Ironic Turn Research Articles

Chemical Baling of Oily Cast Iron Turnings and Use of Bales to Substitute Expensive and Scarce Scrapes

The results of the research are presented as the technology of smelting cast iron using iron-containing substances with organic pollutants as a charge material. Iron- and carbon- containing substances are introduced into the melt as stable components of bales which are not damaged during transportation. Bales are formed under low pressure from iron- containing substances with organic pollutants which do not undergo the preliminary treatment. When bales are produced, cheap materials are used as binders. Binders are formed at the expense of chemical hardening and oxidation of organic pollutants to less environmentally harmful compounds, and refining the melt from contaminants. The composition of bales provides the reduction of iron from its oxide compounds.

Pharmaceutical Study of Kanta Lauha and Teekshna Lauha Bhasma

The Ayurvedic medicines are formulated by using plant, animal, metal and minerals. Conversion of metals and minerals into acceptable form i.e. bhasma is a unique technology of Ayurveda . Certain technical procedures like Sodhana, Marana (Incineration process) etc. will play a greater role in converting the material into acceptable form. GMP provides certain directions for processing these medicines in present day. Standard operative procedure, particularly for bhasma preparation has become mandatory for the standardization and quality control of bhasmas. By considering these views in present research work the different samples of lauha bhasma were prepared by using different raw materials viz. Magnetite iron ore, iron turnings. As per the description of Ayurveda, Kanta lauha (Magnetite iron ore) is considered as best raw material for lauha bhasma preparation. After this next best raw material for lauha bhasma preparation is Teekshna lauha (iron turnings). The availability of Kanta lauha (magnetite iron ore) is rare, hence in many Ayurvedic pharmaceutical industries , lauha bhasma is prepared by Teekshna lauha . In the present work a step is made to find out the best quality of lauha bhasma by preparing various samples of lauha bhasma .

Identifications studies of Lauha Bhasma by X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence

Procedures for preparation of Lauha Bhasma are described in ancient texts of Ayurveda. These procedures also begin with different source material for iron such as Teekshna Lauha and Kanta Lauha etc. In the present study, we have selected different source materials viz. magnetite iron ore for Kanta Lauha and pure (Armco grade) iron turnings for Teekshna Lauha. The standard procedures of preparation of Lauha Bhasma are carried out in identical conditions for these two raw materials. The final product from the Puta are characterized by using X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to understanding the crystallographic form or forms of iron oxides and their composition at the end of each Puta. The iron content at the end of repeated Putas (18 for Kanta Lauha and 20 for Teekshna Lauha) have shown a decrease in case of Teekshna Lauha since the starting material is pure iron while it showed only marginal decreases in the case of Kanta Lauha because the Fe3O4 of magnetite is undergoing oxidation to Fe2O3. The trace elements remain within the Bhasma in the form of various oxides of Si, Al, Ca, etc.

The Blonde Goddess

The Blonde Goddess

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. By Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 278 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11233-6. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11234-3.)

Mindful through my own work of the puffery antebellum reviewers unleashed upon their often unsuspecting readers, I have become reticent to heap praise upon even today's deserving books without leavening it with some criticism. The first exception in my reviewing career is a book that I believe should be on the shelf of every antebellum sociocultural historian: The Flash Press, by a power trio of nineteenth-century American public sexuality scholars, Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Each has previously written cutting-edge books featuring masterful in-depth research in primary sources on sexual topics so controversial in their own time and so censorship-worthy after the 1873 federal Comstock Law, that it is a miracle that any documentation has survived. Sifting through the evidentiary haystack for proverbial needles, the three authors (coming from different directions—a cultural history of a prostitute's high-profile murder [Cohen], an urban microhistory of prostitution [Gilfoyle], and an analysis of sexual knowledge [Horowitz])—converged on a remarkable find, the flash press that flourished in New York City from roughly late 1841 through early 1843. In the book's introduction, the authors fascinatingly recount their individual discovery and uses of these newspapers dedicated to limning the demimonde, alternately by celebrating or critiquing it, at times in the same paragraph. Some incomplete runs of these scandalous sheets have come down to us through a fortuitous if ironic turn: they were collected by a New York district attorney as evidence for possible prosecutions against their publishers (p. 227n7). Other issues apparently wended their way through hands of sports journalists, whose main interest seems to have been the coverage of past sporting events (pp. 5–6). Those different preservation streams resulted in 104 issues, representing about three quarters of what is thought to have been printed (p. 5), now housed at the American Antiquarian Society.

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field by Dorothea Lange, Anne Whiston Spirn

them,dwindled, sometimes snuffedout alto gether.Small towns and countryareas generally relinquished independence and control of their lives to distant cities, corporations, and orga nizations whose interestsoften diverged from their own. Increasingly, workers were forced to bargain unequally with ever-strongeremploy ers. Every rising industry, moreover, exacted horrendous tolls fromnature? land eroded andwasted, waters polluted, forestsand prairies denuded, wildlife annihilated, life-sustaining ecological patterns foreveroverturned. People, likeother beings, increasinglybecame subject todiscipline by the sometimes-cruel "ironhand of the market." Even therailroads themselves ? over-capitalized and over-built, grown fatand conservative from their own successes ? like the steamboats before them fellprey to market forcesand thecompetitionfrommotor vehicles and faded intothebackground after World War I.The authors conclude by evoking the ironic contradiction inherent in the railroad revolu tion,as inall powerful technologies, including today's: "everytraincarried cargoes ofprogress and poverty, triumph and failure" (p. 201). Some of thisbook's contentswill likelybe familiar to serious students of railroad and western history, but the compelling narra tive and stunning illustrationswill appeal to all readers. Schwantes and Ronda are to be congratulated forhaving given general readers and scholars alike this thoughtful and beauti ful reminder that not all truly revolutionary technologies are current ones, that in their century railroads worked amagic everybit as transformativeof lifeand economy as today's computers. Perhaps there is something in that forall of us to learn. Richard J. Orsi California State University,East Bay Purchase back issues of the OregonHistorical Quarterly 503.306.5230 museumstore @ohs.org 132 OHQ vol. 110, no. 1 DARINGTO LOOK:DOROTHEA LANGE'SPHOTOGRAPHS AND REPORTS FROMTHE FIELD by AnneWhiston Spirn University of Chicago Press, Illinois, 2008. Photographs, notes, index. 359 pages. $40.00 cloth. Imaginative and beautifully produced, Anne Whiston Spirn's book is a delightful hybrid: a newly published primary source, a photog raphy book with a fine introduction by the author, an apologia forLange against her often snobbish critics.Professor of landscape archi tectureand planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Spirn developed the ingenious plan to publish a sampling of one year of Lange's work, 1939, including nearly two hundred photographs alongside Lange's original captions. Iwish Lange were alive to see this,because shewas frustratedby the fact that her work was almost always published without these captions and therefore without the context shewanted to emphasize. The book will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, because in 1939,Lange made a several-month photographic trip into Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. These pho tographs have rarelybeen published, in part because theycontain fewerofhermasterpieces than those made elsewhere. But what was ordinary inLange's photography is stilloften superb.Moreover, Daring toLook emphasizes Lange's environmental consciousness and landscape photography. Unfortunately, this promising line of analysis isnot pursued far enough; Ihope Spirnwill develop it in future publications. This photography was made for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal haven of progressives within the conserva tiveDepartment of Agriculture. Lange had been photographing farmworkers since 1935, a project that marked an ironic turn in the life of this deeply urban portrait photographer. By 1939, she had become not only amaster of documentary photography but also an expert on theagriculturaldepression and theexploita tion and miserable poverty of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant farmworkers. Scholars of photography or of the Pacific Northwest will find particularly useful Spirn's meticulous correlation of the captions with thephotographs they explicate. Lange denied that images "spoke forthemselves" and insisted thatwords could enrich images. She disliked the iconization of her photographs, ripping themout of theircontext.Central to thevisual respect she paid her subjects was her sense that they should not become mere symbols of injustice or suffering,that they should never lose their individuality. Many of her captions provided brief narratives of her subjects' lives and of the economic structures that con strained them.Reading these captions as they sit side by sidewith the photographs allows a fuller understanding of Lange's project, her expertise, and her politics thanhas previously been easily available. Spirn presents twobrief sections on Lange's California and North Carolina photography and a longer section on herwork in thePacific Northwest. In each, we see the natural and the built environments aswell as their inhabitants. Lange...

A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley by John Russell Roberts

49 his Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State.’’2 The latter’s premature death on February 16,3 helps date the incident in the winter of 1720–1721. Factual or fictional, the adventure had little effect on George’s fondness for masquerades . On March 18, 1721, he offered a present of £500 to Heidegger,4 by then widely known as ‘‘Director of the King’s Balls.’’5 Although protests from the clergy eventually forced the temporary suspension of masquerades,6 Heidegger soon replaced them with ridottos (‘‘a mask’d Masquerade’’7 ), which once again were ‘‘By’ th’ Court approv’d of, by the K[ing] protected.’’8 1 Horace Walpole, Reminiscences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), p. 29. 2 The Present State of the British Court (London: A. Bell et al., 1720), p. 3. 3 The Daily Courant, no. 6030, Friday February 17, 1721. Horace Walpole relates that he ‘‘caught his death by calling at the gate of Lady March, who was ill of the smallpox, & being told so by the Porter, went home directly, fell ill of the same distemper & died’’ (Reminiscences , p. 36). 4 Otto Erich Deutsch, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955), p. 124. 5 [John Macky], A Journey through England, 2nd ed. (London: J. Hooke, 1722), p. 68. 6 Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669–1748: A Study in Politics & Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1926), pp. 187–192. 7 The Universal Spectator, and Weekly Journal, no. 191, Saturday June 3, 1732. 8 Moses Statute, Ridotto: Or, Downfall of Masquerades (London: A. Moore, 1723), p. 11. Stanford University BOOK REVIEWS JOHN RUSSELL ROBERTS. A Metaphysics for the Mob: The Philosophy of George Berkeley. New York: Oxford, 2007. Pp. xxii ⫹ 172. $65. The Berkeleyan injunction to ‘‘Speak with the vulgar, but think with the learned’’ was never more faithfully executed than by Mr. Roberts in this little gem of a book, brimming with original insights yet written with clarity and elegance. Its pleasing style belies the difficulty of the material and complexity of his argument. For the practicing philosopher, it is destined to become a standard reference concerning Berkeley scholarship and the early modern period. For the literary scholar or casual philosopher, abundant connections link Berkeley and figures from St. Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and Malebranche, through Hume and Kant, to such contemporary thinkers as Wilfred Sellars and Daniel Dennett. The author constantly attends to contextual issues, placing Berkeley within the dialectic of the times, whether Berkeley’s or our own, and he brings out important themes, including semantic theory, frequently missed by hastier readers and commentators. For generations of students, Berkeley has proven a hard nut to crack. His arguments , on their face outrageous, yet strangely compelling, have won many admirers 50 but few converts, an ironic turn for a man of the cloth committed to the proposition that faith is an essential and necessary condition for both knowledge and action. Mr. Roberts tackles this paradox with verve and wit and an admirable determination to be true to his subject and not turn him into a closet dualist, a religious faker, or a hopelessly deluded religious zealot more appropriately remembered for the popular success of his treatise on the medicinal uses of tar water. Kant, whose Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was written largely to distinguish his own ‘‘transcendental idealism’’ from the ‘‘Visionary Idealism’’ he ascribed to Berkeley (and which critics of his Critique of Pure Reason had ascribed to him), stands as an egregious example of ‘‘running from one’s own philosophical shadow’’ and shows just how poisonous Berkeley’s philosophical reputation had become. Mr. Roberts’s argumentative strategy is to face Berkeley’s critics head-on only after carefully preparing the ground. He develops the necessary interpretive tools in the first four chapters, applies them to a particular problem in Berkeley scholarship in Chapter Five, and returns to the theme adumbrated in the title: reconciling Berkeley’s mature philosophical position with vulgar common sense. The first chapter addresses the suspicion that Berkeley is a closet dualist who simply replicates the Cartesian ontology of two distinct and discrete simple substances within the realm of the ‘‘mental.’’ Instead of mind and matter...

Law After the Welfare State: Formalism, Functionalism, and the Ironic Turn of Reflexive Law

This paper analyzes the contemporary emergence of neo-formalist and neo-functionalist approaches to law-making at a time when the state is seeking to reassert, reformulate and reconceptualize its regulatory competence, both domestically and transnationally. While the earlier turn to alternative regulation modes, conceptualized under the heading of “legal pluralism,” “responsive law,” or “reflexive law” in the 1970s and 1980s, had aimed at a more socially responsive, contextualized, and ultimately learning mode of legal intervention, the contemporary revival of functionalist jurisprudence and its reliance on “social norms” embraces a limitation model of legal regulation. After revisiting the Legal Realist critique of Formalism and the formulation of functionalist regulation as a progressive agenda, this paper reflects on both the American and German justifications of market regulation and the Welfare State in order to trace the different evolution towards ‘responsive law’ and legal pluralism in the U.S. and ‘post-interventionist’ and ‘reflexive’ law in Germany. This comparison allows for an identification of the emerging transnational qualities of legal normativity in the face of a declining welfare state paradigm, which – at the beginning of the 21st century – appears to provide the stage for turning the progressive gains of the former era into a set of market-oriented justifications of private autonomy and de-regulation.

The Strange Case for Women's Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray's Use of Irony in “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790)

This tropological analysis of “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) argues that Judith Sargent Murray deployed a series of ironic reversals, including an example of Kenneth Burke's “dialectical” irony, to make her famous case for women's capacity to reason. As such, the article elucidates this trope's peculiar rhetorical potential within the context of eighteenth-century debates on female education and investigates how it can function in conjunction with romantic irony. Significantly, Murray deployed romantic irony in order to question her era's commonplace ideas about women's intellectual capacities and conventional female education. She then employed dialectical irony in order to sidestep relativism, playing off and departing from the expanded field of possibilities that romantic irony opened up. In so doing, she cast doubt upon commonly held doubts themselves, questioning the subversiveness normally associated with learned ladies. Through this series of ironic turns, readers were invited to change their previous beliefs and then presented with a clear means of moving forward—thereby opening a path for elite European American girls to be educated in traditionally masculine domains.

Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture

The German fascination with the American Indian is legion, enduring, and much more than a current, post-modern enchantment with ‘the primitive.’ Indeed, the special and continuing relationship between Germans and Indians is well known, and in recent years it has received considerable scholarly attention. One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on ‘Indianness’ in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of ‘the authentic Indian.’ Their ongoing efforts to harness concepts of authenticity while policing this discourse are hardly surprising; indeed they have become predictable. But the lack of self-reflection with which most people participate in this process is remarkable. Few laymen or scholars seem to notice that they are the latest participants in a repetitive process that has been going on in German-speaking lands for close to 200 years, and even fewer seem to notice the ironic turn it has recently taken.

Psyche and Clio

In 1933, Freud inscribed a copy of his correspondence with Albert Einstein, Why War?, for Benito Mussolini. His dedication hailed Mussolini as a 'champion of culture', a distinction Freud felt he had earned by his support for excavation of Italian archaeological sites. Five years later, Freud, his family, and thirty-eight other psychoanalysts fled to London to escape a fascist regime with which Freud's 'champion of culture' was closely allied. This ironic turn of events was, according to Eli Zaretsky in Secrets of the Soul, typical of the history of psychoanalysis during what he identifies as its eighty-six year ascendancy in the West, from 1890 to 1976. In his account psychoanalysis seems capable of virtually infinite transformation. In Central Europe, for example, it was a force for emancipation; in the more conservative democracies of the US and Britain, however, it served the purpose of social control. Secrets of the Soul is the first book to attempt a historical assessment of the global significance of psychoanalysis, and as such it is extraordinarily valuable. It traces the history of psychoanalysis through the biographies of those who were involved in it, the political and social histories of the places and the societies in which they worked, and the shifting fortunes of the concepts they created, developed, and left behind. Zaretsky places psychoanalysis at the centre of the most profound transformations of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It was at its strongest and most influential, he argues, during the second industrial revolution of the 1890s and the protest movements of the 1960s. After that, in Zaretsky's view, analytic treatment and thought was increasingly sanitized, as the growth of the welfare state, managed care, shifting fashions in child-rearing and changing attitudes towards death cast increased suspicion on the idea that anything good could come out of the stimulation of aggression and despair. There was no longer any place for a treatment that was not afraid of fury. Psychoanalysis was inefficient and it encouraged a kind of temporary craziness. The embrace of human perversity no longer made sense. That psychoanalysis was a theory and a practice on which the West depended for most of the twentieth century is the message of this book. And equally, its message is that that dependency is finally over. Zaretsky argues that Secrets of the Soul is the first book to attempt such a wide-ranging assessment because the necessary distance between psychoanalysis and ourselves, 'with the waning of the medical fortunes of psychoanalysis' (p. 4), is only now beginning to appear. Previous historical accounts of psychoanalysis have focused on particular figures, the history of psychoanalytic thought, the story of psychoanalysis in particular countries, or specific case histories. Zaretsky's much more ambitious book is both a celebration of psychoanalysis and its elegy, even though, as Zaretsky acknowledges at the end, 'a psychoanalytic

Burmese music and the world market

Burmese music is relatively little known outside of Burma/ Myanmar, owing to the reclusive policies of the ruling dictatorship over the last several decades. Despite this isolation, several recent recordings have circulated through the world music market as it continually searches for new and exotic sounds. This article will explore some disparities and tensions between Burmese music as enjoyed and consumed in Burma and Burmese music as it increasingly appears in various 'world music' and New Age markets in North America and Europe. I will examine a number of musical tracks that have their origins in Burma yet have been prepared (mixed, mastered and marketed) in distinct ways for a number of different audiences, Burmese and other. The fate of these different recordings in the hands of Burmese and Western producers illustrates the ironic turns that music can take as it moves across aesthetic and

Arsenic Removal from Bangladesh Tube Well Water with Filter Columns Containing Zerovalent Iron Filings and Sand

Arsenic removal is often challenging due to high As(III), phosphate, and silicate concentrations and low natural iron concentrations. Application of zerovalent iron is promising, as metallic iron is widely available. However, removal mechanisms remained unclear and currently used removal units with iron have not been tested systematically, partly due to their large size and long operation time. This study investigated smaller filter columns with 3-4 filters, each containing 2.5 g of iron filings and 100-150 g of sand. At a flow rate of 1 L/h, these columns were able to treat 75-90 L of well water with 440 microg/L As, 1.8 mg/L P, 4.7 mg/L Fe, 19 mg/L Si, and 6 mg/L dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to below 50 microg/L As(tot), without addition of an oxidant. As(III) was oxidized in parallel to oxidation of corrosion-released Fe(II) by dissolved oxygen and sorbed on the forming hydrous ferric oxides (HFO). The open filter columns prevented anoxic conditions. DOC did not appear to interfere with arsenic removal. Manganese was reduced after a slight initial increase from 0.3 mg/L to below 0.1 mg/L. About 100 mg of Fe(0)/L of water was required, 3-5 times less than that for larger units with sand and iron turnings.

"Heiliger Goethe, bitt' für mich": Friedrich Spielhagen and the Anxiety of Influence

JEFFREY L. SAMMONS "Heiliger Goethe, bitt' für mich": Friedrich Spielhagen and the Anxiety of Influence1 Whatever one may think of Harold Bloom's agonistic account of the history of EngUsh poetry2—as a nonspecialist observer I regard it with considerable skepticism—there are doubtless Uterary-historical situations Ui which the anxiety of influence is a concept of some utility, and none more so than Ui the two or three generations of German writers following upon the Goethezeit. How pervasive the anxiety remained appears Ui the variety of devices appUed to cope with it. Heinrich Heine struggled to maintain a stance of disrespectful awe and assertive competitiveness; nevertheless, when he came to consider the history of Faust treatments, he found himself obUged to yield to Goethe's preeminence Ui the sequence : "Abraham zeugte den Isaak, Isaak zeugte den Jakob, Jakob aber zeugte den Juda, Ui dessen Händen das Zepter ewig bleiben wftd. "3 Novelists from the Romantics to Gottfried KeUer modeUed themselves on Wilhelm Meister with a series of demonstrations that Bildung as conceived by Goethe was not feasible. Parody proliferated, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer's Faust. Dritter Theil. Sometimes the anxiety paralyzed the imaginative vision Ui stasis, as Ui the case of Adalbert Stifter. Few seem to have been able to escape from the charmed circle. Among the German realists, none suffered more cripplingly and more garrulously from the malady than Friedrich Spielhagen. Born in 1829, he ought, by the time he had reached maturity, to have been able to regard the "Classical" epoch as definitively Ui the past (not the "ClassicalRomantic " epoch, incidentaUy; Spielhagen only sporadicaUy indicates even an awareness of the Romantics, unless we count Heme among them). But escape was not possible for him. A fundamental explanation for his search for precision and reliabUity in tradition might be that it was a symptom of the insecurity of his generation between the Nachmärz and national unification, effectively defined Ui his breakthrough novel, Problematische Naturen (1861-63), the title of which was drawn from one of Goethe's Maximen und Reflexionen (BA 18:496).4 That for the motto of the first version of the novel Spielhagen misattributed the passage to Dichtung und WahrheitIndicates not that he was imperÃ-ectly goethefest but that he had internalized texts to the point where he thought he no longer needed to look them up.5 The prestige of the Uterary past exercized a tyranny over him with which he contended almost unremittingly, Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 228 Jeffrey L. Sammons sometimes Ui bizarre ways. He asked plaintively: "wie steht der epische Kunst von heute zur goethischen? Ist sie ihr noch und wie weit tributar? Oder aber: wie weit hat sie sich losgelöst wülkürlich und zu ihrem Schaden ? oder notgedrungen zu ihrem VorteU?"6 The last possibUity does not sound very promising. The anxiety handcuffed him as a noveUst, a theorist , and a critic. StUl, he produced a large and imposing lifetime oeuvre, which, in view of the powers with which he beUeved he was wrestling, might seem virtuaUy Promethean. In the long run, however, the structure buUt under such stressful circumstances could not endure; his great national and not inconsiderable international standing as a major noveUst began to be abraded m bis own lifetime until it a reached a point where Uterary historians could hardly bear to mention his name. Franz Mehring was to remark that one seemed Uke a boor when one spoke of him at aU.7 In 1926, Bert Brecht, with a perfect instinct for what would cause Thomas Mann pain, declared him a successor to Spielhagen. The stung patrician repUed haughtily that he was unable to read Spielhagen and, Ui fact, never had read a Une.8 Spielhagen's problem was the more acute because, Ui his mind, art and especiaUy poesy had displaced reUgion as a moral authority and guide to right Uvmg. When Oswald Stein, Ui a particularly hapless moment Ui Problematische Naturen, sighs: "HeUiger Goethe, bitt' für mich!" (AR 1.1:237), it is more than an ironic turn of phrase. It was common for nineteenthcentury German liberals in their presumed descent from the Enlightenment to be...

Lennox Berkeley: A Source Book (review)

In one of the more ironic turns of the whirligig of time, the convenient designation "English Musical Renaissance" has lately fallen into disfavor. Arguably patriotic, this moniker has become a slow moving target for self-professed radical scholars bent on stripping twentieth-century British music of both cultural context and historical fact in order to deconstruct it. Granted that problems must attend the hermeneutics implied by such an imprecise appellation, no better term so aptly identifies this historical episode. During the period roughly covered by the loose description "English Musical Renaissance," a body of distinguished and enduring music was created in England in an efflorescence of musical composition that occurred after a long period of relative desuetude. This rich musical epoch lasted roughly from the premiere of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in 1899 to the death of Michael Tippett in 1998. Aside from Elgar and Britten, major British composers during this period included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, William Walton, and Benjamin Britten.

Twelve Newly Released Soviet-Era “Documents” and Allegations of U.S. Germ Warfare during the Korean War

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2001, pp. 249-257 Commentary Editor's Note: In our third issue of 2000 we published a commen­ tary by Milton Leitenberg, "The Korean War Biological Weapon Allegations: Additional Information and Disclosures." The question ofBW use by U.S. forces during the Korean War continues to be a matter ofdebate among specialists. In view ofreader interest, we are publishing another viewpoint below. TWELVE NEWLY RELEASED SOVIET-ERA "DOCUMENTS" AND ALLEGATIONS OF U.S. GERM WARFARE DURING THE KOREAN WAR Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman In 1998 a Japanese journalist from the Tokyo newspaper, Sankei Shimbun, found or was given eleven documents of 1953 and one of 1952 from the Presidential Archives in Moscow which he claimed showed that the Chinese and North Korean charges that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War were fabricated and fraudulent. The documents were trans­ lated into English by Kathryn Weathersby of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and were also published by Milton Leitenberg.1 The documents have become fodder for sensationalist journalistic articles in the American press as well as the subject of interpreta­ tion by academic historians. It is our view that these documents, even if they turn out to be genuine, are by themselves inadequate for showing the Chinese and North Korean charges are fraudulent. It is necessary to 250 Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman know as well both what was going on in the USSR at the time and some subsequent events that throw light on the subject. Our first observation is that the twelve "documents" are not the kind of evidence upon which scholarly research is usually based. In this case the original source in Moscow is not disclosed, the name of the collection is not identified, and there is no volume number that would allow other scholars to locate and check the documents. The documents are not photocopies; they are merely hand-written copies or notes purportedly taken from the origi­ nals. (When these issues are clarified it may be time to remove the quotation marks surrounding the word "documents"). Further questions about motives in transferring documents are raised because they were obtained from an unidentified source and given to a journalist for a right-wing Japanese newspaper. Factional Struggle for Power Our analysis of the documents follows. It is immediately apparent that they mainly deal with a factional struggle for power in the higher levels of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the months immediately after Stalin died in March 1953. The struggle portrayed here involves members of two sepa­ rate government ministries concerned with state security, both of which had sent agents to North Korea, as well as members of the presidium of the CPSU. Lavrenti Beria, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers at that time and the person in charge of security police affairs for the CPSU, was one of the main aspirants to Stalin's mantle. Alleg­ ing a cover-up and falsification of reporting about U.S. germ war­ fare in Korea, he tried to destroy the career of a rival, Semen D. Ignatiev, Minister of State Security, and have him expelled from the communist party. According to the found documents, Ignatiev was charged with being "under the thumb" of an adven­ turist and "secret enemy of the Soviet people" who "allowed . . . the falsification of investigative materials." In an ironic turn of events, Beria himself was called a for­ eign spy by the winning faction in the party leadership struggle, led by Malenkov, Molotov, and Khrushchev, a month later in July 1953. He was tried and executed before the end of the year. Soviet-Era "Documents" and Allegations of U.S. Germ Warfare 251 Rival Soviet Ministries During the last years of Stalin's leadership there were two ministries that had some similar or overlapping functions relat­ ing to state security and by their competition and rivalries Stalin hoped to keep better informed on what was actually happening in this realm. Previously Beria had been in charge of all the secu­ rity police. Now there were parallel organizations for this work in the Ministry...

Pigs R Us

Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture. By Richard Horwitz. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1998. 312 pages. $27.95. Richard Horwitz's book weighs in with a wealth of pig lore, science, and first-hand experience, as well as a method for examining the stuff of which American studies is made. Not accidentally, and with self-conscious humor, Horwitz regularly reminds the reader of the connections and disconnections between agricultural and academic work. "Shit happens," as one chapter title reminds us, in both places. How it happens and what it means in American studies is another matter; it is a fertile pile indeed waiting to be turned, and Horwitz has handed us the fork. Horwitz is primarily an ethnographer for whom responsible work begins with real participant-observation. In this case, he is actually working on a hog farm, but he never loses sight of his other role as academic. He takes wry advantage of the opportunity to compare one arena with the other, a gesture that significantly sets the tone for the entire book. Horwitz approached the task of cleaning a farrowing house, for example, as a "break from the sweeter-smelling but too-familiar shit at the university" (15). The farm work Horwitz contributed to his neighbors' operation--which provided a set of original questions for the book--was rewardingly real in a way that academic work could not be; moving between them could be disorienting. The "shift from [End Page 592] shit-covered floors to ivied walls and from hired hand to professor" could take painfully ironic turns, as when a plumbing emergency on the farm might, as he notes, "affect my ability to finish rereading a book that students had to discuss that afternoon. Since the book was about rural life in America, I was in the odd position of trying to limit my experience with the subject so that I could teach it better. That irony and the press of the moment were too extreme to be amusing" (121). If excremental connections between academia and a hog house are perhaps predictable, others are more telling, about hogs and universities to be sure, but about Horwitz's approach as well. Regarding his disinclination to see vertically integrated, corporate producers of pork as "the bad guys" in driving small pork producers out of the business and despoiling rural neighborhoods with large scale hog confinement systems, he writes: "my own university is itself an analogue--a vertically integrated student confinement system--but I would like to think it has redeeming value, much of it precisely because it is big" (66). Mingled with Horwitz's sometimes acerbic commentary on academic work and life is a genuine interest in the world of pork producers. He is curious about the daily routine of hog farming and the ideas informing swine science, and he describes them in great detail. He is proud of his hands-on accomplishments, reminding readers humbly that his abilities might match those of an early adolescent farm kid; he is eager to engage his neighbors/employers/informants in conversation about the meaning of their work and carefully reports and interprets their occasional reluctance to do so. The hogs themselves--as livestock, edible pork, and cultural symbols--suggest avenues of inquiry to follow away from the particular farm Horwitz himself knows. Big questions of the significance of agriculture in American culture, the controversy surrounding vertical integration of agricultural industries, the meaning of disease in American science and culture, and the ways in which Americans resist looking at and understanding mortality as part of life, spin away from the hog lot in waves of investigation that enlist but also challenge Horwitz's skill as a reader of material objects (like hogs, but also pig tchotchkes), as an interpreter of popular and scientific writing, and his work with informants. His allusions to Moby-Dick at the beginning of the book, including a catalogue of desultory porcine material like the one Melville's sub-sub librarian provides, are not entirely misplaced. Hog Ties...

Irony in conversation

This article proposes the adoption of Goffman's concept of “framing” to characterize irony across its forms; the suggestion that this framing is achieved by a shift of footing reveals links between verbal irony and other forms of talk. Examination of irony in conversation shows how the shift of footing allows for detachment, enabling the ironist to make evaluations in response to perceived transgressions with reference to common assumptions. It is both the construction of an ironic turn and its placement in a sequence that make for the discernible shift of footing, and thus the visibility of the frame; with irony, conversational expectations of what constitutes a next turn are fulfilled on the level of form, but undermined on the level of content. This analysis shows the extent to which irony is affiliative, and reveals its hitherto unacknowledged subtlety of effect and range of attitude. I am most grateful to David Britain, Anita Pomerantz, Ad Putter, and Andrew Spencer for helpful discussions and useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Paul Drew, David Good, and Rachael Harris also read versions of my work, when it formed part of a Ph.D. thesis on conversational misunderstandings, and offered invaluable guidance. I am, in addition, deeply indebted to an anonymous referee from Language in Society whose observations on an earlier draft prompted me to reconsider my presentation of certain issues, particularly with regard to the work of John Haiman. Many ensuing improvements in clarity are owed to this referee. The study would have been impossible without the conversational data; the extent of my debt to those who supplied them will be evident to anyone reading this. My thanks to all.

Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS77 Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War. Edited by WardW. BriggsJr. (Charlottesville: UniversityPressof Virginia, 1998. Pp. 448. $47.50) Reminiscing on the formative influences of his childhood, the scholar Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve observed of himself and his family, "We were incredibly narrow. Charleston was at the center." As his writings show plainly, Gildersleeve's intellectual horizons were much broader. He was quite simply the greatest classicist of his era. A graduate of Princeton, Gildersleeve studied the classics in Germany from 1850 to 1853. On his return to South Carolina he tutored and was a freelance writer. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1856, remaining on it until 1876. During the Civil War he continued to teach but served on the military staff of the Army of Northern Virginia in the summers of 1 86 1 , 1 863, and 1 864. He also wrote sixty-three editorials for the Richmond Examiner from 1 863 to 1864. In 1 876 Gildersleeve joined the faculty at the newly created Johns Hopkins University; there he established the nation's first seminarium and its first classical quarterly, the American Journal ofPhilology , which he edited until 19 19. Ward W. Briggs Jr., distinguished professor of classics and humanities at the University of South Carolina, has combined Gildersleeve's autobiographical essays, editorials, and post-Civil War reflections on the cause of the South into a revealing exposition ofa student, a Confederate partisan, and a mature scholar. The first section, Gildersleeve's autobiographical writings, recounts the ambitions and development of a classical scholar. In the second section, Ward reprints Gildersleeve's editorials, in which the South Carolinian observes and analyzes the course of the war at home and in the field. Ward concludes the collection with a series of Gildersleeve's essays that reflect on the meaning of the cause and culture of the Old South. Throughout, Ward provides numerous detailed, revelatory footnotes thatcontextualize Gildersleeve's writings and make clear cryptic historical references. The heart of Gildersleeve's writings and this edited collection are the editorials . Throughout, history provides Gildersleeve with more than just classical metaphors and illustrations; it functions as an interpretive paradigm by which he makes sense of the causes of the war, the conflicting cultures of the North and South, the Confederate government and its officials, and the essence of individual battles. The irony is that Gildersleeve's editorials are insensitive or oblivious to the larger forces that gave shape to the sectional conflict and the war itself. Rather, they are filled with personal invective and demonization. He directs his anger at the agents of government (in particular Jefferson Davis and Christopher Memminger, secretary of the treasury), Southern speculators, and Jews. The editorials of 1863 are particularly bitter and accusatory. In another ironic turn, Gildersleeve became increasingly bright and optimistic as the damage inflicted on the South and its armies increased in 1864. Gildersleeve's postwar analysis of the cause of the Old South, which focuses exclusively on states rights, is similarly simplistic. None of this is to deny the power of his intellect 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY or the passion of his convictions. Ward, an eminent scholar in his own right, has done well by and justice to Gildersleeve, who was, by his own account, "a Charlestonian first, Carolinian next, and then a southerner." Michael A. Morrison Purdue University North with Lee and Jackson: The Lost Story ofGettysburg. By James A. Kegel. (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1996. Pp. xii, 459. $34.95.) Lee Moves North: Robert E. Lee on the Offensivefrom Antietam to Gettysburg to Bristoe Station. By Michael A. Palmer. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. Pp. xiii, 189. $24.95.) Historians have spilled more ink writing about the Confederate invasions of Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863 than they have about any other Civil War campaigns. In the face of a veritable Gettysburg Industry—magazines and organizations dedicated solely to the study of the campaign—it is futile to suggest that it is time to stop the spillage. The least we can ask, however , is that new studies offer something new. Before us are two studies of the Confederate invasions claiming to be "revisionist...

The Limits of Irony

The Limits of Irony Berel Lang (bio) Irony . . . disciplines and punishes. Kierkegaard If my title is not ironic—and it isn’t—it must be tendentious, since it implies that irony has limits and so invites only the question of what or where they are. But the basis for this assumption is not self-evident, and indeed the emphasis in modern theories of irony runs directly counter to it. This more common view finds irony limit less, with its characteristic starting point in a contradiction or reversal that then evokes an indefinite number of further displacements. On this account, one ironic turn opens the way to another and that one opens on still another, with no nonironic end in sight except for the ironic consciousness itself with its denial of any stopping point that might interrupt its own continuing reflection. On this view, irony initiates (more precisely, takes place in) an infinite movement—perhaps regress, perhaps progress—that violates the supposed boundaries of every context in which it appears: it is irony that irony affirms, not just this or that single turn. Thus, irony discloses its purpose not in its individual assertions or truths but in the common manner of their rendering; in this sense irony is an adverb, not a noun—insatiable in its appetite in a way that “persons, places, or things” could not be even if they imagined or willed that state. Kierkegaard’s view at the beginning of his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, of irony’s “infinite absolute negativity” 1 may seem too burdensome for merely human practice, and indeed that view later turns out to be too weighty even for him. But master-ironist that he was, his opening description of irony’s apparently limitless reach warrants attention, and not only because in it he echoes, at least for this one time, his antagonist of choice, Hegel. I shall later be disputing this view of irony and propose an alternative to it, but we do well to look first at the process leading to its historical dominance. This scrutiny is the more pertinent because irony does not openly admit its expansionist design. More typically, it avoids speaking of itself at all—and just this reticence motivated the critic and aesthetician Jean-Paul’s proposal for an “irony mark” to serve, like the question mark [End Page 571] or the exclamation point, as a means of identification: readers could then be confident of recognizing an ironic text when they met one. But Jean-Paul’s idea never caught on, evidently because it would be self-defeating. The avowal by ironic statements of their “point” or even of their identity as ironic could only undermine the effect they strive for: to have the reader himself, as the writer’s “double,” infer and then inscribe the ironic conclusion in its reversal of the assertions offered at face value (at one-face value, that is) by the writer. We thus look to the ironic text for what it omits at least as much as for what it acknowledges; its ironic claims, fittingly, are the more present for being the more absent. Admittedly, other literary tropes or figures—metaphor, allegory—typically also avoid announcing themselves; for them, too, blatancy is self-defeating or, more basically, antifigurative. (Figurative language that cited itself as figurative might turn that reference too into a figure of speech—perhaps under the title of “truth” or “candor.” 2 ) Even allowing for this reticence, however, individual figures often do provide clues of figurative design—all of them, for example, involving deviation from a linguistic norm. None, however, displays irony’s combination of contradiction and then subordination of what is first “literally” affirmed. The characteristic reversal in oxymoron, for example, emphasizes a specific quality (the “silence” of “loud silence”), not contradiction as such. Similarly for catachresis—assigning a figurative term where no literal term exists (the “leg” of a chair)—and for aporia, which in so many words places its subject beyond words, as ineffable: although perhaps hinting beyond their immediate referents, these make no claim to represent a mode of consciousness. By contrast, the reversals of irony, in addition to turning sentences or texts back...