Interpretive Commentary Research Articles

:The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque

In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque. In this interdisciplinary study, the term eccentricity refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini). Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque face of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.

The Counterpoint of Allusion in Fifteenth-Century Masses

This study examines the likelihood that the contrapuntal voices of fifteenth-century Masses quoted or alluded to chansons unrelated to the chanson cited in the tenor. Often these melodic quotations or allusions in turn alluded to the unsung chanson text, in order to offer modern interpretive commentary on the sung Mass text or an elaboration of the textual idea expressed in the tenor. Examples come from works of Dufay, Ockeghem, Busnois, Caron, and others. The relationship of this technique to the rhetorical practices of the time is examined. A comparison to earlier musical and rhetorical techniques suggests that northern composers were aware of the rhetorical theories and practices of Italian humanists.

Albert Camus , and: Albert Camus (review)

Reviewed by: Albert Camus, and: Albert Camus Thomas M. Hines Alba Amoia . Albert Camus. New York: Continuum, 1989. 156 pp. $18.95. Philip Thody . Albert Camus. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 133 pp. $24.95. It now seems apparent, some thirty years after his untimely death in an automobile accident at the age of 46, that Albert Camus has survived the sectarian debate about the scope and legitimacy of his place in the pantheon of modern French writers. Whereas the Sartrean vogue has lost some of its luster (primarily as a result of his doctrinaire support of marxist-leninist dictatorships), Camus's star continues to rise in the critical firmament. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we can focus with greater clarity upon the essential components of his literary reputation and renewed appeal to contemporary audiences. In the historical context of the Second World War and its aftermath, Camus's passion for political and social justice made him the moral arbiter of his times. Somewhat reluctantly, amidst warring ideologies and imminent nuclear holocaust, Camus took on the mantle of prophet in a world of nihilism and despair where Christian morality had seemingly failed and the strong flagrantly exploited the weak. Refusing transcendental values, he sought to reaffirm the need for human dignity within the revolutionary process. In his essay, The Rebel, he denounced the enslavement of the masses by the false gods of historical determinism, both east and west. [End Page 314] He stood firm against the proponents of the statist rationale who made capital punishment a politically acceptable means to a collectivist end. Sadly perhaps, his humanity and divided loyalties weighed heavily upon him as he tried to negotiate a solution to the Algerian conflict in the 1950s without success. He would, if forced to choose, side with his mother (a pied-noir or European resident of Algeria) against the Arab revolutionaries whose terrorist activities paralleled those that Camus had seemingly approved in his play, The Just Assassins. As an artist Camus was a master of style and narrative form who breathed new life into the moribund novel of ideas, imbuing his writings with mythic and allegorical dimensions that strike a responsive chord in each successive generation of readers. Today's youth can easily share his concern for the ecological survival of the Mediterranean basin as well as the neo-pagan cult of sun worship that infused his novels and lyrical essays. Camus's solidarity with the wretched of the earth, his quest for a peaceful equilibrium between the political forces of the right and the left, the intuitive celebration of life stripped of hypocrisy and molded to the fundamental rhythms of nature—these facets of his work are synchronized with modern sensibilities. It is therefore this open-ended dialogue with the human condition, this clear-eyed interrogation of life's absurdist dilemma coupled with humor and compassion that makes Camus so appealing to the specialist and layman alike. These two slim volumes by well-known Camusian scholars bear witness to the fascination that Camus, as a thinker and artist, still exerts on the general public. Aimed primarily at the "cultured" reader (or, to be sure, the advanced undergraduate-fledgling graduate student), these essays adhere to the traditional guidelines which are mandatory in biographical, thematic studies of this sort. As a result, they are delightfully free of ponderous taxonomies and arcane jargon that one so often finds in critical treatises on Camus's thought and art. Alba Amoia offers a functional, albeit highly personal, overview of Camus's life and works in the "Literature and Life: World Writers" series issued by Continuum Publishing Company (Frederic Ungar). She begins with a standard biographical and literary chronology, followed by plot and content summaries of major works which are interspersed with interpretive commentary, brief end notes, and a bibliographical listing (without annotations) of translated works and secondary sources, mostly in French. All quotations are judiciously translated into English. Professor Amoia rejects the conventional notion that Camus was little more than a European artist born in Algeria and views him primarily within a North African and Hellenic framework. Intellectually akin to the neo-platonic thinkers such as Plotinus that shaped...

The architectural theory of Viollet-le-Duc: readings and commentary

Among architects and preservationists, the writings of Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) long been considered major resources. They inspired a generation of American architects, including Frank Furness, John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, In 1894, the critic Montgomery Schuyler observed that Viollet-le-Duc's books have had the strongest influence on this generation of readers. But for the past century, all but one of his works been out of print in English.These readings carefully selected from the entire range of Viollet-le-Duc's work make available the historical insights and practical principles of one of the most imaginative, and inspiring architectural theorists of the modern era. M.F. Hearn has culled from Viollet-le-Duc's books on architecture the passages in which his major ideas about the theory of architecture are most cogently expressed.Hearn has arranged and interplated the readings in a sequence of topics covering Viollet-le-Duc's views on the architecture of the past, his convictions about the education of architects, his philosophy of method, principles of design, and his guidelines for restoration. The selections are introduced by a biographical essay connected by interpretive commentaries, and followed by a biographical note.M.F. Hearn is Professor of Fine Arts and Director of Architectural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Poetics and Metaphor in Mixtec Writing

AbstractThe structure and meaning of Mixtec codical symbolism is examined, based on data drawn from language, ethnography, and ethnohistory. The article is divided into three parts: (a) a discussion of Mixtec ideology and myth, with respect to codex symbolism; (b) a description of Mixtec poetics and symbolic correlates; and (c) an interpretive commentary of a brief mythological passage from the Vienna codex as a practical illustration of the first two parts of the article.

Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature by Lee Patterson

REVIEWS texts edited in the Patrologia latina and Middle English texts edited for the Early English Text Society, and secondary sources, scholarly studies of the Cursor mundi and related matters. Thus the volume appeals more to the literary, historical, or theological scholar than to the textual critic or dialectologist. The list of sources, explanatory notes, and bibliography clearly and admirably delineate the various biblical, apocryphal, theological, and homiletic traditions that inform and enrich this Middle English poem, making it (as stated on the cover of the edition) "a traditional narrative ofgreat interest to the medi­ aeval reader ofbiblical paraphrases in the vernacular." JAMES R. SPROUSE Campbell University LEE PATTERSON. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Pp. xiv, 239. $15.95 paper. In the short time since its publication, Negotiating the Past has already become an important manifesto, so that it almost demands a retrospective rather than a review. Not since D. W. Robertson's Preface to Chaucer(1962) or A. C. Spearing's Criticism and Medieval Poetry (1963) have the very grounding assumptions of our field been so thoroughly challenged. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1, "Historicism and Its Discontents," contains two essays on the history ofmedieval literary study. Chapter 1 traces the continuing impasse ofthe chiefinterpretative models for Middle English literary study, New Criticism and Historical Criticism, back through a series of virtually political oppositions since the birth of academic study ofmedieval literature in the nineteenth century. Victorian medievalism itselfbroke into opposing camps, one nostalgicfor the author­ ity of medieval institutions, the other taken with the local freedom from totalization that medieval society seemed to offer, one devoted to the collection of antiquities for their own sake, the other influenced by the techniques ofpositivist historicist scholarship. The obvious contradictions in these sympathies replicate themselves in the work of the fathers of AmericanChaucer scholarship, devoted on the one hand to the massing of historical knowledge impelled by the effort to reconstruct the period and 267 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER on the other engaged in literary appreciation apparently divorced from such scholarship. The New Criticism, argues Patterson, addresses this division by reading medieval literature as a dramatization of its cultural material. Chaucer, for instance, becomes "a poet who persistently engages his readers in a debate between the straightforward imperatives of cultural and religious authority on the one hand, and on the other, the irreducible complexity of lived experience" (p. 20). Historical location, that is, is subsumedto apparently transhistorical idealvalues, particularly those that support the development ofindividual freedom and the representation of individual character. Despite its apparent concern with historical fidelity, argues Patterson, the refusal to consider its own historicity condemns "exegetics" to a poten­ tially damaging marginality. Exegetics consciously rejects the pragmatic and generally empirical tradition ofAnglo-American criticism in favor of a totalizing Germanic Geistesgeschichte and French iconographic analyses. But exegetics assumes that the master text, usually but not always the patristic source, both means and knows what it says and itself requires no interpretation. In rejecting the "humanist hermeneutics of depth," ex­ egetics severely restricts the range of its own possible interpretations and thus exhausts itself rapidly. Chapter 2 surveys the current options, especially Marxist and New Historicist historicizing projects, and ironically finds in them the mirror image of the paralyzing totalization of conservative exegetics. For Patter­ son, the way out of this impasse is an awareness of the problematic historicity of our own field, so that, seeing where we came from, we can figure out where to go. Part 2 examines editorial principles and contempo­ rary hermeneutical evidence and part 3 the historical consciousness of medieval narratives themselves, presumably as ways of initiating such a survey. Part 2, "Inventing Originality," contains two well-known articles, both revised here, one a defense of the Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman, the other, "Ambiguity and Interpretation: A Fifteenth Century Reading of Troilus and Criseyde." Printed here together, the two chapters make a cogent point: that the nearly collaborative creation ofmeaning by editorial and medieval interpretative commentary can be seen to have a politics as well as a history, so that the apparently objective processes of both enter­ prises...

EARLY HISTORY OF SEXUAL SELECTION THEORY.

Darwin distinguished two forms of selection on the basis of how the differential reproduction of individuals is affected. Natural selection is differential reproduction of individuals in the context of survival or ordinary reproductive endeavors such as finding a mate of the right species and sex. Sexual selection, on the other hand, results from competition for mates. The sexual competition may involve fights, searching ability, or courtship contests to coax choosy individuals to mate. Evolution by Sexual Selection Theory is a timely contribution, because after a long period of neglect, sexual selection is receiving a great deal of attention from biologists. The book reprints many of the scientific papers which were important in the development of sexual selection theory and the controversies surrounding the theory prior to 1900. It is more than a compilation of papers and excerpts from papers. The editor, C. J. Bajema, provides bibliographies and informed, interpretive commentaries for each section of the historical period covered. These commentaries include excerpts from Darwin's diary and from his correspondence with colleagues, which bring the reader closer to the ideas that were important in shaping the thinking of Darwin and other eminent natural historians of the time. The book is divided into five historical periods. Part I contains 10 papers dealing with sexual selection theory before Charles Darwin. For me, the highlights of this section are papers by J. Chardin (1686), S. S. Smith (1787), and J. Prichard (1813), which suggest that human standards of beauty vary among races, and that via mate selection these differences may account for the evolution of racial differences in morphology. This was an idea that Darwin later developed in detail in his major work on sexual selection, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Part II contains Darwin's writing during the period 1837-1858 when he formulated the theory of sexual selection. Darwin's first summary of his theory of evolution by selection, the Pencil Sketch of 1842, contains a paragraph on sexual selection which reveals that he had already divided the causes of sexual selection into the performance of males in male-male combat and the ability to charm females. Bajema points out

The Roots of War Resistance: Pacifism from the Early Church to Tolstoy (review)

138Quaker History standing and reconciliation. In his apt introduction, Douglas Steere calls attention to Leonard Kenworthy's subsequent career with Unesco and at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he held a professorship in social studies and international education. Haverford CollegeJohn R. Cary The Roots of War Resistance: Pacifism from the Early Church to Tolstoy. By Peter Brock. Nyack, N.Y.: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1981. 81 pp. Paper, $4.95. Short though this book is, it is not a broad, interpretive commentary on the history of pacifism. Nor is it the author's own creed on pacifism. It is rather an abbreviated but detailed account in narrative form by a professional historian of the history of pacifism within the Christian tradition from the Roman Empire to about 1914. In effect the book is a summarization of two monumental works by Brock for which he is respected, his Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (1972) and his Pacifism in the United States (1968), and it relies principally on those works for documentation. Unfortunately this book has no index, although it does have a list of suggested readings. Brock describes not so much trends as the specifics of each pacifist movement , such as the Waldenses, Czech Brethren, American non-violent abolitionists , Quakers, and Tolstoyans. He briefly narrates their origin and decline, names their leaders, describes their way of life, and states their methods of refusing to cooperate in war. His presentation is reaUstic and vivid. It moves rapidly. Brock writes with sympathy for pacifists even when he reports their frequent inconsistencies, defections, and backslidings. The book is fruitful in its comparison of one period of history widi another, of one pacifist sect with another, and of sectarian pacifists with non-sectarian pacifists. Again and again some of the same agonizing questions keep arising either expUcitly or implicitly in this narrative. Can pacifists flourish anywhere where individual liberty has not become a tradition? Brock indicates that pacifists were crushed at various times in Russia, Germany, France. Can pacifist groups survive as pacifists where the immediate need to protect their communities from violence seems overwhelming, as in mid-18th century Pennsylvania on the French and Indian frontier, or in the West Indies at about the same time when invasion by foreign powers constantly threatened? Quakers survived as pacifists in Pennsylvania but only by paying die price of withdrawing from poUtics, and diey did not survive in die West Indies. The question also arises, can pacifists make an impact on the world without mixing with it? And if they do mix with the world, how does that affect them? Mennonites in the Netherlands, as they became wealthy and sophisticated, lost their pacifism. In considering the period subsequent to that covered by this book, a fundamental question arises with the introduction in 1945 of weapons which have the ability to destroy mankind; has the relation of pacifists to the world fundamentally changed? State University CollegeCarleton Mabee New Paltz, N.Y.Professor Emeritus of History ...

Book Review: The Interpretation Commentary on Genesis

Book Review: The Interpretation Commentary on Genesis

Book Review: The Interpretation Commentary on Galatians

Book Review: The Interpretation Commentary on Galatians

Hospital Almoning: Portrait of the First Decade

This contribution to the Seminar was not so much a paper as a Picture Show of 120 slides selected to illustrate the beginnings and growth of medical social work (called hospital almoning) in Victoria. The slides were projected in fairly quick succession accompanied by an explanatory and necessarily interpretive commentary. They included a few photographs from the 1920s, and even several from the years before the First World War when medical social work was beginning to be accepted in British and American hospitals in association with the medical care of the “sick poor”.

The Significance of the Declaration of Helsinki an Interpretative Commentary

The Significance of the Declaration of Helsinki an Interpretative Commentary

Music and mathematics: Theophrastus against the number-theorists

A long and important fragment of the Περὶ μοψσικῆς of Theophrastus is preserved in Porphyry's commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics. Both Porphyry and Ptolemy were reedited earlier in this century by Düring, in works which have rightly been taken to supersede the texts of Wallis: and so far as the Theophrastus passage is concerned, we should expect to be able to abandon in Düring's favour the text published by Wimmer, who in effect reprints Wallis, though adopting a few variant readings and emendations from Schneider. But it seems to me that Düring's text is not in all respects an improvement, and that the comments made on it in a subsequent publication by Alexanderson have muddied the waters still further. It is not only a matter of the text: Alexanderson prints also a (partial) translation and an interpretative commentary, and both are open to serious objections. I intend in this paper to deal only with a portion of the fragment, but it is that portion whose argument is the most intricate, and one which ought to shed a good deal of light on central controversies among the musical theoreticians who follow Aristotle. I am not in a position to dispute any of Düring's findings in the manuscripts, but where emendation has in any event proved necessary or where the manuscripts differ among themselves, I hope to show through a study of the content of the argument that the case in favour of Düring is not always closed.

Enthymeme: The rhetorical species of Aristotle's syllogism

The historical controversy generated by logicians and rhetoricians over the definition of the “enthymeme” appears to derive from a confusion of causality and persuasion. The Aristotelian corpus and various interpretive commentaries suggest that enthymematic definition is properly understood in terms of the genus‐species relationship in terms of formal and material causality. Hence for Aristotle the enthymeme is best understood as a speaker's syllogistic method, not as a listener's syllogistic response.

Portrait of a Port: Boston, 1852-1914

Two hundred and thirty-four striking photographs of the port of Boston combine with interpretive commentary to recapture the flavor, buoyancy, and excitement of the city's years as one of the two or three great American ports. After the Civil War Boston underwent a radical and successful transformation from a declining mercantile home port to an important and competitive modern seaport. At the same time the transition from sail to steam was taking place. Photographic studies of deep water sail and steam vessels, naval ships, fishing boats, catboats, tugs, schooners, and sloops, and of the picturesque wharves--all create a kaleidoscopic visual history of these years of change. The volume offers, as well, some of the most distinguished early work in photography, including the widest selection ever published of photographs by pioneer marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins.

The Narrator as Interpreter in “Paradise Regained”

ABSTRACT The speaker of Paradise Regained not only relates but interprets as well the speeches and events of the poem. This interpretive commentary begins in the single prologue, where the speaker explicitly introduces elements of plot, character, and theme, and where he identifies himself, declares the divine authority by which he speaks, and thus establishes with his reader an appropriate mode of communication. His methods of guiding the reader through the intricate events and arguments of the poem vary according to the nature of individual episodes. Those methods range, as in the opening episodes of Book I, from overt judgment of character to the most subtle intimation of theme, and they include the provision of multiple perspectives on major events. Another significant method of internal commentary involves the presentation of the Son of God as the definitive interpreter of demonic temptation and, more generally, of the human condition. In the temptation episodes, then, the narrator shares with the hero the role of interpreter.

Rorschach Movement, Fantastic Daydreaming, and Freud's Concept of Primary Process: Interpretive Commentary

The general purpose of this paper was to contribute to the interrelating of the Rorschach, creativity, and ego psychology literatures. More specifically, its purpose was to relate each of the following to a conceptual framework the author is building around the topics of creativity and Rorschach movement: (1) the Singer and Antrobus finding of two kinds of daydreaming and (2) the meaning that Freud's concept of primary process has for Singer, Maslow, Holt, Schafer, Barron, and Hilgard. The interrelating involved the hypothesis that Rorschach movement responses are a measure of capacity for what Freud meant by primary process and what Singer and Antrobus mean by fantastic daydreaming.

Hamlet and the Hermeneutics of Drama

N THE present condition of Hamlet studies, it is almost useless to offer one more interpretation of the play. Enormous as the mass of interpretative commentary is, its variety is almost commensurate with its quantity. Hardly a speech, a character, or a detail of the plot but has posed numerous problems; hardly a week passes but new problems are discovered; and the solutions proposed are more numerous than the problems themselves. What is more, problems, methods, and solutions of the most fantastic order seem often to be given an authority equal to or even greater than that of the most solid scholarship, as if the criteria on which authority depended were novelty and ingenuity rather than cogency of proof. Critical commentary upon the play is in a similar condition, as one might expect; for criticism rests upon interpretation, and variant interpretations can scarcely lead to identical analyses and evaluations. Unless we are to pursue knowledge only to find confusion, some instrument must be discovered which will

A Position Statement With Interpretive Commentary and Commendation Adopted by the Council of the American Psychiatric Association

A Position Statement With Interpretive Commentary and Commendation Adopted by the Council of the American Psychiatric Association

A Source Book in Indian Philosophy

Here are the chief riches of more than 3,000 years of Indian philosophical thought-the ancient Vedas, the Upanisads, the epics, the treatises of the heterodox and orthodox systems, the commentaries of the scholastic period, and the contemporary writings. Introductions and interpretive commentaries are provided.