Literary Exposition Research Articles

An Epidemic of Apathy: Abulia and the Language of Pathology in Baroja’s Early Fiction

ABSTRACT: The literary exposition of abulia in Pío Baroja’s early novels, especially La lucha por la vida trilogy, illuminates the ways in which diagnostic language from psychopathology was adapted, assimilated, and disseminated through the trajectories of fictional characters who suffer from a loss of volition. This article analyzes cultural narratives about abulia in Baroja’s early fiction, demonstrating that they constitute a resonant pathological metaphor during a period in Spain’s history defined by national introspection and regenerationist debates. By tracing metaphorical explanations for social, political, and economic circumstances conveyed through the literary appropriation of medical terminology, this study explores comparisons between abulia and the gendered and class-based associations of neurasthenia at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the assumed causes of each condition are different, this process of transposition between medicine and metaphor anticipates the contemporary social, cultural, and ideological shaping of concepts such as stress and burnout.

A Special Issue on Contemporary Veteran Voices: A Literary Exposition of the Human Experience in Military Service and War

A Special Issue on Contemporary Veteran Voices: A Literary Exposition of the Human Experience in Military Service and War

THE FRAMEWORK OF NEOCOLONIAL RUDIMENTS IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S ANTHILLS OF SAVANNAH

Literature is observed as a serious and systematic mechanism to manuscript the tranquilities of human endeavours. The diversified domain of Africa is superlatively known for culture, rituals, heritage, tradition and wild life. These diversities have become the integral element of common folk who inhabit and experience the predicaments of African humanity. Most of the nations in African continent are under the silhouette of colonial inheritance even after attaining sovereignty. The literature of Africa has been instrumental in documenting the transformations perceived at different altitudes. It unlocks an option for authors to embody the boons and banes of African citizens. Writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Ngozi Aichie and Chinua Achebe have focused on both the abstract and concrete rudiments of African social order.Chinua Achebe is clinical and influential in typifying the standards of African civilization. He is embarked as a literary figure that represents the African verve in a lucid and sober manner. His literary exposition Anthills of Savannah (1987) traces the life of colonized populace in Africa. With the consequence of colonization, both the individuals and homeland have lost the dignity and integrity. The novelist tries to reclaim the lost dignity for the betterment of Africa through this literary description. But the political leaders fail to restore the dignity of Kangan in Africa. In turn they continue to exist as the substance of white colonizers. The period after colonialism is called ‘Postcolonialism’ and it is also termed as ‘Neocolonialism’. Hence, the research paper makes an attempt to study the framework of neoclassical rudiments in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of Savannah within the obtainable charter.

Narrer la Négritude de façon transmédiale : le cas du rappeur Youssoupha

French rap music provides an original contribution to literary exposition, redefinition and re-adaptation. As a postcolonial product, rap music rehabilitates the memory of an often forgotten colonial past and offers a new transdisciplinary and post-colonial perspective on contemporary French society. Through his music, French-Congolese rapper Youssoupha enters into dialogue with French Martinican poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature. Through the analysis of the albums Sur les chemins du retour (2007), Noir D**** (2012) and NGRTD (2015), the purpose of the present study is to investigate how Youssoupha unfolds and actualizes Césaire’s works and the concept of Négritude across multiple media channels.

OOСОБЛИВОСТІ МУЗИЧНОЇ ПОЕТИКИ КРИМСЬКОТАТАРСЬКОЇ НАРОДНОЇ ЕМІГРАНТСЬКОЇ ПІСНІ «AЙТЫР ДА АГЪЛАРЫМ» («CКАЖУ ТА Й ПЛАЧУ»)

Scientific studies of Crimean Tatar folklore, in particular emigrant songs, began in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Important contributions to this research were made by suchfolklorists as O. Olesnitsky, Ya. Sherfedinov, A. Refatov, Yu. Bolat, Ibr. Bachshish, F. Aliev, A. Veliev. However, the artistic world of Crimean Tatars’ national emigration song has notbeen studied thoroughly until now. The song “I’d say and cry” (“Aityr da aglarym”) occupies an exceptional place in CrimeanTatars’ emigrant folklore. It includes the motifs of a bitter farewell with native land, anxious marine trip, disasters in distant country. This song is peculiar by its strophe structure and rhythm. A title that comes from short refrain line reminds a piercing exclamation. Intensifying particle da gives the special resiliency. This intensifying particle can be consideredas particle among particle, rather as an exclamation among exclamation, because a refrain line plays the same intensifying role between other song lines, where another exclamation(“ei yar”) also appears. Such atypical verse form underlines intonational, figurative, narrative strokes of lyrical expression. Combination of them helps to depict the striking pictureof human suffering. This composition is not only sufficiently old, and is widespread. Its different variants according to toponyms, that appears in them (from Yevpatoria to Kerch),and belong the dialectal features of literary text to the different Crimean region. The long chants (singings of one sound), which are typical of oriental musical poetics, play an important role in the art system of this song. We can say this also about pauses, stops, detentions and prolonging of notes, which sound similar to moaning and groaning, thereby expressing such human distresses as inexorable solitude and an impossibility to returning to something light and sweet, which belongs to past. The means of musical expressiveness of this song effectively support the literary exposition. They strengthen the lyrical anxiety and dramatic depth of the folk text.

The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties

The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron:A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman Appreciation by Ronald Egan New Appreciation Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman, "The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the History of Flowering-Plum Imagery in the Song and Yuan Dynasties," JSYS 26 (1996): 1–54. It is good to be reminded that history exists and even that it matters. In the case of Chinese cultural history, because the time span is so long and the native reverence for the past is so strong, historical change may be difficult to spot. Genuine innovation is often packaged as a "return to ancient times." The situation is further complicated by the persistence of the practice of forging artifacts that claim to be from centuries earlier but actually embody the values and tastes of their own later time. Insight into a case involving emergent aesthetic values superimposed upon dubious older chronology is one of the contributions made by this lengthy article by Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman. An elaborate literary exposition, a fu 賦 on the flowering plum, which is attributed to the Tang figure Song Jing 宋璟 (663–737), is shown to embody elements that are inconsistent with literary work of his time and suggest a much later date, that of the twelfth or thirteenth century, a period that happens to coincide with a new vogue of enthusiasm for the flowering plum in poetry and painting. There are technical components of this new understanding of the real date of Song Jing's fu (e.g., the rhyme scheme in the piece does not match eighth-century practice). But what is of greater interest for historians of culture and aesthetics is that the qualities for which the pseudo-Song Jing poem celebrates the plum blossom—delicate sensual beauty combined, surprisingly enough, with tenacity and a "heart of iron"—is at odds with early Tang writings about the flower but is a fine match with those in the Southern Song. The Song period fervor among literati for the plum blossom (sometimes called a cult) manifested itself as much in painting as it did in poetry, and the later part of the article delves into the images and aesthetics of plum blossom painting, explaining their underlying values, as it follows the fame of Song Jing and the plum blossom associated with him through the late Southern Song and into the Yuan. This is the other major contribution of this article, its demonstration of the advantages of bringing specialists in the two fields together (Bickford in painting, Hartman in poetry) to examine such cultural [End Page 33] phenomena. As we know, many literati in the Song and later periods of Chinese history were conversant in both of those fields and moved back and forth readily between them, as producers and critics. Today, our training in Chinese studies tends to draw a sharp division between literary and art historical acumen. Few of us are qualified to undertake studies of this kind that benefit from looking across that division. This situation is not likely to change any time soon. This study, then, may serve as a model for future collaborative research projects by literary and art historians. The article evinces prodigious learning in the original materials (textual and pictorial), close reading of difficult poems and meticulous translation, a keen eye for dubious claims about textual provenance, and above all a deep understanding of the rather peculiar aesthetic associated with the flowering plum in nature and, even more, in the arts that matured during the Southern Song and lived on thereafter. ronald egan stanford university [End Page 34] Among the most striking features of Chinese artistic expression is the incessant manipulation of a limited set of rhetorical epithets—fixed adjectives, metaphors, conceits, allusions—to describe the same topic. As early as the Six Dynasties period, literary handbooks and encyclopedias collected descriptive snippets and arranged them under the appropriate related themes. Both inspired and insipid writers drew upon these rhetorical stocks to compose the relentless stream of text that now comprises the canon of traditional Chinese literature, especially poetry. So too...

On Some Possible Explanations for the Continuing Denial of the Existence of Keynes’s IS-LM Model in Section 4 of Chapter 21 of the General Theory: Propaganda (from Joan Robinson), Ignorance (of the Keynes-Harrod Correspondence in Volume 13 Of the CWJMK in Late 1935), Anchoring (on Keynes’s Mention of Robinson’s Name in the Preface to the General Theory), Groupthink, and Cognitive

On Some Possible Explanations for the Continuing Denial of the Existence of Keynes’s IS-LM Model in Section 4 of Chapter 21 of the General Theory: Propaganda (from Joan Robinson), Ignorance (of the Keynes-Harrod Correspondence in Volume 13 Of the CWJMK in Late 1935), Anchoring (on Keynes’s Mention of Robinson’s Name in the Preface to the General Theory), Groupthink, and Cognitive

On the Style Used by Keynes in Presenting His IS-LM(LP) Model in Chapter 21 of the General Theory: Literary Prose, Formal Mathematics or Both?

Keynes’s style in presenting his technical analysis in the General Theory was not purely mathematical or purely literary. It was a blend of both. This is especially the case when Keynes decided to bring all of the elements in his IS-LM(LP) model together in section four of chapter 21 of the General Theory after he had gone over the underlying D-Z model in chapter 20 of the General Theory. Keynes incorporated uncertainty and expectations within the theory of purely competitive firms in his D-Z model. Keynes deployed the standard, technical exposition of the goal of (expected) profit maximization using the necessary and sufficient first and second order marginal conditions. This allowed Keynes to derive his Aggregate Supply Curve, a locus of all expected D and Expected Z outcomes that represents a set of multiple equilibria. Keynes’s IS-LM(LP) model of chapter 21 DOES NOT deal with uncertainty and expectations, although Keynes does show how to do so within the context of chapter 20 when he extends his D-Z model of chapter 20 on pp.304-306 of chapter 21 to incorporate the LM curve in his elasticity analysis dealing with the elasticity ed. There are NOT two different competing models in the General Theory, since the IS-LM(LP) model in chapter 21 is built on the foundation of the D-Z model chapter 20. Keynes’s style of presentation has created a great deal of difficulty for economists looking for either a purely mathematical exposition or looking for a purely Marshallian, literary exposition. In fact, Keynes blends both together. Mainstream economists, like Dimand, Young, Hoover, de Vroey, and Rubin, claim that there was no IS-LM model in the GT. They agree with the Post Keynesian school. Their differences with the Post Keynesian position is that they claim that it was Hicks, Harrod, Meade, or Lange, or some combination of the four, who tediously gathered all of the scattered parts of Keynes’s verbal, literary, prose, non formal, non mathematical, Marshallian analysis from the GT and created the IS-LM model in 1937. It is unclear to this author how these types of “interpretations” were ever taken seriously by the economics profession. Keynes’s mathematical constructions supporting the three elements listed on pp.298-299 are in the GT explicitly on p.115, p.137 and p.199. It is unclear to me how Keynes’s system of equations was supposedly strewn throughout the GT for Hicks, Harrod, Meade, and Lange to dig out and reconstitute. What exactly is being reconstituted by Hicks, Harrod, Meade and Lange?

“But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James

“But Their Faces Were All Looking Up”: Author and Reader in the Protevangelium of James

“You’re going to make us all happy”: Orientalist appropriations of the Berber woman in Richard Powers’s Generosity

ABSTRACTRichard Powers’s 2009 novel, Generosity: An Enhancement frequently has been read as a literary exposition of the mechanism by which post-industrial consumer culture seizes upon science to create and devour its own images of happiness. What has so far remained largely unexamined are the ways in which the novel’s depictions of its Algerian female protagonist provide a subtle form of cultural criticism that enacts the Occident’s longstanding appropriation of the Orient in contemporary times. Inverting the plot but adopting the tenor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelogues, Powers’s Generosity makes its characters as well as its readers complicit in the Western world’s ongoing Orientalist project by taking them on a quest to decode and take possession of the secret of happiness that U.S. American culture projects onto the body of a young Algerian refugee women.

Литературные музеи России: генезис и эволюция

The retrospective analysis of the museums and ways of its evolutionary formation has allowed to define time of its origin and to allocate four periods in history of their development as cultural institution. Approaches to a solution of the problem of correlation between original and typological in a literary exposition are revealed. The literary museum acts as a mode of the concrete historical period culture, and therefore is considered in the context of transformations of literary heritage preservation and representation models

Literary analysis and exposition: The second language reader-writer

Literary analysis and exposition: The second language reader-writer

Striving Beyond a Healthy Development: An Insight from Indian Wisdom

Attempts to explore and explain the basic nature of human beings in terms of development can be traced back far beyond the origin of modern psychology. The ancient Indian scriptures are, in fact, full of psychological knowledge in all aspects with much deep-rooted and sound philosophical background. Many have made attempts to translate this ancient knowledge into a form acceptable to modern psychology. But still much of the ancient spiritual literature has to be studied and interpreted to uncover many hidden psychological concepts that are much deeper in meaning as well as relevance than what Western psychology has gifted to the world in this modern time. The ancient Indian scriptures, philosophical literature, astrological–astronomical literature and medical literature, in essence, are the reservoir of the knowledge concerning human nature and holistic development. Literary exposition towards development can be found in Indian philosophical systems such as Vaises. ika, Nyaya, Sāmkhya, Yoga, Mīmāmsā, Vedānta and the medical systems given by Charaka and Suśruta. The present article is an attempt to review the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali in the strict psychological sense so that it could be helpful in re-establishing guidelines not only for all-round healthy development but to strive beyond—for kaivalya.

A Literary Exposition of the Sources of Arabic Proverbs

Proverbs excited the interest of the learned right from the inception of Arabic literature; historians and philologists vied with one another in collecting and explaining them. Indeed, to their works this generation owe most of the legendary and historical materials. This paper, therefore, examines the main sources of Arabic proverbs vis-a-vis the Qur’an, the hadith of the Prophet (PHOH) and the gamut of Arabic literature, with a view to establishing their literary worth and values. It argues that familiarity with the background of the proverbial expressions is very essential to comprehension since a number of them are so tied to the stories and tales behind them.

Erfahrung ohne Erfahrenden

This article examines the limits of Heidegger’s ontological description of emotionality from the period of Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik along the lines outlined by Lévinas in his early work De l’existence à l’existant. On the basis of the Lévinassian concept of “il y a”, we attempt to map the sphere of the impersonal existence situated out of the structured context of the world. However the worldless facticity without individuality marks the limits of the phenomenological approach to human existence and its emotionality, it also opens a new view on the beginning and ending of the individual existence. The whole structure of the individual existence in its contingency and finitude appears here in a new light, which applies also to the temporal conditions of existence. Yet, this is not to say that Heidegger should be simply replaced by Lévinas. As shows an examination of the work of art, to which brings us our reading of Moravia’s literary exposition of boredom (the phenomenon closely examined in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), the view on the work of art that is entirely based on the anonymous and worldless facticity of il y a must be extended and complemented by the moment in which a new world and a new individual structure of experience are being born. To comprehend the dynamism of the work of art in its fullness, it is necessary to see it not only as an ending of the world and the correlative intentional structure of the individual existence, but also as their new beginning.

Discriminating political styles as genres: A corpus study exploring Hariman's theory of political style

Five years apart, Hariman (1995) and Fairclough (2000) produced major theoretical statements about political language and style. Their work grew out of different intellectual traditions and took on different subject matters. Hariman, drawing on the textual criticism model of American rhetorical studies, defined style as a cultural repertoire of persuasive techniques that can work across texts, media, institutions, and other modes of communication. He analyzed four major styles—realist, republican, courtly, and bureaucratic—that have had significant literary exposition and political effect. Fairclough, writing from the tradition of critical discourse analysis, focused more narrowly on the political style of Tony Blair and New Labour, and studied whether New Labour represented an emergent new language distinct from older instantiations of Labour Party rhetoric. Important for this analysis is Fairclough's distinction between political style and genre, which motivated a methodology combining theoretical analysis and corpus analysis. We show how the same combination of methods can illuminate Hariman's theory, particularly in respect to the problem its theoretical sophistication presents for application through close reading of individual texts. The corpus study validates or refines many of Hariman's central claims, and provides one model for better coordination of two important programs of research on political discourse.

Excerpts from the initial stanzas of The Oziad

Excerpts from the initial stanzas of The Oziad Gregory Maguire (bio) The Oziad is the literary exposition of Oz's origin myths. Its author, though thought to have remained anonymous by choice, has been cautiously identified by modern scholars as Pellam Groondy, a marketplace scribe exiled for blasphemy from the unionist monasteries that became, in time, Shiz University. Though its literary style is more reminiscent of the salon than of the hearthside, the epic reconciles ancient Gillikenese and Munchkinlander legends from the oral tradition about the history of Early Oz. The Oziad draws together in a single narrative arc several contradictory foundation stories about the creation of Oz. The invention supplies us with the earliest written explanation for the presence in Oz of its human inhabitants as well as its Animal and animal populations. Among other philosophic enquiries, it offers a symbolist explanation of the arrival of evil in Oz's "land of green abandon, land in endless leaf." Before the storm arrives, before the windThat rakes the sour heavens north to westMakes its argument against our kind,I stake the right to sing against the wind. The valleys moan in river-throated voices. The forests shake their fingers in remorse. The hills that hunch their shoulders in aversion Cannot quell the swell of windy voices.In the airy chorus that advances, [End Page 5] Brooms of anger sweeping down the sky, My voice is bent, bereft of future tenses, Incompetent against the gale's advances. Still the voice will spill, the story tell Of Oz's ancient days and hero days. If none to hear it, none shall hear it well, Told well until the poet's voice is still. Behold the floor of rhymeless rock, where timeLies sleeping in a cave, a seamless deepAnd dreamless sleep, unpatterned darkWithin, without. Time is a reddened dragon. The claws refuse to clench, though they are made, Are always made in readiness to strike The rock, and spark the flint. Then to ignite The mouth of time that, hungry for a mealWill chew and swallow all our tattered daysAs well as those inhabited by menMore vivid than we now can ever be,Because they were the first to ache, and thrive. Time's dragon nuzzles at its dragon chin. Amnesia steams through its copper lungs. Its blood the juice of emeralds, uncongealed. Because as yet unwounded, yet unhealed. The world begins by tiniest of strokes,Significance a later, sadder goal.The dazzle of a burning sky at night,When salty stars will polka and gavotte, Is not an origin, but a result. The orange rolls; a hand must push it first. Will is the smallest indivisible muscle. Will is a spider willing itself to skitchSexless, childless, thoughtless, on the spineOf time: the dragon in its cave. The itchProvokes a stretch, the stretch provokes a scratchOf golden dragon claws against the cave, [End Page 6] Against the nameless rock, provokes the burstOf whitened sulfur spark! The fuse is lit!The dragon's furnace starts to roar and rideAnd time, being dreamt within, begins outside. The world rehearses in its bloody birthThe wrenching throes by which it plans to die.On turning plates of earth, the uncertain hillsRock; and rocks the yet unsettled plinth. The sky is thrown in waves, one on the next, Accumulating breadth in crushed proximity, One night atop the next, a history's worth Of shadows to rise and set beyond the earth.The tablelands adhere, and slip, and stick.The flatlands crawl in fear upon their sex.The wetlands sink as if to drown their sex.And all the sensate forms of land contract. The dragon dreams of isolates space. . . The sky aloof in ribs of starry black, The earth below, ashamed in naked stone, Bereft, unsuckled, cold, inert, alone. Beneath the deepest fundamental graniteIn a pocket sultry with intentRolls the moon in need; she comes and goes,An ailing, uncorrupted virgin eye. She sees no more than what she sees: An appetite for seeing more arises. So she calls the dragon, who arises, Dreaming peerlessly the endless while.On his...

An Interpretation of the Occult Symbolism in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Much of the extensive scholarly criticism on The Master and Margarita has focused on Bulgakov's 'cosmology' and how the events of the novel can be seen as a mirror of his world view. In particular, The Master and Margarita is often seen as a literary exposition of a Gnostic outlook. The overwhelming tendency of many studies is to look for a 'key' which can unlock the riddles in the novel and answer some of the more difficult questions pertaining to developments in the plot. This often means that the book is approached from the outside. In contrast, I have tried to look at it from the inside out, and ask how the imagery and symbolism in the book can help answer some of these questions and reveal clues as to Bulgakov's intentions and world view. The fact that much of the symbolism in the book is drawn from Goethe, witchcraft and black magic has been noted — but not that this occult symbolism runs much deeper to include, for example, Masonic and alchemical motifs. As well as exposing this particular layer of symbolism, I have examined how it points to Bulgakov's belief in the importance and need of a spiritual 're-birth' both for individuals and for Russia itself; and that the secret to regeneration lies in the power of such an inner journey.

The Emergence of Mark Twain's Missouri: Regional Theory and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The contribution of regional criticism to studies of American literature and culture has been held back in our time by the assumption that the region enforces a very limiting provincialism upon its communities and, thus, its literary products. Such an assumption has emerged, perhaps understandably, in a cultural context in which the question of what constitutes a more universally American identity dominates thought nearly to the point of obsession. And yet there is a persistent sense that the individual region in the United States remains, somehow, a crucial unit of culture. Considering this issue in the most general spatial and cultural senses, the critic W. H. New points out that the very question whether authors can ever not be in space yields either absurd answers or openly political ones--political statements that constitute new definitions of the relation between spaces in a society (14). Regarding literature in particular, New writes: Defining the significance that particular spaces have for us, we parenthetically define or at least hint at our preconceptions about the significance of statements that will emerge from those given spaces, locales, regions. The of region, that is, contains within it a of total structure, and it is often the artifice and the emotional reality of this implied total structure that literature encodes. (14-15) This statement formulates the capacity of notions of region, the knowledge of specific geographic landscapes and their cultures, and the explicit and implicit significance in their eventual representative voices, to inform literary texts. What I will call a regional reading of any literary text, then, if it is to apprehend the region's hidden notion informing literature, will require an understanding of the region's intricacies, of the singularities of its moment and topology, and also, of course, of its emergence from and within a national context. The potential value of this method would seem to reside both in a literary exposition that reveals new meaning in the text and also, somewhat incidentally but not unimportantly, in a qualification of the strains of national criticism that have attempted to frame any previous understanding of the literature. In an American context, the national model of empire follows its own peculiar, profoundly complex set of relations within its national borders. And in this setting k seems that the region, either in seeking to reproduce the national model on a smaller scale or in fashioning itself in some other way, cannot avoid, at some point, a confrontation with that complexity, and the realization that America's tangled national history and culture constitute a great measure of its inheritance, for better or for worse. It may be instructive in this connection to note that even the region's attempt to claim some kind of authentic identity apart from the nation personifies exactly that paradoxically individualistic quality of the American national character. Perhaps attention to a specific literary product, and to its grounding in a particular American regional context, will make this kind of complexity clearer. And since a highly suspicious reactionary motive has often motivated the tendency to retreat from nation to region, it is probably safest to consider a literary text that has been universally acknowledged as an archetypally American model, as an undisputed and permanent member of the national literary canon, and as a work that transcends the presumably narrow provincial limits of the region and engages the presumably larger national themes and concerns. Perhaps no American book could be more exemplary under these criteria, or provide a better case study for this kind of regional reading, than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain's novel, of course, is widely considered to be a definitively American literary text. And yet, if the arguments of New and others are to be taken seriously, if the region does indeed offer a particular and appropriate critical framework for studies of literature, a regional reading of Huckleberry Finn should be productive and valuable in the context of any understanding of the novel (New 13). …

Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (review)

Book Reviews 155 not? That a general index would have been ofhelp to any. reader of this at least partly successful attempt to arouse renewed interest in an all-but-forgotten yet for his time not uncharacteristic and indeed quite popular Jewish musician goes without saying. Admittedly, Hartmut Wecker recognizes the need for considerably more detailed studies. But even this, his fmal statement, is marred by his fatefully global conceptions. For what he has in mind is conclusive clarification as to whether the social and political factors he believes to have been so crucial for his hero's life and work did actually affect "all Jewish composers of the emancipation and assimilation period in Central Europe." Would that the Jewish diaspora experience were that simple! Alexander L. Ringer School of Music University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, by David Sorkin. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996. 214 pp. $40.00. I remember when I first heard of Moses Mendelssohn. It was in the kitchen of my mother's apartment in Germany where I had switched on the radio in the middle of some kind of literary reading. I did not recognize the author nor had I any sense of his philosophical or religious agenda. What riveted me was the beauty ofthe words and the serene progress of the prose. As it turned out, the reading had been from Morgenstunden (Morning Hours), the work David Sorkin deems "Mendelssohn's ... most sustained philosophical work" (p. 147). Since this first encounter with the German "Socrates" ofthe Berlin Enlightenment ofthe late eighteenth century I have been going through various phases ofenchantment and disenchantment with Mendelssohn. David Sorkin has produced a new study of this seminal figure in modem Jewish thought and history which promises to shed new light on an old problem. Mendelssohn, a typical . figure of a period of transition, is hard to pin down. How much of his work must be understood as a contribution to the philosophical movement of Enlightenment, how much of it should be read as a genuine and authentic contribution to modem Jewish thought? Sorkin's answer is Solomonic. As a rigorous historian, he locates Mendelssohn in the context ofa "religious Enlightenment," paralleled in other religious movements of the time (Protestant, Catholic), that sought a fertile compromise between the Enlightenment ideal of clear and distinct use of reason and language on the one hand and the historical religious tradition on the other. Mendelssohn further appears as an important sociological link between Enlightenment as a phenomenon represented by 156 SHOFAR Fa111997 Vol. 16, No.1 individuals and Enlightenment as a movement involving schools, journals, and whole groups of individuals promoting (in this case) Haskalah on the popular level. I always understood Mendelssohn's Hebrew works as a means by which he thought to promote the truths of the Enlightenment among his Jewish contemporaries. For example, as Sorkin amply documents, Mendelssohn's emphasis on studying Hebrew grammar thorougWy instead ofhaphazardly, or his focusing on biblical texts rather than on the Talmud, indicate the predilections ofsomeone who wishes to educate his fellow Jews in ways conducive to the development of knowledge and skills useful to an enlightened citizen of the world. An even more striking case is Mendelssohn's promotion of "proper" German among the Jews of his time. So far there is nothing novel to Sorkin's careful and well documented introduction to Mendelssohn's Hebrew writings. Yet Sorkin seems to want to persuade us that Mendelssohn's familiarity with Jewish sources and his use ofsuch traditional forms of literary exposition as commentary make Mendelssohn a more authentic Jew than has been hitherto assumed. Assumed by whom, I ask myself. Another such somewhat puzzling claim, reiterated with a certain monotony at every possible juncture, is that Mendelssohn revived the "Andalusian tradition of Jewish thought" (mentioned no less than 14 times in 155 pages, usually in strategic places). This school of thought, according to Sorkin, consists mainly of Jehuda ha Levi, and Mendelssohn's connection to this eleventh/twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish thinker seems to exhaust itself in certain similarities that are never fully explored by Sorkin. It is difficult to shed one's suspicion that...