Literary Curiosity Research Articles

The Critical Reception of Mark Twain's Introduction to English as She is Taught

The Critical Reception of Mark Twain's Introduction to <i>English as She is Taught</i>

Reception of the Little Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Through Individualisation

This paper examines ideas, meanings, and motives in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. By studying the symbols present in this literary curiosity, we point out the multiplicity of meanings that make this modern fantasy story a read for children and adults. The complexity of The Little Prince, the ambiguity of its elements, and the intertwining of motives, ideas, and messages of this paper, can be a real challenge for young readers when it comes to proper interpretation. There is a question of whether this literary work is intended for children at all? To facilitate students’ understanding and provide a complete emotional experience, we propose the application of individualized teaching, a model of work that allows each child following their intellectual, cognitive, emotional, and other abilities, to adopt a literary text and appropriately engage reception. Literature, as the art of words, should be able to provide an opportunity for recipients to get to know a literary work in their way, that is, following their abilities and sensibility, and to understand all its compositional layers.

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka'sWunderkammer

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka's<i>Wunderkammer</i>

Literary Curiosity Scale for Secondary Education Students: A Scale Development Study

This study is an attitude scale development study that reveals high school students (9th, 10th, 11th grades) literary curiosity. It is thought that students with high literary curiosity have a reading culture. Reading culture is a reading level reached by transforming reading into a habit and critical reading skill. The scale created for this purpose is a 5-point Likert-type scale consisting of 30 items. The scales pilot study was conducted on 522 high school students in the fall semester of the 2018-2019 academic year. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to assess the construct validity of the scale. A relationship was found between the variables in the factor analysis of the items (KMO=0.955&gt;0.60). This size was sufficient for factor analysis. As a result of the factor analysis, the variables were gathered under four factors with a total explained variance of 52.664%. The Cronbach’s Alpha (α) internal consistency coefficient for the scale items was found to be 0.945. According to the scale and test-retest findings, the scale scores differed in the bottom 27% and top 27% groups. Therefore, the literary curiosity scale was found out to be a valid and reliable instrument considering the alpha for reliability, the explained variance value, and the factor loads.

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh Christa DiMarco (bio) Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him Mariella Guzzoni University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo51205258.html224 Pages; Print, $25.00 Vincent van Gogh’s reading practice is as legendary as his paintings. While he devoted his days to his canvases, at night he would “light the lamp and go on reading.” In his letters (of which we have over 800), he devoted many passages to discussing literature from Shakespeare to popular periodicals and modern novels. Reading Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Émile Zola as well as French historical studies by Jules Michelet, cultural criticism by Thomas Carlyle, and studying printed illustrations by Frédéric Montenard, Hubert von Herkomer, and George Cruikshank laid the thematic and stylistic foundation for his art. Van Gogh, for example, noted that he sympathized with Madame François and Florent, two working-class characters who attempt to navigate bourgeois Paris in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Prints that depicted those who lived on the economic or geographic margins likewise captured his attention. In a letter to the artist Anthon van Rappard, Van Gogh shared one of his important artistic influences: The Graphic, a British illustrated publication from which he saved prints to “form a kind of Bible for an artist, in which he reads now and again to get into a mood.” Among the many prints he mentioned, Van Gogh compared George John Pinwell’s The Sisters “to the full song of the nightingale on a spring night” and regularly touted the quality and the impact of the prints he came across. Both the novels he read and the prints he cherished conveyed the dignity of a humble life amid inescapable societal difficulties, a central theme he explored in the imagery of his short, ten-year painting career. Despite the fluency between the written word and painting, we seldom recognize the literary imprint that permeates Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Even art historians pay relatively scant attention to the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of his artistic approach. Cursory references to Van Gogh’s reading habits abound in biographical accounts and exhibition catalogs, and just two scholarly explorations come to mind: Judy Sund’s 1992 True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature and Wouter van der Veen’s 2009 Vincent van Gogh: A Literary Mind. Given that Van Gogh mentioned over two-hundred authors in his letters and read in Dutch, English, French, and German, surely there is more to explore. Mariella Guzzoni’s Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him offers newfound connections between Van Gogh’s paintings and his insatiable literary curiosity that will be of interest to Van Gogh enthusiasts and bibliophiles. Finding a worthwhile approach to Van Gogh’s large body of work — over 800 paintings and 1000 works on paper — requires a method as innovative as the paintings themselves. Guzzoni uses the extensive collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as her own collection of the editions Van Gogh read and discussed in his letters. She leads readers chronologically through Van Gogh’s works without becoming entangled in the myriad facts of the painter’s biography, a temptation few authors navigate well. Instead, she explores specific references and stops to rest on telling exchanges between text and art that the book’s engaging layout complements. Vincent’s Books is a beautiful publication that pays homage to the art of the book. It is carefully structured, poignantly designed, and includes full-color matte reproductions of journal pages and book covers. Reproductions of the editions Van Gogh read appear throughout and Guzzoni also includes pictures of the books open to the passages she discusses so you can view the print in its original publication. These pictures appear alongside Van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, or letters and are often accompanied by germane quotations. Readers can pause on passages dedicated to reflecting on the interplay between text and image, an experience akin to spending time with a rare edition in an archive...

An Invisible Song

Abstract Zelda Fitzgerald’s lone play, Scandalabra, is traditionally dismissed either as a minor literary curiosity that followed the critical and commercial failure of her only published novel, Save Me the Waltz, or as a source of domestic conflict during a turbulent, contentious time in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage when the husband accused his wife of poaching upon his artistic territory. As a result, the play has not yet been subject to proper study or commentary. A closer reading of it, however, reveals that this forgotten piece offers a fascinating, and even innovative, exercise in dramatic language, especially in its use of stage directions. By reading Scandalabra first as a text relevant to a specific movement within the tradition of theatrical realism, second as a further development of the voice its author was crafting in her short stories, and finally as a play that can benefit from a new theatrical context that understands stage directions as a place for formal and linguistic innovation, it is possible to understand the play not as an extravagance of an artist unaccustomed to writing for the theater, but rather as a conscious effort in Fitzgerald’s development as a writer.

A Vietnamese literary riddle from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Hoàng Sĩ Khải's Tứ Thời Khúc

This article considers the literary curiosity from the Mạc–Lê dynastic wars in the sixteenth century of a poem written by a Mạc-dynasty partisan being interpreted by later generations as having been written to praise the Lê dynasty. It uses textual and contextual analysis to argue that the poem was written to praise the Mạc dynasty but was later revised by scholars of the Lê dynasty.

A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall by Hans von Trotha

Reviewed by: A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall by Hans von Trotha Patrick Müller Hans von Trotha. A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2018. Pp. vi + 141. €17. Although 2018 was, of course, a major Sterne year, the publication of this book has come most unexpectedly. These days, Sterne is definitely not an obvious sujet for any German writer, either in academia or belles lettres. This curious, slim volume does, in [End Page 234] fact, incorporate aspects of both perspectives, but first and foremost it must be read as an unorthodox jeu d'esprit, an essay about a man whose mind is, for the author, an object of fascination but not one for close academic scrutiny. Von Trotha is known to readers interested in British culture as the author of a short history of English landscape gardens titled Der englische Garten: Eine Reise durch seine Geschichte (The English Garden: A Journey through its History). A Sentimental Journey is, then, not strictly a book for scholars or academics, but enjoyable enough despite having no new insights to offer for Sterne adepts. The book follows Wagenbach's usual format, a smallish yet very handsome volume in the usual red linen binding. The print on the spine fades easily, a problem with which Wagenbach readers are also familiar. The title might be thought somewhat misleading: the text meanders between biographical observations, travelogue, reflections about art, stylistic investigations, and fictional reconstructions, as, for example, of Sterne's time at Shandy Hall, a device used to evoke the magic that the place holds for von Trotha. It is, therefore, digressive in character, a device that naturally reflects the author's admiration for Sterne. Von Trotha's sentimental journey takes us from London's National Portrait Gallery to Yorkshire and Shandy Hall, and leads us finally to Germany and the echoes there of Sterne's international fame in the country's gardening culture. He has been to all the places worth visiting in England if one wishes to write about Sterne, beginning with fascinating observations about the portraits of Sterne in the NPG. He moves on to British Sterneans, for example, Geoffrey Day, whose manic urge to collect Sterneana is chronicled in one of von Trotha's digressions. And he reads the sources worth reading, other than those strictly scholarly—Johnson, Woolf, and the like—those one would read when writing about Sterne the way he does. His analysis of Sterne's work, which unavoidably takes issue with Thackeray's damning account, is one for the uninitiated reader who wishes to be introduced to Sterne's difficult texts. Consequently, A Sentimental Journey is also a book on how to read Tristram Shandy, along with the Bramine's Journal and the Sermons. In quoting the new, monumental German translations by Michael Walter, von Trotha again highlights the intricacies of reading Sterne in a language other than his own, rendering even more successful his endeavor to interest readers in Sterne's ludicrous literary curiosity cabinet with its labyrinthine network of digressions, allusions, and loose ends. In fact, von Trotha's enthusiasm in reconstructing the eighteenth-century cult of Sterne is infectious and should perpetuate our own fascination with Sterne. For modern—or rather, younger—readers, the elegant, perhaps somewhat oldfashioned prose of von Trotha makes it simply a pleasure to read. With its naïve yet refreshing approach, this well-written book does perhaps help scholars to step out of their comfort zone and enjoy the fresh breeze of unconventionality that blows pleasantly from this essayistic enterprise. It is to be hoped that one effect of this sentimental journey will be to attract a young generation of German academics and general readers to Sterne. Maybe such a book would then no longer come out of the blue. This might, however, be wishful thinking. [End Page 235] Patrick Müller Dresden Copyright © 2020 W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, Kellye Corcoran, Melanie Holm, J. T. Parnell, David Venturo, and Donald R. Wehrs

Jules Verne et Le château des Carpathes : les figures du double et le lieu de l’imaginaire

Entre science-fiction et fantastique, Le Château des Carpathes de Jules Verne se caractérise par une véritable ambiguïté générique. L’auteur annonce du romanesque mais le dément tout au long du roman. Il tient à ancrer les événements dans un décor réel et utilise la géographie de la Roumanie et de la Transylvanie pour créer un univers « référentiel ». C’est une véritable instabilité générique. Mais en même temps, toute la géographie s’ouvre sur un lieu, le château, converge vers ce pôle d’attraction, et y aboutit. Or, ce lieu pourrait être dans n’importe quel autre lieu de la terre. C’est donc une véritable curiosité littéraire que de consacrer tant d’efforts à construire un univers à vocation référentielle pour le conduire à un lieu qui se situe en dehors de l’espace et du temps. C’est ce rapport ambigu entre la géographie et l’imaginaire, entre le romanesque et le fantastique que mon essai tentera d’élucider.

Amusements Électroniques

An 1842 compendium of literary curiosities assembled by bibliophile Gabriel Peignot presents a collection of works and rules for their composition that has interesting correlations with electronic, computational, and digital productions of poetic works. Because these works were written under constraint, their rule-bound approach has an algorithmic character that can be compared with the compositional tactics used in computational work. This paper analyzes Peignot’s collection in terms slightly different from those on which he organized his compendium. Rather than sort the works in a typology of formal properties, this paper presents a typology of production methods and compositional techniques. Though not all electronic approaches are anticipated by the works collected in Peignot’s remarkable work, the range and variety of these methods, many of which reach into antiquity, establishes a long lineage for conventions of rule-based poetic composition.

Mobility, Gender and Empire in Maria Graham's Journal of a Residence in India (1812)

A book by a young lady, who probably went to India like most young ladies, to procure a husband instead of information, is a literary curiosity which we are not disposed to overlook.

“There's Millions in It!”: The Gilded Age and the Economy of Satire

“There's Millions in It!”: <i>The Gilded Age</i> and the Economy of Satire

Not Only Prints: Early Republic-Era Visual Culture Research at the Library Company of Philadelphia

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.

Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (review)

Castillo, David R. Baroque Horrors: Roots of Fantastic in Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 177 pp.David R. Castillo's Baroque Horrors aims to trace roots of fantastic to Iberian Renaissance and Baroque. The group of works brought into discussion ranges from exemplary and baroque novelas of Miguel de Cervantes and Maria de Zayas to earlier works by Antonio de Torquemada (Jardin de flores curiosas, 1570), Miguel de Luna (Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo, 1592), Julian de Medrano (La silva curiosa, 1583), Juan de Pina (Casos prodigiosos y cueva encantada, 1628) and Cristobal Lozano (La cueva de Hercules, 1667). Underlying book's arguments are notions that fantastic springs from tension between rational and analogic views of world during early modern period (46) and that fantastic is used to subvert social codes.Chapter 1 analyzes a host of miscellanies written in Spain, as this successful genre reflects not only curiosity of Renaissance readers also transformation into material- literary curiosities- of numerous myths and stories inherited from classics and from folkloric sources (40). Castillo, completing Giovanni Allegra's work on Jardin de flores curiosas, asserts that folkloric tales included in miscellanies are a more convincing origin of fantastic than classical myths and histories, but miscellanies often come closest to unsettling quality of modern fantasy when they incorporate contemporary folkloric material (40). The second connection between miscellanies and fantastic is the oscillation between acceptance of marvelous and rational analysis of case (42). The third link is fact that early modern culture of curiosities relates to forms of epochal melancholia and profound anxiety about openness and chaotic structure of universe (43). Castillo invokes notion of vacuum in Giordano Bruno's work and in Galileo's nocturnal horror as two early modern products of such visions of chaos. But, according to Castillo, all this unsettled thinking became productive in fantastic ways: Galileo brought with it not just new walls of reason also new windows of imagination and, with them, brand new vistas of nightmarish landscapes as well as Utopian dreams (46). To prove his point, Castillo studies folkloric tales included in three miscellanies Jardin de flores curiosas, La silva curiosa, and La cueva de Hercules.In chapter 2, Castillo links sensationalistic representation of awesome forces (whether natural, preternatural, or supernatural) to exaggerated moralism and moral uncertainty in Baroque (92). One of most exciting points of this chapter is Castillo's observation that some morbid baroque stories, told through devices of epistemological relativism and ethical uncertainty, address fact that raw life content ... makes no sense (95). As a result unjustified violence and macabre express anxiety caused by new scientific epistemology and knowledge.In chapter 3, author explores interconnections between household, female horror, physical violence, subversive pornography, and body politics in Maria de Zayas's Desenganos amorosos (1647). …

Multiple hepatic abscesses due to actinomycosis: difficulties of diagnosis

Authors present the case of a 65 year-old man without any remarkable previous illness, hospitalized because of having prolonged fever caused probably by an infection due to a tick bite. Tularaemia and bartonellosis based on serological results as well as neoplasm of the sigma with multiple metastases to the liver raised by ultrasonography and abdominal CT could be excluded with detailed investigations. Multiple abscesses of the liver were diagnosed, followed by a percutaneuos ultrasonography directed aspiration of one of the abscesses which resulted in 150 ml buffy pus. Microbiological examination evaluated the presence of Actinomyces meyeri. Instead of neoplasm, diverticulosis and diverticulitis of the sigma could be clarified with perforation of one of the diverticuli causing peridiverticulitis, retroperitoneal abscess and probably abscesses in the liver by haematogenous dissemination. Surgical intervention, resection of the liver and the sigma resulted in recovery of the patient. Difficulties of diagnosis are discussed in the article pointing out the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, involving also infectologist. Diverticulosis of the sigma as presumably origin of hepatic actinomycosis is a literary curiosity. This was the cause of the case presentation.

Naturalismo, novela y sociedad en España entre los siglos XIX Y XX

The second half of the nineteenth century in Spain was a period characterized by a strong presence of social science, which even came to permeate the masses. Evolutionary theories and some figures such as Charles Darwin himself were present in areas far from the scientific activity proper. The use of concepts and laws of biological origin for the diagnosis and political practice against certain problematic social realities, such as crime or poverty, gave rise to theories and intellectual schools that asserted the value of evolutionary principles for the analysis of complex realities of socio-cultural inequality. The attraction for difference and the scientific method, with the possibility of observation of poverty and social inequality that industrial development and modernity put forward to the writers, added to the naturalist and biological interest a literary curiosity for the degeneration, both physical and cultural, of that unfortunate part of humanity.

HENRY JAMES: THE THEATER YEARS

1 9 R H E N R Y J A M E S T H E T H E A T E R Y E A R S L O U I S A U C H I N C L O S S Henry James wrote his first full-length play, Daisy Miller, in 1882, when he was thirty-nine, and his last, The Outcry, in 1909, when he was sixty-six. In this period of more than a quarter of a century he wrote ten plays, three of which were produced, one with a mild successs, but none of which could be put on today except as the literary curiosities of a great master of fiction. During his so-called theater years, lasting from 1891 to the disastrous first night of Guy Domville in 1895, James devoted his primary energies to playwriting in a vain e√ort to reap what such best sellers of the novel as Marion Crawford, William Dean Howells, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward had garnered, but which had unhappily not been the case with his own great novels of manners. Was his venture into a field whose basic rules he never fathomed really motivated solely by his desire for monetary gain? Not quite. He had been, particularly during his residence in Paris, a devotee of the French theater. Indeed, he had boasted that he had it ‘‘in his pocket,’’ and certainly there was nothing in the art of Émile Augier or Dumas fils that he had failed to appreciate. The first volume of his autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, is filled 2 0 A U C H I N C L O S S Y with his enthusiastic childhood memories of the theater in New York. And the last novel that he brought out before his selfdedication to the stage, The Tragic Muse, is concerned with the career of a great actress. What is most peculiar about James’s failure to grasp the essentials of the art that he so passionately yearned to assimilate is that he had already shown in his fiction the hand of a master scene writer. One has only to strip the dialogue in some of his dramatic confrontations of all descriptive prose to produce action that would glow before the footlights. Take the chapter in The Portrait of a Lady where Isabel, who has finally realized that her ‘‘sterile dilettante’’ of a husband, Gilbert Osmond, has married her only for her money and now hates her for not being the puppet he had expected, learns in Rome that her beloved cousin Ralph Touchett is dying in England. She goes to her husband’s study to tell him she must go to Ralph’s bedside. Isabel speaks first. – Excuse me for disturbing you. – When I come to your room, I always knock. – I forgot. I had something else to think of. My cousin’s dying. – Ah, I don’t believe that. He was dying when we married; he’ll outlive us all. – My aunt has telegraphed me. I must go to Gardencourt. – Why must you go to Gardencourt? – To see Ralph before he dies. – I don’t see the need of it. He came to see you here. I didn’t like that. I thought his being in Rome a great mistake. But I tolerated it because it was to be the last time you should see him. Now you tell me it’s not to be the last. Ah, you’re not grateful! – What am I to be grateful for? – For my not having interfered when he was here. – Oh, yes I am. I remember how distinctly you let me know you didn’t like it. I was very glad when he went away. – Let him alone then. Don’t run after him. – I must go to England. – I shall not like it if you do. H E N R Y J A M E S : T H E T H E A T E R Y E A R S 2 1 R – Why should I mind that? You won’t like it if I don’t. You like nothing I do or don’t do. You pretend...

“So This Is Dyoublong”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 5–11 July 2009

“So This Is Dyoublong”: A Report on the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, 5–11 July 2009 Amanda Sigler Leaning over the area railings in Georgian Dublin and debating whether they should dare to hang over the edges like Bloom but eventually opting to recline against them like Stephen, students at the 2009 Dublin James Joyce Summer School flashed their cameras and smiles, combining literary curiosity with a documentary impulse as they proceeded on the School’s walking tour. The lively tour, led by Keel Geheber of the James Joyce Centre, was the concluding activity in a richly rewarding week of lectures, seminars, workshops, and social events—all organized under the expert academic directorship of Anne Fogarty. When participants gathered at Hourican’s Pub on the opening evening, a convivial spirit of reunion pervaded the atmosphere as longtime friends embraced and joyfully recounted the highlights of past Joycean gatherings. But there were many newcomers as well, and students traveling from places as varied as Asia, Europe, America, and the Middle East were quickly welcomed into the community. This year’s Summer School had a particularly youthful touch on account of the attendance of ten eager teenagers from the Oak Park and River Forest High School in the Chicago suburbs. Their teacher, Brendan Lee, plans to continue the tradition and take a group to Dublin every other year. [End Page 210] On the first day of the School, I sat in on Christine O’Neill’s A Portrait seminar with them and was both impressed by their ability to summarize the morning’s lectures and enlightened by their amateur readings of Joyce’s work. Though “Flaubert” occasionally morphed into “Flow-burt” on their lips (and here “flow” was often pronounced like the abbreviated flower of U 11.861), the students nevertheless extracted the essential points from Scarlett Baron’s characteristically sharp presentation, “‘I will have shown somebody the way’: Flaubert and the Making of James Joyce.” In class, students reported that Stephen Dedalus’s dependence upon literary precedence, as outlined by Scarlett, made him “less of a smarty-pants” and “more accessible.” Responding to Anne Fogarty’s lecture on “Inventing Dublin,” students expressed surprise over how inconsistent Joyce could be in statements about his fictional recasting of Ireland. Flipping through her handout, the class re-examined such famous quotations as “I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis” (LettersII 134). In an earlier comment, Joyce had described “the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,”1 casting yet further doubt on the precise subject of his project: is it hemiplegia or paralysis? A city or only a place considered to be? The week’s subsequent lectures and seminars were equally thought-provoking. For the remainder of the School, I attended Terence Killeen’s fascinating Finnegans Wake seminar at Boston College, where we sank into overly comfortable chairs and closely studied the henpecked letter of I.5. Other, simultaneous seminars included Peter van de Kamp’s Dubliners, which, I heard, sparked spirited interpretive debates between students and instructor, and two Ulysses classes, led by Fritz Senn and Tom Halpin, which incorporated student-led presentations, included one ambitious high-school participant, and received enthusiastic reviews. In lectures, topics covered a broad spectrum, ranging from the Hungarian and Romanian translations of Ulysses (Erika Mihálycsa) to error (Matthew Creasy), Shakespeare (Laura Pelaschiar), and the textual-genetic origins of Leopold and Molly Bloom (Luca Crispi). Delivered by a combination of seasoned Joyceans and newly-minted doctors of philosophy, the lectures were often enhanced by multimedia presentations or humorous anecdotes. In “A Bloom for No Seasons,” Fritz Senn, Patron of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, described how Bloom is often defined by what he does not do—in “Cyclops,” for instance, he passes up the drinks and opts instead for a cigar. Here Fritz related a corollary story: an Irishman once asked a Swiss man, “Can I get you a drink?” “No thanks,” the Swiss replied. “I’ve already had one.” Just as the fictional Bloom and his modern-day Swiss counterpart fall short of Irish drinking expectations, so Bloom also refrains from...

A Writer’s Prowess

Page 19 September–October 2009 even that is too slight to matter. Lush as Blackwood’s descriptions of the urban landscape are, they are geographically ambiguous. What finally emerges from this writer’s muchtouted second volume of fiction is a series of connected but negligible events that ultimately have a profound impact on fairly unremarkable people. The intensity of their emotional reactions to these incidents makes for an interesting study in the human psyche; but short as it is and lyrical as Blackwood’s prose often is, by the end, things become mundane. Even after multiple readings, it’s not entirely clear which have actually taken place and which are part of dreams and fantasies, how, if at all, the characters and their relationships have been changed by the experiences , or what, if anything, they’ve learned. That Scott Blackwood is a talented wordsmith is beyond question. There is a sense of taut workmanship and linguistic power in almost every line of the book. Yet, by the end of the volume, it’s hard not to believe that the novel is more about the writer’s prowess than it is about his story. The short, tight chapters reveal situations where causes have no earthly effects and effects reveal themselves without temporal causes. Characters circle around one another like so many clouds in a hot summer sky, occasionally touching, but insensible to one another’s presence. What’s wanted is a thunderhead, a climactic storm to bring everything together. The book is overworked, too “writerly” to make for anything more than a literary curiosity. One can hope that more fiction will emerge from Blackwood’s keyboard, but before he sets his hand to that, one can also hope that he will find a story to tell and will gather some sense of a place and the people who occupy it. Clay Reynolds is Professor of Arts & Humanities and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. A writer and scholar, his most recent work of fiction is Sandhill County Lines. A Writer’s Prowess Clay Reynolds We Agreed to Meet Just Here Scott Blackwood New Issues http://www.wmich.edu/newissues 164 pages; cloth, $26.00 Scott Blackwood’sAWPAward-winning novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, will disappoint readers who expect fiction to provide a plot or characterization or theme. Apparently subscribing to what any number of people have come to call “The NewYorker school” of fiction, a post-postmodernistic trend that seems, too often, to make the work greater than the sum of its parts, Blackwood dives into this slender story of American suburban life in medias res; he emerges on the other side more or less in the same place after having shown very little and told a great deal, most of which isn’t important. Nothing actually happens that is of much interest, and much of it isn’t real. Subscribing to another contemporary trend that virtually demands that fiction contain multiple dream sequences and illusions (what most American writers mistakenly think is “magic realism”), he weaves the fantastic with the actual so tightly that in many places, they can’t be separated. Probably nothing is more dangerous for a writer to include in a novel than a dream or hallucination detailed at length. If it’s more compelling than the main story, then the return tends to be a letdown; if it’s less interesting, then it’s a tedious departure, since it’s not part of the novel’s fictional reality. Too often, it’s merely authorial self-indulgence, and it must be handled with care. Charles Dickens pulled it off with panache—once. In lesser works, it almost always falls flat, sends the reader hurrying along, skimming to get back to the main plot. Of course, if there is no main plot, that’s another problem. What Blackwood’s novel does accomplish very well is an in-depth commentary on middle-class angst, most of which is internalized. The reader is exposed to all flavors of personal guilt: parental, spousal, professional. But there is no atonement, or at least none that occurs on the page. In the course of the story...

Nahmanides and Rashi on the One Flesh of Conjugal Union: Lovemaking vs. Duty

The seminal thirteenth century Geronese kabbalist, Talmudist, and exegete Moses Nahmanides (Moses b. Naḥman, 1194–c.1270) perceived the physical world as a mirror for the internal workings of the divine world. For him the Bible “relates about the lower matters and alludes to the upper,”1 rendering its apparently mundane legal, historical, and ethical dimensions a record of the inner variegated life of God. At the very inception of the world, each and every day of creation transcends its strict temporality, referring “at the inner core of the matter” () to the “sefirot which emanate from above.”2 The world's genesis unfolds along the parallel planes of the material world and the complex intradeical mechanics, the sefirot—a staple of kabbalistic thought and terminology—that are constituent of God himself. However, Nahmanides' exegetical project does not invite the escapist flight from reality that mysticism so often requires. On the contrary, his thoroughgoing kabbalistic ontology divulges a keen appreciation for and preoccupation with empirical reality and temporal history rather than threatening to overwhelm the mundane. His biblical exegesis has been characterized as exceptional within its genre for being “entirely free of the frequent kabbalistic tendency to devalue peshat [the plain sense of the text].”3 As David Novak has argued, Nahmanides, despite his kabbalistic theology, “also finds in the Torah a commitment to the reality of nature and history, even if that level of truth is transcended by the Kabbalah. Kabbalah, the highest truth, does not displace all other truths but puts them in perspective.”4 The argument that ensues in this article will demonstrate, firstly, that a prominent example of this feature of Nahmanidean exegesis pertains to the domain of interhuman relations. Here I will focus particularly on those “truths” his exegesis discloses about the spousal relationship. Secondly, Nahmanides' view of the spousal relationship is offered as paradigmatic of his kabbalistic theology, which not only does not displace its concrete social, psychological, anthropological, and juristic realia, but actually complements them. Thirdly, the case will be made that Nahmanides' narrative exegesis, with its overarching quest for the plain sense of the text, is not intended simply to sate his readers' intellectual and literary curiosity but also practically shapes his normative positions. In this particular context I will explore how his exegetical construct of a primordial composite human being, its gendered bifurcation, the definitive ideal of spousal union, the subsequent relational tensions between man and woman, and their conflict and resolution into a gendered hierarchy, all dramatized by the Garden of Eden narrative, inform his normative framework for the conduct of conjugal duties.