Mythical Landscape Research Articles

Petroglifi iz Jame v bližini Trnovskega studenca nad Ilirsko Bistrico na Snežniški planoti<br>Petroglyphs from the Cave in the Vicinity of Trnovno Spring above Ilirska Bistrica on the Snežnik Plateau</br>

The article is an attempt of interpretation of the petroglyphs in Cave in the vicinity of Trnovo spring or Iapods’ cave. The anthropomorphic figure (archer/horseman) and the circles with the crossed lines inside are compared to other cases of rock art. A step forward of the analysis is the comparative study of ritual caves with phallic stalactites in the surroundings and the analysis of its mythical landscape.

From the Depths of Patagonia: The Ushuaia Penal Colony and the Nature of “The End of the World”

This article engages the relationship between prison and place on the island of Tierra del Fuego, in southernmost Patagonia. While Patagonia has piqued popular imaginations for centuries through traveler narratives, these accounts have been reduced to a limited lexicon categorizing the region as prehistoric, desolate, and windswept. Similarly, the Ushuaia penal colony (1902–1947), located on the Beagle Channel, has been narrowly cast as the “Argentine Siberia.” I unpack these evocative labels through an examination of journalist accounts, prison personnel correspondence, and the writings of prisoners exiled to Ushuaia, recuperating more situated visions within this mythic landscape. Some authorities considered Ushuaia a natural prison where engineers could design a modern penitentiary and implement rehabilitation techniques through labor and isolation. I explore the tension produced between these elemental and modern carceral forms and argue that the penal colony was an open-door panopticon, where punishment and routines were aligned with environmental factors that extended beyond the prison walls and thereby complicated progressive criminology. Prisoner labor in the town and the surrounding forests rarely rehabilitated the condemned, and it instead created a dependent prison industry that helped develop a region that for decades had posed settlement problems for Argentine statesmen. This dynamic relationship between the prison, town, and landscape created a carceral ecology within which different actors and elements played various yet entangled roles. As perceptions of Ushuaia were informed by one's status and form of confinement or relative freedom, we see divergent as well as overlapping understandings of the region rather than a monolithic landscape at “The End of the World.”

Monster, Demon, Warrior: St. Guthlac and the Cultural Landscape of the Anglo-Saxon Fens

This essay argues that Old English and Latin literature from the eighth to eleventh centuries reveal the cultural understanding of the swampy English Fens along the eastern coast of the North Sea. This cultural notion defines the Fens as a haunted landscape and a marginal space suitable only for prisoners, exiles, monsters, and demons. For example, the monster Grendel from the poem Beowulf possesses a hybridized human-animal nature that mimics the tumultuous land/water dynamic of his native fen-dwelling. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus, symbolic fens act as a mythical landscape of uncertainty, danger, and monstrosity, and this cultural subject matter is present most profoundly in the historically attested literature of St. Guthlac. This Christian warrior establishes a hermitage in the Fens at Crowland, and through his heroism and religious warfare, he survives the demons and other terrors of the mysterious landscape and colonizes the Fens as an Anglo-Saxon cultural landscape.

Staging Soviet Art: 15 Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic, 1932–33

A documentary photograph from the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR (Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let) that opened in Moscow in June 1933 shows the extent to which contemporaries perceived this show as a watershed, a moment when the last remnants of the bourgeois culture of prerevolutionary Russia definitively gave way to the proletarian culture of the rapidly modernizing Soviet Union. A clean-cut and athletic Soviet youth looks straight into the eyes of the refined symbolist poet, playwright, critic, and translator Mikhail Kuz'min as painted in 1926 by a fellow member of the artistic group World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), Nikolai Radlov. In this confrontation, Kuz'min seems to embody everything the Soviet Union had done away with. The height of his fame as a Symbolist poet was the 1900s and 1910s; in the early 1930s, he was still writing poetry, but was unable to publish and increasingly marginalized. In the painting's background, a mythic landscape set within an arched window typical of Renaissance portraits ties him to the Western humanist tradition. Kuz'min's bodily posture invites contact: Seated close to the picture plane with open arms, he appears to look out. Yet the poet also seems reserved and distant, perhaps because of his formal dress, and introspective: The lit cigarette at the level of his mouth and his semi-open book signal that he is preoccupied with a subject other than his interlocutor. The youth, on the other hand, has the confident, even somewhat condescending look of a master of the universe (khoziain zhizni), with folded arms and a slightly skeptical glance. Wearing a fashionable sports shirt on his fit body, he represents the ideal of the times: a healthy, physically strong, and ideologically prepared builder of a socialist society who, both literally and figuratively, embodies the Soviet future. Such an ideal is exemplified by Aleksandr Samokhvalov's contemporaneous painting Girl in a Soccer Jersey (Devushka v futbolke), which was displayed in the same exhibition and quickly became an iconic symbol of Soviet athletic youth. This seemingly antagonistic encounter between representatives of the Soviet past and future simultaneously reflects the change in the official rhetoric. By 1933 it was conciliatory in tone, having firmly replaced the open class conflict of the preceding years, and bourgeois specialists were not only welcomed back into the fold of Soviet society, they were offered privileges if they worked for the new state.

Carmen’s Illusive Technicolor Fantasy in Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario

Carmen’s Illusive Technicolor Fantasy in Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario Christopher C. Oechler In Cinco horas con Mario (1966), Miguel Delibes portrays a widow’s attempt to cope with the recent loss of her husband. During her vigil at the foot of Mario’s coffin, Carmen Sotillo excoriates her late spouse for his progressive views and his inability to accept the totalitarian regime’s official values, which she parrots with an increasing frenzy. The novel possesses many theatrical and cinematic qualities, not the least of which is Carmen’s unrelenting, 250-page soliloquy that monopolizes the text.1 Gonzalo Sobejano compares this type of objective narrative style to a camera-like eye through which the reader experiences the text (217), and Juli Highfill notes that Carmen displays an acute awareness of her performance, “playing to her audience” (70). These theatrical aspects do more than give the novel a cinematographic texture, however; they thoroughly permeate the discursive level of the novel and highlight several cinematographic trends contemporary to the mid-twentieth century. For the present study, I will conceptualize the text as a type of cinematic script enacted by the protagonist, Carmen Sotillo, in order to construe her as both auteur and leading actress. By focusing on Carmen, I will explain the ultimate failure of a “movie” whose aspirations collapse into a subverted, contrarian version of the mythic landscape the auteur attempts to create. Her five-hour monologue in the presence of Mario aspires to a grandiosity it will not and cannot achieve. In Carmen’s attempt at authoring a filmic narrative, she performs a script that reflects the regime’s official discourse and follows the stylizations of Hollywood blockbusters. However, by adhering to such [End Page 235] models she unwittingly and inescapably produces a cinematographic image that runs counter to the regime’s escapist values. Her failed motion picture-like discourse estranges. Instead of delivering an epic Cruzada or a titillating Maximino Conde-esque love affair as it often promises, Carmen’s performance reveals a low-lit, low-budget examination of the painful social reality it attempts to avoid. From the outset, Delibes’s novel reads as a type of film script. Several of its formal narrative aspects reproduce cinematographic functions; for example, the third-person narrative voice records only speech and movement. This technique produces an illusion that mimics the mechanical capabilities of a video camera while at the same time minimizing the apparent presence of non-diegetic sound and narration: “Carmen se sienta en el borde de la gran cama y se descalza dócilmente, empujando el zapato del pie derecho con la punta del pie izquierdo y a la inversa” (9). In addition to these ostensible stage directions, Carmen’s ensuing monologue exists as an act of performance; her voice dominates a one-sided dialogue with a voiceless cadaver. Carmen employs language to portray an acute self-awareness of her role in actively forging this cinematographic environment. Throughout her monologue she interlaces an excess of parenthetical, self-referential interjections: “como yo digo” (83), “¡qué sé yo!” (216), and “[t]e digo mi verdad” (162), to name but a few. These parenthetical comments draw attention away from Carmen’s narrated moment, the flashbacks she references, to illuminate instead her narrating moment. She thereby retains the spotlight and dominates the cinematic space during her monologue, a scene seemingly comprised of one extended shot. While her interjections do present her as a narrating subject, Carmen also self-consciously exhibits her body as the focal point of her performance. Perhaps the most jarring example of her self-examination, tinged with autoeroticism, resides in her repeated allusions to her own oversized breasts: Carmen baja las piernas de la cama y al hacerlo se la recogen las faldas, y muestra unas rodillas demasiado redondas y acolchadas. [. . .] Luego se atusa la cabeza, introduciendo los dedos de ambas manos abiertos entre los cabellos, ahuecándolos. Al concluir, se estira el suéter bajo las axilas, primero del lado izquierdo; luego, del derecho. Menea la cabeza enérgicamente, denegando: – No tengo pechos de viuda, ¿verdad que no, Valen? (33) Her self-examination (and that of the director-like narrative voice) ultimately ends...

Transnational Perspectives on the Irish Foundation Myth

IntroductionThe town of Woodstock, Illinois, is perhaps most famous for being the shooting location of Bill Murray's 1993 film, Groundhog Day. Too distant from Chicago to be called a suburb, yet too populous to be called truly rural, Woodstock is instead a picturesque example of Middle America that proved ideal for the purposes of Mr. Murray and company. In reality, it is also home to the Stage Left Cafe, a small performance space on the town square where live music and spoken word events are hosted most nights of the week.The storyteller Clare Muireann Murphy came to Stage Left Cafe for a per- formance one Saturday night in November 2009. show was donation only, and the crowd was sparse but enthusiastic. Applause erupted in bursts after each of Murphy's stories, which she drew from her repertoire of legends and folktales from the Irish tradition. Then, at one point, she paused. She informed the audience that the story she was about to tell was not a regular feature of her sets, though she was willing to give it a try on this night because it-the story-was asking persistently to be told. Thus began the Irish foundation myth, told on this cold autumn evening, in a modest venue on the edge of the Midwestern prairie in the United States (Murphy, The Coming of the Milesians).In the next fifteen minutes or so, Murphy called up a myth both ancient in origin and foreign in location. Drawing on a blend of extemporaneous and theatrical performance techniques, the story was told, rather than recited, while voices and gestures were used to heighten dramatic effect. narrative tension reached its peak as the earliest ancestors of the modern Irish people defeated the monarchy that had previously ruled the island. When the three kings fell, the heart went out of the people, Murphy announced before the silent crowd. performance was an aesthetic success. mythic landscape, both alien and familiar to the modern mind, materialized in high relief through Murphy's telling. Yet the social question arising from this moment is how a culturally specific myth remained meaningful in the context of international performance and, moreover, how it reached Woodstock, Illinois, from its apparent place of origin in Ireland. Such concerns inform this study, which attempts to provide an interpretive frame- work for traditional narratives that cross national borders through the activities of traveling storytellers.Contested meanings surround the Irish foundation myth, as it is performed by Murphy on her tours of the world. Although she asserts that the main purpose of the story is to bring audiences together, alternative readings suggest connections with Ireland's history of sectarian conflict, as well as its present economic pre- dicament. Through this dialectic of personal and social forces, Murphy's version of the myth emerges as a quietly subversive ritual intended to foster narrative communion in a transnational performance context that imbues all stories with multiple meanings. following pages briefly discuss the terms and processes associated with this argument: globalization, mediation, transnationalism, myth, and ritual. Next, a description of Murphy's storytelling work outlines her history in the profession and her artistic interests. A subsequent interpretation approaches Murphy's version of the Irish foundation myth through the lenses of politics, economics, and ritual. Concluding remarks explore the connections among these forces, as well as the resulting perspective that may be applied to traditional narratives that travel far outside their culture of origin.1Globalization and the Performance of MythDefining globalization is the object of a perennial debate (Scholte 54-59), but it is generally accepted that one of globalization's practical outcomes is concurrent experience in different locations. For example, globalization allows for the simulta- neous online viewing of an international news event, such as the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, on 14 December 2012. …

James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and the Mission in Iraq

Our Nation Has a Missionthough the united states no longer uses Western films to discuss national issues, the films' relationship to American history, or their place in national mythologies, occasionally a Western is released that reminds us their power. Director James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (2007) is such a Western. It is, I want to argue, an Iraq War Western. And since it is a remake the 1957 3:10 to Yuma, it is able to place the in Iraq in the context two other American missions-the settling the West and the Cold War.In 2003 the United States undertook the liberation Iraq under the banner the most deeply held belief American patriotism, that are a people set apart, a people with a providential (McKenna 6). America needs missions in order to affirm its sense itself as exceptional, alone among the nations the world favored by God. In film, which so often displaces the political with the personal, the idea America's exceptional is often conveyed through stories exceptional Americans. It is the heroic individuals art who often carry the meaning national destiny. In the willingness these characters to act courageously, we see a model for national action. And we see in their virtue and triumphs the promise that a virtuous America will be successful.A number anti-Iraq War films focused specifically on the nature heroism in that conflict in order to deny that war the legitimacy that heroism can bestow. In the Valley Elah (2007) and Redacted (2007) dealt with soldiers who lost their humanity fighting in Iraq, and Hurt Locker (2009), more ambiguously, reduced heroism to an adrenaline addiction. As a character says in In the Valley Elah, you shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq, [where] everything is fucked up.No genre is more famous for creating heroes and incorporating grand, national themes in the personal stories Americans than the Western. has said that Westerns are about great mythical landscape, Mt. Olympus, in which all the great American themes are played out in this kind fever dream (James Mangold A15). And although the Western returns again and again to the same myths, it does so, according to Mangold, to place the events the day in that mythic landscape. Westerns have a tradition, he noted in an interview, of being able to gracefully and easily fold into their subtext ideas about the moment (Esther 28).The continued influence the cowboy narrative was integral to the way George W. Bush presented himself, the war on terror, and his war in Iraq. It was immediately after 9/11 that he likened Osama Bin Laden to a Western whom he wanted dead or alive. More significant was his mission accomplished announcement. In a culture used to the updating the Western hero to fighter pilots in Star Wars (1977), Top Gun (1986), and Space Cowboys (2000), for example, the link between Bush stepping out the jet in full fighter uniform and the symbolism the Western hero could not be missed. His speech on the aircraft carrier that first day May in 2003 continued the Western theme his visual presence tried to establish. He called Iraq an outlaw regime, invoked the cavalry goal bringing order to parts the country that remain dangerous, used the language Manifest Destiny to announce to the world that our nation has a mission, and at the end tied America's to God (as well as to the Western captivity narrative)-To the captives, come out, he said, quoting from Isaiah 49:9.But just as Western films have long provided mythic examples courageous men who subdue vicious outlaws, as in the original 3:10 to Yuma, which could be used to support American policies such as the Cold War, they also have a history that dates at least to the Vietnam War debunking the myth the Western hero and the idea American exceptionalism that the hero carries. …

Science, Cosmopolitanism, and the Greek Landscape: The Cruises of the Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées to the Eastern Mediterranean, 1897-1912

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the blurred contours of the mythical landscapes of Greece acquired sharpness and definition in Western travelers' accounts and visual representations. They were experienced from the mobile elevated platform of steamboats and filtered through the lens of new visual technologies. Traversed by a new category of organized "scientific cruisers," the Greek landscape was a repository of universal values as well as a site of tensions: between a mythical ancient past and a geopolitically dynamic present; between poetic imagination and "clear" scientific observation; between land and sea. Sailing between these tensions, a new cosmopolitan community took shape. This, however, ultimately remained a western elite sailing at a distance from contemporary Greece and its people. It remained a metaphor for ephemeral utopian visions-like the idealized dioramic landscape through which it moved.

Party Favors at the Apocalypse

Party Favors at the Apocalypse Erik Butler (bio) Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker, eds. Punctum. http://punctumbooks.com. 310 pages; paper, $17.00; free PDF. Who invited these people? Classically (and etymologically, too), a symposium involves drinking and good conversation. The model is Plato’s celebrated dialogue, in which the topic of love is on the table. Socrates’s sobriety tempers the mood somewhat, but Aristophanes’s riotous fantasy of primordial togetherness—conjoined human halves doing cartwheels across a mythical landscape—assures that good cheer predominates. Not so here. Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro, and Eugene Thacker have thrown a hellish get-together where gooey matter makes it all but impossible for Platonic forms to appear. Reza Negarestani’s pitch-black meditations on oil and the sublunary contingencies it incarnates provide the stuff of discourse and thought. For the cyclonopediasts, the end of the world has already begun. Since the path between origin and extinction is not a straight line, Leper Creativity charts the irregular but certain course toward annihilation on various terrains. The proceedings do not unfold against a backdrop of what the Middle Ages, still preserving ancient philosophers’ faith in the world and its ways, called natura naturans. Rather, the whole universe seems to have collapsed upon itself. The primeval root of all things lies in the hostile matter that once was sun and light, but now lies thick and congealed in the stagnant, barren earth. Oil is fuel, but not sustenance—the organic turned enemy of life. Accordingly, the matter of love is a sticky mess. Like so many transsexual Transylvanians, one pictures the symposiasts arriving on iron steeds that belch forth smoke and fire before dancing a theoretical “Time Warp.” The spectacle can be considered inviting and repellent in equal measure. Contributor Zach Blas offers an assessment of “queer openness” that, in his view, often seems as turgid and dull as the beefcake bonehead Rocky Horror. His salutary advice to celebrants of the rainbow is to embrace decay. The rectum is indeed a grave (Leo Bersani), and its heady perfume the immanent hereafter—the “no future” of the surprisingly alive death drive (Lee Edelman). Melanie Doherty, taking up Deleuze and Guattari, sharpens her teeth on the Oedipal fantasies that sustain the likes of Brad, Janet, and other squares enamored of triangular family romances. Discussing cosmic horror fiction, she remarks the corrosive power of the “radical outsider,” who “never appears as a discrete entity or individuated substance beyond vague indications of motion and fog.” It’s a monster, not a choice, and the choice is not ours to make. Love and other “symptoms of transmutation and madness” undo more than a happy couple can bring together. To get the most from this gathering, the gentle reader is advised not to plunge headlong into the murk, but, like another amphibian dwelling between elements, to move back and forth between spots of (relative) stability and the puddles that bubble up from the deep around which the symposiasts assemble. In so doing, she or he can, without getting too messy, explore Robin Mackay’s reflections on geotrauma, Alisa Andrasek’s discussions of dust and detritus, and Ben Woodard’s investigation of how “onto-epistemological solidity” falls prey to decomposition. Occasionally, as in Kate Marshall’s contribution (“Cyclonopedia as Novel [A Meditation on Complicity as Inauthenticity]”), the question arises as to what exactly it means to immerse oneself in this “world without end.” Negarestani himself offers “Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone” in guise of a conclusion: the “meaninglessness of the free sign,” shooting across the horizon like a comet, is as close as we come to a final word. One more example will indicate what lurks within the pages of Leper Creativity. “Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness” by editor and instigator Masciandaro pairs quotes from the “black metal” musician Xasthur and German mystic Meister Eckhart. The modern and the medieval voices are united by the view that death inhabits life. The “dark night of the soul,” as St. John of the Cross (1542–1591) put it, is the site where human existence, by embracing its nullity, discerns the prospect, however remote, of redemption...

What Remains: Matthew Arnold's Poetics of Place and the Victorian Elegy

What Remains:Matthew Arnold's Poetics of Place and the Victorian Elegy Tracy Miller (bio) Matthew Arnold's elegy for Charlotte Brontë, "Haworth Churchyard," includes perhaps the most macrabre image—and embarrassing mistake—of his poetic oeuvre. In the early part of the poem the speaker laments the impossibility of communing with Brontë, whose body, he suggests, is decaying among the graves in Haworth Churchyard. The speaker describes Brontë's corpse being covered by and absorbed into the Yorkshire earth: Turn we next to the dead.—How shall we honor the young,The ardent, the gifted? how mourn?Console we cannot, her earIs deaf. Far northward from here,In a churchyard high 'mid the moorsOf Yorkshire, a little earthStops it for ever to praise.1 Arnold's lines revel in the pathos of Brontë's outdoor grave. Addressing Charlotte, Arnold describes her grave as surrounded by those of her siblings in the bleak parsonage churchyard: "Round thee they lie—the grass / Blows from their graves to thy own!" (ll. 88-89). The churchyard that Arnold describes is the overcrowded plot of land beside the Brontë parsonage. On the edge of the moor, shadowed by a canopy of trees and creeping towards the brick edifice of the parsonage, the churchyard is a synecdoche for all that is strange and morbid about the village of Haworth. In truth, however, the Brontës are buried not in the elegy's titular churchyard, but rather within Haworth church, the more respectable resting place that would have been natural for the family of the village's parson. By using Haworth Churchyard and its scene of wind-swept death as his elegy's conceit, Arnold quite literally misplaces Charlotte Brontë's final resting place. Arnold's mistaken burial is more significant and revealing than scholars have hitherto realized. Indeed, this moment of "misburial" is central [End Page 147] to Arnold's poetic practice. Arnold's prolonged attention to the place of Haworth, alongside his displacement of Brontë's grave—from interior to exterior, from unremarkable church to the mythical landscape of the West Riding of Yorkshire—rewrites the topography of elegiac address and, in so doing, essentially reburies Brontë within the churchyard. "Haworth Church-yard" is an example of how Arnold's elegies simultaneously produce and exploit the associative power of the site; in so doing, they expand the work of elegy, making it both a genre of consolation and memory and one of spatial production. In this essay, I argue that Arnold's elegies deploy a revised form of the pastoral and the trope of apostrophe to make people, in their absence, inseparable from the places of their past; in turn the elegies remake these places into sites of mourning and memory that endure despite the consolatory work of the elegy itself. Arnold wrote more elegies than any of his Victorian contemporaries, but his poems inched their way into nineteenth-century culture and remain too-often overlooked in our time.2 The elegies appeared on the pages of Cornhill and Fraser's magazines or scattered throughout his collected works. They were often buried within tables of contents and featured among the quotidian business of the periodical, sharing pages with articles on university reform and periwinkles.3 Arnold's poetic practice was often explicitly commercial and his elegies responded to what scholars recognize as the Victorian period's abiding interest in the rituals of grief and mourning.4 Eager not only for a poem's publication, but also for the payment that followed such an occasion, Arnold wrote pleadingly to editors, trying to convince them of an elegy's topicality, beauty, or necessity.5 Despite his best efforts, Arnold's elegies were largely ignored by contemporary critics and remain unexamined in our own time—indeed, it often seems as though the canon of Victorian elegies has room only for Tennyson. What Arnold has left behind, however, constitutes both an archive of elegies and a means by which to turn the landscapes of the Victorian age into an archive of their own. Reading Arnold's poems collectively, we see the contours of the Victorian elegy begin to change: it becomes more overtly public and...

Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (review)

Reviewed by: Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch Rachel S. Harris Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld , trans. Hovering at Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Pp. 271. Cloth $18.95. ISBN 978-0-393-06524-4. Award-winning Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005) was a paradox in life and in her art. Reclusive and private, she was also the source of media sensationalism in Israel, often featuring in gossip columns for her wardrobe, politics, and personal life. Her poetry employed biblical language in a modern Hebrew vernacular and brought together aspects of her personal biography and her strong political consciousness. "Her status as a beloved, unofficial poet laureate allowed her protest to carry some weight with the Israeli public." (17) Well-known in translation for her vocal opposition to the Israeli war in Lebanon from 1978 onwards with poems like "You Can't Kill a Baby Twice," in Israel her fame began earlier with the publication of her first volume of poetry "The Love of an Orange." (1959) She is associated with the State Generation of poets, which includes renowned figures such as Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach and Haim Gouri, though she is often paralleled with her contemporary Yona Wallach, another leading female poet of the 1960s and 1970s. With this volume, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld showcase a broad selection of Ravikovitch's oeuvre and provide the most comprehensive collection in English translation to date. In this impressive book they provide a helpful introduction to Ravikovitch's work, which places the poet in the context of her peers and the history of Israeli society to which her verse often responds. Best known as a poet, Ravikovitch also wrote short stories and children's poetry. In addition she translated English poetry and numerous children's literary classics. According to Bloch and Kronfeld, Ravikovitch's "defining subject" in her own poetry is "the devastating consequences of unequal power relations for the individual and for society, the self in a state of crisis refracting the state of the nation." (19) The editors explain the reach and variety of her poetry, her style: "restrained pathos to prickly ambivalence, ebullient playfulness, and self-deprecating humor;" the devices that mark the virtuosity of her talent: "irony" and her ability to "hold pathos in check;" and her failure to "shy away from the astringent or irreverent." (21) While the introduction is certainly indispensable, it is somewhat bother some that the authors chose to refer to the poet by her first name Dahlia, rather [End Page 91] than the more traditional approach of referring to an author by his or her surname. Though dissonant, this artifice seems an attempt to link Ravikovitch with other key figures in Jewish history (both secular and religious) such as the biblical matriarchs, or author and poetess Rahel Bluwestein, who is also known only by her first name. The collection is organized by date, and subdivided by publication. This helpful order gives us a flavor of the thematic cohesion of independent volumes and provides a feel for the development of Ravikovitch's subject matter and style over the course of her life and career. Through her invocation of exotic locales such as Zanzibar, Australia, Byzantium, and the world of the Thousand and One Nights, Ravikovitch's poetry has a fairy-tale quality. Rather than foreground Jewish themes, she invokes the Bible as a mythical landscape. Similarly, she calls on images from Greek legend and crusader narratives. Modernist in its construction, the poetry ranges thematically through more ethereal themes conjuring a romantic and indeterminate world. The poetry's energy often comes from the power of nature: the sun, the sea, ants, wasps, and other creatures occupy her verse. There is a constant sense of the desire to escape, longing for adventure and for the world beyond the horizon. In "The Blue West," she writes: I want to reach the ends of thoughtWhose very beginningsSlash like a knife.I want to ascend to the fringes of the sunAnd not fall prey to the fire. "Love," Ravikovitch's poem of romantic passion, brings together this desire...

Jakob, Jelena, and Bogdin – Three Miniatures on the Assigned Theme<br>Jakob, Jelena i Bogdin – tri minijature na zadanu temu</br>

Building upon the research of cultural anthropologists, archeologists and linguists in the area of the Southern Slavs, in particular in Croatia and Slovenia, the authors offer three examples of so far unnoticed paradigms of the “mythical landscape,” and link them to the phenomenon of the cultural landscape and its creation, as seen by the field of the history of visual art. The cultural landscape could have as its matrix a number of old sacred spots, well correlated with the later important human interventions into the environment, something to be born in mind in any environmental modification. In those terms a few words will be also said about a program at the School of Architecture at Zagreb, applying the new humanist research to study of architecture and design.

El imaginario literario argentino sobre el mítico Sur en el road movie patagónico

This is an analysis of the many ways in which contemporary Argentine cinema appropriates literary elements, in particular the representation of the South as a motif. In this regard, road movies related to New Argentine Cinema visit travel narratives by twenty-first-century English travelers, literature of the Pampa, French novels imported to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century, and, of course, Jorge Luis Borges's literature as well as his deconstruction of that literary tradition. The extensive motif of the South in Argentine literature informs the films to ratify an imaginary in which the Pampa and Patagonia are geographical zones that encompass a mythical and remote landscape.

The Archaeology of Myth: Rock Art, Ritual Objects, and Mythical Landscapes of the Klamath Basin

Recent research in the Klamath Basin has shown that rock art and landscape are intimately connected, mutually informed by indigenous notions of sacred places. Modeling this landscape has been possible through an understanding of Klamath–Modoc myth. This has led some researchers to derive general interpretations of the rock art that are largely in agreement with Klamath–Modoc spiritual beliefs. I take this approach a step further and propose interpretations for specific rock art images and ritual objects, arguing that oral traditions harbor the fundamental logic that underpinned shamanic rituals that led to the creation of these paraphernalia.

Do You See What I See? The Mythic Landscape in the Immediate World

Do You See What I See? The Mythic Landscape in the Immediate World

Representing Culture in Malaysian Cultural Theme Parks: Tensions and Contradictions

Cultural representation is nowhere more significant than in multi-cultural countries, where the mode of representation is instrumental in determining the progress of integration. Ultimately, in the Malaysian context this reflects on the success of, and is intrinsically linked to, the affirmative action policies that benefit the majority Malays. This paper highlights the representation of culture through the medium of three cultural theme parks in Peninsular Malaysia, built to promote ‘unity through diversity’ and a re-imaging of the past traditions and mythical landscape of this Southeast Asian economic powerhouse. A central aim is to bring together and make sense of how the notions of nostalgia, nationalism and economic success in cultural tourism all come to bear on representations in cultural theme parks.

Спогади з подорожi по Криму по Едмунд Хоецький (review)

Спогади з подорожi по Криму по Едмунд Хоецький (review)

Inheriting the Renaissance: Three Writers of the Post-War South

Inheriting the Renaissance:Three Writers of the Post-War South Douglas Mitchell Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence. Edited by Jan Norby Gretlund. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2005. 207 pp. $34.95 cloth. Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City. By James Panabaker. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004. xviii + 238 pp. $32.00 cloth. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. By Georg Guillemin. College StationTexas A&M UP2004. 170 pp. $29.95 cloth. The generation of writers who came of age after World War II had the unenviable task of following the Southern Renaissance. As Flannery O'Connor famously said of Faulkner, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Three writers who had to come to terms with inheriting the Renaissance, both in their self-conception and the minds of their readers, are Shelby Foote, Madison Jones, and Cormac McCarthy. For Foote and McCarthy, it was moving beyond Faulkner, and for Jones the Agrarian vision of Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. This movement out from under the Renaissance, so to speak, is the subject of three recent books devoted to these writers. Jan Norby Gretlund's volume, the most traditional of the three, treats the most traditional writer. Madison Jones has been sadly neglected by critics, but he is a fine novelist and easily the major heir of the southern [End Page 158] Agrarians. Gretlund provides a solid introduction, laying out Jones' importance as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and contemporary southern literature, and he has included a valuable collection of commentary and criticism from a range of major critics and writers, among them Lewis Lawson, George Garrett, Hans Skei, and Richard Gray. Several themes run through all the essays, as they do in Jones' work, such as the destruction of the traditional order of the family farm, and the ineradicable presence of evil. Further, what the essays all make clear is that Jones, as a second generation Agrarian, possesses a fully developed sense that what destroys the traditional order is latent within that order itself. Each critic has his or her own way of getting at that problem, and the difficulty of any simple notion of return. The two strongest essays are those by Hans Skei on Season of the Strangler and Richard Gray on Herod's Wife. Both of these reveal Jones' technical mastery, with Skei taking on the question of unity of form within the short story sequence and Gray looking at the implications of a shifting narrative form. Both come to grips with one of the strongest traits of Jones' writing: a kind of potent indeterminacy when confronting the mystery of human evil. The most valuable portions of the book, however, are by Jones himself, including his acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award and an interview with Gretlund. On the whole, the collection is a start toward putting some solid criticism of Jones on library shelves to complement what is scattered in the journals. James Panabaker, in Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City, traces Foote's movement out of the shadow of Faulkner and southern modernism and into his own distinct aesthetic. Faulkner himself said of Foote at the University of Virginia that he "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Panabaker rightly focuses on Foote's attempt to order the chaos unleashed by modernist relativism through aesthetic form. Foote works, Panabaker writes, "by placing his own sense of modernist relativism within clearly demarcated, almost classical, narrative structures—an approach I call his aesthetic of limitations." Panabaker, in his two opening chapters, begins with Foote's heritage and the problem of Faulkner, then moves to his effort to reenvision the South in the mythic landscape of Jordan County. His middle chapter, on the aesthetics of limitation, deals with Foote's creation of an adequate form to treat the vagaries of memory. The final two chapters are largely devoted to Foote's magnum opus, his Civil War narrative. [End Page 159] For Panabaker, Foote's greater distance from the marked cultural shift...

Contract, Classicism, and the Common-Weal

This article examines the influence of classical jurisprudence over the substantive development of English common law in the early seventeenth century and, in particular, the extent to which Sir Edward Coke’s constitutional theories (as expounded in The Reports) were shaped by his interpretation of ancient political texts. The author examines the Ciceronian premise (to which Coke subscribed) that human law was predicated upon a contract or promise, reflecting concordance with divine law. Coke’s poetic skills enabled him to describe a mythical English landscape, in which freedoms were guaranteed by a fictive Ancient Constitution. Coke drew imaginatively upon iconic images of justice (notably Brutus, King Arthur, and Moses), to create a literary constitution that he attempted to equate with common law orthodoxy. The author suggests that, at a symbolic level, The Reports proffer an alternative constitution, in which the social contract between magistrate and subject of law represents the indivisible concurrence of human reason and divine will, and guarantees the constitutional supremacy of unwritten, moral law.

The Female Trickster—Known as Trickstar—As Exemplified by Two American Legendary Women, “Billy” Tipton and Mother Jones

Tricks are always engaging even when they are dangerous or imminently harmful. Their performance invites wonder, raises curiosity, and frequently encourages a desire to explore the rationale for the trick, its ramifications, what it can accomplish or access. Often we admire the trickster, are in awe of him (tricksterism is traditionally regarded as a male activity), but we can just as readily be suspicious of him and feel threatened by tactics that, after all, depend upon some form of disguise and cunning, as well as a beguiling charm. Because the trickster is so frequently irresistible, we can be easily caught in the trick and convinced to think and act in ways that are disadvantageous to our own interests. Tricksters, however, are complex figures; while they may be malicious and unscrupulous, they may also be beneficent, their motivated and devised to expose wrongdoing and, ultimately, responsible for bringing about a more humane condition, a more humane society. In fact, the trick is generally used to facilitate an action only because the action cannot be achieved through more direct means; that is, the trickster may be oppressed or subject to limitations, prejudices, controls that prevent him or her from initiating efforts that are necessary for his or her own freedom or others' liberation. Of course, women have most often had to use both wit and wiles to achieve individual autonomy, if not use some form of strategy merely to survive. trickster is an important figure in mythology; recognizing his personal traits and the patterns of his action conveys a more distinct awareness of how we may perceive more modern or popular tricksters and, also, understand the types of tricks they perform. In the anthropological literature, the trickster dupes and deceives in order to satisfy his needs for food and sex or to prop up his ego by aggrandizement, assault and appropriation. Witness Coyote, that famous North American trickster, or regard the exploits of the Winnebago Trickster as described by Paul Radin in his classic study, Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956 (the of tricks is related in Part One). If we are to believe in the cycle of tales (that is, a distinctly formulated sequence of narrative), then we realize that Wakdjunkago, the Winnebago Trickster, gradually becomes socialized (Radin, World 313). He evolves from the infantile, mostly atomized self, who demands instant physical gratification, to the mature, self-restrained, socially conscious human being. In the classical mythology with which we are more familiar, Hermes is the child figure who both plays and plunders; but he is also an artist and inventor and becomes both healer and peacemaker (Doty 56-64). Prometheus is, of course, the trickster sine qua non, the culture bringer, the rebel against unjust authority, represented by Zeus, and the deliverer of humankind. Yet, Athene is also a trickster-or a trickster as I call female trickstersand while she does not introduce so important an element as fire into human existence, she does invent the plough and the system of numbers and generally encourages reason and reflection over ill-considered action. There are other tricksters: in the anthropological literature, Nafigi, the Amazon heroine of the Kapolo tribe (Basso 216-17); in Egyptian mythology, Isis; in Zuni mythology, The Rabbit Huntress. In Greek mythology, we may also consider Hera, Pandora and Circe-all different for the types of tricks they initiate and for the impact of those tricks on others. More significantly, trickstars inhabit the folkloric rather than the mythical landscape; their presence is wide-ranging. They appear in tales from all over the world, and their activities are various, their accomplishments generally positive. It is in the folkloric tradition that Billy Tipton and Mother (Mary Harris) Jones can be recognized as trickstars; for in their resistance to social conditions and in their abilities to manipulate conventions and power structures, they achieve a personal expression, advance their own agendas and, in very different ways, transform the way we think and relate to others. …