Intellectual Purpose Research Articles

Student Development Theory and the Transformation of Student Affairs in the 1970s

AbstractStudent development theory (SDT) is a diverse corpus of academic and popular psychology with real-world application to the maturation of college and university students. It originated during the campus upheavals of the 1960s as part of a collective effort to reconcile restive students to mass higher education and modern technological society. Then, in the 1970s, SDT was implemented and refined by an ambitious generation of student affairs professionals eager for institutional influence and academic legitimacy. By providing an animating moral and intellectual purpose to the bureaucratic sundering of student affairs divisions from academic affairs divisions, SDT abetted a lasting institutional and cultural change in the organization of the modern university circa 1970. As a discourse of therapeutic empowerment, SDT has had an enduring influence on the daily practice of student affairs administration in the five decades since.

MECHANISMS OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL POTENTIAL OF UKRAINE IN THE CONDITIONS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND MIGRATION PROCESSES

The article describes the relationship between scientific and technological progress and the scientific and technological potential of the country. In particular, the concept of scientific and technical potential in modern research is analyzed. The parallel of the development of scientific and technical potential with the introduction of innovations and further innovative growth of the country was traced. The role of scientific and technical potential in the growth of the world economy and macroeconomic indicators is substantiated. The most important directions of science and scientific and technological progress are determined. Quantitative indicators of the impact on the scientific and technical potential in such countries as the USA, Japan, Germany, France and Great Britain were monitored. Processes of intellectual migration («brain drain») have been identified as a key problem in the development of scientific and technical potential. In particular, it is determined that intellectual migration is caused by processes that occur not within the intellectual sphere, but in society in general: in the economic, social, political, cultural environment, etc. The key factors affecting intellectual migration in Ukraine are characterized, in particular, due to the war and related factors, including progress in the de-occupation of temporarily occupied territories, direct shelling by russian troops of populated areas, the emergence of man-made or natural crisis phenomena, etc. It was determined that in order to avoid or minimize the migration of intellectual specialists, it is necessary to develop a sustainable system of retaining, training and supporting personnel, to join the process of struggle for education seekers. Education is characterized as a highly qualified service, and many countries and the best universities in the world compete for its provision, which should give impetus to development in Ukraine as well. An appropriate step is to create a normative-legislative framework that regulates the processes of external intellectual migration, provides for the development of bills on the entry and exit of citizens with an intellectual purpose, on the social protection of migrating citizens. There is a well-founded need to properly assess the work of scientists and create all the necessary conditions for their development.

A Review on Lehana Yoga of Kashyapa Samhita and its Utilization in Day to Day Practice

Kashyapa Samhita is an ancient text having many benchmark contributions in the field of Kaumarbhritya. Lehaadhya is a major contribution of Kashyapa Samhita where Lehana Yoga (lickable-semisold forms of herbs) is given. Lehana are most palatable and easy to prepare yoga for pediatric practice. In this article i have presented my views on how a practitioner can utilize drug combination of Lehaadhya in day to day practices. Various combinations given in Lehadhyaya are mainly given as preventive measures. But if we think on indication of Lehana, and side by side we thought on pediatric cases we encounter in day to day practices, we can realize that Lehana combinations are also useful in many common ailments in children. In other words Lehana combinations are not just for Preventive purpose and enhancing immunity and intellectual purpose but also can be used in so many common ailment found in pediatric practices. The thing we should kept in mind while using Lehana is its contraindications. Once we are clear about where we should not use Lehana and directly move on the treatment of particular disease, it becomes much easier to decide in which cases Lehana can be used.

Ideation as an Intellectual Information Acquisition and Use Context: Investigating Game Designers' Information‐Based Ideation Behavior

Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday‐life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (that is, the higher‐order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a “means to an intellectual end” and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information‐based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident‐style interviews with 10 game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation‐focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use.

The Development of Kant's Theory of Moral Feeling

Kant’s critical theory on moral feeling can be divided into two stages: early and late. In the early stage, Kant was committed to accepting and transforming the traditional concept of moral feeling, while in the later stage he turned to developing his own unique theory on the topic. His beliefs about moral feeling changed between these two stages, both regarding the basic meaning of moral feeling (from intuitive empirical feelings to a priori feelings based on rationality) and the function of moral feeling in moral philosophy (from the basis of moral law to the motivation of moral action). This paper argues that these shifts help clarify the framework of Kant’s moral philosophy and introduce a new dimension to Kant’s definition of feelings and the relationship between sensibility and intellectuality. Namely, sensibility is not only determined by intellectuality but also has its unique initiative. Through acting on the body, intellectuality generates intellectual feelings, which in turn assist humans in realizing their intellectual purpose as a limited rational being.

The Triumphant Triumvirate: Synergistically Realizing the Purposes of a University Through a Core Management Course

Core management courses bear a particularly challenging curricular as well as pedagogical burden insofar as they are typically the sole or primary vehicle for integrating management principles with larger university and school objectives. Compounding the challenge is that these very objectives are neither universally clear nor necessarily consistent. The article explores two complementary issues: First, what are the purposes of a university and of a business school? Second, and subsequently, how might a core management class contribute to collaboratively realizing them? To the former I delineate three thematic rubrics: cognitive (the intellectual purpose), affective (the holistic purpose), and conative (the practical purpose). To the latter I describe three corresponding principles for clarifying and facilitating their educational ends: (a) theoretical gist-based instruction, centered around the cognitive, which also crystalizes and enables; (b) amalgamated wisdom-based reflection, centered around the affective, which also facilitates and inspires; and (c) active coaching-based development, centered around the conative, which also circles back to reinforce and reinvigorate the above.

Por uma sociologia do ensino de sociologia nas escolas: da finalidade atribuída à disciplina à experiência social do alunato. Estudos de caso no Distrito Federal

Resumo Este trabalho trata da relação entre finalidade intelectual atribuída à disciplina sociologia no ensino médio e representações que o alunato de escolas públicas e particulares do Distrito Federal (DF) fazem a partir da sua experiência social com as ciências sociais no espaço escolar. Baseamo-nos em pesquisa quali/quanti, envolvendo a aplicação de questionários e grupos focais com alunos de escolas do DF, observações participantes nas escolas e análise documental. Propomos identificar a relação entre duas categorias epistêmicas fundamentais em nossa pesquisa: mediações pedagógicas (conhecimentos conteudísticos e didáticos do professor de sociologia) e experiência social do alunato acerca da disciplina na escola. A relação entre mediações pedagógicas e experiência social do alunato no âmbito do ensino de sociologia na escola nos esclarece como o tema da utilidade intelectual das ciências sociais e sua pertinência na formação do ensino médio perpassa as operações críticas que o alunato das escolas do DF realizam sobre a sociologia como área de conhecimento e a sociologia que vai à escola.

Blood on the Rock: Cather's Southwestern History

The history major is a bit of a gut at Hamilton University, and fiction is apparently to blame. Professor Horace Langtry, whose specialty is “supposed to be American history,” panders to the undergraduates by assigning them novels and crediting “the time spent in perusing ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to Colonial history, and ‘Tom Sawyer’ to the Missouri Compromise” (Professor’s House 55–56). Those who want to do more demanding work are better off studying under Professor Godfrey St. Peter, who holds a chair in European history and finds the “collateral reading” in Langtry’s classes to be “lax” (56). Unlike his literary-minded colleague, St. Peter maintains his discipline’s discipline and guards its borders. Yet even he is not so traditional a historian as he might seem: indeed, he was nearly fired in his younger days because “he was carrying on another line of work than his lectures, and was publishing books that weren’t strictly text-books” (Professor’s House 56–57). Langtry and St. Peter have been feuding over the department’s curriculum for years, but each man has run afoul of professional standards, and neither seems entirely committed to history as such. This dispute, and the larger question it raises about whether novelists and historians are capable of working toward a common intellectual purpose, is at the heart of The Professor’s House, Willa Cather’s 1925 tale of a distinguished scholar’s decline into apathy and enervation. She published it just before making a turn to the past in her fiction—of the five novels she wrote during the rest of her life, three were historical—and the story of Professor St. Peter was an opportunity for her to consider the basic methodological problems that such a turn would present. What are the guiding principles, she seems to ask, of serious historical study and effective historical

The Impact of Political Theory

Any systematic understanding of politics requires theory: an organised, if not necessarily self-conscious way of seeing and thinking about it. The point of studying and teaching about politics in universities is educational: to help others to understand it better and bring that understanding into their own lives and the lives of the communities to which they belong. Political theorists have a distinctive responsibility to recognise this and show those they teach and those with whom they work how to generate and organise better understanding of why politics is as it is and what it means for everyone's life. The competitive rating of performance to secure university funding deploys criteria that are intellectually absurd, politically disgraceful or deeply corrupting of intellectual and educational purpose. Whatever else they have managed to add to political understanding by their own work, every academically employed political theorist ought at least to have shown those they teach unmistakably why that is so.

Trouble in Para-sites: Deference and Influence in the Ethnography of Epistemic Elites

Through his enduring efforts to interrogate the regulative ideals of fieldwork, George Marcus has empowered doctoral students in anthropology to rethink their ethnographic encounters in terms that reflect novel objects and contexts of inquiry. Marcus' work has culminated in a charter for ethnographic research among ‘epistemic communities' that requires ‘deferral' to these elite modes of knowing. For adherents to this programme of methodological reform, the deliberately staged ‘para-site' - an opportunity for ethnographers and their ‘epistemic partners' to reflect upon a shared intellectual purpose - is the signature fieldwork encounter. This paper draws on doctoral research carried out among the overlapping epistemic communities that comprise London's market for mining finance, and reviews an attempt to carve out a para-site of my own. Troubled by this experience, and by the ascendant style of deferent anthropology, I think through possibilities for more critical ethnographic research among epistemic elites.

Ranking the Criteria of Quality Evaluation for Intellectual Information on Internet

Recent past has witnessed the fast use of the information and communication technology in the ever developing field of education. Enormous information is brought to the classroom for easy access by the learner anywhere in the world. Learners of today are distinguished by their proficiency in use of technology to know about assessment and successful management of informational opportunities. Critical analysis of existing education scenario emphasizes the introduction of major thrust areas as Information Communication Technology, literacy, organization of curriculum, and others. This is to elevate the standard of education and disseminate the information in shortest time with use of online and offline resources through internet. These are for professional growth, teaching support materials and other classroom related activities. The research work and true knowledge of topics calls for the need to evaluate the information provided on the internet. The present paper caters to this need, especially in context to intellectual information available on the internet. The research work in this paper is accomplished by selecting a system of quality criteria and defining in terms of internet usage for intellectual purpose. Several questions are designed to assess each criterion and as a result an instrument is developed and validated in the form of a questionnaire. The quality criteria taken into consideration are as Content, Objective reasoning, Scope, Authority; these are further classified into indicators for easy assessment. The collected data has been tabulated and analysed to rank the criteria as per their preference for quality assessment of the intellectual information available on the internet. The results indicate that authority is the most preferred criteria while objective reasoning is the least preferred one as per their calculated mean values.

CONDORCET’S LEGACY AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES AND THE VALUE OF HIS FEMINISM FOR TODAY’S MAN

Key Enlightenment minds are often juxtaposed with their iconic foes, religious conservatives. When discussing the subject of women’s rights, however, this comparison creates a false impression that Enlightenment male thinkers held ideas very much opposed to a dogmatic institution such as the Catholic Church. Ironically, and damaging to their legacy of prejudice-free rationalism, nearly all of the philosophes, many of whom were “freethinking” atheists, viewed woman’s intellectual nature and societal purpose through a prejudice-tainted glass, not unlike the most conservative establishments of their time. Indeed, when it came to the perception of women, the philosophes had less in common with a virulently secular feminist such as Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, than they do with modern conservative Christians who believe women should be treated more fairly, but still cling to gender stereotypes.

SEJARAH PERKEMBANGAN ORIENTALISME

This article delas with the history of Orientalism. Orientalism in its history, passed three periods with their respective characteristics: (1) the heyday of Islam, Orientalism in this period was characterized by the transfer of knowledge and philosophy from the Islamic world to Europe (2) during the crusades until the time of enlightenment in Europe; orientalism in this time make Islam as the object of systematic study through translation, in this period the stories discrediting Islam also emerged, (3) the period of enlightenment in Europe until now, orientalism in this period began to shift into the realm of pure intellectual purpose to learn the middle east (Islam) as objective study.Kata Kunci: Orientalisme, Timur, Barat, Perang Salib

IN SEARCH OF A USABLE PAST: CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT IN AMERICA

There is no conservative thought in America, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, thus providing a generation of historians with a convenient set piece to demonstrate the inadequacies of mid-century liberalism and its blindness to the nascent conservative intellectual movement gathering strength and purpose just as Trilling wrote. Two excellent new books about American intellectual history cast this quote in yet another light. Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History carefully documents a centuries-long tradition of conservative thought in America, from the founding era through the end of the twentieth century. In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, Michael Kimmage asserts that Trilling himself be considered a source of conservative ideas in postwar America. Taken together, the books by Allitt and Kimmage indicate that a new cycle of writing about conservative thought has reached full flower. For far too long, the field of conservative intellectual history has been dominated by the figure of George Nash, author of the classic 1976 The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. These books provide an updated and more critically sophisticated way to examine the terrain Nash strode alone for so long. More significantly, they indicate that intellectual historians are ready to consider conservatism in dialogue with liberalism, bringing new balance to the study of American ideas. Furthermore, both books, Kimmage's in particular, suggest that some of what we are calling conservative and liberal might be flying under the wrong flag. The key to sorting out the confusion will be drawing a more careful distinction between conservatism as a “movement” and as a body of ideas, and looking at both conservatisms as part of a typically American response to historical change, rather than as an exotic and abberant specimen.

Introductory Remarks: Malcolm and Theory

continuing value for the community, and to construct a collective memory. Many of the contributors to the conference evoked their memories of Malcolm and spoke of their responses to his work; these introductory remarks were designed simply to set that process in motion. The idea of setting up the journal that eventually became Paragraph arose out of the discussions of the Modern Critical Theory Group, which had been formed two years earlier, in 1981, to provide an alternative forum for people interested in theory in all its forms. Malcolm was a prime mover in that initiative, and many of us still remember the extraordinary atmosphere of intellectual excitement and common purpose that was generated at our inaugural meeting in Dave Kelley's smoke-filled room at Trinity College, Cambridge. Malcolm's book Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction opens with an epigraph from Luis Bunuels Mon dernier soupir. 'We were engaged in a struggle to the death as we built our theoretical constructions. The MCTG and Paragraph did arise out of a struggle, although it was a relatively benign one by comparison with events elsewhere. The alternative forum was needed because the French Studies establishment was markedly hostile to theory in the aftermath of May 1968 and everything it stood for, intellectually and institutionally: they seemed to regard it as a kind of axis of evil, with Malcolm somewhere in the barbarous east (the Mile End Road) grooming subversive graduate students and younger colleagues to undermine the edifice of true scholarship. At French Studies conferences, the MCTG was only allowed to occupy the slot that coincided with the conference

Eight Reflections of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”

In Memoriam: Douglas Bush, Dwight Culler, Edgar Shannon I had ambition not only to go farther than any had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go. --The Circumnavigator, Captain James Cook, R.N. (1) 1. An Anxiety of Influence (2) I dwell in sunny Ithaca ... Many islands lie about it quite close to another, She herself sits low-lying, farthest out to sea Toward dusk, and they are apart toward dawn and the sun, Rugged but good for bringing up young men. --Odyssey 9.21-27, trans. Albert Cook (3) Alfred Tennyson attributed Ulysses' determination to persevere up to the last, in Ulysses, to his own resolute choice in favor of lire and survival upon the traumatic news of the death of friend, soul-mate, and intending future brother-in-law Arthur Hallam (1833). A few years earlier the two Cambridge undergraduates considered printing their poems together in single volume-Hallam's father successfully insisted the project be abandoned. (4) The publication might have included each poet's written for the University's annually awarded Chancellor's Medal. Tennyson's prevailed (1829), and Hallam's note on his own effort-asserting the superiority of his friend's prize-winning entry-Alfred himself managed to suppress, upon the impending re-publication of Arthur's remains by his father. A major effort, Hallam's Timbuctoo is written in the Dantean terza rima earlier used for his Farewell to the South; there his one deep resolve (l. 629) was to serve an ideal uniting virtue, truth, and poetry: I have an oath, Graven in the heart, that I will drift Before the varying gale in aimless sloth Of purpose, like battered wreck: but firm Intendment on the base of my young troth, Shall rear the fabric of thinking life. (ll. 630-636, Writings, p. 25) Similar determination to live with intellectual purpose infuses the search for Timbuctoo, yet Hallam anxiously anticipates the discovery's destroying itself as pure Platonic idea: enhanced by Imagination-which also decked [the] unknown caves of a land ... far from human sight... In the lone West (ll. 1-4)-it will be contaminated by Discovery: Perchance thou art too pure, and dost surpass Too far amid th' Ideas ranged high In the Eternal Reason's perfectness, To our deject and most imbased eye To look unharmed on thy integrity, Symbol of Love, and Truth, and all that cannot die. (ll. 115-120, Writings, p. 41) Hallam probably refers to the celebrated veiled statue at Sais in Egypt, which ruined the too-curious violater's peace of mind for the rest of his life, (5) but the motif of losing paradise by finding it particularly attaches to the Spanish in New Spain, and this example underlies another poem from this period of the poets' lives, Tennyson's own Anacaona. Tennyson's stated, high-minded reasons for suppressing Hallam's note on his Timbuctoo-The poem [Hallam's] is everyway so much better than that wild and unmethodized performance of my own, that even his praise on such subject would be painful (6)--may have been quite sincere; but it is hard not to notice that Hallam's poem, as much as Tennyson's, invokes the discovery of far-off paradise, long-lost Atlantis, (7) but only Hallam's refers the search to the brave voyage of Columbus: Years lapsed in silence, and that holy ground Was still an Eden, shut from sight; and few Brave souls in its idea solace found. In the last days man arose, who knew That ancient legend from his infancy. Yea, visions on that child's enmarvailed view Had flashed intuitive science. (ll. 37-43) Others' hostility and advancing years never quenched his (l. 48): to that faith he added search, and still As fevering with fond love of th' unknown shore, From learning's fount he strove his thirst to fill. …

Futures for the Humanities

Futures for the Humanities Amy Koritz (bio) Engell, James, and Anthony Dangerfield. Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 277 pp. Kezar, Adrianna J., Tony C. Chambers, and John C. Burkhardt, eds. Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005. 345 pp. Liu, Alan . The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 573 pp. The Society that can build the most productive and efficient mechanisms for harnessing human creative energy will move ahead of those continuing to make a fetish of the greed motive. Richard Florida The humanities the core of the university. She may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. J.M. Coetzee Humanists often hear these days that that we belong to downwardly mobile disciplines. This warning comes mostly from our own ranks, since those in positions of real power are too busy pulling in the rewards of status to spend much time worrying about their poor relations. Derek Bok, in his important book on the increased influence of the market on higher education, dismisses us with a single paragraph. Bok observes that humanists tend to complain about the loss of a clear, shared sense of intellectual purpose in universities and attribute their increased commercialization to this loss of purpose. In his experience, however, "[N]o faculty members feel a stronger sense of mission than the scientists, yet it is there—not in the humanities—that commercialization has taken hold most firmly" (5). Meanwhile, humanists themselves have developed a cottage industry of commentary on our degenerating health in the academy. Among these documents are many well-informed, useful, and heartfelt pleas that we refocus our collective attention away from the individualistic, career-driven model of professionalism dominant in higher education and toward the greater good of ensuring at least the survival, if not the revival, of humanistic teaching, learning, and discovery—however the writer in question understands those activities. All those cries of anger, frustration, and fear from humanists are completely warranted. It is true, as English professors James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield point out in their award-winning book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, that the number of bachelors degrees in the humanities has been declining steadily and that the pay differential between humanities professors and those in sciences and professional schools has been widening (according to these authors, in 1996 a beginning assistant professor in business earned on average $25,000 more annually than a similarly ranked humanist). There is certainly little question that literary studies, by any measure most of us can think of (faculty size, salary, number of majors, teaching load, good jobs for our PHDS), is not doing well. There is in fact broad consensus on the reason for this. Money. While in the United States the G.I. Bill enabled a massive influx of students into higher education, democratizing what had been an opportunity reserved for a small elite, the Cold War shaped the institutions providing [End Page 240] that opportunity by funneling federal support to scientific research. The federal funding mechanisms put in place on the heels of Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) guaranteed that scientific research would become a crucial component in the fiscal health of universities. By attaching huge indirect cost recovery monies to grants for scientific research, the federal government ensured a steady stream of research, at least some of which would prove useful for its own ends. In contrast, the research accomplished by humanists seemingly had no value to industry or the government. Nor did the teaching of literature manage to maintain an analogous public legitimacy. Literary studies has for some time lacked a rationale that achieves either general agreement among its professional practitioners or is commonly understood and endorsed by society at large. This waning of status is distressing. The many attempts to revive the humanities and return them to their previous centrality in the education of young adults are therefore welcome...

Candide, ou l'optimisme, seconde partie (1760) Jacques Wagner (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 503 'Vorontsov raconte sa premiere rencontre avec Voltaire (1758)' (pp. 105-07) and J. de Vrinz spends 'Un apres-midi chez Voltaire' (pp. 109-13). This section closes on an opportune republication of Julien Benda's introduction to his 1935 edition of the Dictionnaire philosophique that is no longer readily available. The second section, 'Pour une archive des genocides', takes as its point of de? parture Voltaire's Des conspirations contre les peuples and allows fourteen scholars, ranging from Georges Benrekassa to Piotr Zaborov, to compose a polyphonie set of (sometimes outstanding) responses to the work which are interesting both for the individual stances that they adopt and for the way they constantly incite us to return to the original text and engage in our own debates with it. The third section, entitled 'Enquetes', also reveals a novel editorial approach: 'Cette section est concue comme un espace de libre initiative et de travail collectif (p. 184). Here Magnan has proposed a model by co-ordinating an 'Enquete sur les voltairiens' which is still very much open to contribution, while Francoise Tilkin has sketched out, forforthcomingenquiry, an 'Enquete sur les "contes" de Voltaire'. One hopes that these promising pages, in their successive avatars (to be pre-announced in the Bulletin de la Societe Voltaire), will not become a locus for private conversations between individual members of the Societe. Given the interest of the initiative, the editorial board would perhaps be advised to consider how contributions from furtherflung constituencies (and particularly from those with none) could be generated. The finalsection, 'Actualites', will evidently be a movable feast. This issue contains reviews, resumesde these,and a Voltaire bibliography for2000-01. We learn that future numbers will carry other types of information. The possibilities are surely legion. In this firstnumber, with fewexceptions, we go fromrubric to rubric, with a mounting sense of satisfaction for an initiative well imagined and well executed. Certainly on the evidence that it provides as regards both seriousness of intellectual purpose and concern for material quality, this is a review to be watched. University of Edinburgh John Renwick Candide, ou Voptimisme, seconde partie (ij6o). Ed. by Edouard Langille. (Ex? eter Textes litteraires) Exeter: University of Exeter Press. 2003. xxiv + 89 pp. ?15.99. ISBN 0-85989-723^. Jean-Francois Marmontel: un intellectuel exemplaire au siecle des Lumieres. Ed. by Jacques Wagner. Tulle: Mille Sources. 2003. 248 pp. ?19. ISBN 2-90974421 -3. The study of lesser figuresof the Enlightenment is now an integral part of eighteenthcentury studies. These two volumes are a direct result of this broadening of interest beyond the 'big names'. The firstis a re-edition of the pastiche continuation of Can? dide that appeared in 1760. The edition is accompanied by twenty-four detailed pages of notes explaining satirical references and providing background information on the locations visited by Candide (primarily in Persia and Denmark). The introduction outlines the attribution of the conte to Du Laurens (although rather disappointingly there is little discussion of the tale itself). The volume is of interest because it allows us to understand contemporary literary reactions to Voltaire's original. The second volume shows the full potential of opening up so-called lesser writers to systematic study. The bicentenary of Marmontel's death in 1999 was marked by a conference at Clermont-Ferrand and Bort-les-Orgues (Marmontel's birthplace). Jacques Wagner has edited two volumes of papers from the celebrations. The first, Marmontel: une rhetorique de Vapaisement, (Louvain and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2003) is the more typical actes du colloque. The second, Jean-Francois Marmontel: un intel- 504 Reviews lectuel exemplaire au siecle des Lumieres, reviewed here, is a highly readable collection of articles, beautifully produced and illustrated. It succeeds in that rare achievement, the provision of a more general overview of Marmontel's literary career without any lowering of academic content. Together the articles produce a fascinating portrait of Marmontel and can be enjoyed by those with a more general interest in the eigtheenth century as well as Marmontel scholars. The Memoires provide much of the material for the contributors, but his letters, Belisaire, Les Incas, his moral tales, his operas, Lecons d'un pere a...

The Future of Comparative Literature

THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. If in some future time a literary historian attempts to estimate the critical output of these last fifty years, he will find his task to be a labour of Hercules. He will be able at once to single out a few promi? nent figures such as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Matthew Arnold, Brunetiere, Faguet and Benedetto Croce, and he will easily understand and explain their messages. But he will also notice that these thinkers have had comparatively few followers, and that hundreds and hundreds of other workers in literature have sprung up, mostly in the Universities, with quite different aims and methods. He will readily recognise that these academic men?and women?of research have done a vast amount of valuable work; that they have cleared up obscure questions, annotated and reprinted obscure authors, systematised and tabulated obscure periods, each contributing his own piece of masonry to a vast edifice of learning. But when he enquires what common bond united all these scholars and to what common goal all these efforts were directed, he will search long and in vain for a sufficiently convincing reply. This question, which a future historian is bound to put, we cannot help asking now. After all, to what purpose is all this minute knowledge of literature ? Much of it has obviously and clearly no purpose at all, and runs riot almost as wildly as did the post-Augustan Virgilians or some of the seventeenth century scholars; so that able men devote toilsome years to the discovery of quaint and curious details which they vaguely declare to be important, without saying why. Can all this erudition be put to any ulterior and nobler use, or must most of it lose its vitality as soon as created ? The present writer believes that the ' voluminous and vast' body of knowledge, which has now been made so easily accessible, can be coordinated and interpreted in a way impossible half a century ago. He believes that a subtler and higher kind of know? ledge can be extracted from it by a method rather inadequately designated as that of Comparative Literature. M. L. R. VIII. 1 [5] 2 The Future of Comparative Literature To understand the possibilities of comparative literature it is necessary to see in what relation it stands to the present tendencies of research. Owing to the strenuous competition for academic emoluments , many advanced students are guided in their labours by no other ideal than that of a higher position or an increased salary. But wherever a scholarly and intellectual purpose can be deteeted, it is generally this?to enable others to view some fragment of literature with the same eyes as the specialist. The uninitiated reader looks upon a play, a poem, an essay or a novel much as the man in the street will soon look upon aeroplanes. It is there because it is there. The man of letters realises that a masterpiece is not only an aesthetic pleasure but a triumph of inventiveness for those who know the history of its type. He also perceives that the great books of the past were written for readers with different ideas and surroundings and sometimes with a different idiom from our own, and that much of their thought and style can b"e appreciated only when this atmosphere is recreated. Again, while performing his task of classification and appreciation, he finds that some classic has really borrowed the ideas and even the phrasing of another writer, perhaps of a different age or country, and must be stripped of his borrowed plumes. Thus the critic is really an artist, not necessarily of words but of facts. Whether he is studying an author, an age or the history of a type of literature, he has to gather together a mass of some? times apparently incongruous knowledge, often penetrating far into other ages and languages or digressing into history, economics, sociology and art, and he weaves all this learning round his theme, till it stands out in a new garb. It is obvious that in such a scheme of study there can be no place for comparative literature. Every advanced worker in the most restricted field...

Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu

AbstractThe issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important differences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.