Modern Attitudes Research Articles

A Horse is a Horse . . . and More: Some Recent Additons to Early Modern Animal Studies

Erica Fudge. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 224 pp. $45.00.Kathryn Shevelow. For the Love of Animals: Rise of the Animal Protection Movement. New York: Henry Holt, 2008 1st edition; 2009 paper. 352 pp. $17.00.Donna Landry. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 240 pp. $50.00.Work on animals is necessarily interdisciplinary. Discussion of, for example, subjectivity, symbolism, husbandry, vivisection, pet keeping, wildlife, welfare, and rights overlaps many areas: philosophy, history, literature, art, ecology and environmental studies, medicine, childhood, feminism, empire, and postcolonial studies. list goes on. Respected, established scholars who hail from literature and language departments wrote all three of the books under consideration here. Erica Fudge is Reader in Literary and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University; Katherine Shevelow is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, San Diego; and Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent. All three authors are concerned, broadly speaking, with agency in the, broadly conceived, early modern period (from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries) in Britain. And all three contribute to and cultural studies by also deploying feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist theories. But perhaps what is most significant here is not what these three books have in common, but that, despite all of the authors' grounding in literary studies, they offer three very different contributions to the burgeoning field of studies. Indeed, the diversity of these books suggests that scholarship focusing on nonhuman animals has matured to the point that our offerings are expanding beyond the usual suspects and perhaps gaining stature and recognition beyond the usual haunts. Fudge's book continues her pioneering work in studies in the early modern period with a contribution here to the history of ideas; Shevelow's first contribution to the field of studies is a book aimed at a popular rather than scholarly audience; and Landry offers a very pointed analysis of one kind of horse to add to her multiple contributions to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical cultural studies.Following Derrida's denunciation of the term in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), it has become de rigueur in studies to avoid using the term animal as one that denotes and demarcates the nonhuman in an imprecise and monolithic way. Early modern Britons used it to precisely this effect. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which the concept of reason was defined and figured into the categorization of the in the early modern period (defined here more traditionally as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). Fudge cites concern for the impact of Descartes on early modern attitudes about and actions toward nonhuman animals as inspiration for her book. She suggests that modern scholars too often impose our own post-Cartesian perspectives on the period and thus inadequately consider other animals or elide them from history altogether. She begins by exploring the construction of the category and its instability and proceeds to explicate complicated attitudes toward nonhuman animals in turn. She suggests the two are inextricable and that too many historians have torn asunder unthinkingly what cannot be taken as distinct: the history of humanity and the history of nonhuman animals. To explain the it seems, is to explain the animal; or perhaps that should be reversed: to explain the is to explain the human, she argues (6). All too often modern scholars read metaphor and symbol where there is an actual to be seen. Fudge is concerned to uncover the real animals in early modern considerations of reason, not simply the metaphorical animals that reflect human concerns. …

Bodies in doubt: an American history of intersex

What does it mean to be human? To be human is, in part, to be physically sexed and culturally gendered. Yet not all bodies are clearly male or female. Bodies in Doubt traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present day. From the beginning, intersex bodies have been marked as other, as monstrous, sinister, threatening, inferior, and unfortunate. Some nineteenth-century doctors viewed their intersex patients with disrespect and suspicion. Later, doctors showed more empathy for their patients' plights and tried to make decisions regarding their care. Yet definitions of correct in matters of intersex were entangled with shifting ideas and tensions about what was natural and normal, indeed about what constituted personhood or humanity. Reis has examined hundreds of cases of hermaphroditism and intersex found in medical and popular literature and argues that medical practice cannot be understood outside of the broader cultural context in which it is embedded. As the history of responses to intersex bodies has shown, doctors are influenced by social concerns about marriage and heterosexuality. Bodies in Doubt considers how Americans have interpreted and handled ambiguous bodies, how the criteria and the authority for judging bodies changed, how both the binary gender ideal and the anxiety over uncertainty persisted, and how the process for defining the very norms of sex and gender evolved. Bodies in Doubt breaks new ground in examining the historical roots of modern attitudes about intersex in the United States and will interest scholars and researchers in disability studies, social history, gender studies, and the history of medicine.

Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (review)

Reviewed by: Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine Andrew Fleck Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. London: Routledge, 2007. xxii + 402 pp. index. 30 b/w illus. Optimism about the power of ingenuity to allow human beings eventually to overcome many limitations of the material world might seem to be a modern phenomenon. Renaissance humanists' hopes about human perfectibility, however, gave impetus to many European technological advances of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, important predecessors for European industrialization typically dated to a later period. In his provocative Engines of the Imagination, Jonathan Sawday offers brilliant insights into early modern attitudes toward technology. He uncovers and explores a paradox at the center of European understandings of the purpose of machines: human beings may develop technology to supplement their imperfect condition in an approximation of their Edenic perfection, but in doing so they may run the risk of sinfully transgressing the limitations imposed upon them as a consequence of original sin. The period thus encodes machines doubly, as signs of fallen humanity's weakness and as divinely merciful means of repairing the deficit. The book includes fascinating readings of Leonardo da Vinci, Agricola, Montaigne, and Francis Bacon, among a vast array of others, contributing an important intervention in the history of science. Unfortunately for the readers of this journal, only a small portion of the book treats matters of the Restoration, and these chapters are slightly less compelling than the rest of the study. But Sawday's bold approach to the questions he raises about European attitudes to the natural and the constructed environments and the technology that fuses the two offers an important foundation and fascinating background for thinking about engines of the Restoration imagination. In five chapters on pre-Restoration topics, Sawday isolates key facets of Renaissance Europeans' fascination with machines, offering dazzling readings that focus on Montaigne's Essais, a painting of a woman at a spinning wheel (Las Hilanderas) by Velasquez, portions of Edmund Spenser, and scenes from William Shakespeare. Beginning with primarily Continental texts, Sawday explores da Vinci's, Montaigne's, [End Page 57] and the Italian architect Domenico Fontana's fascination with machinery's ability to magnify power. He mentions in passing a theme that will recur at various points in his study: that for these men such engines acquire symbolic significance for the Renaissance state. He turns next to the importance of the print revolution for Renaissance mechanical thinking, focusing in particular on "machine books"—texts devoted to complex and typically unique engines such as those found in Agricola's illustrated De Re Metallica, one of scores of such tomes—arguing that such books contributed to the process by which "labor or work was itself being redefined by machinery" (88). In a chapter devoted to the gendered component of Renaissance technology, Sawday explores the imaginative connection of women and wheels, focusing particularly on the spinning wheel, but looking as well at Fortuna and her wheel. He then proceeds to a lively reading of Renaissance texts concerned with the oxymoronic possibility of mechanical life. He considers the many idiosyncratic Renaissance automata as part of the period's poetic investigations into the boundaries of art and nature. As mechanistic thinking took deeper root in the Renaissance imagination, he argues in his next chapter, Francis Bacon and others reoriented attitudes toward technology, moving from the enhancement of human perception to the treatment of bodies (and the universe) as merely complex machines whose operations—even the act of intercourse—submit to a dull regularity of process. In the final pages of his chapter on "Reasoning Engines," Sawday explores a distrust of mechanistic thinking in John Wilmot's (Rochester's) verse. This final fifth of his study may be most pertinent to scholars of the Restoration. The final two chapters of Engines of the Imagination treat John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the place of machinery in their poetry. Contrasting Milton's Paradise Lost to the idealism of the Royal Society, Sawday argues that the poet reveals a skepticism about ingenuity, aligning invention and industry with the sinister figures of the epic and the consequences...

From communal charity to national welfare: Jewish orphanages in Eastern Europe before and after World War I

This article examines Jewish institutions for the care of orphans in an attempt to understand several aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe: (1) attitudes towards orphans on the part of communal leaders, intellectuals, and political activists; (2) the transition of Jewish charitable and (in the modern period) philanthropic institutions from the pre‐modern communal charity of the early nineteenth century to modern “scientific philanthropy” at the fin de siècle to national welfare in the interwar period; (3) and, to a lesser extent, the experiences of orphans themselves, as far as is possible to ascertain from documents relating to the institutions that cared for them. Marginal figures such as orphans were of growing concern to the organised Jewish community in its increasingly complex encounter with modernity in the Russian Empire, and traditional patterns of charity, family life, and relations between socioeconomic classes were cast into doubt by new government policies and modern scientific attitudes arriving from Western and Central Europe. The religiously mandated charity of the pre‐modern kehillah gave way to a paternalistic philanthropy that aimed to mould a generation of “productive” working‐class Jews. However, the upheavals of World War I and the mass politicisation of East European Jewry brought about a transformation in attitudes towards orphans and other marginal groups, whose care was made a centrepiece of national, and nationally minded, Jewish communal life in the interwar Polish Republic.

Following Pausanias. The Quest for Greek Antiquity

This book is the first to offer a historical overview of the reception of Pausanias, with a particular focus on the early modern period. Pausanias, a Greek writer of the second century AD, presents a detailed description of the historical landscape of central and southern Greece. His work, the Periegesis, is a mine of valuable information about ancient culture. Since its rediscovery by western scholars in the early fifteenth century, the Periegesis has had a crucial impact on modern attitudes to Greece, Greek cultural history and Greek art. Following Pausanias is a companion (not a conventional catalogue) to an exhibition in the Gennadios Library at Athens, an institution exceptionally well placed to document the reception of Pausanias’ work. The book includes numerous illustrations which demonstrate the scope and value of the library's collections. The first part of Following Pausanias introduces the ancient author and his time. This is...

The Case of Rosaura's Honor, and the Problem of Modernity ( La vida es sueño )

The Case of Rosaura's Honor, and the Problem of Modernity (La vida es sueño) Joachim Küpper Calderón's La vida es sueño (c. 1635) begins with a female character, Rosaura, stepping onstage. She is the daughter of Violante, a lady at the imperial court of Moscow. When Violante was young, she entertained pre-marital relations with a courtier named Clotaldo, who left her, although he knew she was pregnant. We are not informed of Clotaldo's motives, but he is likely to have acted out of career opportunism. He was offered and accepted a position at the court of the Polish King Basilio. When Rosaura comes to Poland some twenty years later, Clotaldo is what one might call the "privado," the first courtier of the Polish King. As an illegitimate child, Rosaura is without honor ("honor") in the sense of reputation and social acceptability. But she has yet another problem: at court in Moscow, she met a young nobleman named Astolfo, who succeeded in winning her favor. Afterwards, he did to her what her father had already done to her mother, Violante: he left her for selfish reasons. He went to Poland as a suitor to princess Estrella, because he hoped by marrying her to inherit the Polish throne from their common uncle, Basilio. Born without honor and forsaken by her lover: this is Rosaura's situation at the beginning of the play, a situation largely brought about by contingency, by adversa fortuna, as it was called in the seventeenth century. She is not responsible for her illegitimate birth, and her surrender to Astolfo's carnal desires, although considered sinful from the standpoint of moral theology, was not a serious mistake measured by the standards of courtly society. Thus, one may regard Rosaura's being without a husband as the consequence of another interference of adversa fortuna: namely the fact that, by contingency, in a neighboring kingdom the dynastic situation is such that it offers Astolfo the prospects to achieve the rank of king. [End Page 509] What Rosaura does in this situation is perfectly understandable by modern standards. She does not accept what contingency has inflicted upon her; she decides instead to claim agency by searching for her father and her lover to make them restore her reputation. She cross-dresses as a man and travels on horseback to Poland. My reading may well seem an over-interpretation, but I will try to substantiate it in the following argument: the function of Rosaura in this play is to represent an attitude towards life that we may call the basis of modernity, a radically different position from earlier periods. According to this attitude one should not simply accept the world and reality as they are; nor should one assign meaning to facts by interpreting contingency as a form of higher necessity (e.g. mythical necessity) or as a consequence of the will of God or Providence. Rather, one should try to set things right or to mend, as it were, the defects of the factual world. To cite a formula that was to become prominent roughly 150 years later, one should pursue one's happiness. One may call this basically modern attitude the project of self-assertion. Of course, a Christian understanding of life's misfortunes also differs from the way these problems were treated in mythical ages—Christianity does not require that humans passively accept their fate. The crucial difference between traditional Christian and modern attitudes towards contingency, however, is that Catholic belief allows for agency only within certain limits, namely the limits of moral theology, that is, tradition and dogma. This excludes the freedom to transgress the boundaries of the "role," to put it in Golden Age terms, which God as the creator of all human beings has allocated to each individual at birth. In the case of Calderón's drama, this would refer to Rosaura taking on a masculine identity and thus denying being born female.1 This assessment of Rosaura's choice may well prompt a contemporary reader to ask what else she could have done to restore her honor: should she have submissively accepted her misfortune? The answer is...

Turkish cinema: identity, distance and belonging

Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging is the first comprehensive study of the cinema of Turkey to be published in English. A recurring theme in the book is the Turkish quest for a modern identity in a world where borders, attitudes and people themselves are shifting and relocating. Turkey is a society striving to reconcile modern attitudes to morals with traditional values and centuries-old customs and its films reflect these contradictions. Against this background Gonul Donmez-Colin evaluates contemporary Turkish filmmakers, as well as the films of those who have left and those who have been exiled from Turkey. Themes of internal and external migration, as well as the voices of the 'denied identities' such as the Kurds are integral to the book. Gender and sexuality, taboo subjects that only the new generation of filmmakers dare to expose are also discussed homosexuality, lesbianism, honour killings, and incest are some of the ground-breaking points of the author's account. Written by a film scholar familiar with Turkish language and culture who has undertaken extensive research both in Turkey and its neighbouring countries, this is an indispensable reference for students of cinema and Middle Eastern studies, as well as the general reader interested in this dynamic, rich and thoroughly modern national cinema.

«EN SUNN SJEL I ET SUNT LEGEME» OM FORHOLDET MELLOM KROPP OG SJEL I ANTIKKEN OG I NÅTID

This article discusses the Latin sentence mens sana in corpore sano, comparing modern attitudes to the body and soul with attitudes expressed by Roman authors.

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (review)

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. By Kenneth Hamilton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. [x, 304 p. ISBN-10: 0195178262; ISBN-13; 9780195178265. $29.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, bibliography, index. In After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Kenneth Hamilton challenges the monopoly of modern performance practice on romantic repertory. Focusing on the so-called of pianism, ca.1840-ca. 1940, Hamilton's healthy mixture of common sense, insightful arguments, and considerable experience as both scholar and pianist demonstrate just how far our current notions of performance etiquette, textual fidelity, and audience responsibility can be from those moved. But Hamilton's main goal is not to enable some abstract musicological recovery of lost nineteenth-century performance practice. Rather, he emphasizes that rediscovering practices of the past does not just satisfy curiosity, it offers to the modern performer (p. 32). Chapter 1 frames the book by identifying the multivalent vocabulary associated with the period. Whether by his technique, his compositions, or through sheer accumulation of students, Liszt has come to be viewed as the inaugurator of the golden age. Indeed, many pianists even today introduce themselves as a student of student of student of Liszt, the implication being that Liszt--his teaching, his artistry, even perhaps his spirit--remains alive and well. Hamilton questions the validity of such phrases on several grounds: Is it really possible to speak of an uninterrupted and uncorrupted performance aesthetic that can be traced back to Liszt? What of the myriad number of national styles or schools of pianism? How do other seminal pianist-composers like Chopin or Mendelssohn fit into the picture? And even if these questions can be answered honestly, should such tradition be reverentially maintained? Many pianists continue to insist upon golden-age attitude (p. 14) that waxes nostalgic about by-gone days, but Hamilton maintains that they, fact, are the odd ones out (p. 30). The romantic and modern attitudes are especially at odds in regards to the solo recital, the focus of chapter 2. While rather regimented diet of compositions from Bach's period through ours--almost always ordered chronologically--is the norm today, Hamilton demonstrates that concerts during the golden age assumed number of stylistic profiles. His accounts of recitals remind us that the performer both seen and heard, that is, as much visual phenomenon as an aural communicant. While Liszt again is often credited with its invention, the modern solo recital (or at least something resembling it) did not become established until about the 1880s--earlier in the century, variety shows were the norm. Perhaps most importantly, the content of performance site-specific. In the late 1830s Liszt reluctant, for example, to perform Robert Schumann's Carnaval at public concert. This decision not necessarily an aesthetic one: ticket-paying audiences expected to hear Liszt perform original fantasies or arrangements. Moreover, Liszt often had to share the stage with other artists. In general, opportunities to mount large work like Carnaval at public concert in the 1830s and 1840s were scarce. (Clara Wieck's programs were quite unusual for the time.) The private soiree or the invitation-only salon would have been (and was) the preferred venue for such an undertaking. Even Beethoven's late works were usually performed by Liszt behind closed doors. The irony of this situation, writes Hamilton, was that much of the 'serious' music in the standard repertoire itself written for more intimate performance circumstances and had certainly not been composed in an era when multi-movement works were played complete and uninterrupted before rapt audience in large hall (pp. 61-62). …

From Servius to Frazer: The Golden Bough and its Transformations

For the past 2,000 years, no work of secular Western literature has been so widely read, studied and interpreted as Vergil’s Aeneid. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exegetes of the poem have focused on its sixth book as the source of ancient pagan wisdom; one of the central images in this book is that of the Golden Bough, which Aeneas plucks in order to gain entry into the underworld. This paper discusses the entire history of the Bough’s interpretation, beginning with Servius and culminating with James Frazer; the Bough is used as an index of the rise and decline of allegorical interpretation, and further hermeneutic developments are studied in some detail. Attention is also given to literary reworkings of the Bough, from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. I conclude with a discussion of modern attitudes towards mediaeval interpretations, and an analysis of the continuity of exegetical methods, as reflected in twentieth-century accounts of the Bough’s meaning.

"Live to Die, Die to Live": An Introduction

"Live to Die, Die to Live":An Introduction Peter Walmsley Two sets of images illuminate this special issue of Eighteenth Century Fiction, "Death/La Mort." Marble putti grace the front and back covers: one, a girl, gazes calmly at a skull; the other, a boy, weeps as he holds an hourglass. Probably carved between 1680 and 1720 by a Dutch or English craftsman, these putti were intended to decorate a funeral monument in a church or a family burial chapel, and perhaps did at some point. Though the carvings are gorgeously realized, they are nonetheless conventional: putti holding the emblems of death commonly adorned more lavish baroque tombs.1 Products of a pan-European aristocratic aesthetic, they were designed to convey the wealth and power of a great family. The second set of images, appearing between the articles of this issue, could hardly differ more. These verses and woodcuts from the English folk rhyme "Who Killed Cock Robin?" are indigenous art, cheaply reproduced for children and the marginally literate. The ballad, which has obscure origins, first appeared in print in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook of 1744 and became over time a common chapbook nursery rhyme. These images create a world of fable: a parish of animals tending its dead and enacting the mundane mechanics of Christian burial—the tolling of bells, the sewing of shrouds, the bearing of palls. Although some readers have sought a political allegory in these lines, the intent of the poem is, clearly, to teach children the steps by which the dead, even the very poor, are laid to rest and grieved. As much as the [End Page 1] putti, "Cock Robin" speaks to the necessary public displays and rituals by which the dead are set apart from the living, but the rhyme registers at the same time some of the inadequacies of the protocols by which the bodies of the dead, and the emotions of a community of mourners, are contained. Eighteenth-century church doctrine and ritual vigorously disavowed the validity of the regular emotions of death, grief and fear—a denial that must have sounded hollow. Taken together, both works of art confirm the role of religion in managing death in the Enlightenment. Christianity had a doctrine for explaining this most catastrophic of life's events. The putti and the "Cock Robin" woodcuts emphasize that in this period people were meant to live with death in view, a prominent theme in popular devotional literature of the period. Jeremy Taylor, in his much reprinted The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), advises that we "make Death as present to us, our own Death, dwelling and dress'd in all its Pomp of Fancy, and proper Circumstances."2 So too William Sherlock, in his Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689), exhorts good Christians "to take a timely leave of the World, and to withdraw from the noise and business of it ... to direct their Face wholly to that World whither they are going."3 The essays in this collection all elaborate upon this eighteenth-century preoccupation, which is proclaimed in the common motto embossed or engraved on mourning rings: "Live to Die, Die to Live." Such sentiments might seem alien to most twenty-first-century readers, and much of the social history of death over the last century dwells on the striking differences between early and later modern attitudes. As Walter Benjamin puts it: "Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one ... In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room in which someone had not once died ... Today people live in rooms that [End Page 2] have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs."4 In two books published in the mid-1970s, Western Attitudes toward Death and The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Ariès provides an influential account of this cultural change.5 Before the eighteenth century, Ariès observes, the focus of death...

Displacing the Gods? Agency and Power in Adaptations of Ancient History and Myth

This article considers the ways in which ancient cultures are represented within contemporary cinematic narrative. The study uses the notion of attribution as its starting point, and focuses on two recent cinematic adaptations, Snyder's 300 (2007) and Petersen's Troy (2004). Attribution is defined as the retrospective assignation of particular sensibilities and beliefs to ancient cultures. The directors and/or authors who generate perspectives on the past may not appreciate the exact provenance of the traditions from which they have drawn their material. Displacing the Gods? examines some of the historical and literary antecedents of modern attitudes, in order to place cinematic accounts of Thermopylae and Troy in a more objective context. The second major feature of the enquiry concerns the ways in which power or agency is assigned to the various characters and forces within the films studied. Particular reference is made to the distinction between human and divine activity, and the evident need to offer rational explanations of events while reinforcing the view that ancient Greek societies were driven by religious superstition.

:Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England

Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being human meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look. From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture.

TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE REPERCUSSIONS AND ITS EFFECT ON THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE

Information and automation are considered the most important technologic achievements that form the future lineaments. Also, the breakthrough increating the materials directed forward high performance competence and the using of modern techniques in architecture have changed number of the prevailing concepts in the technical sciences. The future challenges makes it compulsory to review all what is surrounding the architecture process as of theoretical principles and practical procedures on the light of modern concepts of architecture requirements from scientific and technological point of view having impact on the methods of architectural designs . The problem is to be in the challenges facing the architect in finding new architectural language that invest and accompany the increasing progress in the modern techniques; which requires updating the architectural concepts, requirements and tools as well as developing the architect ability to absorb and direct the available data, alternatives and performance styles by making change in the core of teaching and practicing methods of design. The research aims to observe the technological culture Repercussions and its most important features on the activities of architecture ,and the possible stability for the majority of these repercussions and their relation in the future of architecture through the research procedures that include the following axis: - The future as prospective and intellectual approach: It deals with the concept and types of future studies and the role of forecast in the planned change. - Technology as technical and social phenomenon: This deals with the concept of - technology and technicality and the social insight of technology. - Patterns of the contemporary technical change: Deals with the most important technological achievements forms the lineaments of the contemporary, future and technical change such as: - Information technology, digital design, industrial automation norms and new materials technology. - Lineaments of technological culture: deals with information culture and knowledge industry, technical globalization and its repercussions on the social and culture environment, architecture as after modernity and conformity forms with technology age. - The impact of technology on the development of modern attitudes in the design: deals with the forms of the technological impact forms on the modern attitudes of construction and internal design. - The future of architecture education, development of creative notion and the most important characteristics of creative education.

The Music of Mauricio Kagel (review)

The Music of Mauricio Kagel. By Bjorn Heile. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [viii, 209 p. ISBN 10: 0-7546- 3523-6; ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3523-9. $99.95.] Music examples, photos, notes, chronological list of works, select bibliography, indexes. This is the first monograph in English devoted to the music of Mauricio Kagel, a major figure of the European musical avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Buenos Aires in 1931 and self-taught as a composer, Kagel immigrated to Cologne, Germany in 1957 where he received international recognition for his music. Although he possessed a varied compositional palette that included aspects of integral serialism, indeterminancy, and classical electronic music, Kagel focused on visual and theatrical elements in his works as a means to critique modern attitudes toward music. For him, improvisation was a means whereby performers could uncover new sounds and theatrical modes of expression, making musical performance, in essence, a dramatic event. Besides being active as a composer, conductor, lecturer, and professor since 1958, Kagel has been writing and directing television films since 1965, and authoring radio dramas (Horspiele) since 1969. He has garnered numerous awards, honors, and prizes, among which include the Koussevitzky Prize (1965), the Mozart Medaille of Frankfurt (1983), the French Order des arts et des lettres (1995), the Erasmus Prize (1998), Prix Maurice Ravel (1999), Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis (2000), and the Rolf Schock Prize for Music (2005). In this important book, Bjorn Heile examines Kagel's development as a composer and the musical aesthetics driving his work. He notes Kagel's expansion of the conceptual boundaries of music through both an elaborate imagination and a subversive humor bordering on the bizarre. Characteristic of Kagel's style is the absurd combination of strict compositional technique and playful rhetorical gestures involving irony and paradox. Kagel is, in short, a musical satirist who examines the various ways in which society views music, whether as a commercial product, a significant component of a religious experience, or the subject of scholarly expertise. Heile states that The Music of Mauricio Kagel is both a traditional monograph with pieces examined in chronological order as well as a series of essays on different aspects of Kagel's musical style (p. 5). One can either read the book, Heile maintains, from cover to cover as a critical investigation of Kagel's music or use it as a reference work. In the former case, readers will find that Heile has outlined the different elements of Kagel's musical style in an impressive manner, skillfully placing them in their wider critical contexts. In this reviewer's opinion, readers will also react favorably to how Heile has revealed the breadth of Kagel's imagination and the multiple contexts informing his work. After outlining the goals and structure of The Music of Mauricio Kagel in an introduction (In Search of Kagel), Heile reveals the remarkable range of Kagel's creativity in six chapters. In the first (Buenos Aires), the author explores the roots of Kagel's compositional aesthetics-especially his fascination with how musical expression can be achieved through diverse media and extra- musical contexts-by examining the composer's formative years in Buenos Aires. In particular, Heile notes the pivotal influence of Jorge Luis Borges, Kagel's English teacher at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores and a great South American writer in his own right. For Heile, Borges's impact on Kagel can be seen in the latter's preoccupations with labyrinths, encyclopedias, cabbalistic concepts and techniques, and the idea of parallel realities governed by strange rules (p. 11). Chapter 2 (Beginnings in Cologne: Serialism, Aleatory Technique and Electronics), deals with Kagel's early years in Cologne as a devotee of serialism, aleatoric techniques, and electronic music. …

Psychosocial predictors of adolescent sexual behavior

To find out the psychosocial factors associated with adolescent sexual behavior. A cross sectional study was carried out in Chandigarh Union Territory of India by enrolling 11 th class students from six randomly selected schools. A pre-tested questionnaire containing 83 items was administered after ensuring privacy and confidentiality. Socio-economic status, residence, gender, grade in the class, religion, acculturation level, self esteem, social support and coping behavior were considered as independent explanatory variables and physical sexual contact (which included kissing, hugging and sexual intercourse) was taken as dependent variable. Two hundred and fifty seven students enrolled for the study had mean age of 17 yr. The prevalence of sexual activity was 20% (95% CI: 13.6%-28.1%) among males and 6% (95% CI: 1.3%-18.8%) among females. Four percent of males and 1% of females reported sexual intercourse. The main reason for not having sexual physical contact was societal norms. After adjusting for confounders in multivariate analysis, male gender (OR: 3.5; 95%CI: 1.5-8.1) and modern attitudes (OR: 0.77; 95%CI: 0.6-0.98) were found to be the risk factors for initiation of sexual activity in adolescence. Cultural norms rather than the individual/psychological factors tend to govern adolescent sexual behavior in Indian society.

:Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture

This original analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of painting: the creation of visual art in the form of paint on canvas and the use of cosmetics to paint women's bodies. Situating her study in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, France, and England, Patricia Phillippy brings together three distinct actors: women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women and men who paint women-either with pigment or with words. Phillippy asserts that early modern attitudes toward painting, cosmetics, and poetry emerge from and respond to a common cultural history. Materially, she connects those who created images of women with pigment to those who applied cosmetics to their own bodies through similar mediums, tools, techniques, and exposure to toxic materials. Discursively, she illuminates historical and social issues such as gender and morality with the nexus of painting, painted women, and women painters. Teasing out the intricate relationships between these activities as carried out by women and their visual and literary representation by women and by men, Phillippy aims to reveal the delineation and transgression of women's creative roles, both artistic and biological. In Painting Women, Phillippy provides a cross-disciplinary study of women as objects and agents of painting.

Brutal reasoning: animals, rationality, and humanity in early modern England

Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 224, hb. $45.00, ISBN: 9780801444548.In her new book, Erica Fudge, one of the most important historians of early modern attitudes toward animals, demonstrates how the history of this topic touches on some of the key cultural and intellectual issues of human history. The book's main theme is the construction of the modern notion of the human. This emerged in the early modern era from the consideration of animals within the discourse of the nature of reason, and subsequently from the Cartesian exclusion of animals from this discourse. Throughout, Fudge brilliantly demonstrates how the seemingly simple differentiation between human and animal rational abilities in fact resulted in 'messy' categorization, which ultimately forced early modern people to face the possibility of animal sentience and rationality.As she notes in the Introduction, the chapters of the book follow the lead of her early modern sources in moving from the definition of the human to a discussion of animals, with an emphasis on the combination of these two issues within early modern thought. The first chapter surveys the early modern categories defining human reason, such as speech, laughter, virtue, and prudence; the very lack of reason in animals, according to this perspective, is part of the definition of reason.The second chapter highlights the complexity of the early modern notion of humanity, which unsurprisingly excluded women and New World natives from full human status. Early modern humanity was a concept in need of construction, achieved through education, and the learning of self-control. The third chapter depicts the early modern notion of the loss of humanity, of how human beings by the very fact of being uniquely rational, could also forsake their rationality and become 'beastly' in a way no beast could be. By having the capacity for virtue, human beings inevitably also had the capacity for vice, both seemingly non-existent in animals. In the latter part of this chapter Fudge turns to the early modern ethical consideration of animals, highlighting Montaigne's innovative importance in shifting the arguments for a kind treatment of animals from the anthropocentric benefits this might contain, to the emphasis of the animals' sentience, irrespective of their lack of reason.Beginning with the fourth chapter Fudge centres more on the discussion of animals per se. This chapter surveys ancient discussions of animals, emphasizing the theriophily ('love of animals') of Plutarch, and its influence on early modern thought. The chapter culminates in one of the most original contributions of the book (pp. 114-22), a discussion of the influence of scepticism on the early modern discussion of reason; the definition of what is 'unreasonable' in animals, according to the sceptical viewpoint, is an expression of the limits of human perception, not an admission that animals do indeed lack reason. …

Saxon or European? Interpreting and Reinterpreting St Boniface

AbstractSt Boniface (c.680–754) has been called one of the ‘founders of Christian Europe’ for his wide‐ranging influence on religion, politics and culture in the early Middle Ages. This Anglo‐Saxon was a missionary in Frisia, reformer in Germany, promoted papal authority, and supported the Carolingian seizure of royal power in Frankia in 751. Yet the precise significance of his achievements has always been subject to interpretation, invention and challenge. This essay explores some of the medieval and modern attitudes to Boniface, examining how and why representations of the saint remain varied and open to change. In particular it asks why the commemoration of St Boniface was divorced from the conversion of Saxony – a task he as an Anglo‐Saxon had actively promoted – and instead became a matter of European meaning.

'Good Physic but Bad Food': Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers

The subject of medicinal cannibalism in mainstream western medicine has received surprisingly little historical attention. This paper argues that this phenomenon, far from being as marginal as its neglected status might imply, was closely integrated with many underlying medical theories in the early modern period. Moreover, the phenomenon sheds valuable light on the authority of learned medicine, attitudes to cannibalism and to the often emphatically spiritual basis of Paracelsian medicine. This article aims to show that, while widely accepted by patients and practitioners, corpse medicine was legitimised by a mixture of potentially incompatible factors, including rarity, spiritual virtue, learned authority and commercial normalisation. As historical circumstances changed, these factors would ultimately undermine a once mainstream medical treatment.