Jeu De Research Articles

The Politics of Open-Access Publishing: <i>M/C Journal</i>, Public Intellectualism, and Academic Discourses of Legitimacy

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

Courtois d’Arras et le Jeu de la Feuillée

The thirteenth-century secular theatre is particularly interesting insofar as it is a true literary laboratory based on texts with all kinds of plays whose purpose is not always easy to grasp. The introductory masterpiece of this tradition is Jean Bodel’s Jeu de saint Nicolas, written and performed around 1200. In its wake, two works appeared which represent two generations of plays within the thirteenth century : one, Courtois d’Arras, dating from the first quarter of the century, is a subtle variation on the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32); in the other, Jeu de la Feuillée, performed on June 3, 1276, Adam de la Halle incorporates his own persona and his entire work, which he uses as subtext. But the two plays have most likely been modeled on the Jeu de St Nicolas, to which they make many allusions. From the start it should be pointed out that the Jeu de la Feuillée is based on the Jeu de St Nicolas, reworked and completed with Courtois d’Arras. In addition, if the latter text is given over to an up-dating of the prodigal son parable and a humanizing of religion as well as to an ironic use of courtoisie, the parody becomes generalized in the Jeu de la Feuillée and ends up totally subverting and destroying all hopes and dreams in a universe where God no longer appears, but where the all-powerful Fortune reigns in irrational and arbitrary triumph. The wheel of Fortune, which never stops turning, has influence over the powerful men of Arras, over the fairies (fées) and finally, more generally, over all the other characters, who come back one by one on the turning wheel which becomes more and more frenetic, each turn bringing a character to the front of the stage, to point out his decline and defeat.

Le Jeu de la Feuillée et la dissonance du sujet

The Jeu de la Feuillee (Adam de la Halle, 1276) is based upon a dramatic configuration articulated on a plural dissonance, polyphonic and digressive, to a certain extent lacking in cohesion but nevertheless endowed with coherence inasmuch as this articulation becomes a metaphor for the action of the character on the stage. An action which is static: that of a self divided due to the tedium of its daily life, which ends up losing itself in the midst of a contradictory multiplicity. This play of voices is moreover enriched by the presence of a comic quality which, if indeed it attenuates the tragic dimension of the conflict, on the other hand contributes to reducing the absolute nature of the values which configure Adam’s universe and which might thus permit him to resolve his internal tension. The character therefore remains confronted with himself and with his space, in what we might call an interior estrangement, which is manifest in characteristics such as heterotopy, vagrancy, sterility and even untruth fed upon a project which is never realized. All these features converge upon the character, who in some way announces the modern hero and his crisis.

A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras by Carol Symes (review)

REVIEWS 329 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. Book Six and the Mutabilitie, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Abraham Stoll (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co. 2007) 239 pp. The last in Hackett Publishing’s series of paperback volumes of sections of The Faerie Queene, this comes a year after the first four volumes. The introduction is thoughtful and informative, outlining both how the concept of courtesy is a particularly “complex and contradictory” (vii) virtue, even in comparison to the virtues which rubricate Spenser’s previous books. The editors provide a welcome guide to the enjoyment of the text, pointing out, for example, how Calidore “often appears as a comic figure,” and that his “interventions are invariably clumsy and ill timed, and frequently disastrous” (x). While the introductions to other volumes in this series are more firmly assertive about what the respective section means, or more focused on identifying zones of ambiguity, here the introduction asserts a well-informed reading of the book, while allowing for some acknowledgment of critical debate—often through a list of names taken to mark critical positions. Though this is better than no acknowledgment at all, one might hope for a bit more explanation of how exactly, for example, Williams, Cain, and Bernard differ on the meaning of Calidore’s pastoral experience (ix). At these times and others, the introduction seems rushed. For example, it includes a subsection on “violence” and another on “savagery”; it seems that these concepts, though not the same, need to be discussed together. Hadfield and Stoll skillfully negotiate the complicated tension between (ir)resolution and autobiography at the end of Book Six. The section on the Mutabilitie Cantos is particularly alert to the tension between a mythopeic reading and a political one. One might, however, have wished for more attention to prosody and form, especially since those issues are crucial to Spenser generally and these texts in particular. Like the other volumes in the Hackett series, this edition includes, in addition to the standard apparatus, Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh ,” an index of characters, and a guide to further reading. Though the explicatory footnotes are erudite, they are, at times, overcrammed and overdeterminative of reading and analysis; they seem more like marginal notes that would lead to a fascinating lecture than restrained exegetical assistance. The advantage of this is that the reader is not only guided through the literal meaning of the text, but also continually reminded of the stress that key words experience, such as instances of “courteously” (6.7.4.1) and “cowherd” (6.6.26.6). The disadvantage is that Spenser relies upon and rewards a reader who makes mistakes, corrections, revisions, associations and interpretations as they go along. Though perhaps some of the analysis presented in footnotes would have worked better in a longer and more developed introduction , they are undeniably insightful and informed by recent work in Spenser. This carefully presented and useful volume certainly demonstrates a strong enthusiasm for these tricky texts, which as the editors claim (speaking of Book Six), serve to “unravel the project Spenser outlined in the earlier books” (vii). MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2007) xvi + 335 pp. Carol Symes analyzes five of Europe’s earliest vernacular plays created in the REVIEWS 330 medieval town of Arras, a rich cloth trade town on the border of the kingdom of France and Flanders. Symes entertains and educates in this most revealing book, making interesting connections between the public sphere and the creation and performance of plays. The assortment of plays includes a wide variety of subjects and mores. The Jeu de saint Nicholas (The Play of Saint Nicholas) has at its heart the French expansion into Flanders in 1191. The Courtois d’Arras (The Courtly Lad of Arras) follows the story of the Prodigal Son, if he lived in the year 1228. Le garçon et l’aveugle (The Boy and the Blind Man), dating from around 1265, is a satire that was preformed for hundred of years to come. There are also two plays by Adam de la Halle, the Jeu de la feuillée (The Play...

A variation on the tableau switching and a Pak-Vallejo's conjecture

Pak and Vallejo have defined fundamental symmetry map as any Young tableau bijection for the commutativity of the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients $c_{\mu,\nu}^{\lambda}=c_{\nu, \mu}^{\lambda}$. They have considered four fundamental symmetry maps and conjectured that they are all equivalent (2004). The three first ones are based on standard operations in Young tableau theory and, in this case, the conjecture was proved by Danilov and Koshevoy (2005). The fourth fundamental symmetry, given by the author in (1999;2000) and reformulated by Pak and Vallejo, is defined by nonstandard operations in Young tableau theory and will be shown to be equivalent to the first one defined by the involution property of the Benkart-Sottile-Stroomer tableau switching. The proof of this equivalence provides, in the case the first tableau is Yamanouchi, a variation of the tableau switching algorithm which shows $\textit{switching}$ as an operation that takes two tableaux sharing a common border and moves them trough each other by decomposing the first tableau into a sequence of tableaux whose sequence of partition shapes defines a Gelfand-Tsetlin pattern. This property leads to a $\textit{jeu de taquin-chain sliding}$ on Littlewood-Richardson tableaux. Pak et Vallejo ont défini la transformation de la symétrie fondamentale comme une bijection de tableaux de Young pour la comutativité des coefficients de Littlewood-Richardson $c_{\mu,\nu}^{\lambda}=c_{\nu, \mu}^{\lambda}$. Ils ont considéré quatre bijections fondamentaux et ont conjecturé qu’elles sont équivalentes (2004). Les trois premières sont basées sur des opérations standard de la théorie des tableaux de Young et, dans ce cas, la conjecture a été confirmée par Danilov et Koshevoy (2005). La quatrième symétrie fondamentale, donnée par l’auteur (1999;2000) et reformulée par Pak et Vallejo, est définie par des opérations $\textit{nonstandard}$ dans la théorie des tableaux de Young. Cette bijection sera montrée équivalente à la première définie pour la propriété involutoire du $\textit{tableau switching}$ de Benkart-Sottile-Stroomer. La preuve de cette équivalence, dans le cas le premier tableau est de Yamanouchi, donne une variation du algorithme de $\textit{tableau switching}$ qui montre $\textit{switching}$ comme une opération qui prendre deux tableaux avec une même borde et meut un à travers de l’autre en décomposant le premier dans une séquence de tableaux dont la séquence des partitions des formats définit une diagramme de Gelfand-Tsetlin. Cette propriété conduit à un algorithme du type $\textit{jeu de taquin-glissements sur chaînes}$ pour les tableaux de Littlewood-Richardson.

Léonce Bénédite, « apôtre de la beauté moderne » ?

Léonce Bénédite, an “Apostle of Modem Beauty” ? A key figure of the artistic milieu at the turn of the last century, Léonce Bénédite (1859-1925) was the Chief Curator of the Musée du Luxembourg for over thirty years. Curator as well of the Musée Rodin and the Musée du Jeu de Paume, specializing in foreign contemporary painting, he organized countless exhibitions and was the author of a great number of books, articles and forewords to publications. His many travels and contacts abroad played an essential part in his work. During the first part of his career, he was in close contact with contemporary artists and befriended several of them, such as Besnard, Cazin, Cottet, Dinet, Fantin-Latour, Lebourg, Puvis de Chavannes and Rodin. Starting with the first years of the twentieth century, however, he seems to have lost touch with the art of his time. Criticized in his later years by the avant-garde and traditionalists alike, he sank into oblivion.

Schur positivity of skew Schur function differences and applications to ribbons and Schubert classes

Some new relations on skew Schur function differences are established both combinatorially using Schützenberger’s jeu de taquin, and algebraically using Jacobi-Trudi determinants. These relations lead to the conclusion that certain differences of skew Schur functions are Schur positive. Applying these results to a basis of symmetric functions involving ribbon Schur functions confirms the validity of a Schur positivity conjecture due to McNamara. A further application reveals that certain differences of products of Schubert classes are Schubert positive.

Puzzles, tableaux, and mosaics

We define mosaics, which are naturally in bijection with Knutson-Tao puzzles. We define an operation on mosaics, which shows they are also in bijection with Littlewood-Richardson skew-tableaux. Another consequence of this construction is that we obtain bijective proofs of commutativity and associativity for the ring structures defined either of these objects. In particular, we obtain a new, easy proof of the Littlewood-Richardson rule. Finally we discuss how our operation is related to other known constructions, particularly jeu de taquin.

Conformity and Resistance: Preparing a Francophone Sporting Event in North America

Organizing committees of large-scale sporting events face conflicting pressures from their environment when preparing to host the events, thereby leading them to conform to certain pressures and resist others. Writers on organizations, primarily institutional theorists, have mainly examined conformity, not resistance. This article seeks to examine the competing conforming and resistance pressures for an organizing committee. Findings from a case study relating to the Jeux de la Francophonie, or Games of La Francophonie, highlighted the presence of conflicting pressures between the North American context of the organizing committee and the European, Francophonie context of the event's international body, which impacted goal setting, funding/commercialization, athlete/artist caliber, sanctioning, and international government relationship and VIP treatment. The nature of the event, the stakeholders involved, and the event's setting or context were found to be interrelated sources of pressures on the organizing committee.

Jean-François Chevrier and Jeff Wall: A Critical Stance

Although Jeff Wall’s last exhibition in a French institution already dates back to 1995 (Jeu de Paume), today sees the publication of two books which complement the impressive catalogue raisonne of the Canadian artist’s oeuvre, which was shown in all its splendour in the retrospective held in the vast arena of the Schaulager in Basel in 2005. Adding his name to the list of critics forever associated with an artist or a movement, Jean-Francois Chevrier here puts his name to an ambitious essay,...

Music from the Middle Ages

Le Jeu de Robin et Marion (Naxos 8.557337, rec 200oo3/4, 74') is not exactly the first 'opera', of course, but it provides a convenient marketing ploy. The best word is perhaps the original, jeu. Thomas Binkley's description on his 1987 recording (Focus) was a 'pastourelle play', which works reasonably well if one bears in mind that it is a dramatization of that genre. There is plenty of interest here, for Adam de la Halle was not only no mean melodist but a considerable polyphonist, and it is of singular value to have so much of his work collected together. I thoroughly dislike the very arch introductory 'scene', and find the subsequent bilingual repetition of spoken texts, also very mannered, to be a significant distraction; one longs for the music to return. But the problems of making such a jeu presentable and comprehensible for a modern audience are, admittedly, not easily solved. As for the performances, they are smooth, often rather beautiful, but generally something less than involving; for that the palm goes to Micrologus on Zig-Zag Territoires. The Ensemble In Cortezia's disc Vox nostra resonet (INCOR 2, issued 2006, 66') is a well-planned anthology of pieces relating to the Compostela pilgrimage route, taken principally from the Codex Calixtinus, the Llibre Vermell and the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Pascale Costantini's warm yet incisive voice is absolutely essential to the character of the performances. This is particularly clear in the Cantigas (no.26, Non e gran cousa se sabe, no.175, Por dereito ten a Virgen and no.218, Razon an de seeren), which absolutely depend on text, and her very French 'r' merely adds a touch of cosmopolitanism to the proceedings. However, the subtlety of the instrumental contributions is also of paramount importance, always working with the voice rather than competing with it. The instrumentalists anyway have the opportunity to prove their worth independently in the improvisations of the Danse Cldricale and the suite Karsilamas/Touchia. In addition, Denis Zaidman's vocal contribution, somewhat more folk-like in approach, provides a very good, if occasionally distant-sounding, foil for this milk and honey. Performances are not revolutionary, and neither are they overloaded with orchestration; rather, this is a very impressive disc interestingly built around its theme. My only complaint is that the lack of English and German translations may well prevent the circulation it deserves. Music from El Llibre Vermell de Montserrat (Et'cetera

Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture

‘To be alive,’ according to Bataille, ‘is, madly but inevitably, to roll the dice’ (p. 30). Is gambling not just a mere metaphor for decisions made in life, but much more centrally a direct reflection of what Borges described as ‘nothing but an infinite game of chance’? In a study that ranges over eight centuries and explores depictions of gambling in the theatre, novels, short stories, autobiography, philosophy and film, Thomas M. Kavanagh provides not just a fascinating and diverse exploration of changing attitudes to gambling but an analysis of the close ties linking games of chance, works of literature, and the historical moment. If Huizinga depicted gambling as a degeneration of play, which he defined as essentially disinterested, and Caillois's systematized analysis of play left no space in which gambling could make itself at home, Kavanagh allows gambling to reveal itself as ‘a subjective wildness cosubstantial with who I am’ (p. 11). Affirming what Baudelaire knew perfectly well, that to bet is to ‘be alive in a special way, to escape the mortal boredom of waiting’ (p. 24), he moves easily through a rapid historical survey of chance from Greek and Latin concepts of tyche and fortuna to contemporary game and probability theory, before turning to a historical survey that runs from Jehan Bodel's Jeu de Saint Nicolas to the rise of casinos. Bodel's ironic staging of a victory for faith secured ‘only by the bettor's tawdry dream of doubling his initial stake’ (p. 48) is set against Pascal's correspondence with Fermat at a time when the choice of religion was in itself an often dangerous gamble. With the Enlightenment came an age addicted more than any before or since to gambling, in a gesture that Kavanagh presents as paralleled by social changes in which the aristocracy saw more and more clearly how much their own place depended on an increasingly futile bet. Sexual seduction also finds a direct equivalent in gambling at this period, with the rules of brelan and its function as a socialized game holding a mirror to the libertine's erotic strategies. Casanova's autobiography is convincingly portrayed as emblematic of what was really at stake in contemporary wagers, while whist, whose very name suggests the silence in which it was played, forces the player to enter an isolated, unstable world, very much analogous to the rapidly changing society of the nineteenth century. Paul Bourget's story, ‘Un joueur’, which is provided in Kavanagh's translation as an appendix to the volume, links the anti-gambler protagonist with second-rate art and with the late nineteenth-century's turn away from the kind of adventurous embrace of the aleatory that had marked earlier decades and that we see in Balzac's Peau de chagrin, also illuminatingly analysed here. A crisp and illuminating study of Demy's Baie des anges and Melville's Bob le flambeur leads to a survey of the radically changed culture of contemporary casinos: clearly, Kavanagh wryly asserts, ‘God has left the casino.’ With all this you also get the rules of brelan, pharaon, whist and lansquenet.

Marivaux in the suburbs: Reframing language in Kechiche's L'Esquive (2003)

This article examines the extent to which L'Esquive, the winner of four Césars in 2005, follows the recent traditions of beur and banlieue film-making in France, which, since the mid-1980s, have traced the particular histories of immigrant and marginalized populations that have otherwise largely gone underrepresented in French cinema (Tarr 2005). These films, as Carrie Tarr would put it, ‘reframe difference’ in order to highlight the ways in which France's self-conception as a nation state sometimes occludes certain identifications articulated by marginalized individuals and groups. In so doing, many of these films call into question the French model of integration by highlighting the extent to which socio-political and ideological factors have a hand in marginalizing these individuals. While one observes in L'Esquive many of the hallmarks of other banlieue films before it, this film nevertheless sets itself apart in the way it reframes the relationship between high and popular culture through its explicit and very conscious use of language. By juxtaposing the eighteenth century playwright Marivaux's play Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and the street slang of the Parisian banlieues, L'Esquive puts into question the very divide between high and low cultures. This article explores the implications of such a juxtaposition of different registers by taking into account both the film's production values (casting, budget, etc.) and the impact of its tremendous success at the Césars, as well as the way in which the film deftly deconstructs the much propagated stereotype of a necessarily violent banlieue. Through such sensitive and nuanced portrayal of banlieue life, L'Esquive goes a long way in laying bare some of the otherwise-hidden stakes of the French model of integration.

Jeu de pelote et politique dans le monde aztèque

The ball game opposes sometimes, in colonial chronicles, two sovereigns (Moctezuma against Nezahualpilli). It can symbolically be associated with the fall of the empires (Toltec and Aztec), since the ball's course represents the sun's course. Or else, in fewer cases, it can reflect eventual political plots (Axayacatl against Xihuiltemoc). The colonial chronicles' distortions and the absence of Aztec epigraphy on the subject turn Pre-Hispanic political reality rather elusive. But these are the only echoes that we now have at our disposal. MOTS-CLES : Mexique, Azteques, Jeu de pelote, Politique, Religion. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 06:06:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Double Crystals of Binary and Integral Matrices

We introduce a set of operations that we call crystal operations on matrices with entries either in $\{0,1\}$ or in $\mathbf N$. There are horizontal and vertical forms of these operations, which commute with each other, and they give rise to two different structures of a crystal graph of type $A$ on these sets of matrices. They provide a new perspective on many aspects of the RSK correspondence and its dual, and related constructions. Under a straightforward encoding of semistandard tableaux by matrices, the operations in one direction correspond to crystal operations applied to tableaux, while the operations in the other direction correspond to individual moves occurring during a jeu de taquin slide. For the (dual) RSK correspondence, or its variant the Burge correspondence, a matrix $M$ can be transformed by horizontal respectively vertical crystal operations into each of the matrices encoding the tableaux of the pair associated to $M$, and the inverse of this decomposition can be computed using crystal operations too. This decomposition can also be interpreted as computing Robinson's correspondence, as well as the Robinson-Schensted correspondence for pictures. Crystal operations shed new light on the method of growth diagrams for describing the RSK and related correspondences: organising the crystal operations in a particular way to determine the decomposition of matrices, one finds growth diagrams as a method of computation, and their local rules can be deduced from the definition of crystal operations. The Schützenberger involution and its relation to the other correspondences arise naturally in this context. Finally we define a version of Greene's poset invariant for both of the types of matrices considered, and show directly that crystal operations leave it unchanged, so that for such questions in the setting of matrices they can take play the role that elementary Knuth transformations play for words.

Knowledge of the Environment and Spatial Cognition: JRS as a Technique for Improving Comparisons between Social Groups

In this paper we compare the sketch-map technique with a spatial modelling task based on a set of eight separate items. The aim of the comparison is to verify, thanks to a special spatial reconstruction set, Jeu de reconstruction spatiale (JRS), whether the difficulties often encountered by unskilled persons when asked to draw a sketch map can be avoided. If so, the JRS could help to improve comparisons between different social groups. Thirty university students majoring in geography and twenty-one unskilled staff members were asked to represent the centre of Strasbourg both by drawing a sketch and with the JRS. The results show that, on one hand, the difference between the two groups regarding the number of items mentioned is smaller with the JRS than with the sketch map. On the other hand, in both groups, the same proportion of respondents increased the number of urban elements produced in the second trial with the JRS. This was not the case with the sketch map. Also, the JRS is more stable than the sketch map from one trial to the next. Furthermore, the respondents preferred the JRS to the sketch map. However, the JRS is more suggestive than the sketch map, but only for elements which are more rarely represented (railway tracks, etc). Thus, in terms of scientific research, the JRS makes it possible to improve comparisons between social groups. In terms of applications, it offers interesting possibilities for promoting citizen participation in urban planning.

RSK Insertion for Set Partitions and Diagram Algebras

We give combinatorial proofs of two identities from the representation theory of the partition algebra ${\Bbb C} A_k(n)$, $n \ge 2k$. The first is $n^k = \sum_\lambda f^\lambda m_k^\lambda$, where the sum is over partitions $\lambda$ of $n$, $f^\lambda$ is the number of standard tableaux of shape $\lambda$, and $m_k^\lambda$ is the number of "vacillating tableaux" of shape $\lambda$ and length $2k$. Our proof uses a combination of Robinson-Schensted-Knuth insertion and jeu de taquin. The second identity is $B(2k) = \sum_\lambda (m_k^\lambda)^2$, where $B(2k)$ is the number of set partitions of $\{1, \ldots, 2k\}$. We show that this insertion restricts to work for the diagram algebras which appear as subalgebras of the partition algebra: the Brauer, Temperley-Lieb, planar partition, rook monoid, planar rook monoid, and symmetric group algebras.

Perceptions at Play: Giacometti through Contemporary Eyes

In a rapidly executed sketch dating from circa 1918–20, Alberto Giacometti captures a true-to-type moment in the quotidian life of his family. Intimately grouped around the table in the parental home at Stampa, his three younger siblings—Bruno, Diego, and Ottilia—are portrayed with a friend, playing a habitual game, one now extinct, known as jeu de char, a cross between chess and checkers.1 Performing a conceptual shift in paradigm, the topography of pawns as articulated on the tabletop in this early drawing presages Giacometti's horizontal gameboard sculptures of the 1930s and also his models for city squares punctuated by arrestingly thin silhouettes of 1948–50. This sense of play, congenial to Giacometti's oeuvre, is de facto indelible in the history of the avant-garde. To cite a noted example, Marcel Duchamp took up chess in the 1920s as a cunning approach to art. A chess champion with a taste for gambling, Duchamp engaged in unorthodox matches, saluting ad hoc competitions such as that featured at the opening of his first retrospective, organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. Set against his classic work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, of 1915–23, the Pasadena chess encounter acted simultaneously as one of the most cerebral episodes of artistic exchange and one of the most sexually charged since Duchamp's challenger, Eve Babitz, stripped for the event.

Figures poétiques japonaises: La genèse de la poésie en chaιne (review)

Reviewed by: Figures poétiques japonaises: La genèse de la poésie en chaιne Aileen Gatten Figures poétiques japonaises: La genèse de la poésie en chaιne. By Sumie Terada. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises, 2004. 411 pages. Softcover €23.00. Renga, linked verse, generally calls to mind such fifteenth-century poets as Sōgi and Shōhaku and their magisterial hundred-link sequences. Before them came the poetry and renga rules of Nijō Yoshimoto, and before him the first serious renga gatherings and the pioneering rules of the thirteenth century. And before these, was there linked verse, and if so, how did it come to be? These are the questions addressed by Sumie Terada in her stimulating monograph, the title of which might be translated as "Japanese Poetic Expressions: The Genesis of Linked Verse." The emergence of renga as a genre is usually seen as a thirteenth-century event, and the preceding century or so is considered its formative period. This latter phase is characterized by a more structured, intentional approach to the composition of tanrenga, the thirty-one-syllable, two-link "short renga" that is the earliest form of linked verse, and by the development of kusari, or "chain," renga, the linking of three or more stanzas that gradually developed into the long sequences of later centuries. Terada, however, believes that the roots of renga go far deeper than the late eleventh century: roughly one-third of her study concerns eighth-century prosody with particular relation to Man'yōshū, while the remainder explores the characteristics and rhetorical devices employed in tanrenga throughout the Heian period. In Figures poétiques, Terada analyzes tanka and tanrenga written over this five-hundred-year period in order to reveal the rhetorical "structures" that precede and facilitate the development of linking in mature renga. Figures poétiques thus is concerned less with literary evaluation than poetic structure, rhetoric, and theory. It inquires clearly and in detail into a subject that most scholars of premodern Japanese poetry accept as a given: the grounding of the extraordinary genre of renga on the conventions of tanka, despite substantial formal differences between the two. Terada demonstrates, for example, precisely how and why the practice of sari-kirai (the required switching of subject after a certain number of links) could become a basic feature of renga, and she describes the origins of fushimono, or set topics. Unapologetically scholarly, Figures poétiques assumes its readers have a basic knowledge of tanka and renga and generously illustrates its points with diagrams. Those who meet its challenges will be rewarded by an assured, thorough exploration of the prehistory of renga and of the neglected tanrenga, and will gain added appreciation for the ingenious nature of premodern Japanese poetry. Terada's discussion of eighth-century poetic conventions appears at first glance to cover familiar ground, including explanations of the origin and function of the makurakotoba (our "pillow word," felicitously rendered "mot initiateur" in Figures poétiques) and the jokotoba ("preface," or "motif initiateur"). What is striking about this section, however, is Terada's demonstration of the role played by these well-known devices in preparing the way for linked verse. Among the properties of the jokotoba, for example, is the capacity to link two homophonic but semantically different units. Terada perceives this as an essential device both for tanrenga as practiced from the tenth century on and for linking in general (p. 92). [End Page 536] The analysis of rhetorical devices continues in the final two sections, which are devoted to Heian tanrenga. Terada shows that, like the makurakotoba and other Man'yō conventions, the new rhetorical techniques of early and mid-Heian were vital factors in developing mature linked verse. The kakekotoba ("pivot word," or "motpivot") is seen as the basis of the linking system, creating a unified discourse by placing in correspondence elements belonging to different semantic domains (pp. 198-200); engo ("word association," or "mots associés") are the agents that form a semantic network ensuring cohesion between stanzas; and mitate ("elegant confusion," or "jeu de transfert") is described as a device exploited to introduce thematic change, an...

The octahedron recurrence and [formula omitted] crystals

We study the hive model of g l n tensor products, following Knutson, Tao, and Woodward. We define a coboundary category where the tensor product is given by hives and where the associator and commutor are defined using a modified octahedron recurrence. We then prove that this category is equivalent to the category of crystals for the Lie algebra g l n . The proof of this equivalence uses a new connection between the octahedron recurrence and the Jeu de Taquin and Schützenberger involution procedures on Young tableaux.