Speculative History Research Articles

Beyond bounds? The terrorist teachers of Lev Vygotsky

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explore socio-cultural-historical influences on the ideas of Soviet educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky, since these have become transferable to the point where their influence is now virtually global. The paper provides biographical sketches of Vygotsky, his father and his tutor interwoven with a history of terrorist movements. Design/methodology/approach – Literary study, historical study, biographical study, speculative history. Findings – Passages from his initial major work, Educational Psychology, reveal the radicalism of Lev Vygotsky's thought. It is suggested that two teacher-mentors, his father and a tutor, were influenced by the radical and terrorist narodnik, or populist, movements in Russia of the mid- to late-19th century and passed on this orientation to Vygotsky. The coincidences uncovered raise a series of questions about the degree to which these socio-cultural-historical circumstances influenced Vygotsky's fundamental research project and his attempt to develop an educational method that insisted on going beyond bounds. Research limitations/implications – Several unresolved questions for debate are raised at the end of the paper that may be of particular interest to those using Vygotsky in teacher education programmes. Originality/value – Connects Lev Vygotsky's socio-cultural-historical circumstances to his research project, couched in terms of boundary-crossing and knowledge transference.

Kant and Bolzano on Analyticity

Abstract: The history of speculation on a notion or notions called analyticity, now usually characterized as truth in virtue of meanings and independently of fact, is often viewed from the perspective of the Quine-Carnap dispute. Previous characterizations, due to Kant, Frege and others, are then seen as being of a piece with Carnap’s various definitions of analyticity, and thus open to Quine’s objections. Seen from this point of view, Bolzano’s claims about analyticity appear downright bizarre: for on his conception, analyticity is not only non-linguistic, but also independent of both apriority and necessity. In this paper, it is argued that the problem lies not with Bolzano, but rather with the received historical account, especially its interpretation of Kant.

Electing a candidate: a speculative history of the bacterial phylum OP10

In 1998, a cultivation-independent survey of the microbial community in Obsidian Pool, Yellowstone National Park, detected 12 new phyla within the Domain Bacteria. These were dubbed 'candidate divisions' OP1 to OP12. Since that time the OP10 candidate division has been commonly detected in various environments, usually as part of the rare biosphere, but occasionally as a predominant community component. Based on 16S rRNA gene phylogeny, OP10 comprises at least 12 class-level subdivisions. However, despite this broad ecological and evolutionary diversity, all OP10 bacteria have eluded cultivation until recently. In 2011, two reference species of OP10 were taxonomically validated, removing the phylum from its 'candidate' status. Construction of a highly resolved phylogeny based on 29 universally conserved genes verifies its standing as a unique bacterial phylum. In the following paper we summarize what is known and what is suspected about the newest described bacterial phylum, the Armatimonadetes.

Jambo Bwana: Kenya’s Barack Obama

Taking Barack Obama as a metonym for “the Kenyan abroad,” this article provides a speculative history of this figure, arguing that the Kenyan abroad who was once viewed by Kenyans as an exile is now viewed as diasporic. Obama’s trip to Kenya as a diasporic tourist in Dream from My Father is a point of departure from which to map how the diasporic subject functions in the Kenyan imagination. At the heart of this change from exile to diasporic is the remittance economy. This shift in terms signifies a change in which politics is subordinated to economics. This article examines how this change, and the figure of Obama himself, produces different configurations of Kenyan-ness as understood and practiced by the government, Kenyans abroad, and Kenyans in Kenya.

Adaptations: History, Gender, and Political Economy in the Work of Dugald Stewart

Summary This paper notes and explores the attraction of Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy for women readers and a few women writers. Student lecture notes reveal the chronological development of his ideas, as he drew upon the works of Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, and responded to political events. Particular attention is paid to Stewart's comments relating to women and gender, through discussions of education, the institution of marriage, and population questions. After 1800, he shifted away from a speculative conjectural history towards a philosophy of moral progress rooted in common sense philosophy and a belief in perfectibility. He taught a system of practical morality relevant to the education of children and strongly emphasised the importance of the association of ideas in childhood. For women readers, the message was contradictory in that he united an apparently conservative reinforcement of the relations of the sexes with a belief in the improvement of the condition of women through education in a modern, progressive, and commercial society.

Contemplative History vs. Speculative History: Kierkegaard and Hegel on History in On the Concept of Irony

Article Contemplative History vs. Speculative History: Kierkegaard and Hegel on History in On the Concept of Irony was published on July 1, 2012 in the journal Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (volume 2012, issue 1).

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World by Tim Whitmarsh

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 207 The conclusion also presents some “alternative scenarios” in order to see whether or not Hannibal could have won if he had taken a different approach. It is always dangerous to engage in speculative history, since the actors in each case would have understood the course of action they pursued as the most logical at the time. Fronda’s analysis, however, indicates that the main alternative course of action, namely for Hannibal to have stayed in Etruria after the battle of Trasimene and create disloyalty among Rome’s Etruscan allies, would have created the same problems that he faced in the south: divided local elites and various inter-state conflicts would have made his eventual victory equally unlikely. On the other hand, Hannibal might have been more successful if he had managed to make his allies fight by themselves, independently from the main Carthaginian army, and given them a more active role in his overall strategy. Fronda never explores this possibility fully, although he does mention isolated Italian military activities. The book comes with fifteen maps, a welcome tool in studying the often confusing events; in short, it presents an insightful and simulating analysis of this crucial period and should be read by anyone who is interested in Rome’s growth towards Mediterranean hegemony. University of Nottingham Saskia Roselaar Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. By Tim Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 228. “A people living in isolation on an island,” Tim Whitmarsh writes, “would not think of themselves as ‘local’ ” (2). Indeed, the idea of the local is only possible in the context of what Whitmarsh calls “supralocal perspectives” (2). It is an interesting observation and one that takes on additional cultural and political importance in imperial contexts. As Clifford Ando puts it in his contribution to the volume, “empires distinguish themselves in history, from nation states in quality, and from each other in degree in their success in managing and exploiting diversity” (18). Several of the essays in this volume attempt to grapple in some way with the dialectic of the local and the global (what Whitmarsh characterizes as the “relational nature of identity” [3]) in the early Roman empire. If there is a single question that runs throughout this collection (both implicitly and explicitly), it is this: how are we to understand expressions of local tradition or local identity in the face of ecumenical visions of a culturally and ethnically homogenous empire? At the outset, Whitmarsh locates both ancient and modern responses to this question along a continuum: at one end, Aelius Aristides’ vision of “political and cultural unity of the world under Rome” and on the other, a Pausanian “kaleidoscopic portrait of local cultures” (1). Ultimately, for most of these essays, the question is political; speaking of both the ancient and the modern worlds, Whitmarsh advances, “at least as a working hypothesis,” that consciousness of the nature of the local and its place within a larger whole develops in dialectic with ideas about the global (2). It is precisely periods of intense globalization, Whitmarsh suggests, that focus intention on the local. The best of these essays are challenging meditations on what Greg Woolf describes in an Afterword as the “cultural work” that must be done to model and explain the “ ‘difference yet connectedness’ of distinct communities” (191). Clifford Ando’s essay (like Whitmarsh’s Introduction and Woolf’s Afterword), is a provocative and sophisticated explication of methodological and evidentiary problems. In 208 PHOENIX particular, Ando offers a response to Whitmarsh’s introductory discussion of whether we ought to read expressions of localism as “sites of resistance,” powerful modes of “counteridentification ” (3) that somehow reflect a subaltern subjectivity. Ando addresses what he describes as (and I quote his very precise formulation) “the danger of viewing ancient (or other) societies from an uninterrogated liberal conception of social power [which] would frame as autonomous all supposedly non-instrumental cultural practices, including expressions of local or ethnic particularism, and read them as resistance” (23). Ando’s analysis is top-down: it focuses on the Roman contribution to the “manufacture and sustenance of diversity.” The focus here is squarely on how...

Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology in Chihuahua, Mexico: A Speculative History

Land Use, Looting, and Archaeology in Chihuahua, Mexico: A Speculative History

Introduction: Robert A. Kann on “Speculative History”

Forty-five years ago, in May 1966, Professor Robert A. Kann delivered a paper titled “Should the Habsburg Empire Have Been Saved? An Exercise in Speculative History.” The venue was the spring banquet of the Phi Alpha Theta History Society, held at the State University College of New York in Cortland. The theme was provocative and on a subject of much discussion about the fate of the empire and its implications for Europe. Kann never expanded it for publication.

Should the Habsburg Empire Have Been Saved? An Exercise in Speculative History

The observations which I shall put before you require the kind of apology that is always necessary when the historian leaves the ground of facts and turns to the hazy realm of what might have been or ought to be. Still there may be extenuating factors for an undertaking of this kind. I refer here, of course, to the frequently voiced assumption of the value of hindsight prophecies for the prevention of errors in the future, the wishful thinking that may generate appropriate action and, in a more general way, the training of the mind that may derive from speculative thinking.

It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human

This essay asks what kind of trope or rhetorical operation is activated by the call of the ‘post-human’? What modes of inscription does the term deploy? I argue that the ‘post-ing’ of the human proceeds by refiguring of the ‘human’ as telephone or screen, as a surface that registers the action or presencing of the inhuman via an overwhelming apostrophe or prosopopeia. Allied to this call is a refiguring of the ‘post-humanities’ as an inquiry into how the modeling of non-human entities inflects the constitution of a common world, leading us to embark on a quest for less lethal or more friendly modes of inscription or writing. The philosophical movement known as ‘speculative metaphysics’ provides a rubric for this quest and so for a speculative literary history that would refigure our contacts with the textual traces named ‘past’ as a contact zone with alternate ways of being.

Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life (review)

Reviewed by: Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life Mark G. Spencer Joseph Duke Filonowicz. Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge-University Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 248. Cloth, $99.00. This study takes as its point of departure a question posed by Francis Hutcheson in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, an important text of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson asked: “Whence arises this Love of Esteem, or Benevolence, to good Men, or to Mankind in general, if not from some nice Views of Self-Interest?” (1). As will be well known to readers of this journal, Hutcheson in his answer pointed to the workings of a “moral sense,” arguing: “The Universality of this moral Sense, and that it is antecedent to Instruction, may appear from observing the Sentiments of Children, upon hearing the Storys with which they are commonly entertain’d as soon as they understand Language. They always passionately interest themselves on that side where Kindness and Humanity are found; and detest the Cruel, the Covetous, the Selfish, or the Treacherous. How strongly do we see their Passions of Joy, Sorrow, Love, and Indignation, mov’d by these moral Representations, even tho there has been no pains taken to give them Ideas of a Deity, of Laws, of a future State, or of the more intricate Tendency of the universal Good to that of each Individual!” (2). The book under review here aims to defend Hutcheson’s way of seeing things, even if “many will dismiss [Hutcheson’s theory] as romantic fantasy, sentimentality” (2). Filonowicz explains that, “there is a moral sense” even though “contemporary philosophers . . . will have nothing to do with the idea of a moral sense, considering it to be a historical curio, a sort of philosophical white elephant” (2). Filonowicz will prove the existence of the moral sense, “not by condensing articles from scientific journals—which could never suffice in any case—but rather by examining history, in this case the history of ethical speculation in the era of the sentimental school in early modern Britsh moral philosophy” (2). He aims “to express (intuitively and in a timeless sort of way)” a “rough and ready sketch” of the “career” of sentimentalism. But this is also a book concerned with “what ethics, or moral theory, is supposed to be about” (10). For Filonowicz, “ethics has some obligation to try, at least, to be true to what people really are, true to what is in the open street” (11). True, that is, to the ethical lives of those such as the “Kulaki kids (Kids in the street)” captured in the photograph by Heffy Dantzic (c. 1956) that graces the volume’s jacket cover. “I find it sad to think that any reader should have to choose between loving eighteenth-century British ethics and being part of the analytic tradition, but if my principle is sound and the results are found good, this is a choice that no one really needs, in theory, to face” (43). The result is a refreshingly well-written and wide ranging volume with much to offer philosophers and others interested in the history of ethics. Filonowicz’s investigation begins not with Hutcheson or his moral sense theory, but with Filonowicz’s own observations about people and their moral behavior. People act, for the most part, “from self-convenience” (to use Hobbes’ term), but they are also “motivated by concern, not for themselves, but for others” (16). Filonowicz defends this “ethical sentimentalism” with reference to Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, Hutcheson’s Illustrations upon Moral Sense and An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue and Moral Good, C. D. Broad’s “Some Reflections on Moral Sense Theories in Ethics,” and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense. The volume ends with a short postscript, entitled “Hume, Smith and the end of the sentimental school.” Filonowicz confesses he remains “haunted by Broad’s statement . . . that his primary interest in studying past moralists was to ‘find out what is true and what is false about ethics’ [End Page 110] and that the arguments of his subjects are only really interesting in so far as...

Rousseau’s Natural Man as the Critic of Urbanised Society

Rousseau’s description of the pure state of nature and the natural man in his <em>Discours<br />sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes</em> (1755) has been a controversial topic in Rousseau studies. Natural man has no stable human relationships, language or developed reason, and does not recognise other humans as akin to him. How is it possible to reconcile Rousseau’s views on the pure state of nature with his speculative history of humanity? How could mankind even begin to develop? Why did Rousseau create such a seemingly disharmonious and disagreeable construct? This article introduces a new strategy of interpretation. Instead of proposing a single interpretation of the pure state of nature, it proposes to view Rousseau’s understanding of human nature as a literary device which allowed him to address many questions at once. His insistence on the solitude and ignorance of natural human beings is examined as a part of his critique of other philosophers. This, however, does not explain another tension within the depiction of the pure state of nature. Sometimes natural human beings are ignorant, incapable of learning or surpassing their instincts, but, at other times, they seem very smart and resourceful. This article shows that the latter sections of his work imply a critique of contemporary societies. In these sections, Rousseau introduces his analysis of urban life.

Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief

Captivating EuniceMembership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief Audra Simpson (bio) My youngest Daughter, aged Seven years, was carryed all the journey, & look’d after with a great deal of Tenderness. —John Williams, 17071 Whither Eunice? The famous story of Eunice Williams’s captivity and incorporation begins with tears and ends with tears, as it was a Mohawk woman’s grief that prompted her capture as a replacement child for one lost. Her inconsolability motivated Mohawk warriors from Kahnawake to venture from the southwestern part of the St. Lawrence River down to Deerfield, Massachusetts, in February 1704—during the dead of winter—to take captives.2 Little is known of the specificity of the Mohawk woman’s unrest, or of the particulars of her life, as she is referred to only as “the mother.”3 Far more is known of Eunice Williams, the white child of completely unambiguous Protestant stock that would become her child. She was originally the daughter of the Reverend John Williams and Eunice Williams, and thus was the grand niece of famed Puritan minister Increase and cousin to Cotton Mather. In their commitment to piety, anti-popishness, proper puritan conduct, and [End Page 105] writing and sermonizing on the sinister condition of Indian captivity, the Mathers have been described as “the most prominent divines of their generation.”4 Williams’s life receives its acclaim in part because of these genealogies. But her life is most famous because her captivation became thoroughly consensual and she became Mohawk through time. She steadfastly refused to return to her natal territory and family. Owing to yawning gulfs in the archives, we do not know what this conversion tale looked like within Kahnawake, but it is clear from the literature that, although originally “English,” she became a unilingual, Catholic “white Indian” who was captivated by and fully assimilated into Mohawk society. In this article, I use the story of Eunice Williams’s captivity to argue that her incorporation into Mohawk society does not belong in the past; rather, it forms part of the gendered structure and imaginary of contemporary colonial settler society of North America. This gendered structure and imaginary is instantiated through The Indian Act of 1876, which defined and recognized indigeneity in Canada through a pre-citizened wardship status.5 This wardship status, which is now co-incident with state citizenship, continues to determine rights to material and semiotic resources for Indians in Canada, and shapes the identities and identifications of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada today.6 This article offers a speculative history regarding the Act and the captivity narratives surrounding Williams’s life in order to point to the possibility of their relatedness but also to stimulate further, deeper work on the role of historical narrative in stimulating political and social possibility in colonial, or settler, contexts through time. The story of Eunice Williams, then, is more than a story of thrilling, dramatic, and violent eighteenth-century captivation. It is a story about the transformation of membership or incorporation into a rights-bearing unit of political status, with an attendant form of recognition—a recognition that was later conferred through The Indian Act. This is also a story of colonial alchemy, of recognition of political subject-formation, which moved race and gender to the forefront of deliberations over the meting out of those rights (only to efface them) and which was an evidentiary moment of deep identification that had occurred within Eunice Williams’s interior frontiers, within her mind. Her identifications and recognitions and the celebration of her story do not come without consequences, consequences that have not been considered in the literature on captivation. This is a literature that largely considers captivation to be a case of force, adoption, and/or kinning in an effort to re-historicize the past in deeply connected ways. These important contributions to literary and historical studies have significantly problemetized the notion of settler and Indigenous experiences as isolated from each other and [End Page 106] have given us a sense, especially in literary studies, of the importance of Indigenous “savagery” to the construction and maintenance of a “civilized” colonial self. However, in colonial “situations”—historical...

분기 정보의 추측적 사용과 효율적 복구 기법

ABSTRACT Branch prediction accuracy is critical for system performance in modern microprocessor architectures. The use of speculative update branch history provides substantial accuracy improvement in branch prediction. However, speculative update branch history is the information about uncommitted branch instruction and thus it may hurts program correctness, in case of miss-speculative execution. Therefore, speculative update branch history requires suitable recovery mechanisms to provide program correctness as well as performance improvement. In this paper, we propose recovery logics for speculative update branch history. The proposed solutions are recovery logics for both global history and local history. In simulation results, our solution provides performance improvement up to 5.64%. In addition, it guarantees the program correctness and almost 90% of additional hardware overhead is reduced, compared to previous works.Keyword:Branch Prediction, Global/Local Branch History, Speculative History, Recovery Logic

The “Kling Thesis”: An Early Effort at Systematic Comparative Politics

An entire generation of political scientists trained in the field of comparative politics with a Latin American specialization grew up reading the Thesis, as it was called (Kling 1956). I know: I am part of that generation. I first read Kling's piece as an undergraduate enrolled in the only Latin American politics course that was offered (rather irregularly, I should add) at my institution. I recall the piece to this day because it made such a strong impression on me, being, as it was, in such sharp contrast to so much of the scholarship of the period. Re-reading it today gives us surprising insight into the epistemological battles of Kling's day. First, a brief background about the author of this highly cited paper. I never had the honor of meeting Kling, but a little digging on the web and consultation with those who knew him allow me to sketch out the bare outlines of his academic life. Unlike the lives of our itinerant contemporary scholars, who do their undergraduate studies at one institution, their PhD degrees at another, get their starter jobs at a third, and often move several more times before retiring, Kling received his BA, MA and PhD from Washington University and joined the Political Science Department faculty in 1946, three years before completing his PhD in 1949. He wrote a dissertation that is perhaps best classified as diplomatic history, a subject much in vogue at the time (Kling 1949). Kling spent the rest of his career at Washington University, rising through the ranks and, at a relatively young age, moved into university administration, serving as dean of arts and sciences and also as provost. Despite the strong reception to the article under discussion here (as evidenced by the high citation rates of the piece), Kling did not prove to be a prolific scholar. While today's electronic search engines may have missed some of his writings, as far as I can tell, this piece and few others were his only published studies.1 When Kling retired as provost from Washington University in 1983, a chair was established in his honor. Curiously enough, it was not in political science but was designated the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters and has been held ever since by scholars in the humanities. The first two paragraphs of the Kling article, 'Towards a Theory of Power and Political Instability in Latin make it clear that it was going to be different from the standard political science papers of the day. Despite its title, focused on power and stability Latin America, Kling does not mention these topics at all in his introduction. Rather, he begins by making a forceful statement about the philosophy and practice of the social sciences. The terminology he uses will, no doubt, confuse the young social scientist of today. Kling begins by criticizing empiricism, yet the rest of the article self-consciously provides a great deal of data. Kling uses the term empiricism, however, in the manner in which physicians do when they refer with derision to empirical medicine, that is, treating the symptoms presented by a patient without any attempt to diagnose the underlying illness. Kling's critique is to make a strong case against what he calls speculations unrelated to experience (p. 21) and demands that political scientists start to build explicit theories based on real-life data. Kling directly targeted the field of political theory. He says: Academically, in fact, the field of political theory, within the discipline of political science, traditionally has defined its role as recording, with varied degrees of interpretation, the history of metaphysical speculations in the area of politics and the state (p. 21). To support his argument he cites approvingly what was later to become a long-standing classic, written by the then Young Turk David Easton in his 1953 book, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science. With one bold stroke, Kling on the one hand condemns the subfield of political theory as being hopelessly removed from observation, while on the other he seeks to legitimize the enterprise of theory building based on evidence. …

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy by Park Honan (review)

REVIEWS 286 his case is harmed by the lack of specific evidence that would connect religious activity and the kind of rising urban economies he is discussing. More purely theological is Anna Harrison’s reading of one of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on sainthood in “‘If one member glories…’: Community between the Living and the Saintly Dead in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints.” Of all the articles here, the most innovative is Anne L. Clark’s “Why All the Fuss About the Mind?” Here the author looks at the inferences made by some cognitive scientists about the nature of religious experience through an analysis of Elisabeth of Schönau’s visions, and she concludes that, despite the many insights they offer, the theories about “doctrinal” modes of religiosity during the Middle Ages are in need of revision. In the essay “Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late Medieval English Manuscript: London British Library Additional 37049,” Marlene Villalobos Hennessy discusses the shapes assumed by blood piety in a particular manuscript of Richard Rolle’s works. Hennessy does a fine job contextualizing the imagery of the manuscript’s text and illustrations. Nevertheless, her fascinating picture of the way in which blood piety captures the tensions between Christ’s status as both a fully corporeal human being and the spiritual Word of God is somewhat lost under the weight of cross-references. This is one case where I think the author might have profited from more space to work out her ideas. Another is Allison K. Frazier’s “Machiavelli, Trauma, and the Scandal of The Prince: An Essay in Speculative History.” Here Frazier reads The Prince in the context of Machiavelli ’s personal biography (his torture at the hands of his political opponents), and asks how the text relates to modern thinking about trauma. Unfortunately, Frazier never really engages with the weaknesses of trauma theory, and so the methodological remarks with which she ends her study ring rather hollow. The reader will not come away from History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person with a very changed view of questions of community and personhood in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, judged on the merits of the fine work collected by Holsinger and Fulton, the book does make an excellent addition to medieval studies. THOMAS O’DONNELL, English, UCLA Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005) xv + 421 pp. Despite a relative dearth of concrete documentary evidence, biographies of Marlowe are hardly rare. Park Honan’s study follows hot on the heels of both Constance Brown Kuriyama’s Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002) and David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004). Honan himself is no stranger to the art of biography having previously written accounts of the lives of Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and William Shakespeare . Unsurprisingly, then, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is a case of an experienced biographer turning his attention to well-ploughed fields in the hope of bringing some new life to old soil. In writing this book, Honan’s avowed aim is to “offer the facts of Marlowe’s life reliably … [within] an ongoing historical context” (2–3). Therefore, it stands to reason to suggest that the success of this biography partially depends on the extent to which the author transgresses the REVIEWS 287 boundaries of his own stated remit: a point worth keeping in mind. The book is divided into four sections and ten chapters, which follow the stages in Marlowe’s life periodically and chronologically. Honan’s account of Marlowe’s childhood years in Canterbury is vivid and lively. It successfully brings to life the tactile and sensory world in which he lived, paying close attention to objects, sights, smells, sounds, and—most of all—to the people that surrounded the young boy. From scant information about Marlowe’s father, John, Honan infers that he was “by turns affable or truculent” (26), depending on his level of intoxication. Similarly, from only two documents (a household inventory and a will) Honan paints a colorful and lifelike portrait of Marlowe’s mother, Katherine. He makes imaginative yet distinctly authoritative...

Evolutionary Theories and Design Practices

Introduction How widely applicable are evolutionary theories? What can they tell us about design practices? The concept of evolution often is used in design research, yet Langrish1 argues that many of our evolutionary ideas are confused or pre-Darwinian, and that they should be replaced by a non-progressive Darwinism. The theories we use inform our analysis, and hence a clearer theoretical understanding of evolution has the potential to improve our interpretation of empirical data on design practices. In this paper, I argue that the Darwinian concepts of variation and selection provide a useful theoretical lens for understanding longer-term changes across design families, but that they can be misleading when applied to design practices within particular projects. To support these arguments, I consider the treatment of evolution in literature about technological change, as well as the contemporary debates and controversies in human and cultural evolution. Analysis and comparison suggests that there is a broad spectrum of neo-Darwinian evolutionary thinking. This includes, but is not limited to, the notion of “memes,” currently discussed by design theorists. I highlight the questions and challenges that this rich heritage of evolutionary theorizing poses to researchers of design, who are engaged in analyzing activities and the outcomes of human labor. Of course, it may seem paradoxical to include a discussion of evolutionary theories in Design Issues; given the deliberate and intentional nature of design practice. Darwin’s theory of natural selection provides a mechanism for the evolution of the species, which disposes with the hand of God as the designer of individual living things. It drew him into conflict with the creationists, who believe that all living creatures are individually designed. While there is a long history of speculation that biological evolution is just one instance of a more generic phenomenon,2 a number of dissimilarities between the realms of the natural and the artificial raise potential challenges to the legitimacy of evolutionary claims. Designers clearly are involved in the realm of the artificial. Hence, we are justified in approaching the application of evolutionary theories to design as skeptics. 1 John Z. Langrish, “Darwinian Design: The Memetic Evolution of Design Ideas,” Design Issues 20:4 (2004): 4–19. 2 See, for example, John Ziman, “Evolutionary Models for Technological Change” in Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, John Ziman, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–4.

Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story (review)

Bill Brooks's latest novel is a lovely, lighthearted yet sinister piece of "what-if " fiction centering on the possibly most legendary outlaws of the twentieth century—Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—whose four-year crime spree across the South and Midwest became the stuff of legends, a controversial hit movie and countless books. Unlike most other fictionalized treatments of Bonnie and Clyde's exploits, Brooks's novel focuses mostly on the infamous pair's romantic and sexual relationship rather than on the many robberies and murder sprees they committed, which in this novel serve merely as a backdrop for a tale of star-crossed lovers. Brooks, a popular author of historical and Western genre fiction, weaves this strange love story using simple prose and a straightforward narrative that creates a detailed picture of rural life during the Great Depression—everything from Ford V-8s and secret "blind pig" bathtub-gin parties to "picture shows," pulpy detective magazines and "tourist courts"—the 1930s equivalent of today's Motel 6's, and the Barrow gang's preferred hideout between jobs. Brooks also examines head-on a topic often avoided by other Bonnie and Clyde storymakers—Clyde Barrow's ambiguous, almost neuter sexuality, [End Page 190] which is oddly complemented by Bonnie Parker's ravenous and aggressive sexual appetite. Most historians have agreed that Barrow was, at the very least, less sexually vigorous than Parker, while some have gone so far as to say that Barrow was bisexual or even a latent homosexual in denial about his sexual identity. While the 1968 film depicted the couple's relationship as asexual and Clyde as a virgin until Bonnie very nearly raped him two-thirds into the film, in Brooks's novel Clyde is a man traumatized by the rapes and physical abuse he suffered by other men while serving his first prison sentence for robbery. Clyde's indifference frustrates Bonnie, whose attempts to cajole him into lovemaking are often rebuked. As a result, Brooks imagines Bonnie seeking sexual satisfaction elsewhere— with Clyde's criminal associate Ray Hamilton, with a straitlaced accountant when Clyde is away in prison, with bootleggers and random workingmen she meets in speakeasies. Brooks even imagines that Ted Hinton, a Texas Ranger who pursued Bonnie and Clyde on their cross-country rampages and helped orchestrate their final capture, had fallen in love with Bonnie while she was still working as a waitress, years before her life of crime began. Even if Clyde leaves her sexually unsatisfied, a different, deeper kind of bond keeps Bonnie and Clyde together through every phase of their violent relationship, and when they die in a cloud of bullets, Bonnie's dying thoughts are for her enigmatic lover. Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story is an intriguing piece of speculative history as well as a quick, pleasing read that will appeal to history buffs, romance lovers and literary fiction fans alike.

Messiahs of 1933: radical Yiddish theatre at Artef (a speculative theatre history

This essay is about how playwright Moishe Nadir and Artef (The Worker's Theatrical Alliance) led America out of the Great Depression to a future of full employment, justice and Yiddish satire for all.