Intellectual Substance Research Articles

Why Do They Talk That Way? A Research Agenda for the Presidency

This article surveys the available explanations for why presidential discourse adopts the patterns it does and then suggests new ways of studying the presidency in the future. The article's operat‐ingpremises are these: (1) presidential scholars have been insufficiently attentive to theory building in the past, (2) the available ontological explanations for presidential discourse should be reinterrogated, (3) scholars need to go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries when studying the presidency, and (4) a number of exciting new areas of study beckon on the basis of the preceding assumptions.

The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (review)

In 1988 Antony H. Harrison wrote: "Since the early 1930s, only one major critical book has been devoted to the work of Christina Rossetti. This astonishing fact has its roots deep in the history of modern critical tradition, which was until the 1970s dominated largely by the 'new critics' in the academy" (Christina Rossetti in Context ix). Harrison added that the expanding "range of critical methodologies" (ix) available to students of literary history meant that it was now possible to reevaluate figures such as Rossetti whose extensive writings had for the most part seemed unworthy of scholarly attention in previous decades. Even in 1972, at the time when feminist reassessments of the canon were burgeoning, Lionel Stevenson showed no hesitation in asserting that the poet's writing failed to evince "intellectual substance" (The Pre-Raphaelite Poets [1972]: 88). Harrison would produce what counts among the finest scholarly inquiries into the demanding oeuvre of a writer whose absorption in expressive forms—ballad, hymn, and lyric—can lead unsuspecting readers to believe that no depth lies beneath their seemingly unsophisticated surfaces. As Harrison acknowledges, the appearance in 1979 of R. W. Crump's variorum edition of Rossetti's complete poems assisted enormously in advancing our understanding of a somewhat idiosyncratic figure whose religious faith and sexual predilections have become central in classroom discussions of Victorian poetry. A very distinguished group of scholars—including Cora Kaplan and Jerome J. McGann—has provided teachers with historically informed ways of comprehending how Rossetti's poetry and prose engaged nineteenth-century debates about female sexuality, the Anglican liturgy, and Dante. The Culture of Christina Rossetti—a substantial collection of twelve significant essays that Harrison helped to edit—reveals that research on this poet's remarkable body of work has reached full maturity.

Art Criticism: Reflections on the Evolution of an Educational Concept

Like most efforts at educational reform, initial proposals for the teaching of art criticism represented a promising direction for practice rather than a fully developed educational plan. Educators during the 1950s and 1960s, who first proposed art criticism as an alternative to studio work, viewed it as a remedy for a number of problems with existing practice. They were troubled by a failure to meet the needs of older students whose interest in making art declined with the onset of adolescence; by the lack of intellectual substance in a curriculum that had degenerated into mere manipulation of art materials in the early grades and a narrow development of technical skills in the upper grades; by a perceived lack of balance between studio production and the teaching of art appreciation; and by the marginal status of art education within the overall school curriculum.1 If teaching art criticism was envisioned as a promising way of addressing such problems, educators had only vague ideas about what criticism was and how it should be taught. One of the first to recognize the underlying conceptual problems involved in prescribing the teaching of criticism was Ralph Smith. His pioneering anthology, Aesthetics and Criticism in Art Education, was one of the first works to systematically inquire into the nature of criticism as part of the philosophical study of art education.2 Over the years, the Journal of Aesthetic Education, which he founded and edited, has played a prominent role in encouraging efforts to clarify the concept of criticism and its role in art education.

Shakespeare's legal language: a dictionary

Shakespeare's Legal Language: A Dictionary is a comprehensive reference guide to Shakespeare's legal references. An A-Z of over 100 entries explores early modern social life, legal thought, and the interaction of these within Shakespearean drama. The law is a central theme in many of Shakespeare's plays and every play in the canon makes reference to legality or justice. Indeed, Shakespeare displays considerable interest in the capacity of legal language to convey matters of social, moral and intellectual substance and the use of legal langauge throughout his work shows he was clearly familiar with legal terminology. Shakespeare's Legal Language is an ideal guide to Shakespeare's legal references for students of Shakespeare at every level. Professor B.J. Sokol is at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Dr. Mary Sokol is honorary research fellow at University College London.

McCabe on Aquinas on The Trinity

Much gratitude is due to Fr Herbert McCabe for his paper ‘Aquinas on the Trinity’ (New Blackfriars June 1999 pp. 268-83). Aquinas’ teaching on this central mystery in Summa Contra Gentiles 4 (CG 4) and Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars (ST 1) combines philosophical ingenuity with fidelity to the words of Scripture in a way that is perennially inspiring. But theologians can continue drawing upon it only insofar as it does not depend on philosophical doctrines unacceptable to modem philosophers. To judge if there is such dependence we need to have it expounded in the language of modern philosophy. This task McCabe accomplishes admirably.I think McCabe has stated the crucial part of Aquinas’ argument correctly, but to preclude misunderstanding I shall start by restating it briefly in my own words. I hope he would agree that there is no substantial difference between my exposition and his. I shall then look at some of the philosophical presuppositions of the argument which might seem suspect today, and suggest that the most worrying lie not, as might at first be thought, in the philosophy of language or ontology, but in the philosophy of mind.God, as a non-material, intellectual substance, has knowledge of himself; he knows that he exists and understands his own nature and his activities. This understanding of himself is a kind of action. It is not, like pushing, pulling or heating, a mode of causal action on something else. It ‘remains’, so to speak, ‘within him’. But it involves one thing’s arising out of or proceeding from another, what Aquinas calls a processio. There arises in God a concept of what he knows.

1998 PSA Presidential Address: The Value of Sociology

What is the value-added character of sociology? In an era of change and unease in higher education, can a case be made for sociology in terms of intellectual and scholarly substance rather than in terms of bureaucratic and political considerations? As a scholarly and instructional activity, what is the value of sociology beyond what other disciplines have to offer? I address these questions affirmatively in this paper by identifying and elaborating four distinctive foci of the sociological eye that together frame the window onto the world that sociology provides. These distinctive features are a focus on the relational connections among the constituent elements of the objects of sociological analysis; a focus on the socially contextual embeddedness of those objects of analysis; a focus on vexing social conditions and processes construed as social problems; and an ironic perspective, that is, a penchant for discerning and illuminating the incongruous, unexpected, discrepant aspects of social life. I argue that these foci are more pronounced in sociology than in other social sciences and that together they congeal into a window onto the social world that is unique among the social sciences and humanities, thus accounting for the value-added character of sociology.

Pearls for Pigs (review)

Reviewed by: Pearls for Pigs Robert F. Gross Pearls for Pigs. By Richard Foreman. Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York City. 19 December 1997. Click for larger view View full resolution Maestro (David Patrick Kelly) in Richard Foreman’s Pearls for Pigs, directed by Foreman. Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York City. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. Click for larger view View full resolution Pierrot (Peter Jacobs) in Richard Foreman’s Pearls for Pigs, directed by Foreman. Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York City. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. Although Richard Foreman’s theatre has always been one of crisis, the nature of the crisis has shifted noticeably in his two most recent plays. In Permanent Brain Damage, Foreman’s offstage voice described a man in crisis, a man who had lost the capacity for pleasure, while onstage, a man only identified as “In a White Suit” was menaced, spanked, immobilized, and zipped into a body bag. Hope for this poor fellow was mocked as Foreman sang a strident and grotesquely distorted version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Promoted as the most “emotionally naked and personal” of all Foreman’s plays, the combined effect of the publicity and the use of the artist’s voice encouraged spectators to interpret the play, not as an exploration of the workings of consciousness, like so many of Foreman’s earlier works, but as a blunt expression of the artist’s emotional state. Less humorous, playful and ironic, the strategies of Permanent Brain Damage underscored the emotional intensity of In a White Suit’s personal dilemma, crossing over a subtle boundary from Foreman’s usual philosophical explorations to an expressionist Schrei. The “emotionally naked and personal” style of the play increased empathy while deproblematizing the self. One left the theatre less intrigued by the intellectual substance of the play than worried about Richard Foreman’s moods. Pearls for Pigs took this impulse toward autobiographical dramatization one step further—with a resultant loss in theatrical sophistication. The play is about a theatrical artist, the Maestro (David Patrick Kelly), who articulates a vision of theatre that often sounds very much like the one Foreman articulates in his interviews and manifestos. When, for example, the Maestro asserts, “I am not the main character. The world itself, is the main character” (Theater 28.1: 44), he gives voice to Foreman’s own phenomenological aesthetics. But the Maestro’s claim runs counter to the actual experience of Pearls for Pigs, in which a single character dominated the dramatic action to a degree virtually unprecedented in Foreman’s work. The Maestro’s lengthy speeches were less frequently interrupted by aggressive bells, buzzers, flashing lights, and outbreaks of manic action than usual. His actions were less often undermined by the actions of others. He turned to the audience and directly addressed it, even establishing eye contact with individual spectators. Unlike the usual Foreman actor, who is separated from the auditorium by strings, wooden lathing, and plexiglass, the Maestro was allowed to step into the auditorium, momentarily reducing the gap between himself and the audience. As the Maestro looked for an ideal spectator who would respond completely to all that he hoped to communicate, each audience member was encouraged to hope that s/he could be that sought-for spectator. Kelly’s intense and energetic engagement of the audience tended to further override the usual Foremanian comic distance between actor and spectator—it was hard to stand back from someone trying so desperately to establish a connection. While Foreman has often undercut habitual responses to dialogue by accompanying the words with incongruous physical [End Page 517] action, much of Kelly’s physical performance reinforced the dialogue, especially when it was addressed to the audience. In Pearls for Pigs, the obsessive energy of a Foreman actor was turned toward the audience, which was actively wooed. For once, Foreman’s techniques of writing and staging strengthened the lead performer and contradicted the Maestro’s claim. Despite his protestations, he was the main character, and was situated in a uniquely privileged relationship to the audience. Unlike the densely decorated and tightly contained stage designs of Foreman’s recent productions in his theatre at Saint...

Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS139 compile a list (located in an appendix) of Hughes's reading that will be of use to all students of Southern intellectual life. The core of the study, however, is an extended investigation of Hughes's Treatise on Sociology of 1 854 and a handful of his later writings, all of which Ambrose subjects to a searching analysis owing much to the work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In the final chapter, Ambrose argues that even though Hughes became a casualty of sectional conflict in 1862, his "statist" program was realized by the unlikely agent of the Confederate States of America. This is the most original and provocative (ifnot the most convincing) part ofthe study and is the one likely to be of most interest to students of the Civil War. That this volume does not rank among the best studies of proslavery polemicists is as much a tribute to the achievements of Drew Faust, Neal Gillespie, and others as it is an indication of any serious flaws of its own. That said, however, there remains the lurking sense that in its admirable attempt to be evenhanded about its subject; the book does not adequately convey Hughes's "fine sense of the ludicrous," as his eulogist aptly put it, and his Fitzhughian delight in shocking and, at times, "putting on" his audiences. The book also bypasses opportunities to link Hughes's career to broader themes, as it makes only minimal note, for instance, of how the overheated world of Mississippi politics in the 1850s shaped his output. It neglects other issues, such as the relation between Hughes's critique of free society and the quite similar earlier arguments crafted during the depression of 1837, or the likelihood that the authoritarian programs of Napoleon III provide a more useful parallel for understanding Hughes's reactionary vision of state power than they do Jefferson Davis's wartime government in Richmond. That such topics receive little consideration has much to do with the limitations of the biographical approach itself. Whatever their inherent contributions, studies of individual proponents of slavery should help scholars pursuing other, perhaps more productive, means of understanding the slave South's justification of the unjustifiable. It seems safe to predict that this body of polemical writing, including the authoritarian variant of Hughes, will continue to draw students interested in proslavery's intellectual substance, its cultural and political context, and its profoundly troubling agenda. Robert Bonner University of Southern Maine Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. By Eric T Dean, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. xi, 384. $35.00.) The American Civil War is the most scrutinized incident in the whole ofAmerican history. It is the focus of more publications annually than any other subject —including the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy. Moreover, this analysis is not limited to monographs and journal articles; no less than three television documentaries, one of which continues to air new material, continually find new and appreciative audiences. 140CIVIL WAR HISTORY The War Between the States is central to a multifaceted inspection from the tactically analytical to the numerous aspects of what constitutes the New Military History. Furthermore, despite this exhaustive appraisal, each year produces at least one work that unearths new evidence or examines the tried and new in such an innovative manner as to constitute something exceptional. Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress Vietnam and the Civil War is such a work. It must be stated at the outset that, save for a concluding chapter, the impact of theVietnam War on itsAmerican participants serves only to frame Eric Dean's discussion. In the course of two concise, but nonetheless informative chapters, Dean examines the changing interpretation ofthe effects of the Vietnam War on those who survived and the history of military psychiatry from the GreatWar to Vietnam. Upon this foundation he proceeds to establish the parameters of that special hell created by a close formation and the rifled musket. A time of suffering and tribulation which found focus in such works as Gerald Linderman's Embattled Courage, "Seeing the Elephant," by Frank and Reaves, or The Union Soldier in Battle, by Earl J. Hess...

Long-Term Strategy for Sustainable Urban Development in Korea: For the 21st Century

This paper serves as an open forum in which all groups of students, citizens, planners, politicians and researchers are to represent their own opinions in the process of making urban policies. Urban planning can not be formulated in one dimension. This paper is intended to present a broad context of planning framework, which may facilitate comprehension of more detailed aspects of the planning issues in an orderly manner. A number of measures should be taken for cooperation and coordination. Those interested can demonstrate a capability to create conditions to make an economically competitive, socially cohesive, ecologically sound and culturally flourishing society in the international arena. I hope this paper provides intellectual substance from which unresolved planning issues will be further discussed and the prospective outcome will accomplish the main purpose

Mathematics, Statistics, and Teaching

How does statistical thinking differ from mathematical thinking? What is the role of mathematics in statistics? If you purge statistics of its mathematical content, what intellectual substance remains?In what follows, we offer some answers to these questions and relate them to a sequence of examples that provide an overview of current statistical practice. Along the way, and especially toward the end, we point to some implications for the teaching of statistics.

Robert Schumann: herald of a "new poetic age"

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Among many works, his Spring Symphony (1841), Piano Concerto in A Minor (1841/1845), and the Third, or Rhenish, Symphony (1850) exemplify his infusion of classical forms with intense, personal emotion. His musical influence continues today and has inspired many other famous composers in the century since his death. Indeed Brahms, in a letter of January 1873, wrote: 'The remembrance of Schumann is sacred to me. I will always take this noble pure artist as my model'. Now, in Robert Schumann: Herald of a 'New Poetic Age', John Daverio presents the first comprehensive study of the composer's life and works to appear in nearly a century. Long regarded as a quintessentially romantic figure, Schumann also has been portrayed as a profoundly tragic one: a composer who began his career as a genius and ended it as a mere talent. Daverio takes issue with this Schumann myth, arguing instead that the composer's entire creative life was guided by the desire to imbue music with the intellectual substance of literature. A close analysis of the interdependence among Schumann's activities as reader, diarist, critic, and musician reveals the depth of his literary sensibility. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness - which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856 - and his musical creativity. Schumann's character as man and artist thus emerges in all its complexity. The book concludes with an analysis of the late works and a postlude on Schumann's influence on successors from Brahms to Berg. This well-researched study of Schumann interprets the composer's creative legacy in the context of his life and times, combining nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history with a fascinating analysis of the works themselves.

Professional and Academic Levels of a Mass Media Writing Course

An innovative media writing course at Texas A&M University proves that professional journalism training can play a central role in liberal arts education. New ideas, many suggested by Journalism and Mass Communication Educator writers, have strengthened course. The issue arises from assaults on journalism education by some university leaders. Dennis (1986) observed that some educators argue that journalism education lacks academic value. Critics argue that journalism curriculum, especially that train practitioners, are without academic and intellectual substance. James (1995) discussed attempts to eliminate journalism programs at universities of Washington, Michigan, and Arizona. She described complaint at Washington: According to central administration, school was suspect based on quality of instruction and scholarly production as well as a lack of centrality to mission of College of Arts and (p. 79). Washington's school survived by radically changing thrust of its programs to emphasize academic rather than practical training, and to integrate school more fully with other Arts and Sciences units (p. 80). Mencher (1994) points out that attacks on practitioner training came at a time when other educators were rethinking university roles. He quotes Ernest L. Boyer, president of Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching, who sees university as institution that celebrates teaching and effectively supports research, while also taking pride in its capacity to connect thought to action, theory to practice (p. 72). Mencher argues that journalism training at its best, makes connection and delivers ideal liberal arts education. Similarly, in exploring roles of history, theory and philosophy in journalism curricula, Iorio & Williamson (1995) found that the liberal arts were embedded throughout curriculum in both skills and survey courses (p. 21). They defined a new goal for journalism education that enlightens professional performance and constructs a journalism program central to core of liberal education and university mission. The idea that professional training in journalism is best-perhaps perfect - environment for arts and sciences education, provided blueprint for remodeling beginning media writing course at Texas A&M. The goal was to bring an existing professional writing course up to highest academic and intellectual standards. The course Journalism 203, Media Writing I, is an introductory, sophomore-level, threehour-credit course, regularly scheduled with three hours lecture and three hours lab each week. The course is first of three media writing and editing required of all journalism majors including students interested in public relations and broadcasting. Students in many different majors and at any academic classification take course. The only prerequisite is passing a departmental language skills test. The department offers five, 15-student sections during regular semesters and two sections in summer school. Three of regular semester sections typically get revised course. It has been taught five times by same full-time, senior faculty member. There are no teaching assistants and there is no textbook. The course is taught in a 15-week semester and 45 students meet for an hour on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for first three weeks for a crash course that delivers a quick summary of how journalistic stories are prepared. The crash course literally covers most journalistic skills and concepts. Starting on first day crash course requires writing, evaluation and rewriting. It begins with punctuation, grammar, listening and critical thinking, and ends with depth discussions of attribution and story organizational schemes. The workload in course is heaviest in first two-thirds of semester, allowing a slowdown as students tire and demands in other increase. …

Conflicts and New Departures in World Society.

This third volume in the World Society Studies series focuses on a central theme: how market mechanisms can correct the world welfare deficit also resolve the environmental crisis through processes of sustainable development. The two editors trace how such objectives have been addressed since the 1960s, describe the parameters of the debate. and New Departures in World Society contains original research on confluences fissures in emerging world society, in both international domestic arenas. The sixteen contributors offer an unusually wide range of perspectives. Topics include peace war, core-periphery situations, social labor conflicts. Marek Thee traces the quest for a demilitarized nuclear-free world. Johan Kauf-mann analyzes the role of the United Nations in the post-cold war era. Jill Crystal concentrates on the human rights environment in the Arab World. H.C.F. Mansilla comments on the destruction of the tropical forests in Bolivia. Other contributors include Bruce Russett, Christian Suter, John Foran, Beverly Silver, Georg Kohler. Conflicts New Departures in World Society gives intellectual substance to the still nebulous notion of a world society. It does so not by advocacy, but by indicating parallel social, economic, political conditions that compel new interactions between advanced developing lands. This books will be of interest to sociologists, environmentalists, political theorists scientists.

Conjuring science in the case of cold fusion

Most media accounts of cold fusion described that experience as a conflict among scientists, e.g., chemists versus physicists. It is worth seeing, however, how nonscientists perceived the scientific issues and supporting evidence surrounding cold fusion. From Clifford Geertz's anthropology of meanings-and-symbols, plus Jean Baudrillard's sociology of hyperreality, I derive a general theory that common public symbols of science can be separated from the intellectual substance of science, and then attributed to beliefs and ideologies that do not necessarily have anything to do with science. The result is to make nonscientific matters seem scientific. In the case of cold fusion, a naive hope about abundant cheap energy displaced the science behind the cold fusion hypothesis. That hope was then sustained by a certain visual image of the cold fusion hypothesis; by selective science journalism; and, by a simplistic sociology of science, thereby making it seem that naive hope was substantiated by science.

Intellectual Substance as Form of the Body in Aquinas

Intellectual Substance as Form of the Body in Aquinas

The Myth of Race and the Human Sciences

This article presents a critical assessment of two major schools of thought in the sciences relative to the mythology of race: logical positivism and social realism. In reviewing both, it maintains that while confronting and resisting the intellectual substance of racist arguments of scientists is essential, questioning the very nature of science as a way of knowing is even more necessary. It concludes with discussion of an alternative, emerging school of thought: science for the people as a means to facilitate the empowerment of the oppressed, who are usually viewed simply as human subjectsfor dominant-group analysis. The sciences are those paradigms, theories, methods, and substantive areas preoccupied with the empirical study of beings in their physical and social habitats. They include the social sciences and the concerns of the biological, genetic, and medical sciences. There are two ways of interpreting the history and the sociology of sciences that have great bearing on the ways in which we come to understand the place of persons of African descent in the intellectual and policy frameworks these sciences produce: logical positivism and social realism

Taking Aim at Environmental Risks: Questions of Feasibility and Desirability

For the fourth time in the past quarter-century, the U.S. stands at a crossroads and must choose how best to protect human health and natural ecosystems from environmental pollution. At the three previous junctures exemplified by the crusade to remove sewage from our waterways and smog from our cities (c. 1970), the shift to combatting the less visible health threats posed by carcinogenic substances and toxic wastes (c. 1978), and the heightening of global ecological awareness (c. 1987) individuals and groups stepped forward to bring intellectual substance, political firepower, and institutional capabilities to bear on the newly-identified tasks.

Where have all the Angels Gone?

Anyone who wishes to talk about angels has to respond to the mocking question, how many of them can dance on the point of a pin. The answer is: ‘just as many as they please’. Angels being immaterial intellects do not occupy space to the exclusion of any other such intellectual substance, and their being ‘on’ the point of a pin can only mean that they attend to it. The question, however, is not one that concerned our mediaeval predecessors, although it seems as difficult to persuade anyone of this as it is to clear Canute of the charge of insane conceit.

Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama ed. by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn

Reviews289 (especially to new historicism), his basic project would not seem that foreign to the New Criticism which he seems to attack for its "painstaking totalization" (p. 39). In fact, the author comes close to making hospitality a "unifying theme" in his discussions of Lear. At any rate, a consideration of a motif throughout a period is not beyond New Critical practice. Another point concerns background material. A perusal of earlier drama might keep the author from saying that from "Hrothgar to Stow the invocation of hospitality seems practically synonymous with a rhetoric of household nurture" (p. 157). On the contrary, Tudor moralities regularly show the protagonist's fall by sending him off to the tavern (in company with the Vice and/or assorted low types) in search of good cheer. Indeed, this is one of the limited means the morality play has to show change in the character's status. Yet another criticism concerns the style. Perhaps inescapably, given the vocabulary of modern criticism and the range of sources considered, the book is not easy to read. In addition to the perhaps inescapable heaviness, however, there is some incoherence. For example, in discussing The Old Wives Tale, the author dates the play 1595 and makes a transition to Macbeth with "by the turn of the next century" (p. 38). But Macbeth is no more than ten years away: the transition misleads. And in a discussion of Sidney's Arcadia, we read that the work "preserves absolutely the distinctions of rank" (p. 54), but on the next page Kalander "entertains the stranger without regard to degree"; here the solution to the problem may lie in Kalander's "instinctive" hosting, but such apparent inconsistency distracts the reader. Hospitable Performances survives such cavils, however, and is well worth the effort. Its intelligent use of modern critical approaches, its reference to much primary material, and its focus on a motif too little considered recommend it to the reader concerned with Renaissance English drama. CECILE WILLIAMSON CARY Wright State University Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Pp. 316. $34.50. This volume memorializes the publication thirty years ago of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, here celebrated as a book which "caught the pulse of Western drama . . . after the Second World War," or so the blurb writer with the typically encomiastic energies given to such activities would have us believe. The dedication—invoking Esslin, it appears, as some iconic, indispensable critical deity—is pretentious or tendentious, depending on how you regard his eponymous study of long ago. And the introduction by Professor Ruby Cohn, long the doyenne of this patch of the theatrical garden, is hypertrophic, done up in a perfervid prose which oddly and often omits definite articles in that ancient and quaint Timese fashion inviting parody. But Wolcott Gibbs is no longer around to do the honors; hence the common reader will have to endure the hasty trumpeting of this fast-paced roundelay as some kind 290Comparative Drama of tribute to Esslin, enshrined in the final sentences as one whose work presumably compares to and/or with the intellectual substance and philosophic import of, say, Das Kapital, The Decline of the West, or 7'Ae Birth of Tragedy. Not much, however, is new or inviting in Professor Cohn's overly urgent remarks, as she aggressively restates matters and details familiar to any student of the period. Often, however, she is downright disconcerting or baffling as she races from the end of the nineteenth century to the madness of the twentieth—a place, need we be reminded, filled with the utter despair of what is currently called postmodernism (whenever that "unfortunate movement," to borrow Lady Bracknell's useful phrase, began). For example, trying to be either historically clever or adroitly space-conscious she writes: "Queen Victoria died in 1901, but her unpuritan son brought no vigor to the British theatre." Well, one may ask: was he supposed to? Could he? Would he? Or was he perhaps much too busy chasing Lillie Langtry? What is the point of such a useless sentence? Is it to rush...

Lollardy and Locality

There can now be no doubt of the intellectual substance and cohesion of early Wyclifitism as expressed in the writings of educated clerks in immediate contact with the man himself. Most would accept, too, that this coherence was successfully transferred from Latin to English. However, although these Wyclifite scholars recognised the need for a corpus of literature to cater for a non-academic audience and provide the basis in ideas for a sustained movement, they had difficulty in supplying it. This might seem to offer easy comfort to those who are already doubtful whether people called Lollards could or did grasp Wyclifitism; whether they just amputated the bits they liked, debased or perverted them, or really did not take anything on board at all. Even some less cynical would agree that the Church itself played a large part in shaping Lollardy's ideas and characteristics: such is so often the way in the birth of protest movements. Indeed, to some hardliners ‘Lollardy’ seems little more than a scare-story invented by the Church in order to damn a large but motley crew of critics and dissenters. Or, if not the Church, then those historians in whom hope triumphs over experience.