Imaginative Construction Research Articles

LOUIS MINK, “POSTMODERNISM”, AND THE VOCATION OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay reconstructs the intellectual development of the philosopher of history Louis O. Mink Jr, in order to illuminate the philosophical background to “postmodernism” in American historical epistemology. From around 1970, Mink was a prominent and influential defender of the view that historical narratives were imaginative constructions rather than representations of past actuality. This has since been understood as a characteristically postmodern view. Mink's wider sensibility, however, is better described as modernist than postmodernist. The crucial context for his philosophy was a hostility to “positivism” going back to his graduate years at Yale, and his epistemological views were of a piece with a defence of historical understanding as both distinctive and valuable. In both respects Mink was influenced by the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, while he was himself an important influence on Hayden White. Mink's case therefore helps bridge the gap between interwar and later twentieth-century versions of Anglophone historical contructivism, while drawing attention to some cultural contexts in which the development of both modernist and postmodernist views of historiography must be understood.

Italians and the Invention of Race: The Poetics and Politics of Difference in the Struggle over Libya, 1890-1913

This essay is part of a book in progress about Italy and Africa in the modern and modernist Italian literary imagination and cultural identity, from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (1947). It argues that racism, colonialism, and imperialism are not an incidental, minor (and thus, understandably largely forgotten) component of Italian identity and Italian history, but that in the final years of “Liberal Italy,” they became increasingly a defining trait of the imaginary Italian national identity. As in the Risorgimento, literature and the literary imagination played a crucial role in this unifying process. In a nation whose wealth and growth after unification were effectively based on the exploitation of voiceless women and peasants and where parliamentary politics was soon reduced to cynical maneuvers, bargains, and intrigues, intellectuals, writers, and idealists had sought in vain a principle around which a strong sense of national identity and community could, however belatedly, take form. An imaginary construction of racial difference and the fashioning of an imaginary “Italian” ethnic national identity, contributed more than any other element to unify Italians and give them the sense of being “one nation.” The word and concept razza in this period, are not used just as another way of saying patria, but rather to forge the sense of an imaginary yet essential identity. This imaginary sense of identity could entice and include even those who, like women, Catholics, Jews, peasants, and Southerners, were (or felt) excluded or alienated from the humanist discourse and the paternalistic yet secular rhetoric of Italian Risorgimental patriotism. This new imaginary identity was constructed and reinforced increasingly by applying the debasing colonial logic of otherness outside rather than inside the nation’s borders. The creation of an imaginary racially different and inferior “other” on the other side of the Mediterranean finally allowed for an Italian identity to come together as never before. The Libyan war was construed largely as a literary fantasy and a utopian wish-fulfillment. It represents the culmination of a racial process of self-definition by Italians, through which the profoundly disintegrating internal differences of race, gender, class, and religious belief that threatened the very notion of a united Italy were at once repressed, forgotten, and surpassed. Through the racialization of literary discourse, poets and prose writers took, for the first time in the history of united Italy, an active political role that in some ways was even more influential than that of professional politicians.

Fractal Village Unplugged: Design-Based Research On Computing with Marginalized Youth

At an alternative high school serving predominantly at-risk underrepresented students evicted from mainstream education, we designed and implemented Fractal Village, a critical/computational/constructionist-pedagogy (C3) learning environment. Fractal Village, instantiated in the virtual-world "Second Life," constituted an empirical environment to research my emergent model of mathematical/computational agency (m/c) as well as an intervention aiming to foster such agency. Key research objectives were to: (1) study relations amongst cognitive, affective, material, technological, and social factors that would contribute to individual development of m/c agency; and (2) delineate design principles for fostering m/c agency. The student cohort engaged collaboratively in virtual-world imaginative construction activities each manifesting generative themes (Freire, 1968), to which the designers-as-teachers tailored mathematical and computer-science concepts, such that students appropriated the STEM content apropos of tackling their own emergent construction problems. We argue that to build agency, students must develop both skills and dispositions—a spiraling inter-constructive growth and articulate a developing methodology for fostering agency development. We conclude that we can, and must, engage at-risk youth by helping them to build STEM identities, engaging their a priori m/c agency, and customizing skills and dispositions-related classroom discursive supports.

A Poetics of Comparison: Euripides, Zhuangzi, and the Human Poise of Imaginative Construction

As constructive acts of imaginative making, comparative endeavors in the study of religion bear descriptive, interpretive, and normative demands in ways that poetry and poetics can speak to especially well. By drawing upon poets to engage and elaborate extant theoretical concerns in comparative study, I present an approach for considering comparisons as made objects. As such, using poet Kay Ryan's terms, I suggest rafters and ghost ribs of various forms characterize the scholar's methodological structures, the religious texts at issue, and the ideals of practice emergent from each. A comparison of Euripides and Zhuangzi—focusing on their chorus-like discursive strategies and their respective ideals of spiritual endurance and spiritual anticipation—accompanies the essay's theoretical emphases as a preliminary example of what might be involved in a terrain for comparative religious ethics comprised via poetics.

California at the Point of Conflict: Fluvial and Social Systems in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Joan Didion's Run River

I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world. The development of American literature has, to a large degree, depended on shifting and highly social attitudes toward conquering, developing, and, finally, trying to save the land, air, and water we claim as ours. Because of California's highly dramatic and highly volatile relationship with the landscape, and a population as large as it is diverse, California literature is generally unable to escape some kind of mark left by the environment. As Jack Hicks points out, an “essential feature” of the region we call California “is the extent to which its many endowments—stunning climate, spectacular landscape, abundant resources—lived up to some of the visions and fleshed out the hopes for a promised land” (3). Begun in the minds of both Europeans and Americans as an imaginative construct, the state's fiction and nonfiction, whether novel or promotional tract or the myriad of publications in between, explore the collision of dream and reality. Often three “large metaphors” guide this exploration: El Dorado, Continent's End, and the Pacific Rim, all of which, while utilized in many racial and social analyses of the state's inhabitants, are based in its “natural blessings and expansive terrain” (Hicks 5). Whether overt, as in Robinson Jeffers' 1924 homage to the wild and holy Big Sur coastline in “Continent's End” and Mary Austin's land-based pilgrimage in her 1903 Land of Little Rain, or covert, as in T. C. Boyle's geographically dependent analysis of race and class, the recent Tortilla Curtain, land and water, indivisible in the West, are important signifiers in much of California's literature.

Some Remarks on the Re-buliding of the Category of Essence and the Reflective Modernity

If modernity is manifested as essentialism, postmodernity is manifested as anti-essentialism. Modernity is, in essence, human beings’ discovery of their own power, and is based on rational knowledge that has grasped the essence of things. In fact, in the discourse system of modernity, the various concepts of “essence” connote nothing but people’s imaginative constructions and rational conjectures about objects. In the past, our order, be it internal or external, was in essence guaranteed by God. Afterwards, all “essences”, as essences, must rationally prove the reason for their existence. In the postmodern context and discourse system, God, and also the “human being” who has created essence, has “died”. We should not simply resume the belief in traditional essence, but should reconstruct, on the basis of a full understanding of the intellectual meaning of postmodernity’s challenges, some historicity, practicality, and the concept of essence that accords with the historical as well as communicative rationality. We must realize that the essence of things is the essence of particular things in a particular stage of development, internally containing infinite differences and variety. Only things with postmodern traits contain modernity, and only the concept of essence that conceives difference accords with time.

Dopamine Enhances Expectation of Pleasure in Humans

SummaryHuman action is strongly influenced by expectations of pleasure. Making decisions, ranging from which products to buy to which job offer to accept, requires an estimation of how good (or bad) the likely outcomes will make us feel [1]. Yet, little is known about the biological basis of subjective estimations of future hedonic reactions. Here, we show that administration of a drug that enhances dopaminergic function (dihydroxy-L-phenylalanine; L-DOPA) during the imaginative construction of positive future life events subsequently enhances estimates of the hedonic pleasure to be derived from these same events. These findings provide the first direct evidence for the role of dopamine in the modulation of subjective hedonic expectations in humans.

Magritte, the Work of Art, and Lacan's Three Dimensions of Experience: From Idealization to Sublimation, from Resemblance to Similitude, and from the Id to It

Any good work of art has a capacity to “draw” and evoke the experience of the reality of the Unconscious. In the presence of a painting, the ordinary experience of reality may be transformed into an experience of the mind writ large. The larger mind is not only inside but also outside and represents and realizes a structural connection between object and subject, the external and internal, the representational and emotional worlds. The work of art functions as a symbolic object that links the subjective experience of the artist with the subjective experience of the viewer. Because the subjectivity of the artist is included in the object of art, the latter also has an impact on the subjectivity of the viewer. In his paper “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Freud (1914) described his subjective experience of Michelangelo’s sculpture. Lacan made a distinction between objectivity and objectality. The object of psychoanalysis, as a scientific object, is an unconscious phantasy object and as such it necessarily involves subjectivity and the life of desire. Phantasy objects mediate our perception of reality. No matter how much objective science tries to demystify and nullify the influence of phantasies on our perceptions, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that ultimately science itself may be a construction of the human imagination widely defined. Nevertheless, the task of giving us the purest and most beautiful representation of our imaginative faculty falls on the visual arts and not on science. The object of art

Driving Pan-Americanism: The Imagination of a Gulf of Mexico Highway

This article examines the intertwined efforts of Mexican and Cuban officials, US policy makers and business interests, as well as tourists and tourism advocates, to link all three countries' highway systems around the Gulf of Mexico and promote automobile excursions in the region from the 1930s through the 1950s. Adopting Ricardo D. Salvatore's concept of transportation utopia, the article argues that the physical and imaginary construction of this particular infrastructural project came into being through the combined impact of the politics of hemispheric unity, the emergence of tourism as a development strategy, and the growing vogue of automobile touring. The article first situates the circum-gulf highway project within an earlier history of road building, tourism, and motoring in Cuba and Mexico. It then traces the numerous efforts by officials from all three countries to join these road systems through a circum-Gulf automobile link, an idea that soon became the subject of numerous articles publishe...

CUANDO LA MEMORIA POÉTICA DOCUMENTA LA HISTORIA NO TODO LO SÓLIDO SE DESVANECE EN EL AIRE: (En torno a Nada queda atrás de Carlos Trujillo y Milton Rogovin)

Nada queda atras is a book of documentary photographs and poetry. The photograghs, shot by Milton Rogovin in 1967, in Quemchi on the island of Chiloe, are today documents which record history and denounce the empoverished conditions in which the fishermen and farmers then lived in Chiloe. The poems, written by Carlos Trujillo, 37 years later in the United Status are, on the one hand, poetic testimonies of the personal and collective memory that the photographs suggest; memories which, in turn, become an imaginary (re)construction of the cultural identity of Chiloe lived by the poet, as a particular experience of foreignity and absence. The poetic texts are, then, derivations of the photographic document, but at the same time they are symbols with which to read/see the photos as metaphors of a profound Chiloe of olden times and today. Seen as such, the book is literally a document of of culture and barbarism: culture as a recognition of the ethics and aesthetics of the “forgotten,” and barbarism as that same recognition reveals stories of postponement and inequality.

Encountering the Arugula Leaf: The Failure of the Imaginary and its Implications for Research on Identity in Organizations

The article reviews research on identity in organizations. It suggests that current research reiterates imaginary constructions of identity by which identity can be defined as coherent or fragmented. Based on a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, it explores how articulating identity as lack may unsettle such imaginary constructions. The article develops the significant implications this has for how identity is conceptualized and researched and, importantly, how the failure of imaginary identity constructions relates to resistance and control in organizations. The article provides new directions for the study of identity in organizations particularly with respect to widening the discursive spaces in which creative identity struggles occur.

Transforming Schooling through Technology: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Participatory Learning

Transforming Schooling through Technology: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Participatory Learning Craig A. Cunningham (bio) The fifty years since the 100th anniversary of John Dewey’s birth have marked the emergence of new technologies that afford a wealth of previously unknown approaches to learning, making it not only possible but practicable for Dewey’s educational vision of participatory learning to be realized on a mass scale. This chapter discusses these possibilities and their implications for learning in the twenty-first century. A Brief History of Deweyan Participatory Learning In The School and Society (1899), John Dewey writes that the best learning occurs when students participate in what he calls an occupation: “a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life.”1 Such participation touches children’s “spontaneous” and “worthy” interests while organizing such interests into “regular and progressive” modes of action such as those carried out in contemporary social life. Occupations “furnish the ideal occasions for both sense-training and discipline in thought,”2 because they grant students “an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and information in active pursuits typifying important social situations.”3 Working with his colleagues at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, Dewey developed this idea into a new theory of education that would come to be known as progressive education.4 However, because the phrase “progressive education” has multiple meanings and so much historical baggage,5 this chapter will refer to Dewey’s conception of learning through occupations as “participatory learning,” a phrase used recently by Speaker, Reingold, and others.6 In framing his participatory approach to learning, Dewey looked primarily backwards to a time when people allegedly lived in more direct interrelationship [End Page 46] with nature and with the basic tools necessary to harness and shape its potentialities. Dewey and his colleagues placed students in situations similar to those of laborers, farmers, and do-it-yourselfers from an earlier time so that the students could experience first-hand the building of a house, the spinning of thread, and the making of candles. This approach acknowledged that life at the turn of the twentieth century was increasingly disconnected from nature and that direct participation in contemporary industrial practices was increasingly out of reach for children. Not only wasn’t it safe for children to be roaming around a factory floor, but the science or knowledge underlying modern industrial processes was often beyond the children’s understanding. Making candles or spinning thread, Dewey wrote, “engages the full spontaneous interest and attention of the children. It keeps them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more useful, more capable, and hence more inclined to be helpful at home; it prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later life”7—without exposing them to the hazards or conceptual confusions they might experience if they were asked to generate electricity or work with the tools of large-scale textile production. Dewey did not consider these activities to be preparation for a job; rather, the purpose was to build the habits and skills of life-long learning. “The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education—that is, to intellectual results and the forming of socialized dispositions.”8 Such activities, Dewey believed, presented “plenty of opportunities and occasions for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number work,”9 plus had the corollary benefit of providing “training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world [and] . . . of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities.”10 In theory, this participation in what might be called “historically situated” occupations could also be used as the basis for teaching related subject-matter in history, geography, and science, fostering mental quickness, “sense...

Dewey and Taoism: Teleology and Art

In some ways, the inaugural thought of the Western tradition is Aristotle’s, repeated with regard to almost every subject matter he investigated. We could call this thought teleology, technology, or means-ends rationality. Here is the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” This notion reappears in fits and starts throughout the tradition and has a particularly fraught relation to Christianity. But in Adam Smith’s economics and in utilitarian ethics, as well as in the economic and political orders they reflect, it reasserts its dominance. And in pragmatism, teleology becomes a theory of all value, and in particular a theory of truth. The West, however, also suffers from teleology, or from (in the current phases) “excellence” or a “purpose-driven life.” And it is possible for a planet to suffer from our enthusiasm for its technological transformation. Within the Western tradition, the Eastern tradition is read as a cure for teleology, as a place where ends are annihilated into being, or into immediacy, in which one lets go of purpose and finds peace. This essay explores that imaginary construction of teleology’s Asian other. But even Aristotle, and even the pragmatists, felt an urgency to collapse ends into means, to find meaning in the process as well as the products of living. They found it, I propose, in perhaps the zone where West meets the West’s East—in the concept of art, particularly as set out in Dewey’s great work of aesthetics, Art as Experience.

Struggling with Lack: A Lacanian Perspective on Organizational Identity

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on organizational identity by developing a psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, the author draws on Lacanian theorizing to explore how organizational identity discourse is informed by imaginary constructions of subjectivity. It is proposed that the collective construction of coherent, unitary, and definably organizational identity discourse is validated by and validates conscious but illusory constructions of the self. The resulting discourse is inevitably disrupted by unconscious subjectivity and invariably fails. Therefore, the collective construction of fragmented, dynamic, and emergent organizational identity discourse is equally inevitable. While such discourse can be illusory, it also contains the opportunity for engaging in liberating struggles with identity as lack. The implications of this perspective for the theory and practice of organizational identity are discussed.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS: RADICALISM IN A GLOBAL AGE

Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively “conceptual” and more firmly grounded in social theory.

Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (review)

Brad Prager, Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. viii + 287pp. Kant marks boundary line, an abyss, in the words of Philip Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, with regard to the construction of the modern subject that divides it with the past. (Rene Wellek and Jane K. Brown might also have been evoked.) Kant's conception of the mind forecloses the possibility of direct experience of the thing-m-self or absolute certainty about God or the order of the world. Writer s and artists responding to Kant are compelled to account for the limits of vision and the active role of the imagination in the construction and representation of the world. Brad Prager, author of book on filmmaker Werner Herzog (Wallflower, 2007) and the co-editor of volume on visual studies and the Holocaust (Camden House, 2008), applies Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to visual aesthetics in German romanticism. Specifically, Prager looks at selection of romantic painters and novelists writing or referring to the visual arts, and how each implies model of perceptual aesthetics that conceives the outside world as an imaginative construction of our own malting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Prager integrates philosophy literature, and the visual arts to lay out model of romanticism as a system against systems (227), an open ended discourse that speaks to the modern and post-modern. Prager begins with discussion of Lessing's Laocoon, both as it stands in relation to the classicism of Winckelmann, and as it expresses conception of art that contrasts with the romantics. For Lessing there is distinction between the plastic and verbal arts related to the former's inability to capture the dynamic character of experience. Lessing nevertheless sees fixity in the object that makes it independent of the mind .The romantics, by contrast, do not grant such generic distinction. For them the ideas that represent the verbal and those that represent the visual both occur in the same field of the imagination, and so are indistinguishable from each other. Prager next turns to Wackenroder's fictional Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders and Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. While the former sympathizes with classicism, the aesthetic value of the friar derives from the divine inspiration of the artist, not the formal qualities of the art. The real work is created by revelation, the material object disappearing under the gaze of the religious beholder. Looking at this from the secular side, Tieck's Franz Sternbald develops these themes; the phantasm becomes sign for the unattainable ideal. In this way, Prager argues, Franz Sternbald can also be read as an anti-Bildungsroman in which the growth of the artist remains unfulfilled. He extends this theme in the next chapter, in his discussion of the Clemens Brentano's Godwi. …

<i>The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination Elizabeth A. Dolan The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. By Carl Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 299. ISBN 9780199259984. £45.00. In The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination, Carl Thompson explores the ways in which misadventure came to be highly valued in canonical Romanticism. After cataloguing the tropes or 'scripts' inherent in exploration and maritime adventure narratives, Thompson offers a compelling analysis of the implications of these sources for understanding major poems by Wordsworth and Byron. Although he ultimately writes a successful book, Thompson's explanation of his methodology and scope in the introduction is troubling. Defining his historical scope as 1780–1830, Thompson explicitly excludes women authors from consideration, citing as justification Anne Mellor's and Marlon Ross's seminal studies from the late 1980s, both of which identify a 'masculine' agenda within canonical Romanticism. It is puzzling that Thompson does not take into account the extensive body of scholarship of the last twenty years that builds on these early studies to explore the nuances of gender, specifically in travel writing. On the topic of suffering in travel, one thinks, for example, of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway, not least because Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom Thompson discusses in connection with Byron, read the travel narrative on his elopement trip with Mary Shelley. To explore Wollstonecraft's text as a 'script' or even anti-script for Shelley's and Byron's traveller personae would serve to deepen rather than to diminish Thompson's argument. In his first chapter, Thompson offers a helpful explication of the term 'tourist' in the Romantic era, cataloguing the types of travellers – Grand Tourists, picturesque tourists and female tourists – with whom the Romantic anti-tourist contrasts himself. The chapter argues that [End Page 182] Wordsworth and Byron signify their radicalism and disdain for these other modes of tourism by travelling on foot and by emphasising their own suffering and discomfort. Thompson then dives into the archive of the Romantic-era 'Voyages and Travels' genre, and here his careful readings and captivating insights engage, educate and entertain the reader. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the existential and political resonances of narratives written by various 'misadventurers', particularly sailors and survivors of shipwrecks. Thompson deftly identifies the rhetorical and interpretive conventions that make up four categories of misadventure narrative: the providentialist's misadventure, in which the hero's salvation, or, alternatively, his suffering, is 'evidence of election'; the empiricist's fragmented observations; the sceptic's account of a random universe; the sentimentalist's focus on the sufferer rather than God. In each case, shipwreck narratives function as sites of exploration for religious contestations and existential anxieties. Likewise, the 'topos of suffering in travel', Thompson argues, offered writers a vehicle through which to express social and political concerns, particularly in their sympathetic identification with figures such as wanderers, vagrants, exiles and, especially, maritime adventurers. Accounts of the hierarchy on board a ship depict civil authority structures, while accounts of mutiny play out resistance to those structures. Shipwreck narratives thus offer a microcosm for analysing political ideals and conflict in an age of revolution. By Chapter 4, one feels oneself in the hands of an excellent historical and intellectual guide, as Thompson describes the 'exploration "mania" [that] gripped British culture in the Romantic period'. Here Thompson builds upon the scholarship of Nigel Leask, Mary Louise Pratt, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson to analyse the various ways in which the Romantic imagination constructs the figure of the explorer. He identifies objectivism as one of the primary features of the 'house style' of exploration narratives, and elaborates the ways in which narratives by James Bruce and Mungo Park violate this house style with their emotional accounts of disaster, and thus fuel the major Romantic poets' interest in misadventure. The payoff of this archival and historical work comes in the final two chapters, one on Wordsworth's poetry and the other on Byron's. In his careful reading of the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude, Thompson identifies a residue of the Providentialist shipwreck narrative. If Wordsworth looks to those who suffer or survive shipwrecks to convey...

Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement (review)

Reviewed by: Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement David S. Williams Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement, by Walter Brueggemann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 301 pp. $44.95. Willa Cather wrote that “some memories are realities,” which leaves room to suggest that some memories are not. In this book, Walter Brueggemann explores the collective Israelite memories of the singular personage, Solomon, whom Brueggemann deems “a complex interpretive construct” (p. xii). Thus, though Brueggemann does deal initially, in his first chapter, with the question of the historical Solomon, that question is not the main subject of his study. Finding Solomon to have been “a modest historical character from the tenth century who presided over a modest court, a modest economy, and a temple apparatus in Jerusalem” (p. 21), Brueggemann instead turns the bulk of his attention to “canonical Solomon,” the “Solomon of faith,” who is “surely a product of interpretive imposition, that is, of ideology” (p. 22). Unlike the modest historical personage, “canonical Solomon” is triumphant, and becomes a symbol of power and wisdom. Yet this very image is subverted in the canon by “the ironic exposé of his would-be success” (p. 22). Brueggemann shows that an ironic point about the limits of human power pervades the whole: “On the surface, Solomon is as fully absolute as any ruler in Israel could ever [End Page 166] be. . . . The narrative presentation of Solomon, however, is given in literature that has a distinct, deliberate theological edge, that is, an awareness that the power of YHWH—variously enacted by direct or hidden means—serves to deabsolutize every human claimant to power and to render such claimants penultimate” (pp. xii–xiii). The “key narrative” about Solomon is found in 1 Kings 3–11, and Brueggemann appropriately devotes much attention to this foundational depiction. Thus, in chapters two through eight he explores “how a modest Solomon became a large narrative Solomon” (p. 66). Brueggemann lays out how “the articulation of Solomon as temple builder, wise king, and economic genius is an act of sustained, constructive imagination” (p. 139). However, he also constantly reminds the reader that the matter of irony “is of great importance in reading the Bible alertly” (p. xii), for it exposes contradictions that may be overlooked. In this case, the “surface” reading suggests that Solomon is a great and faithful king. An attentive reading of the text that is attuned to irony, however, reveals that this view is systematically undone. Indeed, on all counts of his celebrated reputation, “Solomon ends exposed as failure: A temple for presence becomes a house of absence for the deported; the gift of wisdom is transformed into distorted foolishness; and the accumulation of wealth culminates in disastrous loss” (p. 156). Because the key narrative about Solomon is located at the beginning of 1–2 Kings, it drives home the main point about human power: “By placing the failed Solomon of temple absence, foolish wisdom, and lost wealth at the beginning of the narrative, the story shows how Solomon is a key contributor not only to the failure that immediately surfaces for his son Rehoboam, but to the ultimate failure, the termination of the dynasty in 2 Kings 24–25” (p. 157). In chapters nine through fourteen, Brueggemann extends his, and our, view by examining further depictions of Solomon in Chronicles, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Psalms. Brueggemann does not stop with canonical depictions, but also takes up some fascinating extra-canonical depictions in the Wisdom of Solomon, the Qur’an, Ethiopic traditions, and Freemasonry traditions, as well as the New Testament. In so doing, Brueggemann underscores the point that “the memory of Solomon has continued to feed and energize the interpretive imagination of ongoing communities of faithful interpretation” (p. 225). [End Page 167] As can be seen, while carrying the sparse title Solomon, this book actually traces the multiple “Solomons” of biblical tradition. The result is a highly readable and provocative study, which is easily accessible by general readers. David S. Williams Director of the Honors Program University of Georgia Copyright © 2008 Purdue University

Of Blood and Blindness: Islam and Huguenot Identity in Aubigné's "Jugement" ( Tragiques VII)

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY OF BLOOD AND BLINDNESS: ISLAM AND HUGUENOT IDENTITY IN AUBIGNÉ’S “JUGEMENT” (TRAGIQUES VII) MARCUS KELLER ONE of the major figures in religious polemics during the French civil wars was the Turk. A versatile imaginary construction, the Turk served both Catholic and Protestant pamphleteers and authors of political treatises to denigrate their opponents. The ideological conflict growing ever more acerbic after the outbreak of the fist war in 1562, Catholic polemicists often equated Huguenots with Muslims to imply that a new crusade was needed to purge France of her heretics from within. Some alleged that Protestants had requested support from the Ottoman empire for their fight against the Spaniards and the Pope: “Ilz sont prests à coëffer le Turban et prendre la Circoncision de Mahommet.”1 On the other side, Calvin did not hesitate to invoke Islam in his condemnation of Catholic rites and “superstition,” especially the adoration of relics. He wondered how idolatrous Catholics would explain their form of worship “au Turc qui se moque de leur folie,” but not without distancing himself immediately from both sides: “il suffit qu’entre eux ils vident leur débat. Cependant nous serons excusés de ne croire ni à l’un ni à l’autre” (Rouillard 412). In Protestant pamphlets the Ottoman empire was also cited as a model for religious tolerance that France could emulate to find a way out of its religious and political impasse (Yardeni 87-88). As religious violence escalated and the kingdom threatened to collapse, impassioned calls for a new crusade against the Turk could be heard 1 See “The Turk as a Weapon of Religious and Political Propaganda” (Rouillard 40718 , here 414). YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 137 from both camps.2 Ronsard was among those who encouraged Charles IX to reunite the French behind a common cause and lead them against the infidel in Istanbul.3 Evocations of the Turk and Islam then were pervasive in the religious and political discourse of the second half of the sixteenth century . It therefore does not come with surprise that they also play a significant role in Les Tragiques, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s epic staging of the drama of French Protestantism, which he began to compose in 1577 and published first in 1617. The Ottoman empire emerges in books I, V, and VII, and although references to the Turk and to Islam are relatively few in number, Aubigné makes a very targeted use of them. They contribute to the complexity of his endeavor to foster Huguenot identity . Mostly linked to the epic’s satirical attack on Catholics, the Turk becomes the poet’s unexpected accomplice in creating a vision of France as a reformed nation that nonetheless reunites Catholics and Protestants. Toward the end of “Misères,” the epic’s first book in which Aubigné paints a gruesome tableau of his war-stricken country, the poet implores God to reestablish order among the French and punish the persecutors of the Huguenots, His faithful servants. After portraying the Protestant Church as a harrassed and persecuted “fille du ciel” seeking refuge in the desert,4 the poet likens the situation of the Huguenots to God’s own isolation in a world populated by pagans, Muslims, and idolaters: Les temples du payen, du Turc, de l’idolatre Haussent au ciel l’orgueil du marbre, et de l’albastre, Et Dieu seul au desert pauvrement hebergé A basti tout le monde, et n’i est pas logé. (I. 1305-8) 138 ROMANCE NOTES 2 Michael J. Heath shows how important a role the idea of a new crusade played in Catholic and Protestant discourse alike. 3 See for example Ronsard’s “Élegie à la Magesté du Roy son maistre” (131-40) in which the poet encourages the young king to move military action outside of Europe: “Comme Alexandre aurez l’ame animée/ Du chaut desir de conduire une armée/ Outre l’Europe, & d’assautz vehemens/ Oster le Sceptre aux puissans Ottomans…” (ll. 43-46). 4 “Préface,” ll. 125 and 167-8. I quote from Aubigné 2006. Subsequent references bracketed in the text are to book and lines. Contrary to Calvin who casts Catholics and Muslims as antagonists because of their different views of proper worship...

The Entrepreneur: Real and Imagined

Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard were the main architects of the distinctly Austrian theory of production as it exists today. All three conceived the entrepreneurial function in the actual market economy as presupposing the ownership of property, specifically capital. Yet, many, if not most, contemporary Austrian economists conceive the entrepreneur as a pure decision-maker possessing superior “alertness” but owning no resources. This pure entrepreneur earns profits by “discovering” and seizing objectively existing but previously unperceived opportunities to arbitrage price discrepancies between a bundle of complementary inputs and the output it yields. That this is the essence of “the” Austrian theory of the entrepreneur and profit is accepted as a matter of course by those among the broader economics profession who are sympathetic to the Austrian approach. It is the goal of this paper to demonstrate that there is in the Austrian tradition traceable back to Carl Menger, a very definite and prominent strand of thought that conceives property ownership as central to the tasks that the entrepreneur characteristically performs in the real-world market economy. The managerial function . . . can never evolve into a substitute for entrepreneurship. The fallacy to the contrary is due to the error confusing the category of entrepreneurship as it is defined in the imaginary construction of functional distribution with conditions in a living and operating market economy. The function of the entrepreneur cannot be separated from the direction of the employment of factors of production for the accomplishment of definite tasks. The entrepreneur controls the factors of production; it is this control that brings him either entrepreneurial profit or loss. (Mises 1998, p. 302) Mr. Keynes obviously arrives at this view by an artificial separation of the function of the entrepreneurs as owners of capital and their function as entrepreneurs in the narrow sense. But these two functions cannot be absolutely separated even in theory, because the essential function of the entrepreneurs, that of assuming risks, necessarily implies the ownership of capital. Moreover, any new chance to make entrepreneurs’ profits is identical with a change in the opportunities to invest capital, and will always be reflected in the earnings (and value) of capital invested. (Hayek 1931, p. 277; emphasis in original) It is clear, therefore, that the process of equalization of rate of return throughout the economy, one that results in a uniform rate of interest, is the very same process that brings about the abolition of profits and losses in the ERE. . . . [I]f the . . . entrepreneur owns no assets, then how in the world does he earn profits? Profits, after all, are simply the other side of the coin of an increase in the value of one’s capital; losses are the reflection of a loss in capital assets. (Rothbard 2004, pp. 513–14; 1997, 2:247; emphasis in original)