Moore's Work Research Articles

Circular economy disclaimers: Rethinking property relations at the end of cheap nature

Converging environmental crises have inspired a movement to shift dominant economic forms away from linear “take-make-waste” models and toward more circular forms that reimagine discarded materials as valuable resources. With the coming “end of cheap nature”, this invitation to reimagine waste as something more than “the political other of capitalist value” is seen as both an environmental necessity and an opportunity for green growth. Less often discussed is that the circular economy, in its reconfiguration of value, also has the potential to reshape contemporary property relations and dismantle existing forms of circularity. In this paper, we explore potential shifts in property relations through an analysis of three strategies often imagined as key to facilitating the transition to circularity—extended producer responsibility, repair, and online resale. Each case synthesizes existing research, public discourse, and findings from a series of focus groups and interviews with circular economy professionals. While this research is preliminary and demands additional research, all three cases suggest caution given the possibility that some circular economy strategies can concentrate value and control of existing materials stocks, dispossess those most vulnerable, and alienate participants in existing reuse, recycling, and repair markets. Drawing on and adapting Luxemburg's concept of primitive accumulation, Tsing's ideas about salvage accumulation, Moore's work on commodity frontiers and recent research which encourages more attention to processes of commoning—we argue that without careful attention to relations of power and justice in conceptualizations of ownership and the collective actions necessary to transform our economic forms in common, transitions toward the circular economy have the potential to enclose the value of discards and exacerbate inequality.

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon & New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, LiamCamplingAlejandroColásLondon & New York: Verso. 2021. pp. xiv + 418. £20/$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781784785239

Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine

<i>Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the</i> Dial <i>Magazine</i>

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case"

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case" Erika Renée Williams (bio) W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he defines as "a problem" in the Euro-American imaginary, has long been understood to denote an alienated black subjectivity and an American body politic divided by racial caste. The white gaze, Du Bois instructs, has the potential to restrict the parameters of black subjectivity by barring black subjects from fully accessing their citizenship and expressing their humanity. In the opening chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," he recounts the childhood memory that perhaps occasioned his divided consciousness: that of a young white female classmate refusing the affection he offered with the gift of a "gorgeous" calling card.1 The incident leads him to realize that his blackness signals not approbation but abjection to many of his white compatriots and thus to see that they deem him a problem and not fully a person. Because he likens this experience of failed interpersonal, interracial affection to that of being cast out from his native land, Du Bois arguably suggests a parallel failed "romance," understood in its most capacious sense as any heightened exchange of intersubjective affect, between himself and the American nation writ large. In rendering the young white girl a symbol of an ungenerous and withholding white nation, Du Bois implicitly ties the development of individual states of black consciousness to the promise and pathos of black assimilation into a Euro-centrist American body politic, foregrounding the way interpersonal dynamics of intimacy shape collective processes of nation-building and implicitly rendering double consciousness a matter of misbegotten love. [End Page 27] Moreover, Du Bois's recounting of a childhood story of foreclosed "puppy love" to set up his theory of double consciousness in Souls marks his deployment of a literary trope that I term the "cross-caste romance." Drawing on Lisa L. Moore's work regarding the role of intercultural love in imagining and shaping the fabric of a nation, I define the cross-caste romance as an intimate relation between persons separated by differences (e.g., race, class, and gender) that are purportedly immutable but are in fact constructed, a relation that foregrounds the fragility of intersubjective exchange and the tenuousness of nation formation.2 Simultaneously a remainder of transatlantic slavery, a harbinger of antiracist and decolonial critique, and an object of metaphysical inquiry, double consciousness cannot be understood solely by way of history, politics, or philosophy. Rather, I argue that it must be approached through the framework of the story with which he introduces it and through its trope of failed interpersonal intimacy, which symbolizes not just the psycho-social alienation of black subjects but the broader material and sociopolitical divisions fracturing the United States. Indeed, Du Bois's various narrative projects, both fictional and nonfictional, describe the urgency of America's revaluation and acceptance of its ethnic others by using the language of intersubjective and intrasubjective intimacy—whether figured as romantic courtship or as other forms of love or eros. For Du Bois, the solution to the conundrum of the black subject's compulsory, divided consciousness is twofold: first, a robust process of black recovery and reclamation, premised partly on the recovery and reclamation of African ancestry and African folkways, and second, an attempt at some form of black assimilation, through which the black subject might "consent," with Motenian echoes, not to being reduced to a "single being" but rather to being incorporated into the American body politic while still maintaining some measure of cultural distinction.3 Du Bois suggests that black American subjects, once having taken sustenance from the legacy of "wasted, dispersed, or forgotten" African "genius," might then be freer to offer up the gifts—however conditional—of their affective labor.4 Like his anecdote in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's forgotten 1907 detective story "The Case" frames double consciousness as a form of misbegotten love and in terms of the challenge of placing black self-love on a parallel track with black assimilation in the form of affective, intersubjective...

Charles Moore and Late Triassic vertebrates: history and reassessment

Ilminster-born Charles Moore (1815-1881) was an indefatigable West Country geologist who made significant and wide-ranging contributions to the science, both in terms of the material he collected and his publications. Following his permanent move to Bath in 1853, Moore collected extensively in Late Triassic rocks, amassing a rich haul of fossil vertebrate specimens. A pioneer of bulk sampling, his fossil vertebrate collection from the Rhaetian fissure infills at Holwell, Somerset has provided much research material for subsequent study; Holwell is now the type locality for several Late Triassic mammaliaforms, reptiles (lepidosaurs) and chondrichthyans. His collection of vertebrate remains from the Arden Sandstone Formation (Carnian Age) at Ruishton has never been fully described, but contains some significant material including isolated xenacanth and hybodont shark's teeth, dorsal fin spines and cephalic spines. The objective of this present paper is to raise the profile of Moore's work on late Triassic vertebrate fossils, to highlight his innovative approach to bulk collecting, and to assess the scientific importance of his collections in both historical and modern contexts.

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore

Reviewed by: The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Dramaby Cecelia Moore Elizabeth A. Osborne The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama. By Cecelia Moore. New Studies in Southern History. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. x, 221. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-2682-1.) At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deployed the Works Progress Administration with the intent of providing relief to the unemployed by putting them to work in their fields of expertise. One arena was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935–1939), a nationwide network of theaters linked by goals, ideology, and resources but centered on the regional and local needs of their communities. Cecelia Moore's The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama focuseson the FTP in North Carolina, using clear and comprehensive archival labor to demonstrate the connections between the FTP and local and educational theater work already in place, as well as the conflict between national political forces and regionalism. Moore introduces the FTP through national director Hallie Flanagan's oft-quoted description of the different regions, highlighting Flanagan's assertion that the FTP's work in the South would be "'a folk play'" (p. 5). This description serves as inciting incident to Moore's explication and leads her to consider amateur, educational, and professional theater. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of the Carolina Playmakers, an outgrowth of the little theatre movement and spearheaded by Frederick Henry Koch (no relation to Koch Industries) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapter 2 builds on this discussion, offering a more focused interrogation of the role of race in community dramas and the various complications that confronted the FTP in the state. The third chapter concentrates on The Lost Colony, a hit historical pageant staged in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, as a case study for regional success. Chapter 4 highlights playwrights such as Zora Neale Hurston and two virtually unknown women writers, Loretto Carroll Bailey and Betty Smith, as one way of uncovering the vital work of largely unknown individuals. The final chapter traces the regional repercussions of national politics when the arts strive for local relevance, focusing on the FTP's downfall and the shortcomings of a regional model for a national theater. Moore's strength is her ability to dig deeply into the archival record and to flesh out the politics, social norms, and impacts of competing objectives and personalities. Her chapter on The Lost Colonyshowcases this skill. In it, she considers the "Manteo pageant venture [as] an attempt at people's theatre. . . . It would put the working-class people of Manteo onstage in a dramatization of their history and draw similar kinds of people to see it" (p. 85). In this effort, The Lost Colonyserved as a way to integrate theater and U.S. history, "to use the past to promote an inclusive, democratic future for the nation" (p. 85). Moore's detailed case study reveals intriguing information about how and why The Lost Colonywas created, the stakes of its success, and the troubling link between that success and the promotion of Roanoke as "the cradle of Anglo-Saxon civilization" in the United States, at the expense of Native and minority populations (p. 107). Moore's research is compelling and thorough, incorporating the major FTP archives at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, as well as [End Page 1048]numerous local collections that contribute to a deep understanding of North Carolina activities during this period. Yet there is a notable absence of secondary scholarship on theater history in general and the FTP specifically; works by Barry B. Witham, Amy Brady, Ann Folino White, and myself would have offered helpful insights into the many ways that theater intersects with issues of regionalism, censorship, American identity, race, and gender. Nevertheless, Moore's work should appeal to historians and students looking to learn more about this exciting moment in North Carolina and theater history. Elizabeth A...

Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes

Reviewed by: Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes David T. Mitchell Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–196. By Kenneth C. Barnes. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. x, 266. $34.95, ISBN 978–1-68226–016-6.) In the past sixty years, scholars have written a number of good books on Catholic-Protestant relations in the United States, but until recently, cursory attention has been given to anti-Catholicism in the South. In his 1938 biography [End Page 200] of agrarian rebel turned anti-Catholic bigot Tom Watson, C. Vann Woodward created a seminal interpretation. Woodward concludes that while white southerners like Watson fostered religious bigotry, their actions revealed curious but extraneous truths about the South's history. Kenneth C. Barnes's book on anti-Catholicism in Arkansas has attempted to reframe this narrative, shifting the lens to the people and institutions that made religious bigotry their prime concern. The lion's share of Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 is devoted to an eighteen-year period, beginning in 1910 with the publication of Tom Watson's Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine (an anti-Catholic tour de force) and ending with the anti-Catholic campaign against 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith. The focus is noteworthy. In Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), an important study of America's nativist past, John Higham contends that the South's fixation with Catholicism began in 1910, with Watson contributing to paranoia. Barnes credits Strangers in the Land for providing a foundational framework for understanding anti-Catholicism in Arkansas, but he aligns with more recent scholars of anti-Catholicism who argue that anti-Catholicism was not primarily about ethnic identity but rather "essentially about a religion" (p. 4). One glaring omission is Andrew S. Moore's recent work on Catholic-Protestant relations in Georgia and Alabama. Seven chapters are organized chronologically. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to America's and Arkansas's anti-Catholic past, detailing how the anti-Catholic fringe element connected with a rural, religious, and conservative base. Chapter 2, perhaps the best chapter, uncovers the connection between anti-Catholicism and sexualized gender. For a brief time, anti-Catholic leaders created a paranoid, sex-obsessed frenzy, fueled by fictional accounts of convent abuses. Robert Randolph Posey, a notable zealot and Arkansas state representative, sponsored convent inspection bills twice. After it was passed, the Convent Inspection Act of 1915 required "religious institutions such as convents, monasteries, hospitals, orphanages, asylums, seminaries, or schools to submit to an inspection by the county sheriff or a grand jury upon the request of a judge or a petition of twenty citizens" (p. 25). Chapter 3 addresses how liquor issues and World War I influenced religious antipathy. In highlighting the work of Arkansas Baptists, Barnes convincingly links religiously motivated prohibition with anti-Catholic sentiments. The second part of the chapter examines how wartime anti-German sentiments fueled hatred against Catholics as another point when nationalism and ethnic identity trumped religious conviction. Chapter 4, "Catholics and the Ku Klux Klan, 1921–1925," emphasizes how the state's Klan leadership fueled jingoistic fears about immigration, public school control, and political conspiracy. Echoing other recent Klan histories, Barnes finds that these organizations attracted middle-class, urban, and educated leaders who wielded enormous political influence. Chapters 5 and 6 cover how the citizens of Arkansas debated the possibility of a Catholic president of the United States. In 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith picked Arkansas senator Joseph T. Robinson as his running [End Page 201] mate, creating a fissure between culture warriors who were fighting against a pro-alcohol, pro-evolution, and Catholic presidential candidate and those who supported a ticket that included Arkansas's "favorite son" (p. 164). Although anti-Catholicism did not disappear, Barnes sees 1928 as the pivotal year when it began a steady decline. John F. Kennedy's 1960 election marked the end of politically organized anti...

A Response: Difficulty, Opacity, Disposition, Method

A Response: Difficulty, Opacity, Disposition, Method1 Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Even they evince their own interests and modes of investigation, these responses to Thinking Sex Early Moderns generously correlate concerns of my project their own. Generated from institutional locations diverse classics, history, medical sociology, and area and postcolonial studies, each response seizes on points of connection that provide a platform for affirming particular values and concerns: of history and interdisciplinarity, of complexity and contradiction, of problematic travel in concepts. None of these values map onto a discipline; they point rather to habits of thought that are encouraged when we read for method.From this standpoint, is fascinating to see what appears-and doesn't appear-in these pages. Although Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands begin by invoking what they describe my book's pedagogical principle of historicizing, they quickly move to affects generated by its epistemological investments. Describing my work occasionally difficult and discomforting, they report that leaves them with an acute awareness of problems of interdisciplinary history of sexuality. They nonetheless applaud effort to put methodological questions into dialogue epistemological ones, insofar reshapes our very concept of sexual knowledge an analytical category. . . . The study of sex becomes investigation of how sex is turned into knowledge.Similarly intrigued by epistemological processes, Lisa Jean Moore emphasizes way Thinking Sex Early Moderns reveals procedures by which analytical are constituted, thereby allowing us to interrogate 'how categories . . . came to be.' Portraying our methods mutually reinforcing and bringing my strategies into conversation her favored scholarly tactics of getting lost and situational analysis, she reformulates points of contact between our projects: it is elusive, contested, and controversial problematics around defining . . . that is actual 'data' Moore's invocation of notion of boundary objects further collocates our mutual interest in the centrifugal forces of opacity, plurality, and polyphony,' and centripetal drives of capturing range of variation and complexity.Both of these responses note ongoing tension between empirical and queer approaches. With considerable force, Moore claims for queer an empirical method that starts taking world as if exists, no matter how is constructed. Intriguingly, imperative of that claim is implicitly de-dramatized by her portrayal of her relationship to queer flirt[ing]. Indeed, methodological flirtation suggests one tactic for sidestepping double-binding scene of assessment that renders Moore's work too empirical to be considered part of queer studies (while empirical enough by standards of sociology). Flirting, after all, need not require a commitment on either side.Looming large in these responses is book's advocacy of interdisciplinarity. Highlighting my engagements with, and critiques of, different ways of doing history, Fisher and Langlands confirm from their standpoint practitioners of a large scale interdisciplinary project, the inherent frustrations and fruitfulness of reaching across disciplinary boundaries, while embracing what they describe my optimistic brief on behalf of a practice that acknowledges the impossibility of working together without friction and contradiction. Much of my book is dedicated to confronting such frictions, disciplinary and otherwise. An emphasis on method, I suggest, helps us appreciate that protocols that would lubricate interactions are still in process of being worked out. Not only does such a practice entail valuing thorny issue, dilemma, impasse, but also enjoins a willingness to unpack incommensurate idioms and resist impulse to either assume sameness in room or strive for premature unity. …

George Moore: influence and collaboration

Nearly every major figure of his era, writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore. The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852-1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately controversial, the personality at the core of this book invented himself as he reinvented his contemporary world. Moore's key role-as observer-participant and as satirist-within many literary and aesthetic movements at the end of the Victorian period and into the twentieth century owed considerably to the structures and manners of collaboration that he embraced. This book throws into relief the multiple ways in which Moore's work can serve as a counterbalance to established understandings of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary aesthetics both through innovative scholarly readings of Moore's work and through illustrative case studies of Moore's collaborative practice by making available, for the first time, two manuscript plays he co-authored with Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) in 1894. It is this collaborative practice in conjunction with his cosmopolitan outlook that turned Moore into a key player in the fin-de-siecle formation of an international aesthetic community. This book explores the full range of Moore's collaborations and cultural encounters: from 1870s Paris art exhibitions to turn-of-the-century Dublin and London; from gossip to the culture of the barmaid; from the worship of Balzac to the fraught engagement with Yeats; from music to Celtic cultural translation. Moore's reputation as a collaborator with the most significant artistic individuals of his time in Britain, Ireland and France in particular, but also in Europe more widely, provides a rich exposition of modes of exchange and influence in the period, and a unique and distinctive perspective on Moore himself.

Lorrie Moore Collection“Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers”: Lorrie Moore's Metafictional Feminism

Lorrie Moore's work offers up a comic exploration of the pain of womanhood and feminism, and a powerful metafictional critique of prevailing narratives. She melds a postmodern experimentation with a gendered sense of identity, focussing on the fragmented self not just as a reaction against the constraints of a realist narrative, but as an opportunity to explore multiplicity and artistic agency. The principal focus of this essay is onAnagrams, a collection of linked short stories that has also been marketed as a novel.Anagramsoffers a metafictional recycling of the alternative “stories” of the central character's life. This may be Moore's most overt play on masquerade and (re)invention, but, as will be explored, heroeuvreis suffused with women characters who attempt a variety of escapes from their presumed narrative closures and who also struggle with feminism and its consequent impact on their narrated lives. Moore admirably captures the angst attached to narrative disappointment; the desire for replication, reinvention and a shifting of responsibility; and the problematic landscape of feminism for her mature and maturing women characters. This essay explores Moore's fictional(ized) feminism and postfeminism and her characters' resort to masquerade as a legitimate response to contemporary angst and narrative tension.

Lorrie Moore Collection Lorrie Moore: Mo(o)re than an Interim Assessment

Lorrie Moore has long shed the image of the precocious talent who won the Seventeen story prize with her first submission as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, but there is still a sense that her best work may be yet to come. In that respect, this mini special issue represents by no means the final word on Moore, but rather an interim assessment of a career that is already substantial and that promises much more to come. Together these three essays (and introduction) offer a coherent and striking exploration of Moore's work that develops new directions for future criticism and will help cement her growing reputation as one of the most original and distinctive contemporary writers. They sometimes circle around the same stories, even the same quotations, reading them in a variety of frames and picking up (and at) the nuances of Moore's sustained wordplay and careful documenting of space, of identity, of gender. Thus these essays work together rather than separately, layering over multiple understandings of Moore's incisive American literature.

“Humor Saves Steps”: Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore treats humor as a means of both recognizing commonality and creating mutual understanding between individuals. In two comparatively minor poems, A Prize Bird (1915) and The Wood-Weasel (1942), Moore uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in The Pangolin (1936), like the artists' tools Moore discusses in the poem, is both an end in itself and a means to ever-greater things: it becomes the marker of shared humanity and a medium for uniting the human with the divine. Throughout Moore's work, her humor can be read as a kind of ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.

The Moore film adaptations and the erotic-grotesque

The grotesque, a staple of the comic book vernacular is a defining characteristic of Alan Moore's graphic literature. Moore's work often transcends the traditional grotesque and blends this aesthetic with erotic elements, evoking the subversive spirit of the carnival, foregrounding bodily transformation, deformation and the connection between interior bodily functions and the external world. Bakhtin describes this 'festival of the body' as essential to an understanding of the literary and artistic carnivalesque. Moore's literary take on the erotic-grotesque adds resonance to some of his central themes such as invisible connections between class, gender, social groups and moral opposites. His artistic collaborators have expressed this effectively throughout Moore's literary oeuvre. Unfortunately, the film adaptations of Moore's work tend to de-emphasize this critical aspect. I assert that the artistic success or failure of the Moore film adaptations rest to a large extent on the degree to which they grapple with the erotic-grotesque. From Hell (2001), which I argue is the most successful cinematic adaptation of Moore's literature in these terms, retains the essence of Moore's erotic-grotesque sensibilities even while altering much of the principal narrative and themes. By contrast, the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) also alters the narrative and characterization to a great extent, but also removes much of the novel's sense of the erotic-grotesque. This omission, I argue, is the key element that leads to the film's relative artistic failure. A truly satisfying cinematic adaptation of a Moore novel, therefore, must embrace this key element of his literature.

Dark Genesis: Falls from language and returns to Eden from 'Pog' to Promethea

While Alan Moore's recent work has emphasized the power and primacy of language, this article examines one early story that focuses on its limitations. 'Pog', published during Moore's tenure on Swamp Thing, returns its characters to their generic, cultural and linguistic origins to argue that comics and other forms of pictorial narrative can convey meaning more clearly than words. Moore effectively strips the Swamp Thing of language in 'Pog', restoring him to his original role as a speechless, unintelligible monster and forcing him to devise nonverbal, pictorial methods of communication. Moore's story also recalls a number of intertexts, from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo to the Biblical fall of man. These allusions speak directly to the issue's linguistic preoccupations, suggesting that humanity has fallen from a perfect and universal language of direct correspondence between sign and object into a chaotic profusion of tongues and a welter of arbitrary, floating signifiers. Like later works such as Promethea, 'Pog' proposes that comics have the potential to counteract this linguistic fall through their recourse to visual as well as verbal narratives. Unlike Moore's later comics, however, 'Pog' does not argue that our world is constituted by language and does not express much confidence that any language, even a visual one, is capable of resolving its shortcomings.

Alan Moore's underground: The formation of a dissident cultural practice

This article addresses Alan Moore's earliest work for zines and underground papers from 1971 to 1980. It argues that the hippie counterculture was a formative influence not only on his anarchist politics but his approach to cultural production, and an awareness of its significance is therefore crucial to the critical understanding of his oeuvre as a whole. Equally Moore's experience of the underground augments historical understanding of the UK counterculture itself and the role of comics within it, and challenges dominant chronological narratives that insist on a definitive split between its political and cultural wings during this period. This article considers Moore's output in illustration, poetry and prose, but particularly focuses on his earliest comics, featured in Embryo, anon. and The Backstreet Bugle. It looks in detail at the Northampton Arts Lab and the underground press as counter-institutions, and spaces in which Moore developed highly politicized aesthetic and creative strategies that he would carry into his later professional work. These included a commitment to the realization of non-alienated and collaborative artistic production, a partisan engagement with key political issues, an insistence on formal experimentation and an emphasis on a demystified and enabling relationship with the reader.

Max on Moore

I first met Max Black in 1952 when I was teaching at University of Oregon, and though we corresponded a bit during next two decades, it was only in period 1973-1986 that I began to interact with him regularly. To a great extent, Henri Lauener was catalyst that made this association possible by inviting us to be participants in international conferences held in Biel every two years. Independently of our Biel relationship, I also arranged for Max to visit University of California at San Diego twice during this period. We frequently talked philosophy together on these occasions, interchanges that I both enjoyed and learned from. Max was sharp, mordantly witty, irreverent, deeply committed to philosophical enterprise, and with a genuine talent for finding just right word or phrase to characterize some concept or notion. It was Max, for instance, who hearing me describe role that surfaces play in helping ordinary human beings organize world in prototopological ways recommended that I call this notion the geometry of ordinary speech. I am pleased to say that when my book, Surfaces, was published just before his death in 1988 it did prominently display his suggestion. The last conversation we had was in 1986 in Biel and was about G. E. Moore. It was a long discussion that I still remember well, and it has inspired, for reasons that will quickly become clear, paper that follows. Max had known Moore and admired him, but not without serious reservations. He felt that Moore's work exhibited a tension whose components were profound insights deriving from common sense, on one hand, and a surprising philosophical naivete, on other. At end of our discussion, he mentioned

Difficult Ground: Poetic Renunciation in Marianne Moore’s “Walking-Sticks and Paperweights and Watermarks”

Even most intrepid reader of Marianne Moore might be forgiven for declining to engage her poem and Paperweights and .The last poem Moore published in 1930s, it did not fare well in her own editing of her work. She published it first in Poetry in November 1936 and then revised it for What Are Years? in 1941. Thereafter she never published it again, so it is missing from both her Collected Poems (1951) and her Complete Poems (1967) and has been mostly invisible to Moore scholarship, to say nothing of general readership. (1) As her extensive draft material and correspondence demonstrate, Moore put great deal of work into poem and was never satisfied with it. Criticism has agreed: cited as an example of the tendency of Moore's verse to puzzle her readers (Hadas 72), being perhaps too cluttered and digressive in its associations to be finally successful (Costello 105), and exemplifying tripartite metonymies that (in another context) Moore's mother deemed bizarre, poem is, even for Moore, difficult. (2) It is also beautiful, however, in its spiky and strangely jointed way, and intensity of its tangle of aesthetic pleasures and frustrations is more than incidentally interesting in history of Moore's poetics: it is sign of poem's status as boundary marking end of one phase of Moore's writing life and beginning of another. As we shall argue, some of poem's difficulties resolve nicely when reader knows about objects and exchanges to which they refer. That resolution, however, introduces its own kind of difficulty; and Paperweights and Watermarks may only make sense to one who knows about all experiences, including exchanges of material objects, that went into making it, and poem knows this and is troubled by it. By end of 1930s Moore still believed in level of poetic meaning, traditionally called visionary, that transcends material particularity of texts; however, she had also come to see assertion of poets visionary as directly inimical to web of material, social, and ethical relations that that exists, ideally, to illuminate. Read in light of this tension, we argue, published poems of 1930s that were eventually abandoned, especially and Paperweights and Watermarks, become signs of decisive act of renunciation in Moore's career. The complexity and subtlety of Moore's work up through 1930s has often been contrasted favorably with relative straightforwardness and didacticism of work that followed, particularly in those poems that she revised for her 1951 (Collected Poems. (3) Various persuasive explanations, including Moore's despair at rise of fascism and her own mother's decade of ill health and 1947 death, have been offered to account for change. However, reading of and Paperweights and Watermarks we offer here proposes that that act of renunciation is best understood not solely in psychological, moral, or biographical terms; it suggests instead that there was reasoned philosophical motivation for transformation in and of her work. Our hypothesis is that at end of 1930s Moore decided that conversion of experience into thought (as Emerson has it) is achieved at too great cost to fabric of social relations and material circumstance in which poet lives. Simultaneously, she decided that transformation of genius into practical (as Emerson also has it) would no longer be her poetry's purpose. Emerson calls intellect's conversion of experience into thought a strange process, comparing it to a mulberry leaf [being] converted into satin (60). In celebrated conclusion to Experience, the transformation of genius into practical power is called the which world exists to realize (492). (4) Moore's guiding hope in Walking-Sticks is that poem can participate in both transformations at once, aligning tonus of artisanal production (including papermaking, glass working, and molding of wax into seals) with visionary world of true romance in which beautiful is reliable sign of good. …

&lt;i&gt;Restoring Order: The École des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Restoring Order: The École des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 Christophe Jacobs Restoring Order: The École des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820–1870. By Lara Jennifer Moore. Duluth, Minn.: Litwin Books, 2008. 320 pp. $32.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-9778617-9-8. From the moment of the foundation of the êcole des chartes to the demise of Napoleon III, this excellent investigation from Lara J. Moore revisits the history of nineteenth-century France. In the process she casts new light on traditional concepts pertaining to archival and library science. The purpose of her dissertation is to contrast changes in the political context with the evolution of governmental policies toward archives and libraries. These policies include classification modalities, setting up agendas for priorities, and introducing new curricula in the êcole des chartes, where librarians and archivists were trained. One is reminded that the perception of the ancien régime and the French Revolution changed whenever a new political regime came into power. Therefore, the legacy of those documents inherited from previous periods, hardly organized as they were passed on, has been managed according to the official perception of [End Page 382] the day. These legacies of the past have been used to serve the immediate political needs of the recipient governments. Moreover, the ministers who were in charge of the archives and the libraries in these governments were often historians themselves, most of whom had gained experience in researching documents for the purposes of their own studies. Accordingly, they handled archives as dictated by their political views as well as their knowledge and competencies in the subject. Priorities were defined for classification, and new methodologies were put in place. Moore suggests we adopt another viewpoint when considering these recording processes: archives should be acknowledged as the ultimate (or least perceptible) expression of the political decision-taking process. Moore never fails to be very specific on the part played by the École des chartes in those changes. She makes a point of highlighting the concrete details whereby these policies saw the light of day. The history of this institution is indeed an object of discussion in this study, but it becomes almost an ancillary subject to the author's main concern. The school, it is stressed, generally suffered from the successive policies aiming to reform the sector of archives and libraries and incorporated, often quite reluctantly, more practice-based courses into its curricula (e.g., classification of libraries and archives). But the actual value of this book lies in the fact that the author goes beyond the mere analysis of the history of so-called traditional institutions (royal library, national archives, etc.). By focusing on commissions or associations like the Société de l'École des chartes, it provides further insights into the actual places and stages where decisions were made, where they were relayed, and where they could be undermined. It is critical to be made aware of the existence of these secondary stages as yet another outlet for power and authority. Such a work should be complemented by a study of the social networks that developed around these secret institutions, taking also into account the Chartists themselves. Finally, this work gives further insights, derived from the circumstances and context in which they came about, into the creation of fundamental notions and principles in archival science, such as the respect des fonds. We (re)discover a period in the 1860s, when librarians and archivists debated passionately about their roles. This era may be identified as a defining moment in the history of both professions. Moore's reasoning is generally rigorous. Her selected bibliography is extensive, like the list of the manuscript sources. Given the difficulty of finding and accessing some of these documents, Moore's work is particularly impressive. The prospects offered by Restoring Order are many and promising. A more detailed analysis of administrative and professional practices would certainly help corroborate Moore's findings. At any rate, this book can be regarded as a major contribution to the history of French archives and libraries in the nineteenth century. Moore said that while her study...

Marketization, Class Structure, and Democracy in China: Contrasting Regional Experiences

After two and half decades of market reforms in China, the question of whether reforms have created favourable social conditions for democracy and whether the country's emerging entrepreneurial class will serve as the democratic social base have become hotly debated issues in both academic and policy circles. Based upon an analysis of two regions – Sunan and Wenzhou, the two prototypical local development patterns in China – the article argues that different patterns of economic development have produced distinct local level social and political configurations, only one of which is likely to foster the growth of democratic practices. It suggests that China's political future is largely dependent upon the emerging class structure and class relations that reform and development have produced. If the market reforms and economic development only enrich a few (like the Sunan case), then the possibility of democratic transition will likely be very bleak. Nonetheless, the possibility of a brighter alternative exists, as demonstrated by the Wenzhou case. These arguments thus link China's political transition to critical social conditions, echoing Barrington Moore's influential work on the social origins of democracy and dictatorship.

How Not to Edit: The Case of Marianne Moore

Despite almost two decades of arguments by editorial theorists about the interpretative dimensions of good editing, literary scholars are still inclined to view the act of editing as merely positivist, pre-interpretative activity. Literary scholars, however, denigrate the interpretive complexity of editing at their peril. The belief that resonates among both academic departments and presses that editing is simply a set of mindless procedures has led many potential editors to choose other scholarly pursuits. Meanwhile, the number of scholars equipped to tackle the challenges of editing are dwindling and, with them, the consistent, theoretically sound editions upon which literary scholars rely. The editorial state of the texts of Marianne Moore argues the importance of viewing editing as a vital extension of the act of interpretation. The very different editions of Moore's poems currently available underwrite very different arguments about Moore's work and career. Most recently, Grace Schulman's edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking Penguin, 2003) offers a telling example of the bad things that can happen when an editor fails to recognize the ways in which his or her presentation of the works of a given author reflect, or not, the arguments he or she wishes to make about that author, the author's work, and the issue of textuality generally.