Writings Of Men Research Articles

Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater, and: The Framers' Intentions: The Myth of the Nonpartisan Constitution by Robert E. Ross

Reviewed by: Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater, and: The Framers' Intentions: The Myth of the Nonpartisan Constitution by Robert E. Ross Lorri Glover (bio) Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution. By Jeff Broadwater. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Cloth, $30.00.) The Framers' Intentions: The Myth of the Nonpartisan Constitution. By Robert E. Ross. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. 282. Cloth, $50.00.) Amid the spiraling political chaos that defined 2017–2019, Americans found themselves living though a seminar on the U.S. Constitution. Some days the topic was familiar-sounding if not fully or easily comprehended: impeachment, for example, or the separation of powers. Other days brought revelations. The 25th amendment, it turns out, has a very important Section 4. Many Americans heard for the first time about the previously archaic but suddenly relevant "emoluments" clause. The learning curve has been steep and made more challenging by the popular seduction of "originalism." Besides that folly, there has been a surfeit of mendacity. The pressures on our framework of government grew so intense that learned and measured people—historians, constitutional scholars, journalists, diplomats, and political scientists—judiciously began to warn the public of looming constitutional crises. Where it all will end, and how much longer the governmental design conceived 233 years ago will endure, is anyone's guess. Revisiting where it all began offers some insights and, if one squints, a bit of comfort. In Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution, Jeff Broadwater tells a complicated story with clarity and elegance. He weaves together the personal experiences and intellectual journeys of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to reveal strong connections between the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Jefferson/Madison vision for the federal government in action, which Broadwater calls small-government nationalism. Broadwater emphasizes evolving consistency: Jefferson and Madison are always learning and adjusting but never abandoning their fundamental convictions about just government. Broadwater presents sophisticated and clear analyses of the two men's writings that scholars would expect, including Jefferson's "Summary View of the Rights of British America" (1774); Madison's "Vices of the [End Page 561] Political System of the United States" (1787); their joint work on disestablishment in Virginia; and their long correspondence on constitutional matters. Broadwater also finds space to discuss the impact of the two lifelong friends' shared Virginia background, Jefferson's family troubles and his international travels, Madison's hypochondria and his frustrations in the Confederation Congress and the Virginia legislature, and how they interacted with and were influenced by other leading members of the founding generation. It is an impressive writing feat. There are, understandably, challenges to the design of the work. Jefferson figures more prominently in the early parts of the book. Broadwater tries to keep him in focus through the ratification of the Bill of Rights, but this grows strained in places, most noticeably in the sections focused on 1787–1789. Then, of course, the story centers on Madison, and Jefferson is absent or reactive and generally less influential than Broadwater suggests. Throughout the book, Broadwater skillfully reveals for the reader the myriad specific influences that culminated in Madison's various innovations in the Constitution. Madison's struggles with Patrick Henry in the Virginia legislature and the persistent parochialism he endured in the Confederation Congress shaped his views on representation. Efforts at creating a constitution for Virginia influenced his vision of ratification. Searching for a plan for Kentucky propelled his convictions about western lands. Broadwater mines to particularly strong effect Madison's advice to his former Princeton classmate Caleb Wallace regarding Kentucky statehood. While Broadwater explains Jefferson and Madison's interactions with a host of contemporaries—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Randolph—there is less of George Washington than one might expect. Washington is mentioned only once in the chapter on the 1787 Philadelphia convention; while Washington's practical contributions were minimal, his friendship with Madison and his influence across the country mattered deeply. Such quibbles aside, Broadwater brilliantly balances familiar stories with fresh ideas. He knows just when to use a brisk pace...

De Man's Negativity

De Man's Negativity Lee Edelman (bio) Of the many questions for which we might turn to Paul de Man's writings for guidance or insight, "What is an erection?" probably doesn't rank among the top ten. But in "Kant's Materialism," a preliminary version of "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," de Man observes that "erection… is likely to be anything but what one—or should I say men?—think(s) it to be" and then, still focused on erection, de Man asks: "What is it for Kant?" (1996b, 126). Stranger still, in seeking an answer, de Man locates, as he puts it, "a hint" in the following much-discussed passage from section 29 of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: If we call sublime the sight of a star-studded sky, we must not base this judgment on a notion of the stars as worlds inhabited by rational beings, in which the luminous points are their suns, moving purposefully and for their benefit. We must instead consider the sky as we see it, as a wide vault that contains everything. This is the only way to conceive of the sublime as the source of pure aesthetic judgment. The same is true of the sea: we must not look upon the ocean with the enriching knowledge that makes us conceive it as, for example, the vast habitat of nautical animals, or as the water supply from which, by evaporation and for the benefit of the land, clouds are being seeded, or even as an element that keeps continents apart, yet enables communication between them. All these are teleological judgments. Instead, one must see the ocean as poets do, as the eye seems to perceive it, as a transparent mirror when it is at peace, circumscribed only by the sky, and, when it is in motion, as an abyss that threatens to swallow up everything. (qtd. in de Man 1996b, 126) If this hints at what erection is for Kant, then erection is indeed quite far from what one "think(s) it to be"; for the hint consists, according to de Man, in "tell[ing] us how to look at the sublime, how to read judiciously, like the poets" (126). Whether or not the sublime as such can be "looked at" will be subject to doubt, but the problem of reading judiciously will dominate not only the content of the passage from Kant, but also, in de Man's analysis, how that passage itself gets read. Encapsulating in its "purest form" (126) Kant's architectonic vision, these lines, as de Man will write later in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," [End Page 471] invoke a perspective that is "purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication," while also, and, to the same extent, "purely formal, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics" (1996c, 83). Such an optics returns us to the problematic of looking at the sublime, of treating it as an entity, but the question of looking gets framed as an injudiciousness of reading, one that, as it happens, characterizes the larger tradition of interpreting this very passage from Kant. That tradition, as de Man goes on to note in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," "has seen only this one, figural, and…'romantic' aspect" of Kant's theory of the imagination "and has entirely overlooked what we call the material aspect" (83); when it comes to Kant's account of how poets read, Kant, de Man argues, has himself been read as a particular type of poet: like the Wordsworth of The Prelude, for example, or the Baudelaire of "Le Voyage." In "Kant's Materialism," however, de Man frames such misreadings in terms that invoke the very geometrization of optics at issue for Kant in the poet's vision; referring to traditional interpretations of Kant de Man writes that "a misguided imagination, distorted by the conception of romantic imagery, runs the risk of setting the passage awry" (1996b, 126). The distortion that risks setting the passage awry takes the form of an anamorphosis, the geometral mutation of optical perspective that Slavoj Zizek, borrowing from Richard II, refers to with his...

Afterword: Re-Inscribing de Man

Afterword:Re-Inscribing de Man Ian Balfour (bio) What is one to do with the writings and thinking of Paul de Man these days? We are now at a sufficient distance from the high-water mark of debates about "theory" as well as, more specifically, the period of deconstruction being a primary mode of literary, cultural, and philosophical analysis. The days of it being de rigeur to contend with are long gone too, though that is not to say that a good many of the issues and problems raised by deconstruction are a thing of the past. To some extent, many of the "lessons" and protocols, as even Stanley Fish once argued, were folded into practices of criticism not flying under a banner of "deconstruction," much less the non-existent entity of "deconstructionism." The querying of relations of form and history, the status of performative language, the stakes of rhetoric, and the force of discourse in the force-fields of difference are relatively alive and kicking. Whatever one's attitude to the work of Derrida, de Man, and others associated with the fragile term "deconstruction," their works remain of value to think with and through and against. We are also at a distance from the belated scandal of de Man's early collaborationist past and from the days, in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when graduate students and early-career teachers were tethered by lines of filiation to de Man and his direct influence. We are now in a good position, without a lot of brouhaha, to look at de Man's writings afresh and ask "What is to be done?" That entails achieving some sense of the status of de Manian readings and reading in themselves and in relation to pertinent others across the fields of criticism and theory, including formations of psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, postcolonial work, and critical race studies, to name just some dominant modes. This is a modest task but one that seems to require rather more modesty than at some moments in recent history. We are also well past the age of the (mainly French) maitre-penseurs (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Kristeva) and the succeeding generation of somewhat less masterful thinkers (Badiou, Rancière, Nancy), which is also to say the moment, especially in the former era, when so many paradigms were being shifted. The essays collected in a volume some years ago, Theory Aside, argued collectively for both the non-fetishization of a small number of uber-canonical thinkers and the lifting of the burden of theoretical-critical [End Page 483] work to be relentlessly paradigm-busting.1 This is not unrelated to the recent emphasis in literary theory, in the work of Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Saint-Amour and others, on "weak theory."2 It may well be that the work now done in relation to de Man will and should be conducted more in the mode of weak theory, which is not far from what de Man meant by reading, even if a good many of the pronouncements in the name of readings and reading by de Man were grand, absolute, or hyperbolic. Also on the agenda, I think, should be figuring out to what extent de Manian readings co-exist easily or uneasily with others addressing the same texts or bodies of texts. Does a de Manian reading challenge or undermine or simply take its place beside those others? Do those others challenge or undermine or just take their place beside de Man's or de Manian readings? It would stand to reason that de Man is hardly exempt from the law of blindness and insight he enunciated in his early work, and there could well be blind spots or lacunae of sorts not thematized by de Man. Not everyone can do everything, of course, not even the most dialectical or negatively dialectic of readers. But it would be good to have some synthetic sense of how such readings relate to each other, not least on the matter to which we will turn to in a moment, de Man's notion of materiality. It's not, I think, an accident that several of the essays collected here—essays...

Gendering the Planchette: Female Writer Qian Xi's (1872–1930) Spiritual World

Abstract Fuji (wielding the planchette, or spirit writing) was in vogue among Ming-Qing literati, and its influence extended into modern times. Existing studies focus on this popular divination itself or on men's writings related to this practice. This article, instead, explores the poetry and prose of a female writer, Qian Xi, and her writing activities associated with this divination. Qian claims that the spirits she communicated with include several female immortals and her deceased husband. Some of the questions the author explores are: What are the characteristics of Qian's writings? What inspired Qian to participate in spirit writing? What role did this practice play in Qian's life and writing? Regarding the emotions, thoughts, and works of Qian, what types of information can spirit writing and corresponding poetic and prosaic compositions provide? Instead of simplifying and disregarding the ritual of wielding the planchette as bizarre, superstitious, or even mad, the author argues that it played a meaningful role in shaping Qian's literary images and enhancing her literary productivity. More important, Qian Xi's strategies of using spirit writing to stimulate her literary creations was significant in meeting her emotional needs, highlighting her identity as a talented woman, and demonstrating the worth of her very existence.

Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions ed. by Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf (review)

Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions. Edited by Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 311. Cloth, $49.50.)Paine and Jefferson is a scholarly collection of essays on the profound role Thomas Paine played in developing the ideals of democratic revolution. While Paine is the principal focus of the essayists, a significant portion of the book also illuminates his relationship with Thomas Jefferson and their comparative, often overlapping, philosophies about human equality and the republican role of government. The editorial scheme for this pithy and enlightening book also sheds clearer light into their personal and political differences. This one-volume intellectual history is a welcome addition to scholarship that over the years has produced many disparate perspectives about Paine, portraying him as everything from progressive and liberal to conservative. Among modern authors, Jefferson, of course, has enjoyed far greater interest than his friend Paine.The book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with the radicalism of both men. It begins with Gordon Wood's deeply synthetic explication of the two men's shared sentiments and the different directions of their lives, with Paine maintaining an activist stance in response to the many convulsions in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Jefferson's political paths requiring more cautious public statements about matters like religion and revolution abroad. Francis Cogliano identifies their different visions for the new constitutional republic, with Jefferson working toward an agrarian- and Paine an urbancentered society. Their backgrounds no doubt contributed to separate visions, as the former emerged from rural Virginia and the latter from the metropolis of Georgian England. Unlike many previous authors, however, Cogliano argues that Jefferson's agrarianism was not regressive; to the contrary, his constitutional vision was in many ways as forwardlooking as Paine's.Although Paine enjoyed much popularity across the political spectrum until the mid-1790s, as Simon Newman points out, he came to be reviled by Federalists and some Republicans for his criticisms of organized Christianity and President George Washington. Newman's study is richly illustrated by primary sources and ceremonial toasts that display Paine's star through the French Revolution as well as his sharp decline in status. Jack Fruchtman, Jr.'s chapter turns outward, providing details from Paine's lesser-known writings on the desire to support revolutions overseas. Paine's formative experience at the time of the American Revolution prompted him to advocate for upheavals throughout Europe-indeed, for broad global change-so as to vindicate the universal rights of mankind.The French Revolution not only affected the evolution of Paine's views but Jefferson's as well. Both men understood equality within a representative democracy framework. As Armin Mattes demonstrates in his chapter, both men's writings during and after the French Revolution incorporated anti-aristocratic values into the legacy of the American Revolution; they thereby played a significant role in the U.S. shift from Federalist hierarchical politics, which John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had adopted. …

JOHN W. COAKLEY. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 354. $45.00 and JODI BILINKOFF. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 181. $45.00

In recent years, medieval and early modern female spirituality has burgeoned as a field of scholarly interest. John W. Coakley and Jodi Bilinkoff provide welcome additions to this lively critical conversation. Their books extend the discussion of a wide range of topics, including women's strategies for crafting religious authority, women's ascetic practices, forms of female mysticism, and conflicts between holy women and the ecclesiastical establishment. They also both address another set of important issues that has received comparatively little attention: the lives and perceptions of the male confessors so intimately involved in the careers of holy women, and the ways in which these male clerics' perspectives, self-conceptions, and desires shaped the forms of female holiness they created in their texts. Coakley's book covers the period from 1100 to 1400, featuring nine pairs of men and women chosen because each “man wrote about the woman in such a way as to include himself extensively” (p. 3). Coakley sets out to provide neither a comprehensive study of female holiness, nor an overarching account of the relationships between holy women and their confessors. What he does give us is a sustained exploration of female and male modes of religious authority as well as of strategies of (self) representation. His methodology is to focus on holy women's own writings in dialogue with men's writings about them; in the process he devotes admirable attention to modes of collaboration and cooperation alongside investigations of tension and competition.

Hopkins

Hopkins Jeffrey B. Loomis (bio) Although some new full-length books about Hopkins have been announced, none of these has yet appeared in general distribution. Most of the new pieces of published work available (which are all either articles or essays in book collections) focus on Hopkins' intellectual interaction with a range of both predecessor bards and his writer contemporaries. From such an array of discussion, we can learn quite a bit about the nature of intertextuality, as well as about the criticism that examines it. In "Hopkins and Cynewulf: 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' 'The Windhover,' 'The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,' and the Christ" (VP 43, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 19-32), James Finn Cotter locates, in Hopkins' canon, considerable potential referencing of diction, images, and themes from Cynewulf's Old English work Christ. He particularly notes such potential referencing in the three Hopkins poems mentioned in Cotter's subtitle (but also, according to one of his endnotes [p. 33], in Hopkins' expansive sonnets "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" and "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves"). Allowing us to establish quite detailed acquaintance with Cynewulf's medieval opus, Cotter most convincingly demonstrates Hopkins' potential borrowing from that work when he compares Hopkins' sense of his "fling[ing] of [his own] heart to the heart of the Host" ("Wreck," st. 3, l. 21) with Cynewulf's depiction (as he himself recalled images from the Song of Songs and from a homily by St. Gregory) of "six [specific] leaps in Christ's redemptive mission" (p. 23). Besides discussing Cynewulf and Hopkins, Cotter reminds us of the Biblical prediction of the resurrected Christ, "go[ing] before [His disciples] into Galilee" (Matthew 28.7). Cotter believes that this Biblical verse influenced Hopkins' somewhat contrasting lines about Christ's incarnationally resplendent days of Galilean ministry ("Wreck," st. 7, ll. 49-50). Thomas Rand also, and quite meaningfully, studies Biblical allusions in Hopkins, sharing his observations in "'Time's Eunuch' Reconsidered" (HQ 32, nos. 1-2 [Winter 2005]: 5-7). My own interpretation, two decades ago, of Hopkins' "Thou art indeed just, Lord" focused on the poem's link with a text that its epigraph quotes: Jeremiah 12. I found that Biblical chapter an obvious background text of ironic commentary for Hopkins, calling into question the surface petulance of his sonnet's narrator. Rand sees more such ironic undertexting, in his case connecting the same Hopkins sonnet to Isaiah 56.3 ("And let not the eunuch say: Behold I am a dry tree"). Besides, [End Page 357] he believes that Hopkins may be recalling, in "Thou art indeed . . . ," a key Biblical convert-figure whom his own persona might wisely emulate: the Ethiopian eunuch—whom, according to Acts 8.32-34, the apostle Philip led to comprehend Christ's attitude to suffering as a model for the behavior of all Christian disciples. Peter Whiteford, in the Review of English Studies N.S. 56, no. 225 (2005): 438-446, answers his titular question, "What Were Felix Randal's 'Fatal Four Disorders'?," by pointing to St. Thomas Aquinas' discussion in the Summa Theologicae, about the four "wounds of nature" resulting from "original sin" (p. 443). These wounds were said to affect persons' reasons, their wills, and both their irascible and their concupiscible appetites (p. 444). Whiteford sees such theologically conceptualized wounds as helping to explain what Hopkins means by his reference to the poetic character Felix Randal's "fatal four disorders"—largely because the poem "Felix Randal" seems most to concern Hopkins' responsibility "to [spiritually] heal," " to mend, sacramentally, the [spiritually] wounded man over whom he watches" (p. 446). Moving forward in history and agreeing (with many) that Hopkins and Whitman have many very real affinities (p. 39), Eldrid Herrington presents his essay "Hopkins and Whitman" in EIC 55, no. 1 (January 2005): 39-57. Herrington detects a common nurturing impulse in Hopkins' poems about the priesthood and in Whitman's Drum Taps, with that book's accounts of Whitman's tender service as a wartime medic (p. 40). The critic also finds in both men's writings a frequent topical focus on birds, a stylistic "gallicizing...

The “Woman Writer” and feminist literary history; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the “woman writer”

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) The "Woman Writer" and feminist literary history; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the "woman writer" William B. Warner There is a specific logic that has worked sequentially to produce the necessity behind a literary history ofwomen's writing: first there is the critique of the canon as too much "his," of having systematically excluded "her." Then, by using the wrongs and occlusions of this sexist literary history, an alternative feminist literary history tells "her" story. This proj ect justifies the gathering together of women writers into a separate study, which is studied as a group, so as to isolate its distinct character, sometimes in contrast to its "other"? men's writing. Then, (and this is the third stage of the dis cursive isolation of the woman writer), the separation of women's from men's writings, first justified on political and ethical grounds, is assumed to be grounded in history. It is now assumed that the separation ofwomen writers frommen writers is inevitable, natural, proper, and illuminating. Such an assumption, with the organization of literary and cultural histories it enables, and the category of "women writer" itnat uralizes, have yielded rich critical insights. But this pre sumptive separation ofwriters by gender has also become a kind of filter, encouraging a critical blindness to the contexts, motives, and affiliations ofwriters who were women. Here it is useful to distinguish between the liberal or strict elaboration of women's writing, for each encounters a distinct problem. If there is a generous, inclusive catholic 188 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies impulse to find the minimal common traits of all writers who were women, there is a tendency to suppress the very con siderable differences among women writers. Alternatively, if one develops a more rigorous, strict, and exclusive concept of women's writing, women who wrote are put "on trial'': they are tested for their correspondence to a feminist checklist of desirable traits. In her pioneering essay on Behn's Love Letters, Judith Kegan Gardiner documents the way the inces sant sex, the occasional sexism, and the consistent Toryism of Behn's writing have troubled feminist readers ("Aphra Behn's Love Letters, The Canon, and Women's Tastes," Tulsa Studies inWomen's Literature 8, no. 2 [Fall 1989]: 201-222). This procedure usually works to the benefit of some women writers?for example, those women writers whose opinions were proto-feminist, those who never married, or those who enjoyed relative autonomy from men. By this analysis, some women writers turn out to be more "women" than others. As a corrective to these tendencies, there has been a strong chal lenge to this false harmonization ofwomen's writing. Thus for example, Beth Kowalski-Wallace's book, Their Father's Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth & Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) reads the "good daughters"?those who not only did not advocate separation from the patriarchs, but proclaimed their indebtedness and linkage to the fathers. Paula McDowell's book, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730, contests the notion that women were excluded from the eighteenth-century public sphere or accepted their subordination to men, by documenting the many registers of women's effective economic and cultural agency as printers and writers. Within recent feminist literary history, the woman writer has usually meant more than a woman who wrote: itmeans a woman who wrote as a woman. Such a literary history usually entails a certain way of reading the texts written by women. Thus, pride of place is given to a certain concept of writing: its goals are to achieve recognition as an author; stabilize personal identity, and forge connections with the lives and writing of other women. To state these themes for reading women writers is to confront the essential moderni ty of such a project. As many scholars have argued, author Warner 189 ship only becomes a recognizably modern category over the course of the long eighteenth century; personal identity is an obsession of twentieth-century forms of subjectivity; and the ideas of the...

Exploring Lewis and Clark: reflections on men and wilderness

Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. By Thomas P. Slaughter. (New York: Knopf: Random House, 2003. Pp. xviii, 231. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $24.00; paper, $14.00.)Thomas P. Slaughter has written an intriguing and courageous book. In the midst of the hagiography surrounding the bicentennial anniversary of the journey of Lewis and Clark, Slaughter bravely challenges long-cherished beliefs about the of and the men who chronicled it.Exploring Lewis and Clark impressively blends research from all the extant journals, including those of Joseph Whitehouse, Patrick Gass, Charles Floyd, and John Ordway. Slaughter wonders whether these men's writings denote an accurate depiction of what actually transpired or a carefully orchestrated attempt to provide future generations with what the expedition members wanted their readers to perceive. His valuable monograph also attempts to provide Native-American perspectives of the encounter and examines what occurred after the expedition.Slaughter admires Lewis and Clark, but guardedly. he respects the men who led an expedition that originated east of the Appalachians, traveled from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean and back, and lost only one man. Yet while acknowledging the appeal of this hugely fascinating story, Slaughter urges scholars to look beneath the explorers' narratives for different meanings than those they intended us to find (xiv).Through careful comparisons of the journals, Slaughter discovers numerous inconsistencies. he contends that the so-called Voyage of Discovery was the first in virtually nothing, even though the chroniclers vehemently wanted the world to believe they were. he questions other scholars' insistence that the journey represented a forward-looking exercise in egalitarianism as well as a multicultural, multiracial, gender-integrated success (101). he accuses Lewis and Clark of numerous obfuscations, especially when they sought to justify their thefts of Native-American property or paint themselves in a morally superior light relative to the men who served under them as well as the indigenous peoples whom they encountered.Slaughter arranges his chapters topically rather than chronologically. Therefore, each can be read as a discrete essay. At its best, Slaughter's work brings voice to those who have always wondered why expedition members were so fascinated by snakes, hateful of bears, relentless and wasteful in their massacre of game, miserly about their possessions, and dismissive of Sacagawea and Clark's slave, York.Porivo's Story, the chapter about the Shoshone woman who joined the expedition at the Mandan Village in North Dakota, is a tour deforce. Slaughter willingly accepts the real possibility that Sacagawea survived until 1884, despite attempts to kill her off in 1812. Sacagawea's extended life among the Comanche and later with her own people in present-day Wyoming has tended to upstage the major players. Killing her off is one means of getting her offstage. Keeping her alive alters the plot (87).Slaughter's chapters on Sacagawea and York also raise important questions about the validity of the written word versus oral tradition. Written records, particularly those of William Clark and his acquaintances, place Sacagawea's and York's demises but a few years after the voyage. Oral sources, however, report them returning to the wilderness, where they led long and adventurous lives. Sacagawea left her ne'er-do-well husband and fled to the Comanche, later returning to her people and dying an elderly woman. …

Challenging boundaries: gender and periodization

What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly fit female writers into the white male scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work.Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study.

Titanic light: Paul de Man's post-Romanticism, 1960-1969

Notoriety struck the Belgian-born literary critic Paul de Man more than once. First came his fame as one of the principal and most controversial theorists of deconstruction in the 1970s and early 1980s. After his death in 1983, notoriety struck a second time. In 1987, a Belgian scholar discovered that de Man had written in the early 1940s for several journals that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium. The revelations precipitated debates that have yet to subside. The scholar who set loose this furor was Ortwin de Graef, who has since embarked on a comprehensive survey of de Man's writings. The first book, Serenity in Crisis, covered de Man's career from 1939 to 1960. Titanic Light examines de Man's work from the 1960s. Titanic Light concentrates on de Man's increased interest during the 1960s in Romantic (and post-Romantic) literature and criticism. De Graef follows in detail de Man's strong readings of the works of Rousseau and Wordsworth. He connects de Man's interpretations of these and other writers with his earlier critical works and his later deconstructive writings. In addition, de Graef places de Man's essays from the 1960s (some later collected in the influential volume Blindness and Insight) in the context of the critical debates of that era debates about structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, American New Criticism, and other critical schools. The result is a penetrating portrait of a critic who, during the sixties, reached full maturity as an interpreter of literature and contemporary criticism. Combining sympathy and skepticism for its subject, Titanic Light continues what is already the most insightful, thorough, and balanced examination of de Man's intellectual career.

The Ideal and the Real. An Outline of Kant's Theory of Space, Time and Mathematical Construction.

Many students coming to grips with philosophy are understandably daunted not only by the complexity and sheer difficulty of the man's writings, but almost equally by the amount of secondary literature available. A great deal of this seems to be - and not only on first reading - just about as difficult as the work it is meant to make more accessible. Any writer deliberately setting out to provide an authentically introductory text thus faces a double problem: how to provide an exegesis which would capture some of the spirit of the original, without gross and misleading over-simplification; and secondly, how to anchor the argument in the best and most imaginative secondary literature, yet avoid the whole project appearing so fragmented as to make the average book of chess openings seem positively austere. Until fairly recently, matters were made even more difficul t, in that commentaries on Kant were very often of a whole work, say, The Critique of Pure Reason, with the result that students would have to struggle through a very great deal of material indeed in order to feel any confidence at all that they had begun to understand the original writings. Recently, things have changed somewhat. There are now excellent commentaries on Kant's Analytic, Kant's Analogies etc. . We have also seen, (at least as reflected in book titles), a resurgence of interest in what is perhaps the most controversial and far-reaching Kantian claim, viz.

Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher by Reiner Schürmann

BOOK REVIEWS sos Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Phuosopher. By REINER ScHUID>i£ANN. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1978. Pp. 9l69. $17.50. Have there been five books published in English on Meister Eckhart in this century? The past eighteen months alone have brought us three: C. F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale, 1977); a symposium on Eckhart printed in The Thornist (April, 1978); and finally this volume by the professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research . Although this book is a translation of a French edition, it owns a fine English style, bright and succinct. Schlirmann recently published in France a book of autobiographical reflections, Origines, which attracted wide attention as a first view of life after World War II by a young German. So the author's literary talents enhance this study of Eckhart, for it is aesthetically as well as intellectually captivating. Schlirmann wants not to explain everything about Eckhart but to unlock the central spark of the mystic: the unavoidably and permanently dynamic Eckhart. "As long as Eckhart's readers attempt to grasp his thought in relations among entities, isolating different philosophical currents like musical motifs, the simple source from which everything springs remains hidden. Eckhart's thinking is such that probably any list of 'theses' drawn from his works will provoke objections and rejectien for diverse reasons " (p. 164). The format of this book is novel and avoids the labored structure, inspired by dissertations, of a superfluity of quotations and references culled from all the great man's writings. Instead, Schlirmann has carefully chosen three sermons which through exposition and hermeneutic allow the Meister's word to emerge and to impress. Each of the sermons contains central motifs of Eckhart's philosophico-theological view of the world and the self: detachment and birth; the quaternity of dissimilarity, similarity, identity and dehiscence; the concluding juxaposition of ontic nothingness opening to the nothingness of the Godhead; and being-born in the being of the Son of God. Schlirmann points out that these moments are " intensities " for every or for any moment of a person's life; they are not stages in a methodology of prayer or interior ascent. For each of the three chapters exegeting one sermon newly translated, the author provides a second sermon: an expansion upon, an illustration of the teaching in that particular chapter. The professor at the New School expresses lucidly an approach which has been on the tip of the tongue of other, European scholars. He observes that to remain with a metaphysics of substances is inevitably to be incapable of expressing what Eckhart, as mystic and writer, wants to say. Eckhart, no more than any other speculative mystic, thinks of God and the mind as united by some kind of fusion of entities into a common substance; rather, 306 BOOK REVIEWS Got entwird: in the disappearance of the God-Person and of the man-person, in detachment and the great forgetfulness of self, being accomplishes itself. Only this process "is." Breakthrough, on the one hand, birth on the other, are reconciled in the itinerancy of the detached man. (p. 164) The critical apparatus of the book is sparse, but this should not delude readers and scholars into the opinion that the volume ignores the intellectual sources and milieu of Eckhart. Schilrmann knows medieval thought very well, and his uncovering of Eckhart's words and ideas in Albert or Aquinas is thorough. He unravels and intertwines in a sophisticated way the interplay of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism in Eckhart. He makes a good case in the final sections for showing that Eckhart finds the different kinds of theories of analogy inadequate for his thought. Schilrmann explains how Eckhart saw true prayer and mystical insight attaining the Godhead beyond God. This "breakthrough" (the word is Eckhart's own creation) to the Godhead-through radical detachment and Zen-like focus upon the present existent-must mean that the philosophical categories which were at hand for the Thuringian Dominican appeared inadequate: not false but inadequate. "The authentic core of Meister Eckhart's thinking is releasement . In the history of ideas, each epoch has its own language, and perhaps releasement precedes its own...