Opening Words Research Articles

A Bayesian interpretation of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate and the Taylor Rule

When the Federal Reserve was established by the US Congress in 1913, its charter mandated that the new central bank “promote an elastic currency” and the institution was given extraordinary powers to serve as a lender of last resort to the banking system. Congress was reacting to the cycle of financial panics that had beset the country since the Civil War and had worsened with the Panic of 1907. Congress sought to find a remedy to prevent runs on banks turning into full-fledged financial crises. The term “elastic” in the opening words of the charter was intended to underscore the need for a robust banking system that could withstand shocks and not collapse upon itself. There was no mention whatsoever of a dual mandate of promoting price stability and encouraging full employment.With prodding from the US Congress, the Federal Reserve became highly involved in the management of the economy of the United States after WWII, focusing on inflation and full employment objectives. In 1993 Professor John Taylor set forth an elegant and simple framework (aka, the Taylor Rule) for analyzing the interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve in terms of its dual mandate.This paper examines Federal Reserve behavior from the mid-1950s to 2011 through the lens of the Taylor Rule. Our contribution is to use a dynamic linear model with Bayesian inference to update the evolution through time of the key parameters surrounding the inflation and full employment mandates, using only the information available to the Federal Reserve at each point in time. Our findings provide a more nuanced quantitative view than is previously available in the literature of how the Federal Reserve shifted its management of its dual mandate over time and in response to different economic challenges. Moreover, our research leads to serious questions of how Federal Reserve decision making may change in the future, following the financial panic of 2008, pointing toward numerous avenues for new research.

Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer (review)

Reviewed by: Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer Robert Scherr (bio) Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer, by Jeremy Schonfield. Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Jeremy Schonfield undertakes this study of Birkhot Ha-shaḥar and P’sukei D’zimra with a fundamental assumption: just as all sacred text is a matter of inquiry and curiosity, rather than simple acceptance, so we should encounter the familiar texts of the siddur as investigation and engagement. He writes, “Liturgy is more than a purely linguistic gesture or ‘speech-act,’ partly because it relies on physical props and performance in real time for its effectiveness” (p. 48). While worship is performative, it is also inwardly a challenging multivocal expression of poetic-liturgical narrative. Schonfield has undertaken an investigation of scriptural and rabbinic contexts for prayer texts, as well as the meaning of objects—tallit and t’fillin— to frame the opening words of daily prayer. Appreciating and engaging the background and context of the liturgy, both text and subtext, is part of the worship experience itself. Rather than presenting a p’shat reading of the liturgical texts, Schonfield presents pathways of curiosity and historical/poetical exegesis, as well as multilayered readings—which can raise the reader’s thoughtfulness and delight in the traditional texts of our siddur. Schonfield’s discussion of the siddur is a close reading of a small part of the daily liturgy. He devotes over three hundred pages to Birkhot Ha-shaḥar and P’sukei D’zimra. The author creates a particular sense of structure of each prayer, and each group of prayers. Traditional davening, then, is a matter of assembling distinctive threads into the whole cloth of the experience. He draws articulately on biblical, talmudic, and midrashic literature, as well as the recognizable commentaries of Rashi, Maimonides, and Karo. He engages the reader in thinking about the meaning of particular texts in the flow of moving from one prayer to the next. Throughout the work, this reader felt the lively imagination of one who is an engaging teacher, as well as a sincere believer. Of the very opening of the daily prayers, Schonfield observes, “. . . there is no resounding introductory proclamation such as might be expected of the beginning of a new day, and its absence [End Page 110] suggests that the moment of waking is not a point of departure for the speaker [davener] at all, but part of a continuum in which communication with God has never ceased” (p. 68). It is in these opening moments of the day that the davener renews the relationship with God that was abandoned during sleep. Of this intimate moment, Schonfield suggests that the words modeh ani can be read as “I thank God,” as if God may, or may not, grant us the kindness of returning our soul this morning. Or modeh ani can be read as “I acknowledge that God [restores my soul as an act expressing God’s beneficence for humankind].” Schonfield reads these personal prayers with communal meaning, as the departure and return of one’s soul suggests also the theme of exile and return for the Jewish people. Schonfield cites the scriptural language from Daniel and Lamentations to establish a state of mind for this prayer acknowledging one’s nighttime survival. He intriguingly suggests that this prayer upon awakening can be understood as a type of mourning the exile from the Divine, which we experience during sleep, and then ends when the soul is reunited with God upon our awakening—even as our ancestors lived in a world bereft of Jerusalem, praying for a messianic time of lasting salvation (p. 76). Various chapters bear titles that express his search for meaning in the ironic (or rather, the oxymoronic): “The Darkness of Waking” on the opening words of prayer; “The Bonds of Freedom” on the texts for wearing tallit and t’fillin; “The Silence of Language” as prayer moves from personal gestures, such as waking and dressing, to prayers recited in the synagogue. He interprets donning tallit and t’fillin as an act re-clothing oneself, as one has been re-souled upon waking. As one prays, one is transformed into a cultural entity, manipulating...

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems (review)

Reviewed by: Beowulf and Other Old English Poems J. Michael Colvin Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, trans. Craig Williamson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) xxxii + 255 pp. Beowulf is not only the most translated work of the Anglo-Saxon period, it might be the most translated composition of the first millennium, as no fewer than forty translations have been published in the last century. To these may now be added that of Craig Williamson, who collects in his new book the “greatest hits” of Old English poetic literature and presents them in translation. Williamson has offered extremely able translations, and the proems before each translation accurately and adequately summarize the interpretive scholarship on them. In addition to a translation of Beowulf, this book contains translations of forty-six other works, of which thirty are riddles and three are charms. Among the other poems Williamson translates are The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Dream of the Rood. Tom Shippey, a noted Tolkienist and a scholar of Old English verse in his own right, provides a foreword that seeks to contextualize the poems—in terms of their compositional milieux, their historical environments, and the long shadows they have subsequently cast. Williamson’s general introduction is a concise and cogent treatise on Old English poetics and translation. The seven-page bibliography is thorough, if not complete (no attempt is made, for instance, to locate Williamson’s translation in the tradition of Beowulf translation.) The index contains entries only for the apparatus criticus—not for the translated texts themselves. To the end matter are added a Glossary of Proper Names (237–243), and four appendices, the most useful of which (Appendix D) proposes solutions to the riddles translated from the Exeter Book. The translation of Beowulf is a notoriously difficult task, and Williamson is to be commended for producing a fluent and lively text that recalls the language of the original to the beginning student of Old English literature. To give a sense of how difficult and contentious a translation of Beowulf actually is, the opening word “Hwæt”—ostensibly meaning “what” and employed in Old English as something akin to a vocative particle meant to elicit attention and command an audience to hear—has been variously translated as “So,” “Lo,” “Yes,” “Look,” “Behold,” “Well,” and “Attend,” in addition to being left untranslated or omitted entirely; Williamson translates it as “Listen.” That scholarly consensus cannot be established on the opening word does not bode well for the subsequent 3,182 lines of the poem. The root of the issue is the deep-seated affinity that Beowulf seems uniquely able to inspire in scholars of multiple disciplines (e.g., History, English, Linguistics, etc.). The intoxicating allure of the poem has occasioned a multitude of strategies for translation. So, which strategy is the right one? How ought the translator to deal with kennings? How ought the translator attend to his or her duties to the language of the original while still capturing the conceptual essence of the poem well enough to communicate it to a modern audience? What of meter? What of formal conventions? With these concerns doubtlessly in mind, Williamson has produced a satisfactory translation that preserves aspects of the original, but does not depart radically from other tacks taken in earlier translational attempts. Williamson lays out his translational strategy in his introduction (1–28), and endeavors to offer an alliterative verse-translation in an attempt to capture the spirit of the original language. It is clear that he is very capable of doing so; [End Page 161] indeed, Williamson’s alliterative verse is impressively consistent. But the attempt to preserve this convention leads him away from a more literal translation that might have been more appropriate to the enterprise. The heavy-lifting of translation is done behind the valence of the verse itself, and no gloss is offered or attempted. So, instead of preserving the language, Williamson ultimately preserves his own conception of the sense of the language, and twists his translation to fit that sense accordingly. This critique is compounded by the editorial choice not to provide a facing-page edition along with the translated text...

Mindful Breathing: Creating Counterpublic Space in the Religious Studies Classroom

Mindful Breathing: Creating Counterpublic Space in the Religious Studies Classroom Laurie Cassidy (bio) . . . Let meKeep my mind on what matters,Which is my work,which is mostly standing still and learning to beastonished.The phoebe, the delphinium.The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart . . . —Mary Oliver1 How do we help our students keep their minds on what matters within a culture preoccupied with the trivial and spectacular? In this essay, I will explore how mindful breathing can be a powerful-yet-simple embodied practice of feminist pedagogy, especially in the teaching of Christian social ethics. Rather than a focus only on theory that can be debated, critiqued, or dismissed, focus on the breath develops the capacity to be present to bodily existence. This presence to bodily existence is a starting point for learning and knowledge production that regrounds students in their own lived material conditions. I argue that mindful breathing is a political act of self-care, not simply a self-soothing participation in the status quo.2 As a pedagogical strategy, mindful breathing is a bodily acknowledgment of one’s material conditions interrupting the mediation of reality through the spectacular. Nancy Fraser’s concept of counterpublic space is useful in understanding [End Page 164] the importance of feminist pedagogy in a democratic society. Fraser explains that counterpublics are spaces at the service of groups excluded from dominant conversations of civil society. These counterpublics provide subordinate groups with “parallel discursive spaces” “to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”3 For Fraser, these spaces enable subordinate groups to question how reality is framed by the dominant political economy. Returning to Mary Oliver’s opening words, these spaces allow subordinate groups to focus on their work, and their own existence. The classroom can be one of these counterpublic spaces to the degree that it enables students to formulate an oppositional interpretation of their own identities, interests, and needs. This oppositional interpretation must first confront how contemporary culture obfuscates students’ reality through the spectacular. Spectacle is a cultural process involving images that dominate public discourse through personal and collective imagination.4 Media spectacle is a cultural production that normalizes, and makes “common sense” of the political frames of exclusion, described by Fraser. The phenomenon of media spectacle necessitates exploring how this process distances us from our bodies, and lived material conditions. The all-consuming power of spectacle distances individuals from the experience of our own bodily existence, and disempowers us to act on our own behalf. To create counterpublics in the religious studies classroom necessitates pedagogical strategies that make conscious the operation of spectacle, and interrupt its inner framing of outer political and economic order. Media spectacle must be interrupted in order to enact Fraser’s concept of counter-public in the classroom. Mindful breathing is a nondiscursive practice making embodied awareness possible, and holds the possibility of empowering discursive capacity in regard to lived material conditions. In this essay, I illustrate the necessity of mindful breathing as a feminist pedagogical strategy to create counterpublic space in two ways. First, I elaborate on the notion of spectacle in U.S. democracy, and demonstrate how this dehumanizing production of meaning in contemporary culture lends urgency to contemplative ways of knowing. Second, I will theoretically and practically describe mindful breathing as a pedagogical strategy in the classroom. I explore how mindful breathing can make conscious and interrupt the cultural production of spectacle, as a pedagogical strategy. I argue that in contrast to the spectacular, mindful breathing and other contemplative practices cultivate a capacity for “deepened awareness, concentration, and insight” about lived material conditions.5 This deepened bodily awareness serves as the ground for [End Page 165] social ethical inquiry in the religious studies classroom. Mindful breathing is an embodied practice reconnecting a person with the present moment. With the assault on reason in American civil society, ironically contemplative ways of knowing, like mindful breathing, may be a way to retrieve critical thinking in a culture of spectacle.6 As a form of contemplative inquiry mindful breathing is...

Lawrence's Sense-Words

IN HIS BEST-KNOWN POEM, written in Sicily in 1920, Lawrence's lord of life – his ‘Snake’ – softly slips into our view: We read again, to be freshly startled. The strangeness of this single sentence lies only partly in the celebrated kinaesthetic shiver it sends across its own slack long body, with the free verse rhythms lengthening and tightening over the seven lines. More intimate, almost prehensile, is the way individual words are felt round, slightly shifted. ‘Slack’ is not just introduced as a noun (‘slackness’), but syntactically couched in such a way that an attribute becomes a visual shape and an object, lending body to the burst of colour and touch in the second line. Aurally, the word palpitates with its linguistic neighbours as Lawrence delves into the organic heart of prosody, the relation between sound and sense. Equally delicate is his handling of the word ‘soft’. In a narrative drama between reptilian softness and stony hardness, ‘soft’ in its passage from adjective to adverb moves within the field of haptic vision, from body texture (‘soft-bellied’) to physical action (‘Softly drank’). Lawrence uses repetition to play on both sameness and difference. ‘Soft’ is a word that he, like Keats, would turn to and turn round repeatedly, from the opening word of ‘Piano’ to describe his mother singing, to its incantatory use to evoke touch in the short story ‘The Blind Man’, to the ‘softness of deep shadows’ (‘Shadows’, p. 727) that he feels envelop him as he lies dying in 1929. The word does not just cut across the five senses in Lawrence. It reveals his peculiar talent for articulating the submerged world of emotion that clings around colour, shape, and movement. ‘Softly drank’: is ‘softly’ the imagined sound of the snake drinking or a glimpsed movement of its forked tongue or the tenderness of the observer's mood? ‘It is the hidden emotional pattern’, he wrote in a letter to Edward Marsh, ‘that makes poetry, not the obvious form’.2 The word also vibrates internally. ‘Softly’ is the opening trochee but it weaves itself with the labials and sibilants: it lingers on our tongue between the hard, monosyllabic spondees (‘straight mouth’, ‘straight gums’) before we understand its meanings in the world.

The Secundo Folio and its Uses, Medieval and Modern

The cataloguing device known in the middle ages as the secundo folio , being the opening words of the second leaf of a book, was a means by which a medieval book could be matched to its record in a list. First used in the early thirteenth century, it came to be universally employed in England and elsewhere, and continued to be used until the early sixteenth century, for printed books as well as for manuscripts without discrimination. While the secundo folio has long had a meaning and usefulness to modern manuscript cataloguers, for whom it has been a means of matching a surviving book to its medieval institutional home, its usefulness has escaped the attention of incunabulists. While it is true that the diagnostic cannot be used to identify an individual printed book as it can an individual manuscript, it can be used to identify the edition (or editions), and thereby offers a new source of evidence for the acquisition and ownership of incunabula at an early date, making a contribution to studies on the development and reach of the early booktrade.

25 Years of Schur Analysis in Leipzig

The “25Years of Schur Analysis in Leipzig” workshopwas held from September 29 to October 1 of 2009 in honour of the 25-year anniversary of Schur Analysis in Leipzig. The journal “Complex Analysis and Operator Theory” is celebrating this anniversary with this special issue on Schur Analysis. This brief introduction to the special issue is based, in large part, on the second author’s opening words to the workshop, with which he aimed to provide an overview of the turning points and topics most important to the evolution of Schur Analysis in Leipzig. Schur Analysis’ development and success in Leipzig stands as one of Bernd Fritzsche and Bernd Kirstein’s proudest achievements. This success was only made possible by the support and the cooperation of their longstanding colleagues from the former Soviet Union; foremost among them D. Z. Arov, V. E. Katsnelson and V. K. Dubovoj. The history of Schur Analysis in Leipzig is best told from the beginning. Its origins as a major field of research at the University of Leipzig go back to 1984; the year after B. Fritzsche and B. Kirstein successfully defended their thesis. Their thesis defense took place in December 1983. In their thesis, they focused on various aspects of the theory of multidimensional weakly stationary sequences. At this time, both B. Fritzsche and B. Kirstein were members of a work group, mainly concerned with applying mathematical methods to problems in microelectronics. B. Fritzsche and B. Kirstein were both, in particular, occupied with problems in best linear predictions. Now beginning their postdoctoralresearch and building on their previous

Florence Nightingale at First Hand (review)

Reviewed by: Florence Nightingale at First Hand Sue Hawkins Lynn McDonald . Florence Nightingale at First Hand. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. xv + 197 pp. Ill. $24.95 (paperbound, 978-1-55458-191-7). "Why another book on Florence Nightingale . . . ?" are the opening words to the preface of this new addition to the Florence Nightingale library, and it is a good question (p. xi). "The Lady with the Lamp" has consumed reams of paper: what can this book have to say that has not already been said? The Contents Page suggests an answer: each chapter is dedicated to different aspect of Nightingale's working life, promising insight into areas of her work rarely discussed. As Vicinus and Nergaard have argued, "The nursing reforms for which Nightingale has been remembered have been labelled 'female' and appropriate for a Victorian woman, while her major contribution as a sanitarian and unofficial government advisor, work in the 'male' sphere, has been denigrated or forgotten."1 In this book, McDonald promises to avoid the pitfalls of past hagiographic work by presenting Nightingale in her own words. Unfortunately, the author's tone belies this objective. She describes her book as differing "sharply from the large number of adulatory books portraying a self-sacrificing and brave woman," but adds immediately, "(both of which are true)"; and throughout she makes attacks on critical analyses of Nightingale's life and work (p. xi).2 If McDonald had used Nightingale's own words to refute such critics, a more balanced impression may have been made. As it is, the reader moves into the book with the author's attachment to her subject well established, her objectivity in question. However, the book is a very useful guide into the world of Florence Nightingale. Each aspect of her work occupies a different chapter, making it easy to dip in and out according to the reader's interest. There are chapters on Nightingale and social reform, war work, nursing and midwifery, workhouse infirmaries, and India. This latter topic, rarely discussed in the literature, is of particular interest, [End Page 144] as is Nightingale's statistical work in public health. The discussion of her contribution to the Royal Commission into the Crimean War is well presented, while the section on nursing and midwifery avoids the usual heroic portrayal of Nightingale as sole reformer. It would have been more illuminating if her views of other reformers, such as Ethel Fenwick, had been illustrated by extracts. As a whole the book conveys the breadth of Nightingale's interests, her energy, and the influence she held over powerful men in several government departments. There are some problems though. The book could have been enhanced by hearing more from Nightingale herself. McDonald wrote of Nightingale that "she . . . had more normal human qualities: a temper, a wicked sense of humour and considerable style" (p. 13), but little of this comes through in the selected extracts. In the letter to Ellen Eckblom, Nightingale opens, "I learn more from you than you can learn from me," betraying a surprisingly humble side to the woman; but such examples are rare (p. 105). It is still hard to see beneath the public façade Nightingale built around herself. Dates are a problem: they are often not included in either the text or the reference, making the sequencing of events or contextualization of statements problematic. The book is almost devoid of references (apart from Nightingale's writings), so when claims are made, as in the example that Nightingale acted as Gandhi's mentor (p. 97), there is no evidence to back them up. An extended recommended reading list, providing context to Nightingale's life, is also missing. At the end of the preface, McDonald writes, "If you want to read another book of sarcastic, sexist inference . . . this book is not for you. If you want to discover Nightingale as she was to her collaborators . . . this is" (p. xv). As an introduction to Nightingale and her writings, the book works quite well; as an exploration of the woman behind the image, it does not quite deliver. Sue Hawkins Kingston University London Footnotes 1. Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, eds., Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected...

<em>Alain Leroy Locke: Le rôôle du Nèègre dans la culture des Améériques</em>, presented by Anthony Mangeon

Reviewed by: Alain Leroy Locke: Le rôle du Nègre dans la culture des Amériques Kathleen Gyssels Alain Leroy Locke: Le rôle du Nègre dans la culture des Amériques Présentation D'Anthony Mangeon. Autrement Mêmes. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009. ISBN 978-2-296-084339. As I write this review at the very moment Jean-Bertrand Aristide is preparing to return to his country after seven years in exile in South Africa, I remember the African American Alain Leroy Locke's opening words at a lecture in Port-au-Prince in May 1943 that now take on an explosive tone: Fort heureusement, les relations entre nos deux pays sont parvenues à une phase de réciprocité durant ces dernières années. Fortunately, the relations between our two countries have reached a phase of reciprocity in the past years. (5) His polite expression, even by way of "captatio benevolentiae," reminds us of the astonishing degree to which black American intellectuals were fascinated by the country that had liberated itself from the yoke of slavery in 1804. African [End Page 142] Americans traveled to Haiti to speak to the people and to learn more about this first "black republic in the New World," seeing with their own eyes what a nation looked like when it was entirely governed by people of color who had succeeded in freeing themselves from slavery. Alluding to the important role of his predecessor Frederick Douglass, Locke (1885-1954) aimed to reinforce the ties of friendship between the first black republic in the northern hemisphere and the largest (white) democracy, where its black minority, at the very time that the aforementioned talks were taking place (December 1942 to May 1943), still suffered heavily from Jim Crow laws, thus from apartheid and the legacy of the Peculiar Institution. This volume from the collection "Autrement Mêmes"1 presents to francophone readers the lectures delivered by Alain Leroy Locke, a guiding light of the Harlem Renaissance, founder of avant-garde journals such as Opportunity (1923) and editor of anthologies such as The New Negro (1925). A great mediator between those who were to become the figureheads of Négritude and the Harlem Renaissance (Claude McKay, Countee Cullen), philosopher and pedagogue Locke was a forceful ambassador for the cause of American blacks and others who found themselves disadvantaged through any form of racism. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, who also traveled behind the wall of the USSR to view the benefits and disadvantages of communism, Locke took part in different missions and followed the footsteps of Langston Hughes who had landed in Port-au-Prince in 1932, and Aimé Césaire who visited the island in 1944, invited by Jacques Roumain. During his sojourn in the Haitian capital, Locke gave six lectures on the relationships between whites and people of color. A first lecture was entitled "Race, culture, et démocratie" 'Race, Culture, and Democracy' (I); a second, "L'héritage africain et sa signification culturelle" 'The African Heritage and Its Cultural Significance' (II); while "La position du Nègre dans la culture nord-américaine" 'The Place of the Black in North American Culture" (III) and "The Sociological Place of the Negro in the United States' (IV) examine the status of the black and the person of color in an openly racist society. In the latter two lectures, Locke surveys the race debate in "Trois Amériques" 'Three Americas' and dwells at length (long before Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic [1993]) on the importance of African roots in music whether in North, South, or Central America. Moreover, Locke uses the term "creole" to designate these hybrid forms in dance, music, or idioms (128-29). He provides the example of Brazilian composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos and Latin Americans Amadeo Roldan, Alejandro Caturla, Pedro San Juan, and Gilberto Valdés. He gives evidence of Creole art through the sculptures and painting by Latin Americans Diego Rivera and José Clemento Orosco. Anticipating the many pages of Glissant's Le discours antillais (1981), Locke expresses his fascination with those artists who interweave different traditions and styles and translate the African component of New World...

The Grand Challenge for Psychoanalysis ? and Neuropsychoanalysis: Taking on the Game

As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, “psychology has a long past but only a short history.” In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely “psychology” – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The two-dimensional “anthropologia” is articulated in “anatomia,” science of body, and “psychologia,” science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: “The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (…) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (…) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.”1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that Rene Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken.

A 'cloud of Metaphysics’ in Pindar: the opening of Nemean 6

This article questions traditional approaches to Pindar’s γνῶμαι and reviews the problem in interpreting the opening words of Nemean 6, coming down on the side of previous interpretations which, unlike the current Loeb translation, see Pindar as saying that gods and men belong to the same race. Key-words: Pindar, gnomic utterance, Nemean odes. Πλάτων καὶ Πίνδαρος πολλαχῆι μὲν καὶ ἄλληι σοφοί Plato and Pindar in various different respects are σοφοί Aelius Aristides, Oration 34.5 Humanitas 63 (2011) 61-73

Beyond the Short Term: Legal and Institutional Space for Future Generations in Global Governance

The process leading to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (also dubbed Rio+20) has served to highlight the very real prospects of increasing resource scarcity, rapid population growth, and, consequently, multiple strains on our ability to provide for even our most basic needs. In the opening words of the summary of the authoritative 2012 GEO-5 Global Environmental Outlook: ‘The currently observed changes in the Earth System are unprecedented in human history.’ Already, the report cautions, ‘several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded,’ bringing the likelihood of multiple and possibly irreversible changes to planetary life-support functions and to human social systems.1 Looking back on developments since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, and to adopt the words of the UN secretary-general’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, published in January 2012: ‘[P]rogress...

Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530. Daniel Wakelin . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+254.

<i>Daniel Wakelin,</i> Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530<i>Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530</i>. Daniel Wakelin . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+254.

Le rôle de l’oralité dans le roman Paravion de Haffid Bouazza

Bouazza’s novel, Paravion, has been widely acclaimed by Dutch critics, but the so-called “loose” structure has elicited much criticism. The title refers to the wording on the letters sent by migrant labourers in the Netherlands to their respective families in Morocco. The opening word “Hear!” not only refers to the public reading of these letters to the illiterate families in the market place, it in fact alludes to the traditional beginning of a letter (“Dear ...”). Thus two seemingly conflicting traditions (the ostensibly unsophisticated oral tradition and the highly sophisticated epistolary tradition) are linked. In this article this novel is interpreted as a hybrid of Arabic and Western literary traditions and it is asserted that allusion to the oral tradition invalidates the criticism leveled at the novel, and ironically lends it its sophistication.

Opening words

Opening words

“Some of These Days” and the Study of the Great American Songbook

AbstractSupporting a new methodology for the study of classic American popular songs, this article offers a history of both the print editions and recorded versions of “Some of These Days” (1910) by Shelton Brooks. This saga commences with a hitherto unanalyzed precursor to Brooks's famous song that shares nearly the same opening words and melody, the 1905 “Some o' Dese Days” by Frank Williams. It continues through nine major print editions and numerous recorded performances, of which this study examines forty-six, including ten as the theme song for Sophie Tucker. Performers are clearly influenced by both performed and printed variations; more surprisingly, print editions are also influenced by performers. Thus, Tin Pan Alley songs are best viewed as products of collaboration within a community of songwriters, publishers, and performers. Brooks fills “Some of These Days” with compositional details that are conducive to effective performance variations. This elusive intrinsic adaptability represents, for 1910, a modern, innovative quality and is central to any understanding of this song genre. Oft-neglected, such early popular standards—poised at the juncture of musical cultures, oral and print, amateur and professional, live and mediatized—help the critical historian pinpoint aspects that make this repertoire valuable.

Editorial

Hwaet! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the new volume of English, at the start of a new decade. As is indicated by my opening word – the invitation to listen with which Beowulf commences – this issue marks our journal's interest in medieval literature and its reception in later ages. I am delighted that colleagues working in medieval and related literary studies consider English a mead hall for their musings, and that their work, in turn, reaches our international audience of readers. The sequence of articles within this edition demonstrates a range of critical approaches of the second millennium towards literature written around the turn of the first. All of the contributing authors, in their various ways, signal the long-lasting influence of the medieval on writers in later centuries. We begin with an article by Helen E. Wicker who explores the fascinating world of the appropriation of medieval moral verse into a variety of different contemporaneous contexts: sermons, household books, and general literature. Two further critical contributions examine the work of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the outstanding medievalist to whom students remain indebted for, among other works, his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and his British Academy lecture of 1936, ‘Beowulf: the monsters and the critics’, the latter marking a turning point in the study of this poem. Many more have been introduced to the joys of medievalism through Tolkien's fiction, namely The Hobbit and his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. In this spirit, Jonathan and Kenneth Padley provide a new perspective on the evidence for Christological imagery in the representation of three key characters from Middle-earth: Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn. Our third article positions Tolkien's work firmly in the historical context of the early twentieth century. Aaron Isaac Jackson explores the relationship between Tolkien's pre-war experience of life in England and his later writings, offering insight into some of Tolkien's less familiar work and a reading of The Hobbit as a response to the First World War and the trench memoires of his generation. Our second and fifth articles might seem, at first, to have little connection to the medieval. Robert Wilcher's detailed and nuanced reading of Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder reveals the influence and effects of the genre of romance on Hutchinson's poetic paraphrase of Genesis. Our fifth article, by Sam Perry, offers a fresh reading of the poetry written by Philip Larkin during his final year at St John's College, Oxford. Perry examines the poet's work through the prism of the philosophy and art of the Surrealists, identifying correspondences in terms of content and modes of expression. The texts addressed by Wilcher and Perry clearly are not medieval but both Hutchinson and Larkin are indebted, albeit unconsciously, to medieval literary practices and aesthetics. Hutchinson is following in a long tradition of biblical paraphrase modified by other genres, such as the Cursor Mundi written around 1300, whereas the surrealist dreamscapes that Perry detects in Larkin's imagery are very much in the tradition of medieval dream poetry as exemplified in Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame.

Historia Ecclesiastica (review)

Reviewed by: Historia Ecclesiastica A. P. Martinich Thomas Hobbes . Historia Ecclesiastica. Critical edition by Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp. 729. Cloth, €130.00. This book in effect consists of two parts. The first part contains seven chapters on Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine and related topics, written by Patricia Springborg over many years. While valuable, they will not be discussed here because these have been previously published. The second part is a critical text and translation, on facing pages, of Historia Ecclesiastica by Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson, accompanied by extensive explanatory and interpretive notes by the same scholars. The work shows prodigious effort and scholarship. This book, a large part of which, it seems, will also be published in the Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes (Clarendon Press), is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on the works of Hobbes. Hobbes' poem is a selective, static, ill-proportioned, and repetitious history of religious belief, practice, and abuse from the ancient Near East to the Reformation of Martin Luther. Much of the same history appears in the appendix to the Latin Leviathan and in An Historical Narration Concerning History. A problem with Hobbes' views stands out in Historia. On the one hand, he privileges the Bible and criticizes the Church Fathers, Popes, and several emperors for making non-biblical doctrines law. On the other hand, he believes that emperors and anyone else who has the authority can make law any doctrine they please. Arguably, popes sometimes had this authority because emperors allowed it and [End Page 470] the people willed it: in tuto fuit illi tanta Potestas; . . . / Stabat namque super populum fundata volentem ("his immense power was secure; . . . / Indeed, it stood on firm foundation over a willing people") (ll. 2195, 2197; see also ll. 899–901, 1530–40, 1551–67, 1585–90, and 1817–24). He is aghast that the Pope can say about bread, "It is cheese," and his subjects consequently are supposed to say, "It's cheese" (Etsi tu Panem esse putas, si dixerit ille, / Caseus est, dices tu quoque Caseus est). But that follows from his own doctrine. The expansive notes, while usually apposite, sometimes miss their mark by over interpreting, overreaching, or missing the point in some way. Space permits only some random examples. (1) In note 3, the beginning of Hobbes' poem is compared to that of the Aeneid because the action of Hobbes' poem, a dialogue about religion (between the characters Primus and Secundus) takes place during the English Civil War. However, the Aeneid is about war, not religion, and begins with Aeneas's report of past battles. Also, there is no echo of Vergil's opening words and lines arma virumque and so on in Hobbes' opening, Quid fers. (2) The translators say that Hobbes' rendering of the philosophical principle, Quodque Deo tribui debeat id Deus est ("And what ought to be attributed to God is God") (l. 626) echoes Luke 20:25: Reddite ergo quæ sunt Cæsaris, Cæsari: et quæ sunt Dei, Deo ("Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's: and to God the things that are God's"). Not only is the verbal similarity weak, but the point of each passage is significantly different. Hobbes' character Primus is mocking a vacuous or incoherent scholastic Aristotelian proposition ("God is God" or "God is to be predicated of God") (l. 626). About this proposition, Secundus comments, Audio verba, meras sed video tenebras ("I hear words, but I see mere darkness") (l. 629). In contrast, Luke's aphorism is sensible. (3) The translators attribute the principle, "nothing is produced from nothing" to the atomists (l. 651), but this principle is more widely accepted and, according to a standard interpretation, is consistent with creation ex nihilo. (4) Although they see Hobbes alluding to God as Yahweh ("I am") concerning line 1080, the translators do not see the same point being relevant to lines 1311–12. Appreciating the difficulty of producing a translation that will satisfy everyone or even anyone other than the translators, I will note only one example of a possible alternative rendering. The word 'sperandum' in the phrase 'a Christi sperandum morte salutem' is...

Welty’s Words for the Birds … and for Children and Scholars, Too

Welty’s Words for the Birds … and for Children and Scholars, Too Cindy Sheffield Michaels Eudora Welty had a great sense of humor and a sharp wit. Those who knew her or even met her just once often speak of her ability to entertain with both. Reynolds Price, for example, says, “I could hold you well past dinnertime with recollections of the laughter she generated so effortlessly” (11). Humor and wit seemed to simply emanate from Welty, just as they flow from the characters and situations of her greatest stories. Who could forget Sister’s justifications for taking the sewing-machine motor in “Why I Live at the P. O.” or the “playfulness … a kind of bloody and ruthless comedy” (17) that Ellen Douglas says she found in The Robber Bridegroom? Yet with Welty’s moments of humor and wit there also comes a deep understanding of human nature; as Welty said in an interview with Tereza Marques de Oliveira Lima, “Humor … has to interpret…. I think that humor interprets better than most any other aspect of writing. But it has nothing to do with gags, with jokes, as you know. It is much more profound: the sense of human relationship and human nature” (11). There are many moments of human insight in Welty’s novels and short stories. Laurel McKelva Hand, the protagonist of The Optimist’s Daughter, offers one such realization: “The past is … impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world … calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears” (991–92). Welty’s understanding of human nature is, rightfully, as widely praised as the humor and wit with which she infuses her tales. Although Welty’s humor, wit, and insight into human nature are well known, it is less well known that among her novels and short stories she also penned a children’s book, The Shoe Bird. Perhaps this fact is little known because not quite 7,000 copies were printed and bound when the book was first published (Polk 114) or because the book has been reprinted only once, twenty-nine years after its initial publication in 1964. Or, perhaps it’s because, as Ann Waldron surmises, “the powers that be in the children’s book world found it lacking” (269). It is true that a handful of reviewers and scholars commented negatively on the book. For example, Jeanne B. Hardendorff claims in her review that the “stereotyped characterizations of birds based on their names … and the heavy handed moral spoken by [End Page 159] the Phoenix are poor fare from such a talented writer of adult fiction”; Neil Isaacs claims in his Southern Writers volume that the book is not enjoyable because Welty is “talking down” to the audience (15); and Albert J. Griffith claims that The Shoe Bird is missing “great imaginative inspiration” (87) and that it “lacks the high levels of fantasy, poetry, and humor one might have hoped for in a Welty story written especially for children” (86). Click for larger view View full resolution Cover of The Shoe Bird, 1964 (UP of Mississippi, 1993). Illustration © Beth Krush. There are only a few such reactions to The Shoe Bird, however. In fact, The Shoe Bird has received a fair amount of praise from book reviewers. Nancy D. Hargrove rejects Hardendorff’s reading, stating that Welty’s “remarkably clever characterizations of the various birds ... rely heavily on humor in descriptive details and in dialogue” (77). Helen Bevington’s review reads, “You can tell by the opening words that it’s a delightful book” (50), and Leslie Myers says, “her pen … produced great joy, imagination and comedy in Shoe Bird.” Aside from various reviewers, other artists have praised The Shoe Bird in their own ways: the Jackson Ballet Guild adapted the book for the stage in 1968 (Waldron 269) and composer Samuel Jones transformed it into a musical in 2003.1 Thus, it is unlikely that stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed morals, talking-down-to, or below-par fantasy, poetry, and humor have caused The Shoe Bird to be excluded from collections of Welty’s works...

Towards an Ontology of Fetishes

Alphonso Lingis (1933– ) is an American continental philosopher and translator who is currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.1 Associated with the phenomenology, existentialism, and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lingis’s philosophical influences also encompass the literary works of Pierre Klossowski and Yukio Mishima, Michel Tournier, and the postpsychoanalytic theory of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Lingis’s philosophical concerns are thus similar to those of major continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault, and with whom he often engages in sustained dialogues on everything from sensuality and anthropology to travelogue, the human body, inanimate objects, the elements, and perception.