Opening Passages Research Articles

Innovative Approach to Promoting Walkability in Lisbon

The increases in both the elderly population and urbanization present new problems for planning new cities and managing old cities. To solve this challenge, innovative ideas/proposals that encourage walkability and reduce fossil energy motor transport are needed, in line with the actions advocated by Sustainable Development Goal #11 (SDG11), Sustainable Cities and Communities. Opening passages that cross blocks, creating connections between the streets, is the proposal discussed in this paper, as seen in cities like Paris, Prague, Milan, and Juíz de Fora, which have passages in their urban fabric. These can be implemented in a building’s rehabilitation or when a new building replaces it. New architectural project designs should have several characteristics that promote walkability in the city, including passages and galleries. Although previous research has obtained promising results, extending the research to different urban fabrics and block sizes is needed. Using space syntax and data analysis, we simulated and quantitatively assessed the walkability of three neighborhoods in Lisbon, Portugal. The comparison of all simulations and the discussion of the results show that the passages improve walkability. It is also noticeable that there is higher walkability in orthogonal urban fabrics than in non-orthogonal fabrics. The results for block size are inconclusive.

Kārtikā Tirunāḻ Bālarāma Varma’s Self-portrait in Bālarāmabharata

Kārtikā Tirunāḷ Bālarāma Varma (r. 1758–1798) was the ruler of the South Indian state of Travancore and the author of a Sanskrit treatise on theatrology, the Bālarāmabharata. His reign constituted an important period of patronage of arts and literature, especially in the field of performing arts. The king was not only an outstanding patron but also an eminent scholar and an accomplished author. As the evidence of this great variety of roles, the paper proposes to analyse the opening passages of the Bālarāmabharata where Kārtikā Tirunāḷ Bālarāma Varma presents himself in a self-portrait of sorts: as a ruler, patron, scholar and poet. He inscribes himself in the patronage tradition of the rulers of Travancore as well as in the line of the continuators of Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra while simultaneously showcasing his literary prowess and practical experience in the contemporary tradition of performing arts.

The Rule of Law and the Imitation of God in Plato’s Laws

Scholars interested in the characterology presupposed by constitutional government have occasionally turned to Plato’s Laws, one of the earliest and most penetrating treatments of the subject. Even so, interpreters have neglected a vital tension that the Laws presents as coeval with lawfulness itself. Through a close reading of the dialogue’s opening passages, I argue that the rule of law for Plato is implicated in a certain paradox: it both prohibits and requires the imitation of god. Law cannot safely originate with human beings; yet human beings must involve themselves nonetheless in laying law down. Trustworthy lawgivers must revere the gods while at the same time emulating them, must somehow make law themselves while regarding that very task as beyond their ken. Although the political psychology of lawfulness would therefore seem incoherent, I conclude by surveying reasons for thinking this inference unwarranted.

An Insufficient Canon: The Popol Wuj, Book of Mormon, and Other Scriptures

An Insufficient Canon: The Popol Wuj, Book of Mormon, and Other Scriptures

Beethoven's String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, and Brahms's String Sextets: A Wallflower Blooms

Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design.The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements.It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.

Chardak Between Heaven and Earth: Tracing Vernacular Space in Balkan Architecture by Judith Bing

Reviewed by: Chardak Between Heaven and Earth: Tracing Vernacular Space in Balkan Architecture by Judith Bing Serena Acciai Judith Bing Chardak Between Heaven and Earth: Tracing Vernacular Space in Balkan Architecture Maine, USA: Procyon Lotor Press, 2018. 303 Pp. ISBN 978-1-73321994-1-5 The research carried out by Professor Judith Bing, together with Professor J. Brooke Harrington, has evolved over thirty years. In its opening passages, it recalls Nicolas Bouvier’s discovery of the Balkan world, which stretched from Belgrade to the idyllic Šumadija farmland. There, Bing first encountered the subject she would delve into for the following decades. In one sense, it is a travel book, much like Le Corbusier’s experience recorded in Le Voyage d’Orient in 1911. Bing unearths the poetic meaning of the vernacular element chardak, a wooden veranda, and “an element that could expose and join together a region of rich cultural complexity”. The book has a poetic levity as it describes how the same architectural element found its way into different cultures over a vast geographical area. It also bridges the controversial, and, at times tragic, history of the last 30 years in the Balkans. The author highlights the ancient iconographic sources of this kind of space and also explores the etymological origin of the word chardak. Her research is ample and even takes into consideration the military chardak type constructed along the “wooden line” on the Sava River as a frontier between the warring Hapsburgs and Ottomans. Particularly fruitful was Bing’s reading of the Romanian chardak tradition, which influenced greatly Le Corbusier’s building and theoretical expertise, and was described in the famous juvenile trip recorded in his book. Herein lies the link between Le Corbusier’s five points for architecture and his early encounter with the Ottoman-Balkan housing tradition. The Swiss master was one [End Page 197] of the first XX century architects to recognize the similarities between this historic house type and the modern house: a similarity which lies in the up-to-date relationship between the ground plan and the elevation, in the independence of the inner disposition of a room from the wall structure, in the built-in furniture, in the architecture of the outer rooms, in the plastic modeling of the house above its supporting walls, in the harmony of architecture with nature, and in the desire for a view. She deals with the multicultural complexity of the region by showing some shared aspects of Balkan cultures. Literature, material culture, history, many good sketches, and architectural surveys are the tools that Bing employs for her fascinating tale. These same documents are also the corpus of the marvelous Balkan Vernacular Architecture portal edited by Bing and Harrington (available at http://www.balkanarchitecture.org/). The site is well worth visiting as their life-long research is an extraordinary tool for any scholars wanting to explore the rich vernacular housing heritage in these lands. The book is a thesaurus of the terminology used to indicate this type of space prevalent in the Balkan lands, from Croatia in the west West to Anatolia in the East. It gathers many case-studies based on literature by the most influential scholars of the region. She particularly regards Dusan Gabrijian’s studies on Bosnian and Macedonian chardak because they are, after Le Corbusier, a fundamental step for the work in this field and one of the best typological analyses carried out in (the former) Yugoslavia by a modern architect. Any formal and functional variant of this vernacular wooden veranda is contemplated and explained by Bing in relationship to the domestic culture of the land under study. The reader travels with her on this journey from West to East and throughout time, until reaching Istanbul, where the chardak is usually called kiosk and is a variant of the main gathering space called sofa. The section dedicated to the use of the chardak in monasteries starts from the same consideration made by the Balkan architect Aleksandar Deroko about the persistence of some characteristic vernacular elements in monastic complexes. Over time, monasteries’ housing complexes have often been rebuilt, but always in the same manner, and have permitted the conservation of this building type...

ПСАЛМОВІ ТЕКСТИ В УКРАЇНСЬКОМУ ДУХОВНОМУ КОНЦЕРТІ ДОБИ БАРОКО І КЛАСИЦИЗМУ: МИСТЕЦЬКІ ПАРАЛЕЛІ

The purpose of the article is to identify common and distinctive features, to determine artistic parallels in the choral sacred music of the Baroque and Classicism through the prism of using psalms of texts. Research methods are used by researcher at the represented scientific article the next, a namely historical-typological, stylistic, structural-analytical, and comparative. Scientific novelty. For the first time, it is traced how the principle of selection of psalm lines affects the compositional structure and content of concerts. Conclusions. Analysis of the material of East Slavic spiritual chants using the example of the genre of a choral concert in its baroque and early classical varieties allows us to make some generalizations on the use of psalm texts. In the selection of psalm texts for concerts from the handwritten set of the Mikhailovsky Monastery, the main tendencies characteristic of European church music are noted. Among the verbal texts, we can find psalms in fragmentary liturgical use, contamination of separate lines of one or different psalms, and with other texts. Note, however, that when writing concertos on selected lines from the psalms, priority is given to the opening passages of the psalms. Poetic versions of the psalms are also found, but it is unlikely that they were intended for church use. The principle of grouping the psalms of the lines influenced the form of choral concerts, where the desire for isolation is traced: in the partisan version, the text-musical lowercase contrasting-composite form acquires features of reprisal (figurative, and at times also intonational), and the features of the four-part cycle, outlined in the part, are the most are evident in the early classical choral version. In the latter, the principle of contrasting comparison of images, tempos, individualized thematicism is more clearly visible, even before the appearance of signs of popular everyday dances. The consistent disclosure of the content of the text did not require balancing the proportions of the sections in the partisan concert «As the hart panteth after the water brooks» («Ymzhe obrazom zhelaet»), while in the spiritual concert «I will love thee, O Lord, my strength» («Vozliubliu tia, Hospody»), a similar tendency is outlined in the arrangement of the psalms of the text in parts, which is associated with both dramatic deployment and with purely musical means of material development.

Hegel and the Problem of Beginning

AbstractIn this article I develop an interpretation of the opening passages of Hegel's essay ‘With what must the beginning of science be made?’ I suggest firstly that Hegel is engaging there with a distinctive problem, the overcoming of which he understands to be necessary in order to guarantee the scientific character of the derivation of the fundamental categories of thought which he undertakes in the Science of Logic. I refer to this as ‘the problem of beginning’. I proceed to clarify the nature of the problem, which I understand to be motivated by a concern to avoid arbitrariness, and then to detail the nature of Hegel's proposed solution, which turns on understanding how the concept of ‘pure being’, understood in a specific sense to be both mediated and immediate, avoids the concerns about arbitrariness which accompany attempts to begin merely with something mediated, or merely with something immediate. On this basis, I offer a number of criticisms of alternative approaches to the beginning of Hegel's Logic.

Inhabiting (CC.) ‘Religion’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to Develop an Ambedkarite Critique of the Blasphemous Nucleus of Upanishadic Wisdom

This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. The work is entirely philosophical in its intent and does not aspire to defend a faith-perspective. The horizon for this exposition follows the spirit of Ambedkar’s critique of Brahmanic superiority inherent in this entire system of religious thought: we must expose what lies in the heart of modern Hinduism to reveal its inner-contradictory entanglements, which are not exactly innocuous. A phenomenological-deconstructive inspiration motivates our own critical theoretical-philosophical conceptualizations beyond Ambedkar’s basic attestation to liberate India from Hinduism. The enterprise derives from a speculative appropriation and extension of the depths of (CC.) ‘Religion,’ the penultimate chapter of Hegel’s indomitable Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The aim of the paper is to advance new philosophical theses in an unrelenting metaphysical critique of Hinduism– beyond Ambedkar’s writings–but also in a manner that is irreducible to the Western philosophical cosmos within which the nineteenth-century Hegel inhabited. The paper argues that the internal contradictions and aporias of mortality, immortality, self, bodyhood, time, and eternity in the Hindu Upanishads can be contrasted with Hegel’s speculative Western-Christological propositions to expose a greater metaphysical complexity that escapes Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions alike. Therefore, the paper falls within the scope of comparative philosophies of religion.

Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan by Takeshi Watanabe

Reviewed by: Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan by Takeshi Watanabe Sonja Arntzen Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan. By Takeshi Watanabe. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. 324 pages. Hardcover, $65.00/ £52.95/ €58.50. This is the first monograph-length study in English of Eiga monogatari (Flowering Tales), the progenitor of rekishi monogatari (historical tales) in Japan. Eiga monogatari, [End Page 328] considered to be of multiple female authorship, comprises forty chapters: the first thirty, seihen (the main books), cover the years 946–1029, and the last ten, zokuhen (the sequel), the years 1030–1092. An excellent translation of the seihen by William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, has been available since 1980,1 but the text has elicited scant critical attention in English compared to Genji monogatari, Heian diaries, or Heian poetry. Watanabe's volume redresses this gap. One of the obstacles to appreciation that Eiga monogatari presents is its hybrid identity: is it history or literature? In their introduction to Flowering Fortunes, the McCulloughs stress that in Heian Japanese, the term monogatari (tale) did not exclusively connote fiction, but rather meant "'colloquial narratives,' which might be fictional, semi-fictional, or nonfictional"; they assert that Eiga could be considered "the historical side of the monogatari coin whose obverse was the fictional Genji" (McCullough and McCullough, vol. 1, pp. 7–8). Nonetheless, the fabrications and many factual errors in the text (outlined in McCullough and McCullough, pp. 33–37), make it difficult for historians to take it seriously as history. For the literary scholar, on the other hand, the work's chronological structure and seeming absence of central themes can make it appear like a long string of anecdotes, not that interesting as literature. Watanabe suggests that another reason for the relative lack of attention afforded Eiga may be found in the contrast between its opening passages and those of Genji: Genji commences with a riddle and disorder. With affirmative declarations, Eiga sees harmony, which may have been ideal, but makes for a less riveting plot. Most narratives are driven by conflict and its resolution. Evolutionarily, human beings are wired to be attentive to danger (the negativity bias). Eiga is relatively free of such confrontations, not because that period was peaceful, but precisely because the aim was to quell such tensions. (p. 7) This introduces Watanabe's central thesis, that the authors of Eiga were writing history to promote harmony and healing in a society riven by competition and jealousies. He stresses that there was a real fear of vengeful spirits, which were believed to arise after the deaths of people who felt they had been wronged, whether by other people or fate itself. Watanabe posits that the narrator in Eiga can be considered metaphorically a shaman who exorcises the potentially negative energy of the losers, the unlucky, and the unjustly persecuted in that community by providing an empathetic retelling or "re-remembering" of their stories that offers, at least, a "placatory, symbolic space of honor" (p. 141). He argues that Genji supplied the model for writing a realistic representation of that society in "a prose language that could grapple with its members' turbulent experiences at court, occupied with merciless political intrigue, unsettling gossip, and dangerous envy" (p. 2). The authors of Eiga employed the discourse of fiction to write a history of the personal side of court life (which could arguably be considered the more politically important arena, especially for women). Watanabe calls the genre they invented "affective history," a serious historical record that only occasionally sacrifices factual accuracy to serve its primary goal of fostering empathy, connection, and reconciliation within a community. This thesis [End Page 329] convincingly explains why, despite its emphasis in the main books on recording the flowering fortunes of the Northern branch of the Fujiwara and, in particular, the spectacular career of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), Eiga nevertheless includes so many narratives of those who lost in the competition. Likewise, it explains why, despite the surface texture of harmony and auspiciousness, the work also contains many scenes of illness, death, and mourning. Watanabe sees another important inspiration for the affective history...

A Pedagogic Reading of Wittgenstein's Life and Later Works

This article establishes a pedagogic reading of Wittgenstein's later work, which explores the significance of teaching and learning themes through close textual analysis and archival work on his Nachlass. I argue for the prevalence and importance of Wittgenstein's references to teaching, learning and training by showing the role these references play in the structure and central points of his later works. The opening passages of the Philosophical Investigations and the Brown Book about how we learn language are a framing device for arguments later in the texts; one to which Wittgenstein repeatedly returns at crucial junctures. Learning is the process that weaves together our practices and their expected outcomes, which in turn shapes and reshapes the norms operative in our shared forms of life. Reading Wittgenstein with sensitivity to pedagogic themes thus undermines interpretations that rely on rule-following as the explanatory mechanism by which linguistic use generates meaning. Instead, we learn to use language that carries meaning by being taught the patterns, norms and judgements that come with particular uses. I thus argue that these references to learning and teaching are far from incidental and are instead central to understanding major concepts such as rule-following, experience and judgement.

Introduction

Introduction

PERSUASION IN RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE: ENHANCING CREDIBILITY IN SERMON TITLES AND OPENINGS

Since the emergence of the Aristotelian idea of appeal within the framework of his understanding of poetics, the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos have indicated the essence of what came to be labelled much later as persuasive strategies. Although persuasion seems to be present in virtually all text types and registers, in many ways it is the religious discourse that utilises persuasion as one of its pivotal instruments to convince the audience of the veracity of the doctrine presented through it. The present paper explores scripted sermons, particularly sermon titles and opening passages, in terms of the persuasive strategies employed. The main emphasis is placed on how particular linguistic realisations of persuasion enhance the credibility of the message.

L'Escalier : dispositif au cœur du montage de la Vie mode d'emploi

ABSTRACTGiving rhythm to our daily routine, the staircase that we climb and descend, like a musical scale that carries on and on, can open up like a fan of possibilities. An architectural feature meant to permit transit from one level to another, it also channels bodies and the flow of information, opening passages between different states. Seeing how Perec uses the stairs to gather the collective life of a building, in this case the dwelling in La Vie mode d'emploi, we understand that the staircase is a gateway to people's stories, an access to perspectives from which narratives are born. Taken for granted most of the time, the staircase can be a powerful and dramatic tool, a structure suspended between two planes, designed to create suspense. Its delayed temporality animates the shadow plays of anticipation and memory, akin to vertigo in space, the stairs being the source from which all lines of escape project. In short, the poetics of Perec takes a common place and reinvests it as a means to assemble the collective story.

Highlighting the Build: Using Lighting to Showcase the Sydney Opera House

Highlighting the Build: Using Lighting to Showcase the Sydney Opera House

Recording Life Stories: A Service Learning Project for the Composition Classroom

Recording Life Stories: A Service Learning Project for the Composition Classroom Travis W. Johnson (bio) and Jeremy Reed (bio) We’re here today to share with you a service learning project that we’ve integrated into our advanced composition courses. This project—what we call the Life Story Project—asks students to record interviews with local community members and design exhibits based on their life stories. Students also deposit the interviews and transcripts in an archive at Central Methodist University’s Smiley Memorial Library. We had three goals in mind when we designed this project. First, we wanted to record and preserve the life stories of community members in Central Missouri. Second, we hoped to strengthen the connection between university and community through civic engagement. Last, we wanted to provide students with unique opportunities to develop their communication skills. Today’s presentation will show you how we met those goals, guiding you through the major steps we took in designing and integrating the Life Story Project. We’ll also reflect on some of the challenges we faced along the way. In sharing our project and course materials with you, we hope you’ll be able to design a similar project for your own writing courses. We’d like to start with some artifacts that our students produced in our advanced writing classes. We have an abstract painting done by a student after he listened to a story of his father’s, a video collage of wedding photos set to period-appropriate music and snippets of voice recordings recreating a moving story of how a local woman fell in love, and a canvas on which students painted icons representing important moments in the life story of a community leader. Likewise, we have a mock sash covered in merit badges created to help tell the story of a former boy scout, a briefcase that opens to show a photo collage representing the law school experiences of a student’s mother, and playing cards inscribed with a local woman’s reminiscences of familial bonding over games of canasta. Admittedly, these aren’t the kind of artifacts people typically associate with writing courses. Instead of having students simply write essays about a range of topics, we wanted assignments that would put questions about the nature of composition and representation at the fore. In this class, we wanted students to explore what it means to represent ourselves and others. We asked them to parse whether or not representation need be strictly and traditionally textual. And we encouraged them to think about the connections between representation and truth, or representations and truths. [End Page 313] What is the meaning in a person’s story about themselves? How can we find that meaning? Is it possible for us to convey it to others? What is lost in translation? What is gained? With the Life Story Project, students must grapple with these sorts of questions because they’re asked to not only record an interview with a community member but also to create an exhibit that showcases the essential meanings of that story. It is through these meaningful exchanges with the community—the student’s recording of a life story and composing an exhibit for that story—that this oral history project becomes a service learning project. That is to say, in this process, there is a genuine exchange, a collaboration, that is mutually enriching and produces a positive learning experience. The opening passages from our assignment sheet for the Life Story Project immediately introduces students to the spirit of service learning: Your major project this semester is to collect the life story of a local community member. What is a life story? A life story is a type of oral history, a recorded interview in which a person reflects on his or her entire life. Or, as Robert Atkinson puts it, “A life story is the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she has lived, told as completely and honestly as possible, what is remembered of it, and what the teller wants others to know of it, usually as a result of a guided interview by another” (8). Your task this semester...

No “Publick funerall”? Lucy Hutchinson’s elegy, epitaph, monument

What were uses of mourning and memory in post-Civil War England, and what evidence can be used to investigate this? This essay responds to these questions using Lucy Hutchinson's elegies for her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, who died in 1664 being incarcerated in Sandown castle by Restoration regime. Accordingly, this essay draws on Kate Lilley's foundational discussion of gendering of elegy, particularly inefficiency and failure to seal off grief 's eloquence, and on significant body of work on English vernacular funerary art (Robert Tittler, Nigel Lewellyn, Peter Sherlock).1 What follows returns to question of shade in Hutchinson's Memoirs and Elegies, responding to it on a different terrain from that of established debate on Hutchinson and modesty. Investigating where this material might also lead, this essay takes as its starting place her nocturnal bewailing a Publick funerall. Investigating nocturnal world evoked by elegies, essay juxtaposes this with material presences - things left which can come to light. It attempts to draw out some of implications of Hutchinson's textual production for study of mourning phenomena and for consideration of intersection of literary and other traces of seventeenth-century events.ElegyLeaue of yee pittying friends; leaue of in vaineDoe you perswade ye dead to liue againeIn uaine to me yr comforts are appliedFor, 'twas not he; twas only I That diedIn That Cold Graue which his deare reliques keepeMy light is quite extinct where he but sleepesMy substance into ye dark vault was laideAnd now I am my owne pale Empty (1:1-8)So start Hutchinson's elegies as we have them. While it is unclear that Hutchinson organised these poems in sequence, their present shape does nevertheless have logics which can tentatively be taken as a structure.2 The opening poem's isolation of its speaking subject as a shade initiates a turn away from social world, yet this ghostly identification is bookended and balanced by emphatic presence of social forms of latter pages, in part songs but substantially (almost) closing epitaphs one of which, as apparently planned, is in place in church in Owthorpe.3Hutchinson's texts give some guidance on how to consider Shade which is, inter alia our ghostly guide to nocturnal, enchanted labyrinth of grief. While connections between opening passages of Lucy Hutchinson's memoir of her husband and elegies are critically established, elegies are also echoed in later passages, as Colonel's retiredness from public life means that Memoirs' providential scenes become those of everyday and internal. The scene of providential interpretation shrinks to become room, conversation between spouses, prison, and death-bed. As leader John Hutchinson's actions are replaced by events in a narrowly bounded sphere, where events are decided by others, spaces determined by a mixture of accident and malice, these later passages of memoir pursue ideas and images in parallel to elegies. Tellingly, while focusing on John Hutchinson, they mediate him through narrator's concerns, charting simultaneously her displacement from power into a space of thought, writing, retrospection and interpretation.The final page of Memoirs tells us that Sandown castle had been disturbed with evil spirits. These were absent throughout time of Colonel's residence until two weeks before his death, and he was dead those noises ceased. However, the spring after (1665?), an apparition of a gentlewoman in mourning in such a habit as Mrs Hutchinson used to wear there . . . and was often seen walking in Colonel's chamber and on platform.4 Apparently, using Hamlet as a text with which to consider past and potential political poisoning of her husband, and therefore considering a ghost that haunts a troubled regime, this ghost evidently marks a search for meaning within Hutchinson's text. …

“Like the incense of a bad heart”: The Ethics of Industry in Sophia Hawthorne's and Margaret Fuller's English Travelogues

Margaret Fuller and Sophia Hawthorne aren't often associated with the mid-nineteenth-century debates surrounding transatlantic factory and labor reform, yet both women begin their European travelogues with visits to English textile mills. In her first New-York Daily Tribune dispatch in August 1846, Fuller introduces her readers to an increasingly volatile Europe through a brief discussion of textile mill workers in Manchester and Liverpool. Over two decades later, Hawthorne's 1869 Notes in England and Italy similarly begins with her 1853 visit to a "very ugly" Lancashire mill town that is noticeably absent of workers yet leaves her haunted by the "cost" of industrialization (7-8). These moments are anomalous in both Fuller's and Hawthorne's narratives, yet they are also rare points of commonality in the two projects, which are divergent in many crucial ways. For even as Fuller's work for the Tribune traces her increasingly revolutionary politics, her more frequently discussed dispatches from Risorgimento Italy do not dwell on the effects of industrialization. (1) In contrast, Hawthorne's Notes focuses on ekphrastic descriptions of famous architectural landmarks and Italian masterworks; amid her accounts of museums and churches and interpretations of famous paintings and sculptures, social commentary is rare. (2) While it is important to note the similarities and differences between their texts, I use the women's introductory--and brief--references to English factories and factory workers as a way to think about the larger mid-century, transatlantic conversations surrounding industrialization and ethical labor. (3) Fuller's and Hawthorne's travels may be filled with visits to famous literary and cultural sites, but their (at least partial) "pleasure tours," to borrow William Stowe's term, are all the more striking by beginning in the un-aesthetically pleasing industrial centers of northern England with serious discussions of education and reform (103). Fuller's and Hawthorne's seemingly elliptical descriptions of the mills point to a larger cultural touchstone: they are commentaries on how the increasing pervasiveness of industrialization in the nineteenth century also raises questions about doing fulfilling work and leading meaningful lives. By beginning their respective journeys--and their accounts of those journeys--with these visits, Fuller and Hawthorne reveal how factories and the cloth they produce affect individuals regardless of class, gender, race, and nationality. Moreover, as women visiting northern England, then the industrial center of the Western world, Fuller and Hawthorne call attention to the often invisible labor done, in large part, by women. For if, as Annamaria Elsden suggests, Hawthorne understands her writing as "a way to 'copy' what she sees on her travels and transmit it to readers at home," then perhaps we can understand both Fuller's first dispatch and Hawthorne's Notes as confronting an individual's culpability for the working conditions of the factory operatives--even when physically removed from sites of industrialization and production (74). Ultimately, each woman positions her reflections on her tour as a way to establish common ground with her imagined readers, underscoring the wide-reaching impact of the international textile trade, the growth of factories, and the passage of laws protecting humane working conditions. In fact, Fuller and Hawthorne use their anomalous opening passages as oblique appeals to the middle-class reader--especially the middleclass, American woman reader--urging her to understand how she, too, is affected by these conditions overseas and, in turn, to support industrial reform on both sides of the Atlantic. I explore how Fuller's and Hawthorne's travel narratives are part of a larger mid-century print culture concerned with the transnational textile industry. I first outline Fuller's and Hawthorne's representations of their factory visits and how they pointedly obscure different parts of the industrial landscape: factories for Fuller and people for Hawthorne. …

1834: “Melancholy and Affecting Accident: Eleven Persons Drowned”

1834: “Melancholy and Affecting Accident: Eleven Persons Drowned” Allison Fieldberg (bio) On 26 December 1833, eleven members of the Stillingfleet church choir were drowned in the River Ouse during a carolling expedition in their North Yorkshire parish. A week later, the Hull Packet, alongside other print publications including the Yorkshire Gazette and the York Courant, picked up the story, entitling its account of the mass drowning “Melancholy and Affecting Accident.” Such a title would have been familiar to the paper’s readership, for the headline “melancholy accident” proliferates throughout the nineteenth-century press to describe a range of mishaps, accidents, and catastrophes both large and small. In this instance, however, the Hull Packet lingers over the details of this mass drowning, seemingly unable to determine just what sort of tone it should adopt. While it declares the accident a “lamentable … awful catastrophe,” potently “illustrative” of the fragility of human life, the account concludes with quotidian details such as the inquest jury’s final judgment of “a deodand of 1 [shilling] for the boat” (“Melancholy”). And while it stresses the parish clergyman’s “indefatigable” efforts to assuage his parishioners’ grief, it also spends a great deal of column space detailing the Stillingfleet parish’s earnest (and, ultimately, unsatisfactory) attempts to determine the party responsible for the accident. Overall, the account’s uneven tone raises questions not only about what sort of details one should include in an account of such a tragedy but also about whether religion, law, or something else has the capacity to comfort the survivors of such a catastrophe, as well as the readers of newspaper accounts of the disaster. The article considers, obliquely yet provocatively, whether this accident should be deemed “melancholy” in the first place, hinting at the tensions that exist between secular and religious theories of accident, mortality, and culpability. [End Page 13] Ultimately, it provides no satisfactory answers, conveying Victorian ambivalence about the notions of risk and accident. The details of the event are straightforward enough: on the afternoon of 26 December 1833, the church choir members of Stillingfleet, North Yorkshire, left their “happy homes” for the purpose of visiting farmers within their parish (“Melancholy”). Late in the day, while they were travelling by boat between destinations, their vessel was swamped, an event described by the newspaper as “one of those mysterious visitations of Providence, which occur to warn, or to alarm us” (“Melancholy”). Eleven of the fourteen members of the choir were drowned, their bodies so deeply submerged that it took a team of men dragging the river a day and a half to recover the bodies, two of which remained lost. The newspaper account is detailed (in that it names the victims, their ages, and the number of children who survived them) and hyperbolic (particularly when it describes how the accident “plunged” the entire village of Stillingfleet into “deepest affliction”). The article’s tone, especially in its opening passages, is not unlike that of many early-to-mid-century newspaper articles that detail accidental deaths, for its text lingers not only on the deep sadness of the event (its melancholic, lamentable, mournful, grief-filled, and awful qualities) but also on its potential to teach readers a lesson. In this, it is “illustrative,” and one need go no further than the opening paragraphs in order to understand just what the instruction might be: “in the midst of life we are in death.” Presumably, the loss of life on such a grand scale is comprehensible only within the context of what the event can teach us about the “unhappy” or chance-driven quality of our lives (made even more perilous by our decision to undertake voyages in overloaded vessels travelling across fast-moving, wintry rivers) (“Melancholy”). In its simplest analysis, what is melancholy about this event, then, is not merely the catastrophic loss of life but its ability to remind us, dishearteningly, of the easy slippage from life into death. In fact, multitudinous newspaper accounts of accidental death in Victorian England include in their titles the terms melancholic or melancholy. The earliest usages of these terms in headings of news reports about accidental deaths can be dated to the early seventeenth century, and...

The Snake in the Tree in Abu al-ʿAlaʾ al-Maʿarri’s Epistle of Forgiveness: Critical Essay and Translation

Abstract This study first proposes to interpret the opening passages of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s (363-449/973-1058) Risālat al-Ghufrān (Epistle of Forgiveness) in terms of the mythic, lexic and ludic elements that make up the substance of what is essentially a non-narrative discourse. The study argues that al-Maʿarrī uses his parodic “heavenly garden” as a “ludic space” in which his self-righteous protagonist and addressee, Ibn al-Qāriḥ, as well as his (presumed) reader, is tested with riddles, both verbal and conceptual. Ibn al-Qāriḥ fails in what I claim to be a parody of a rite of initiation (a literary counterpart to the Prophet Muḥammad’s Night Journey and Ascension): he is constantly surprised and dumbfounded by God’s mercy. This study argues that the opening passages, which play on names, epithets and lexical items relating to the snake, the snake in the tree, the black core of the heart, and related symbols of the soul and immortality are ultimately grounded in the shared Mesopotamian-Mediterranean symbolic matrix. It argues that the bivalent image of the snake as a source of longevity and of death, of deception and of veracity, is found in the interwoven Christian symbolism of Eve, the serpent, the tree of life, the Virgin Mary, Christ and the tree of the Cross. Second, it offers an annotated translation of the opening passages of al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-Ghufrān.