Michael Long Research Articles

Unveiling AI's Accent in Spoken English Education

Viewed against the backdrop of the technological landscape, artificial intelligence has become the shining point of the 21st century. In recent years, AI has been pervasively applied into various realms in modern society, among which the incorporation into spoken English education has become one of the most heated topics. To navigate the application of AI in spoken English learning, this paper evaluates the effectiveness based on the Interaction Hypothesis proposed by Michael Long. To be specific, this research focuses on the comprehensive application of AI in the realm of spoken English acquisition, underscoring why AI language models have gained in popularity in innumerable apps concerning language learning and how AI serves as a double-edged sword in spoken English education. By illustrating the language acquisition process, a strong connection between the Interaction Hypothesis and AI-based spoken English learning is constructed and clarified. Through all-round evaluation and analysis, the article concludes that despite challenges, AI has not only acted as a knowledgeable mentor for individual learners,but also provided an effective driving force for the innovation and improvement of spoken English education. In the future, more advancements concerning human-like interactions and immersive learning environment are likely to emerge.

Technology Focus: Offshore Drilling and Completion (October 2023)

Optimizing and continually increasing efficiencies at every stage of the drilling and completion process are central themes in the papers showcased in this feature. Innovating our way through difficult times is what the oil and gas industry excels at, especially during challenging periods. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the offshore energy industry faced immense struggles with high upfront capital investment and long lead times in uncertain circumstances with extremely low oil prices. The challenges brought about by the pandemic served as a backdrop to many of these innovations. Companies were compelled to discover creative solutions to maintain efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure safety during an era of unprecedented disruption. Innovation in advanced analytics and machine-learning algorithms is used to optimize drilling-center locations, leading to cost reduction. This development became even more critical during the pandemic as companies aimed to maximize efficiency and minimize expenses. The execution of large-scale projects such as the Johan Sverdrup development highlights innovation in project management, enabling timely and cost-effective operations in a challenging environment. The emphasis on digital solutions and fiber-optic technology in Guyana’s offshore operations illustrates the industry’s adaptation to the pandemic by enabling remote operations and real-time data collection while maintaining efficiency in a new discovery. Innovations in riserless light well intervention systems are particularly relevant during the pandemic. These systems improved efficiency and safety for offshore interventions, enabling the industry to operate with minimal personnel onboard. The focus on well-planning strategies to overcome challenges in deep depleted reservoirs includes approaches that optimize drilling in complex conditions, which is crucial when efficiency is paramount. Retrofitting autonomous inflow control devices proved an effective approach in implementing state-of-the-art technology to improve reservoir sweep and productivity. Moving forward, this innovative spirit in our industry as seen in these papers is a testament to our resilience during challenging times. In the coming years, this ability to sustainably increase recovery efficiencies to ensure energy security is crucial to shaping the future of energy production. Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 212499 4D Radar Imaging of Wellbore Geometry While Drilling by Lars Øy, Well ID, et al. OTC 30979 Guyana Operations and First Oil by Mike F. Ryan, ExxonMobil, et al. SPE 212915 Enhancing Riserless Light Well Intervention Operability From Operator Perspective by Michael Long Ge, BP, et al. SPE 214057 Challenges of Drilling Deep Wells in a Complex Overburden With Severe Depletion and Experiences From Caspian Sea by Anwar Juma Al Saadi, Dragon Oil, et al.

Weaving Language and Learning in Negotiating for Meaning

Achieving an understanding of interlocutors in an English classroom is essential in successful communication, learning, and second language acquisition. Through these interactions, interlocutors can negotiate meaning by changing the linguistic form, conversational structure, and message content, or all three. This qualitative content analysis research focuses on the interactions produced between teacher and student or between the students themselves with the use of Michael Long’s Negotiation for Meaning (NfM). The research, conducted in Compostela Valley State College Main Campus, involved five (5) sections of first-year college students enrolled in General Education 2 - Purposive Communication along with their respective instructors. Interactions throughout the class were recorded and then transcribed for further analysis. According to the findings, three (3) signals from NfM are primarily utilized to achieve meaning; comprehension check, clarification request, and confirmation check. These signals functioned in the interaction through eliciting understanding, correcting, probing, recalling, and clarifying. The most used signal was a clarification request, and the most used function of these signals is understanding. The findings suggest that the negotiation in the interaction mostly required previous utterances to be clarified and that the main goal of negotiation is to achieve comprehension of the meaning being negotiated.

What is effective second language exposure and how does it relate to content-based instruction and language across the curriculum?

AbstractSecond language acquisition cannot take place in the absence of exposure to input. However, despite extensive L2 instruction and/or learning content subjects in L2, many struggle to communicate adequately in their L2 in social and/or academic contexts. A clearer delineation of the concept of ‘exposure’, which requires a review of relevant language acquisition theories and findings, is needed. As such, substantial bodies of work in L2 acquisition by well-known language educators, namely Jim Cummins (‘BICS’ and ‘CALP’), Stephen Krashen (‘Comprehensible Input Hypothesis’), Michael Long (Interaction Hypothesis) and Merril Swain (Output Hypothesis) are reviewed. A review is also made of relevant neuroscience research. Two educational approaches, Content-based instruction (CBI) and Language across the curriculum (LAC), are discussed in relation to the insights obtained, with special reference to contexts influenced by Confucian heritage culture (CHC). To allow subject networking to take place, school managers/L2 policy makers need to actively revamp the curriculum.

LEARNING STRATEGIES AND STYLES IN THE SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

SLA is an expanding, and diverse field. SLA theories have a variety of origins and differ substantively. In many ways, these theories are “interim understandings” of how people learn second languages. All SLA theories are designed to facilitate the process of second language learning and teaching and likely to be relevant to language teaching practice in one way or another. SLA is defined by Michael Long: Second language acquisition is a field of study which generates and tests theories concerning the acquisition of languages other than L1 in many different contexts, including – but not mainly – the foreign language classroom. (in Byram, M. 2000, p. 527)

Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball by Michael Long, ed (review)

Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball by Michael Long, ed (review)

Discussion of “Quality of Conventional Fixed Piston Samplers of Norwegian Soft Clay” by Michael Long, Nouri El Hadj, and Knut Hagberg

Discussion of “Quality of Conventional Fixed Piston Samplers of Norwegian Soft Clay” by Michael Long, Nouri El Hadj, and Knut Hagberg

Closure to “Quality of Conventional Fixed Piston Samples of Norwegian Soft Clay” by Michael Long, Nouri El Hadj, and Knut Hagberg

Closure to “Quality of Conventional Fixed Piston Samples of Norwegian Soft Clay” by Michael Long, Nouri El Hadj, and Knut Hagberg

Introduction. Beyond the Obvious: Do Second Language Learners Process Inflectional Morphology?

Language LearningVolume 60, Issue 1 p. 1-20 Introduction. Beyond the Obvious: Do Second Language Learners Process Inflectional Morphology? Kira Gor, Kira Gor University of MarylandSearch for more papers by this author Kira Gor, Kira Gor University of MarylandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 February 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00549.xCitations: 20 concerning this article should be addressed to Kira Gor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland, 3125 Jiménez Hall, College Park, MD 20742. Internet: [email protected] I would like to express my deep gratitude to Michael Long for his generous help and to Svetlana Cook and Anna Lukyanchenko, PhD students at the University of Maryland, for assistance with formatting issues. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume60, Issue1March 2010Pages 1-20 RelatedInformation

Reply to discussion by Winter et al. on ‘Peat slope failure in Ireland’ Boylan, Jennings & Long (2008), Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology , 41 , 93–108

Noel Boylan, Paul Jennings & Michael Long reply: The authors thank the discusser for his interest in their paper and would like to respond to his observations. The discusser suggests that we “appear to introduce information that may be interpreted as contradictory to some previous and very precise accounts of peat engineering and instability that aimed to provide coherent and consistent frameworks for future researchers and practitioners (e.g. Hobbs 1986)”. The discusser does not substantiate this claim and raises issues that are mostly beyond the stated scope of our paper, which was to ‘summarize the issues surrounding peat slope failure in Ireland that would be of interest to an engineer or engineering geologist assessing this geohazard’. The additional points raised by the discusser relate more to geomorphological interpretations of these events rather than the assessment of this geohazard. We clarify the points raised as follows. #### Peatlands and their properties The authors agree that fen peat deposits are an additional peatland type found in Ireland; however, their significance nowadays, especially with respect to peat failures, did not merit their inclusion in the paper as a separate entity. In Ireland, fen peatlands have been widely developed for agricultural use and only 22 180 ha remain that are in a relatively intact condition (Foss 2007). This constitutes only 2.3% of the total peatland resource of 0.95 Mha in the Republic of Ireland (Connolly et al . 2007). In addition to this, there is no available evidence as far as the authors are aware of previous instability associated with this type of deposit in Ireland. The authors clearly differentiated between the terms ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ blanket bog. The inclusion of the term ‘oceanic’ in parentheses is to provide clarification, as this term is sometimes used to refer to lowland blanket bogs in Ireland (Feehan and O'Donovan 1996) although …

Reply to discussion by Dykes of ‘Peat slope failure in Ireland’ Boylan, Jennings & Long (2008), Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology , 41 , 93–108

Noel Boylan, Paul Jennings & Michael Long reply: The authors thank the discusser for his interest in their paper and would like to respond to his observations. The discusser suggests that we “appear to introduce information that may be interpreted as contradictory to some previous and very precise accounts of peat engineering and instability that aimed to provide coherent and consistent frameworks for future researchers and practitioners (e.g. Hobbs 1986)”. The discusser does not substantiate this claim and raises issues that are mostly beyond the stated scope of our paper, which was to ‘summarize the issues surrounding peat slope failure in Ireland that would be of interest to an engineer or engineering geologist assessing this geohazard’. The additional points raised by the discusser relate more to geomorphological interpretations of these events rather than the assessment of this geohazard. We clarify the points raised as follows. #### Peatlands and their properties The authors agree that fen peat deposits are an additional peatland type found in Ireland; however, their significance nowadays, especially with respect to peat failures, did not merit their inclusion in the paper as a separate entity. In Ireland, fen peatlands have been widely developed for agricultural use and only 22 180 ha remain that are in a relatively intact condition (Foss 2007). This constitutes only 2.3% of the total peatland resource of 0.95 Mha in the Republic of Ireland (Connolly et al . 2007). In addition to this, there is no available evidence as far as the authors are aware of previous instability associated with this type of deposit in Ireland. The authors clearly differentiated between the terms ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ blanket bog. The inclusion of the term ‘oceanic’ in parentheses is to provide clarification, as this term is sometimes used to refer to lowland blanket bogs in Ireland (Feehan and O'Donovan 1996) although …

"Lillies Without, Roses Within": Marvell's Poetics of Indeterminacy and "The Nymph Complaining"

"Lillies Without, Roses Within":Marvell's Poetics of Indeterminacy and "The Nymph Complaining" Matthew C. Augustine As in so many things, contemporary students of Andrew Marvell have been tutored by the New Critics to appreciate and interpret the formal hallmarks of his work: its ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes; its ingenious deployments and deformations of genre; its tonal mastery and linguistic poise. Yet as surely as New Critical approaches to Marvell's poetry unlocked many of its meanings and secrets, such approaches also distorted and misrepresented his verse, and to an unusual degree. In part, and as others have argued, that is because the New Critics and their followers assumed for Marvell and for his poetry the model of an approximately modern heterosexuality that may have far less purchase on the poet of "vegetable love" than it seems to have for, say, John Donne.1 Of course, new generations of readers who are more attuned to social history, and who are specifically interested in the libelous pamphlet literature directed against Marvell, have discovered the lineaments of another story, not one of formal design, but of sexual ambiguities and paradoxes.2 To be sure, it was entirely conventional in early modernity to write political deviance as sexual aberrance, but the persistence and odd particularity of the pamphlet attacks that accuse Marvell of sexual deformity and secret perversion suggest something beyond mere convention. And so, in the context of a broad and recent social, political, and literary interest in the body, and specifically in issues of gender and sexuality, students of Marvell have revealed in his poetry strains of homosocial and homoerotic desire that had been occluded by the standard tropes of heterosexuality. But at least two major poems have resisted easy assimilation into this regime: "The Unfortunate Lover" and "The Nymph Complaining for the [End Page 255] Death of Her Faun." These poems seem in some strange but obvious ways to be love poems, and surely they are written in a highly coded language of desire, but they do not yield to Paul Hammond's formula of "sex between men." More broadly, although the discovery of the homoerotic has opened certain interpretive doors, others have remained shut, for insofar as homoerotic and heterosexual models of desire assume a genitally organized libido and a coherent and conventional erotic attraction to the desired body, whether male or female, they are not so structurally different. A few of the most daring and original Marvell scholars, however, have begun to extend and complicate the revisionist notion of Marvell's sexuality. Michael Long's Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia some years ago brought into view the appeals that pedophilia seems to have held for Marvell's imagination.3 More recently, and perhaps even more troublingly, Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have deciphered in "The Unfortunate Lover" "a dramatic and determining story of eros and abuse, and of wounding and incapacity, for which the transcendence of poetry was his counter and his solace."4 Building on their earlier exploration of Marvell's relation to patriarchy, Hirst and Zwicker's narrative for the Unfortunate Lover of child abuse, of guilty longing, and of adult sexual deficit does much to displace the traditional structures by which Marvell's sexuality has been understood. Indeed, I do not see how the attractions of liminality, or the prospects of pedophilia, can be escaped in reading Marvell's poetry. Still, I would part company with the assumptions that continue to underpin even such provocative work: that sexuality for Marvell, even if radically subaltern, was something fixed and complete; that the brilliance and beauty of his verse lies in how it both records a history of desire and simultaneously makes that history invisible; and that the difficulty of his poetry is therefore largely a matter of deception and disguise, the baffling transcript of an otherwise stable self. To the contrary, I argue that Marvell's poetics are a poetics of indeterminacy and in-betweenness, and that the poet's eros does not lie behind this poetic but is identical with it, such that the difficulty of his poetry actually signifies the form of his desire. The pleasure of the Marvellian text consists not in the...

Reaping the benefits

Michael Long analyses costs, benefits and returns for students with VET qualifications. Copyright 2008 Michael Long. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Reaping the benefits

Michael Long analyses costs, benefits and returns for students with VET qualifications. Copyright 2008 Michael Long. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Labour pains?: skilling labour strategies

Richard Cooney and Michael Long take a closer look at innovative training activities. Copyright © 2008 Richard Cooney and Michael Long. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Labour pains?

Richard Cooney and Michael Long take a closer look at innovative training activities. Copyright © 2008 Richard Cooney and Michael Long. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

The social turn in second language acquisition (review)

Reviewed by: The social turn in second language acquisition by David Block Lisa DeWaard Dykstra The social turn in second language acquisition. By David Block. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Pp. 162. ISBN 087840144X. $27.50. Mainstream second language acquisition (SLA) research has at its core several seemingly basic tenets: the ‘second’ language is any language acquired after the mother tongue, the ‘language’ typically examined is concerned with syntax and morphology, and ‘acquisition’ refers to linguistic knowledge resulting from contact with the language in either a classroom or naturalistic setting. Block, drawing from work in sociolinguistics, argues for a more interdisciplinary approach to SLA, responding to the challenge of Michael Long (SLA: Breaking the siege. University of Hawai’i Working Papers in ESL 17.79–129, 1998) that researchers ‘who would like to see a more interdisciplinary SLA’ should ‘offer … some evidence that a broader view of social context makes a difference, and a difference not just to the way this or that tiny stretch of discourse is interpretable, but to our understanding of [second language] acquisition’ (Long 1998:92). The current monograph is B’s response to this challenge. A brief introduction is followed by a comprehensive review of the development of SLA. B then takes the component parts of the acronym SLA and problematizes the traditional understandings of each. He concludes with some cautiously optimistic directions for future research. S: Second language, in the literature, typically refers to any language acquired after the first language has been fully acquired. B argues that this is an oversimplification since it does not account for learner variation in terms of multilingualism. The increase in research being done in Europe on third language acquisition (TLA) provides further evidence for his point, as TLA is seen as a distinct field in its own right. B argues for the replacement of ‘second’ with the word ‘additional’, although he doubts the discipline will adopt this change. L: in problematizing the use of language, B focuses on the wide discrepancy in the literature about the kind of language acquired. Researchers in SLA, from those conducting cognitively based studies to those in pragmatics, all speak of ‘language’ gains, using the same term to refer to very different phenomena: for the former, gains in syntax and morphology, and for the latter, gains in the use of language in context. [End Page 909] A: the question of what researchers mean by acquisition is complex. Researchers focus on different aspects of language. For some, acquisition is an accumulation of grammar rules, for others increased pragmatic abilities, for some enhanced participation, and for others still the processing of information. B, who sees the input-interaction-output hypothesis (IIO) in its standard form as too simplistic, advocates for more research like that of Merrill Swain, who synthesizes in her work the frameworks of input-interaction-output with sociocultural/activity theory. B’s work is an admirable answer to Long’s challenge. His writing is clear and precise, and his conclusions are optimistic yet realistic. Future strands of research that he sees as particularly conducive to a more social look at SLA are projects like Swain and Sharon Lapkin’s that merge IIO and sociocultural/activity theories, and interlanguage pragmatics. Lisa DeWaard Dykstra University of Iowa Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America

Language and social identity (review)

Reviewed by: Language and social identity ed. by Richard K. Blot Liwei Gao Language and social identity. Ed. by Richard K. Blot. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. xx, 295. ISBN 0897897838. $83.95 (Hb). This book consists of papers concerned with the relationships between the social use of language and the positioning of language users within a specific social stratum by other people. Articles in this collection also address the issue that particular uses of language are usually viewed as an indicator of language users’ geographic, ethnic, age, and gender attributes. The chapters in this volume mainly address two questions: (1) Under what circumstances is it necessary or desirable to resort to the use of a particular variety of language to construct a particular identity? and (2) What are the consequences of the building of various types of identities? Following an introductory chapter by Richard Blot, three essays examine the role of narratives in constructing contrastive identities by Indians in the Americas. Gary Gossen looks at the situation in Chiapas, Mexico. He discusses a Tzotzil Maya story and suggests that narratives provide the Indian community with resources for treating linguistic performance as a foundation of social identities and social inequality. Janet Chernela and Eric Leed discuss the Unurato myth narratives in the Brazilian Northwest Amazon and explore how a collective identity is generated and preserved through narratives. Jerry Kelly studies the circulation of visionary Mayan narratives in southern Belize and shows that even when narratives are used for the purpose of reconstructing traditional identities to fight against modern oppression, the latter may still exert a strong influence in this rebuilding process. [End Page 454] The next three articles highlight the important role that language plays in ideologies and practices of inclusion and exclusion and point to the shifting relations between language, identity, and political-economic development. Kathryn Woolard discusses the transformation of Catalan from the language of a suppressed minority to the official language of an economically and politically powerful Catalonia in Barcelona. Maria Lagos looks at the way in which individuals in Cochabamba, Bolivia, reproduce and transform the dominant discourse in a society where markers of class and ethnic differences have become ambiguous. Maria Villalon analyzes an Enapa text from Venezuela and argues that narratives constitute a major part of Enapa politics of self-representation, which help build different representations of personhood against the homogenizing procedures of the criollo society. The remaining studies focus on the United States. Michael Long argues that the Ebonics debate was actually started mostly by the appearance of the New Right and its goal of weakening challenges to racial oppression. Bonnie Urciuoli examines the phenomenon that Spanish is used sparingly in the advertising in the magazine Hispanic and argues that this is a strategy for avoiding clashes with the rise of the Official English movement. Ellen Schnepel discusses language and gender in the French Caribbean and suggests that language planners, among others, have not paid sufficient attention to the way in which changing gender relations help shape the relationship between Creole and French in Guadeloupe and Martinique. James Collins looks at new strategies for mobilizing American Indian identities against historical and contemporary pressures to eliminate Tolowa identities in California. In examining the interaction among language, social identity, and the worldview, John Pulis calls attention to the importance of verbal performance in building Rastafarian identities in Jamaica. In scrutinizing passionate speech and literate talk in Grenada, George Mentore contends that the literacy practices that seem to be instrumental to political participation are actually imperialist tools for suppression that aim to produce acquiescent citizens. Liwei Gao Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97): Papers from a Symposium by David s> Short (review)

REVIEWS 317 like a doctoral degree as 'LitD';and why 'LatH'ratherthan 'L4TH?').Poems by Marvell are mentioned, but there is no referenceto Michael Long's book, Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood andArcadia (Oxford, I984). And there are of course gaps in coverage. The story Venetsianka ('La Veneziana') - the prime early painterly example in Nabokov's ceuvre is treated only fleetingly (despite having received recent detailed treatmentfrom several commentators).More disconcertinglystill, though, after an initial correct mention (p. 17),it is then consistentlyreferredto, both in text and apparatus,as 'La Venezia'. Any such criticisms,however, remain footlingwhen consideredin the light of the impact made by the book as a whole. Nabokov andtheArtofPainting really has to be on the shelvesof all seriouspublic and privateNabokov collections. Department ofRussianStudies NEIL CORNWELL University ofBristol Short,David(ed.).Bohumil Hrabal (I9I4-97): Papers froma Symposium. SSEES Occasional Papers, 63. School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2004. x + 132 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Indexes. Li6.oo (paperback). BOHUMIL HRABAL (b. I9I4), who died on 3 FebruaryI997 at the age of eightytwo in a (possiblysuicidal)fallfrom a fifth-floorhospitalwindow while feeding pigeons, is one of the foremost European writers of the twentieth century. With a gift for yoking the incongruitiesof the vernacular,the grotesque, the absurd,the lyrical,the ordinaryand the forgottenmarginsof lifeinto a spirited prose that can hurtleforwardwith the exhilarationand irresistibilityof a runaway train, his work also confoundsplayfullythe traditionalbarriersbetween high and low culture,between life and art, between truthand fiction. Hrabal perhaps speaks to what is most vulgar and most lyrical in the human spirit in a manner that very few writerscome close to (but one thinks ofJoyce or Beckett, for example, and their understanding of the subterraneanbeauty of the vernacularand ordinary).In the Czech Republic there is a nineteenvolume Collected Works of Hrabal, evidence both of his prolific output and of his status there as a writer. Although his work has been translated into umpteen languages,and literarycriticssuch asJames Wood have done much to raise his profile among a broader English-speakingliterary audience in publications such as the London Reviewof Booksand the Guardian, outside the Czech Republiche probablyremainssomethingof a cultishfavouritefor those in the know. Russianistswill be more familiarwith him throughJirilMenzel's I966 film of Hrabal's novel, Ostr'e sledovane vlaky(popularlyknown as Closely Observed Trains), a cornerstoneof the Czech New Wave, than with the original work that inspiredthat film. The volume under review is the product of a symposium organizedjust over three months after Hrabal's death by SSEES's Centre for the Study of Central Europe. Unfortunately, it has obviously taken some time for the volume to come to print. The overallqualityof the contributionsis, however, commendably high, drawing from London, Oxford, Prague and Ostrava, 3I8 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 namely: David Chirico (on Hrabal and Giuseppe Ungaretti);Zuzana StolzHladk 'a (on the corporeality of the Word); Martin Pilari(on Hrabal and Boudnik);David Short (on totome'sto je vespolec'ne pecai obyvatel [this city is in the joint care of its inhabitants], supported by some engaging illustrations reproduced from this work); Tim Beasley-Murray (on the avant-garde in Obsluhovaljsem anglickiho krdle[I waited on the King of England]);Robert B. Pynsent(on Hrabal'sautobiographicaltrilogy);and PavelJanalcek(onHrabal's Listopadovy uragan[November hurricane] in the context of the 'November Revolution' as a literarytheme). A littlejuggling of the chaptersmight have made for a better thematic complementarity(Chirico with Beasley-Murray, for example, Stolz-Hladkawith Pynsent),but this is a minor quibble. There are some small infelicities(z seems to have been problematic to reproduce a couple of times; see p. i for example), but none so serious that they detract from the contents. Short's introduction is lively and informative, and the various indexes demonstrate that the reader's interests have not been shortchanged. This is Hrabal for the cognoscenti, rather than a work opening out to a broader audience. Some of the common themes and discussionsthat emerge are the influence of Surrealism, Poetism and the Avant-garde aesthetic in generalon Hrabal'searlywork;Hrabal'suse of collage and montage;Hrabal's constant reworkingand revisingof his texts, an 'endlessprocess of metamorphosis ' (p. 42); the relationshipbetween life and the word; Hrabal'sgrotesque fusion of...

Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) (review)

Reviewed by: Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) Siân Echard (bio) Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell, and Margaret Reeves , editors. Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. xiv, 334. $53.00 Shell Games is a collection of thirteen essays concerned with lying and truth-telling in western Europe in the medieval and early modern period. The many different kinds of lies - deceit, perjury, fraud, impersonation, playacting - all serve to throw ideas about truth into high relief. The earliest case dealt with is Robert of Artois's ultimately unsuccessful attempt, in 1329, to claim the county of Artois through an elaborate edifice of perjured witnesses and forged letters; the latest concerns the fabrication of the story of the Yorkshire prophetess Mother Shipton, examining the layers added to her myth from the seventeenth century to the present day. The essays range across borders and centuries in their pursuit of liars both historical and literary. Inevitably there is some disorientation for a reader trying to track these ne'er-do-wells across so broad a canvas, but the individual essays generally make for fascinating reading. Richard Raiswell's introduction unpacks the exposure of the Boxley Rood in 1538 to show how frauds can offer a window into mentalités. After an overview of ideas about truth and lies in the medieval and early modern period, the essays follow, grouped into five thematic sections. There are three essays in the first section, 'Knowledge for Sale.' Tara E. Nummedal ' s discussion of fraud in early modern alchemy centres on practitioners and their patrons in the Holy Roman Empire. Both this essay and Paul M. Dover's study of diplomacy in late fifteenth-century Milan argue that we must abandon present-day assumptions - that alchemists were charlatans, [End Page 250] or that early modern Italian court culture was characterized by deception - in order to understand what German princes expected of alchemists, or how Italian resident diplomats went about the business of collecting information. The section's theme, the commodification of learning, is seen most clearly in Sarah Knight's study of the scholar-mountebank of Jacobean satire. She shows how competition for economic advantage produced both academic impostors and vitriolic literary criticism of those impostors. The second section, 'Reputation and Honour,' is less thematically cohesive. Michael Cichon reads the deceptions in Titus Andronicus through the lens of anthropological theory about feud. Steven Bednarski's examination of two cases of fraud prosecuted in Provence in the late fourteenth century considers how the constraints upon the women involved produced their frauds and governed the reactions to those frauds. Roni Weinstein ' s account of courting games between unmarried Jewish youth in early modern Italy shows how game-playing could shade into reality. The third section, 'Government of Women,' links fraud to issues of gender. Georgia Wilder examines the impersonation of the voice of female petitioners in the pamphlet wars of the English Revolution, while Núria Silleras-Fernández explores the attempts of two late fourteenth-century Aragonese queens to take some control over their destinies through fraud. The essays in 'An Idle Press' deal with the opportunities and anxieties presented and represented by the transition to print. Allyson F. Creasman shows the many tricks used by the printers of Augsburg in the mid-sixteenth century to circumvent the censors, while Michael Long explores the connections between the shady practices of seventeenth-century English popular printers and the negative reputations of those who wrote for the popular press. Finally, 'Inventing the Past' offers three essays which consider the wilful reinvention of history: Johannes C. Wolfart's study of the Lindau archives; Dana L. Sample's essay on the Robert of Artois case; and David A. Wilson's excursion through the development of Mother Shipton's myth. It is not always clear why some essays appear in one section and not in another - a slightly different articulation of the relationship between gender and fraud would have grouped Bednarski with Silleras-Fernández, for example, while Wilder's piece would fit well with other essays particularly concerned with print culture. Because so many of the early modern essays...