the pope to send 100 Christian clergy able to preach the Gospel and convert his people—as well as his request for some oil from the lamp burning in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The hundred priests were not forthcoming, because of a three-year vacancy in the papacy and a certain reticence on the part of unadventuresome ecclesiastics to go that far east over dangerous terrain. But in 1271 the Polos returned with the Holy Oil and with Niccolò’s son Marco, then seventeen years old. The book tells us that Marco’s many qualities—especially his gift for languages and his shrewd understanding that the Great Khan craved information about his vast empire when he sent messengers abroad in it—gave him a high value in the Khan’s bureaucracy, where he served the Khan faithfully for seventeen years. He returned to the West in 1295, and the prologue says that in 1298, in a Genoese prison with Rustichello, a writer of romances, Marco decided he had an obligation to share his knowledge with those who had never traveled to Asia.3 The fact that the prologue dates the book’s genesis so precisely is unusual in itself. But here the uncertainties around the book begin, as John Larner summarizes them: Who is the man? What is his book? Is it his book? What is its...

Language and Doctrinal Reception in Law

The capacity for legal thinking is closely linked to a person’s gift for languages. This is due to the fact that the norms of a legal order are formulated in the ordinary language of a specific country. On top of this ordinary language, a legal community is usually creating a specialized language, in the form of a doctrinal discourse on the legal order in question. Such specialized languages may even have a two-tier structure, consisting not only of the object level of doctrinal studies, but also of a certain theory of law serving as a meta-level.Legal doctrine seen as a language is not easily embraced, but needs a certain socialisation into the forms of living and communication of a given community, which presupposes a rather long educational process.Suppose, as a thought experiment, a Uniform Highway Code, which is applied by lawyers belonging to different language communities. Are they really applying the same code? Suppose further that the law of the European Union maybe considered as a uniform law. Is the supposition correct that we are confronted with a uniform law, uniformly applied by lawyers of the Member States? Would that indicate the emergence of a common European legal language, gradually influencing the national doctrinal discourses? Will, under the influence of this development, lawyers be inclined to function more and more in the way of Google-like search engines, operating on a heap of rules, or rather stick to the traditional structuring approach, with the aim of transforming a set of rules into a doctrinal system?

THE LIGHTENING FLASH OF LANGUAGE

Man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in the lightening flash of language. Free towards, and endowed with the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of language that remains beyond his death: here alone lies redemption for the mortals. It is this affirmative question of the coming time that is pursued in this work: it occurs as and in a configuration of questions, not constituting a system: question of mortality and temporality, the flash of language that reveals man - beyond any predication - his finitude, the opening where man finds himself to welcome the coming, and finally redemption in the coming itself in the existential attunement of hope. This article attempts, reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, to think the gift of language as redemptive, beyond any appropriation, in the face of evil whose possibility is given to the mortal alone.

The Lightening Flash of Language

Man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in the lightening flash of language. Free towards, and endowed with the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of language that remains beyond his death: here alone lies redemption for the mortals. It is this affirmative question of the coming time that is pursued in this work: it occurs as and in a configuration of questions, not constituting a system: question of mortality and temporality, the flash of language that reveals man - beyond any predication - his finitude, the opening where man finds himself to welcome the coming, and finally redemption in the coming itself in the existential attunement of hope. This article attempts, reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, to think the gift of language as redemptive, beyond any appropriation, in the face of evil whose possibility is given to the mortal alone.

David Tabor

David Tabor

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language by Russ McDonald

43 o Reviews Nevertheless, the attention to formlessness highlights important aspects of the his? tory play, notably its embeddedness in a time outside the world of the play and its corresponding resistance to clear beginnings and endings. Griffin's later chapters of? fersome interesting insights into history plays ofthe 1580s and 1590s, and one ofthe reasons why his arguments about genre do not always convince is that he is properly appreciative of the distinctiveness of individual plays. His attention to companies and repertories in his closing chapter also usefully disposes of some untenable theories about popular and populist theatre. The book is more valuable for its comparative analyses of history plays as representing differentkinds of theatrical experience than for its analysis of the genre. University of Nottingham Janette Dillon Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. By Russ McDonald. (Oxford Shakespeare Topics) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. ix + 211 pp. ?25 (pbk ?12.99). ISBN 0-19-871170-0 (pbk 0-19-87171-9). As a recent contribution to the series Oxford Shakespeare Topics, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language offersa comprehensive overview of various aspects of and ap? proaches to language in the plays of Shakespeare. Chapters relate to the historical development of English leading to phenomenal change in the use of the vernacular in the sixteenth century; the uses and abuses of rhetoric; prose styles; metrical de? velopment; the study of imagery and of wordplay. Shakespeare's 'particular gift for language' is thus weighed with the humanist and cultural contexts that shaped and enabled the expression of his verbal facility. In this sense, in the spirit of the times, Russ McDonald is returning a topic to the context from which it was wrenched by the New Critics and modernists. The topic is not one but many, as McDonald draws, for example, on the work of Sister Miriam Joseph on rhetoric, on M. M. Mahood and William Empson for wordplay and ambiguity, and on Caroline Spurgeon and Wolfgang Clemen for study of imagery. Surprisingly, there is no mention in the text or in the further-reading sec? tion of G. Wilson Knight, who did so much to popularize the prevalence and use of image patterns in Shakespeare. As with secondary material, so with primary texts, as illustrations of linguistic excess or stages of Shakespeare's metrical experimentation are taken from a range of plays. Points are well made, but with so much local detail, their effectiveness demands familiarity with the canon. McDonald's approach to Shakespeare's use of metre and his rhetorical and figurative styles tends towards the chronological and teleological. In verse, McDonald charts a move from metrical simplicity to sophistication. In relation to the use of language, the celebration of its virtuosities, manifest in the earlier comedies, gives way in the tragedies to a distrust of its duplicities. Yet McDonald implies, and in? deed illustrates, a dialectic throughout the canon, though particularly discernible in tragicomedy, as faithin language is eroded by scepticism. Words, figures,and rhetoric are constantly abused and wilfully appropriated by Machiavels and villains such as Richard III and Iago. It is the na'ifs,Lear, Othello, and Desdemona, with their faithin the relation of sign and signifier,who are most vulnerable to the power and manipulation of language. More than any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare self-consciously exploited the dramatic and theatrical potential in verbal slipperiness and ambiguity. Good students will, of course, soon discover this latter feature for themselves by close reading, for example, of lines spoken by Falstaff, Hal, or Henry IV, or by Claudius in Hamlet. This raises a question about the intended readership of McDon? ald's study. The series as a whole seems designed forA-level teachers and undergraduates . In textbook fashion, McDonald illustrates his topics with copious citations, but MLR, 98.2, 2003 431 unless the reader is familiar with most of Shakespeare's plays, and the book's intended reader may not be, there is a danger of losing the subject in local detail. In trying to cover such discursive material in comparatively short compass, Shakespeare and theArts ofLanguage shifts uneasily from commonsensical to the occasional linguistic foray,from the technicalities of humanist rhetoric...

Helen and Heidegger: Disabled Dasein, Language and Others

Both Heidegger’s Being and Time and Helen Keller’s The Story of my Life address the problem of what it means for humans to be optimally human. In reading these texts together, I hope to show that Helen’s life-story confirms Heidegger’s existential analyses to some extent, but also, importantly, poses a challenge to them with respect to the interrelated issues of disability, language and others. Heidegger’s hermeneutic explication of what it means to be human is intended to uncover supposedly basic human existential structures. As a fore-structure for this explication, Heidegger projects an already able-bodied, self-sufficient adult, resolutely engaged in daily activity. I shall argue, however, that it is due to this starting-point in adult-Dasein that Heidegger’s existential analyses miss important insights concerning the meaning of being human to be gained from Helen’s experience. Starting from the essentially disabled child-Dasein, Helen describes her struggle to achieve the very condition that Heidegger assumes from the start, first through rescue by the other as teacher, who offered the gift of language and community, and thereafter in her grasp of language as a “pharmakon.” I hope to show in the end that Helen’s experience of a struggle for humanity offers the model for an alternative projection, that of an essentially disabled and needy Dasein, which, I believe, provides a more viable fore-structure than Heidegger’s for a hermeneutics of humanity.

Infant Figures: The Death of the Infants and Other Scenes of Origin (review)

Reviewed by: Infant Figures. The Death of the Infants and Other Scenes of Origin Zahi Zalloua Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures. The Death of the Infants and Other Scenes of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. ix + 199 pp. Not a critical commentary about the “origin” of language, nor another reading that would be satisfied by simply affirming the “unsayability” of language through a proliferation of aporetic linguistic constructions, Christopher Fynsk’s triptych volume assumes the modest task of “bearing witness” (2) to an eclectic selection of disruptive works (from Friedrich Nietzsche to Salvatore Puglia, passing through Blanchot and Lacan) that call upon us to think differently (about) our human relation to language. Each part of the volume explores how a “pragmatics” (the practice of writing/art) points in its own way to the limits of language and thought. The first part of the volume juxtaposes on the same page a preface on Nietzsche with an essay on Francis Bacon. In this preface, Fynsk examines how the Nietzschean motif of cruelty functions as a way of entering what the author calls the “ethico-political,” a primordial space from which “the question of political and ethical meaning opens in all its historicity [End Page 194] and materiality” (13). Fynsk insists, however, that the experience of the “ethico-political” does not enable political and ethical reflection to take place; that such an “experience” cannot be contained, neutralized and subsumed under the traditional categories of thought; and that any attempt to appropriate it also fails since the self-fashioning subject is exposed to a dimension of material existence that is fundamentally irreducible to meaning and incommensurable to any aesthetic ideology. The essay on Bacon carefully investigates the motif of crucifixion in an attempt to elucidate what is at work, and at stake, in Bacon’s violent realism and radicalization of the traditional relationship between the image and the real. After the first part, which is intended to open up a space for critical reflection, Fynsk addresses explicitly the major concern of his text—two scenes found in Blanchot and Lacan, each depicting “the death of the infans”—through a fictive dialogue, a doubling of the author’s voice. In this dialogic fiction, Fynsk considers Blanchot’s reflections on Leclaire’s phrase “a child is being killed” and Lacan’s “Father, don’t you see I’m burning.” These “primal” or “originary” scenes, it is argued, testify to the human subject’s mortal exposure to language, to his/her birth to language (that is, the gift of language is knowledge of finitude, of “the capability of death” [67]), and to “another dying,” to the “passivity of the relation” to the il y a, which involves the “anonymous ‘subject’ of the death drive” (68). These point to a trace of this immemorial death (an experience prior to experience) existing in each speaking subject. Furthermore, these scenes/acts of recollection attest to an exigency to figure this human relation to language, and serve to remind us of the infans in all of us. The second part of the volume ends with a brief but original essay on Antigone centered around the question of friendship and exploring Antigone’s ethico-political relation to the other (others). The third part of the volume addresses the work of Salvatore Puglia. It contains a dialogue between the author and the artist, which focuses on the social and political import of the latter’s aesthetic practice, and a critical essay on Puglia. The essay focuses on the ethical appeal of the artist’s use of anonymous figures (perhaps “an affirmation of community” [171]). It also tells us how these figures demand from us a kind of relation that resists a reduction to an economy of the Same (comprehension of alterity through ontological identification), and how, finally, his uncanny figures call for a relation without relation, that is, a relation to an “incommensurable.” To conclude, in blending theoretical acumen with literary sensibility, Christopher Fynsk’s volume makes an important contribution to the timely and ethical project of thinking otherwise than Being our human relation to language. Zahi Zalloua Princeton University Copyright © 2002 symploke

Helen Keller and "The Empire of the Normal"

IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO TALK ABOUT DISABILITY MEMOIR IN AMERICA without mentioning Helen Keller. Certainly her first book, The Story of My Life (1903), is the disability autobiography that leaps most readily to mind. Moreover, most of Keller's writing centered on her own life, and during her long career she attempted every genre of life-writing: linear narratives, personal essays, a treatise on her religious belief, and a published journal recording her daily life during a five-month period. But it is her first book that set the standard; The Story of My Life has the quintessential triumph over adversity plot. It chronicles her first twenty-two years, from birth through her first year at Radcliffe College. With the self-effacing modesty characteristic of the genre, Keller is at pains to show that her accomplishments were made possible chiefly through the effort and self-sacrifice of her teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan. She represents Sullivan as her savior who first liberated her from darkness and silence through the gift of language and then championed her cause against individuals and institutions that stood in the way of her educational goals. Perhaps recognizing that deaf-blindness is a condition few seeinghearing readers can imagine or identify with, Keller shifts the focus of her autobiography to make Sullivan its protagonist. Combined with the book's upbeat tone and inspirational message, this helped The Story of My Life enjoy almost universal critical acclaim and popular success. One anonymous review in The New York Nation, however, expressed doubts about the book's authenticity:

A Postcolonial Child: Achebe's Chike at the Crossroads

A Postcolonial Child:Achebe's Chike at the Crossroads Miriam Dow (bio) In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the French-trained Antillean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon finds the locus of European neuroses, in orthodox psychoanalytic fashion, in familial relationships. The neuroses of the colonized subject, however, do not have their source in the family: "A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world" (143). This abnormality occurs before actual contact with Europeans, Fanon continues, and assumes complex forms. The Antillean child, for example, was taught to refer to "his" early antecedents as "our ancestors the Gauls" and to identify totally with France. Such a child read children's books and comic books "put together by white men for little white men" and in which the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes. (146) Fanon calls such texts an aspect of collective catharsis, which works as a release for collective aggression. According to Fanon, the solution to the problem of such a destructive influence is not the equal distribution of evil between black and white but "the establishment of children's magazines especially for Negroes, the creation of songs for Negro children, and, ultimately, the publication of history texts especially for them, at least through the grammar school grades" (148).1 Chinua Achebe clearly participates in Fanon's project by writing African stories for African children; by offering them a "utopianized" space (the term is Simon Gikandi's) in which to create themselves; by modeling physical courage, integrity, and imagination. Achebe's work also suggests that children flourish when they see themselves and others in works of art that offer them not only satisfying, rounded images but also the gift of language itself. Language, in the work of this postcolonial author, integrates the colonial and colonized cultures in a specifically Igbo spirit.2 In this article, I propose to examine Achebe's Chike and the River (1966) within the context of Achebe's articulation of the Igbo aesthetic and his personal responses to colonialism and its legacy. Ideologically, Achebe is not of the party of African cultural nationalism, whose most radical representatives are Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. These three Nigerian academics declare that "African literature is an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literature. It has its own traditions, modes and norms" (4). In his approach to language, Achebe also differs from another cultural nationalist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, an artist and critic who began writing in Gĩkũyũ while in prison (without being charged, under the post-independence government of Kenya), and continues to do so, but who either translates his own work into English or has it translated.3 One cannot deny the validity of Ngũgĩ's famous question: "Where would English Literature be now if Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had written in Latin?" (Address). He believes that the responsibility of African writers is to develop African languages and African cultures; if they want a larger audience, let them translate their works into other languages. Ngũgĩ calls the writing of Africans using European languages "Euro-African" literature.4 But as Achebe makes clear throughout his work, his position (and Kwame Anthony Appiah's a bit later) is that both African and European literatures are always already entwined as a result of the centuries-old Euro-African embrace. By his own account, his first novel is a response to the representation of Africa and Africans in the work of Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. That novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), the most widely read book of African fiction, is written in English, like all of Achebe's fiction; uses part of a line from Yeats for its title; and contains a buried allusion to Tennyson. Indeed, the modern genre of fiction itself is a Western, middle-class construct. In addition to establishing...