Passage Points Research Articles

Making serious measures: numerical indices, peer review, and transnational actor-networks

Numerical indices and peer review processes, which are used increasingly to assess and rank countries, are relatively novel governance instruments. They have serious practical consequences and pose conceptual challenges for conventional international relations theories. This article draws on concepts from actor-network theory (ANT) to analyse the differences between these two mechanisms, their relationship to networks, their differing materialities, and how they succeed or fail. These concepts include actants, translation, enrolment, black-boxing, obligatory passage points, and immutable or mutable mobiles, which together provide useful insights into the way in which humans and objects work together in transnational networks to produce, alter, or resist power. The article argues that ANT can address some problems associated with the concept of governmentality, while complementing its strengths. Numerical indices and peer review processes engage with humans, objects, and networks in different ways and this can alter how larger global forces are or are not transmitted, modified, or resisted. The article explores the empirical relevance of these concepts by examining the World Governance Indicators and the African Peer Review Mechanism review of Benin.

Seaside resort-hinterland Nexus: Palanga, Lithuania

This paper examines the ordering process of a seaside resort tourismscape and its hinterland. In this study we argue that the increasingly mobile, savvy and discerning post-mass tourists require an increasingly ‘fluid’ ordering of the tourist actor-networks. This is the key prerequisite for the rejuvenation of a seaside resort. The multiplicity of the ordering modes strengthens the durability and reinvention potential of a seaside resort-hinterland nexus that caters to the needs of the post-mass tourists. The analyzed obligatory passage points of Palanga, the pier and the rustic mega-inn, demonstrate the obsolescence of the conventional notions of centrality in the seaside resort development.

Determinantal correlations of Brownian paths in the plane with nonintersection condition on their loop-erased parts

As an image of the many-to-one map of loop-erasing operation L of random walks, a self-avoiding walk (SAW) is obtained. The loop-erased random walk (LERW) model is the statistical ensemble of SAWs such that the weight of each SAW ζ is given by the total weight of all random walks π that are inverse images of ζ, {π:L(π)=ζ}. We regard the Brownian paths as the continuum limits of random walks and consider the statistical ensemble of loop-erased Brownian paths (LEBPs) as the continuum limits of the LERW model. Following the theory of Fomin on nonintersecting LERWs, we introduce a nonintersecting system of N-tuples of LEBPs in a domain D in the complex plane, where the total weight of nonintersecting LEBPs is given by Fomin's determinant of an N×N matrix whose entries are boundary Poisson kernels in D. We set a sequence of chambers in a planar domain and observe the first passage points at which N Brownian paths (γ_{1},…,γ_{N}) first enter each chamber, under the condition that the loop-erased parts [L(γ(1)),…,L(γ(N))] make a system of nonintersecting LEBPs in the domain in the sense of Fomin. We prove that the correlation functions of first passage points of the Brownian paths of the present system are generally given by determinants specified by a continuous function called the correlation kernel. The correlation kernel is of Eynard-Mehta type, which has appeared in two-matrix models and time-dependent matrix models studied in random matrix theory. Conformal covariance of correlation functions is demonstrated.

Distribution of Raw Silk Size at the First Passage points up to the Limit Size for Cocoon Feeding

Distribution of Raw Silk Size at the First Passage points up to the Limit Size for Cocoon Feeding

Perimenopausal Obesity

Obesity is recognized as one of the most important underlying risk factors for a wide variety of diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. Women are particularly prone to obesity, and approaches that address life transitions across the life span suggest that a number of factors may converge at passage points, such as menopause, that contribute to weight accumulation in the aging woman. The menopausal phase of a woman's life brings a number of changes that may trigger and maintain weight gain. Although the prevalence of overweight and obesity is attributable to each of these factors, it is most likely the interaction among multiple factors that determines an individual's propensity for excess energy intake, sedentary behavior, patterns of fat distribution, and risk of developing obesity. The problem of weight change and obesity in perimenopausal women is best understood from an ecological perspective that can integrate the analysis of factors across levels, from the culture and built environment of the community to family-related factors to individual factors, such as subjective norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs, and biological/genetic predispositions. This review describes the literature relevant to weight change during perimenopause using a multilevel perspective and recommends future directions for the development of translational weight management research to meet the unique needs of women.

Making and Mending your Nets: Managing Relevance, Participation and Uncertainty in Academic–Practitioner Knowledge Networks

Making and mending your nets is concerned to examine, from an actor–network theory perspective, how the relevance debate concerning research and teaching is a significant non‐human actor in the development and management of industry–academic networks associated with UK business schools. By significant, we do not imply the most important because it is only one of many human and non‐human actors that may arouse interest, be problematized, enrolled and/or mobilized for such networks to become ‘obligatory passage points’ and ultimately irreversible collective assemblies. The paper then utilizes actor–network theory as a framework for examining our primary empirical research on academic–practitioner knowledge networks – nets that require a continuous making and mending in managing relevance, participation and uncertainty. We argue that the actor–network framework is more compatible than alternative knowledge diffusion or transfer models with the data we have collected on academic–practitioner knowledge networks in the UK. In accounting for the dynamic instability and precariousness of knowledge networks, it avoids raising false expectations about business knowledge and its relevance or effectiveness. If knowledge in the physical sciences and engineering unfolds slowly and unevenly in the face of many disputes, disruptions and setbacks, as actor–network theory has claimed, then how much more likely is this to be the case in the social sciences? Consequently there should be no expectations of one‐to‐one, direct causal chains between knowledge production and application, as some business school critics seemingly demand.

Power and learning in managing a multi‐stakeholder organization: an initiative to reduce air pollution in Ontario, Canada, through trading carbon credits

The paper explores a case study of a multi‐party collaboration that used learning in an inter‐organizational context to address an environmental problem by experimenting with emission reduction credits trading. Learning was associated with politics: individual learning with non‐decision‐making or two‐dimensional power, while inter‐organizational learning with three‐dimensional power and the construction of hegemony, while strategic institutional learning occurred through the creation of obligatory passage points.

Exploring How New Registered Nurses Construct Professional Identity in Hospital Settings

To describe and explore the experiences that contribute to the construction of professional identity in hospital nurses 1 to 3 years postgraduation from nursing school. This qualitative study used in-depth interviewing and open-ended questions with a semistructured format. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. Twenty-one interviews were conducted with 16 participants. The researcher analyzed the data through the lens of symbolic interactionism. The study identified various passage points as nurses progressed in establishing their professional identity in the first 3 years after graduation. These points required adaptation to stress to accomplish successful negotiation and included finding a niche, orientation, the conflict of caring, taking the licensure examination, becoming a charge nurse, and moving on. A sense of responsibility and the need for continual learning and perfection were inherent in all passage points. The significance of this study rests in situational influences on the construction of identity, the need for balance and support in the practice environment, passage points in the first 3 years of practice, and the organizational need to support nursing empowerment and voice.

Making Decisions on Innovation: Meetings or Networks?

Within some streams of thinking in the management of innovation and product development, the crux is the manager's active engagement in the evaluation, selection and control of the various activities through gate and portfolio meetings in which information is presented and decisions are made that manage innovation projects at a distance. This traditional managerial perspective regards the meetings as (important) ‘obligatory passage points’ but cannot explain a number of observations that reveal few decisions being made at those meetings. A network process perspective on the management of innovation is derived as an alternative to the normative linear view. This alternative perspective makes it possible to explain how innovation projects actually consist of myriad actions, negotiations, and micro‐decisions in the effort to create strong networks, leaving few decisions for the official gate and portfolio meetings. Through the analysis of two cases, this paper demonstrates how project managers work to stabilize the network in order to involve numerous human and non‐human actors and to encourage more and more of them into joining the network. Successfully establishing stable networks and successfully filling the templates for their projects leaves little room – and requires little intervention – for decision makers at portfolio meetings, where approvals are sought rather than decisions made. This study explains how gate and portfolio management meetings are, in some instances, better viewed as checkpoints rather than as decision meetings, how decision making is displaced from the meetings, and how the use of gate and portfolio management systems have created a number of mandatory templates which must be dealt with by the project managers. These mandatory documents function as boundary objects between and among the different worlds of the actors involved and establish new obligatory passage points in the management process; thus boundary objects become transformed into obligatory passage points. Implications for managers and research are outlined, including methods of dealing with the management of product innovation projects when the focus shifts from planning, preparations and decision making toward the co‐creation of technology and markets and involves interessement of human and non‐human actors.

Hearth and Hotmail

Hearth and Hotmail

Ways of reading as religious power in print globalization

In this article, I address issues of power with regard to religious print media distributed worldwide. I show that mission societies seek to ensure a homogenous interpretation of their publications by making them “obligatory passage points” for socioreligious advancement and standardizing literacy practices. Once successfully established, networks created through religious print media evolve as a twofold process in which the construction of power by media distributors and their audiences' seeking of empowerment form an integrated whole. In this trajectory, literacy practices bridge local and global realms by enabling extensive religious networking based on the shared use of print media.

Named in Song

NAMED IN SONG The catalogue of those named in troubadour song is somewhat broader than that of Old Occitan onomastics, strictly defined. An informal inventory would naturally include the proper names of individuals; place names, geographic names; the names of groups, both regional and national. Yet such a list might also encompass epithets and titles referring to the saints or the divinity; senhals for master, singer, lover, friend; words evoking love personified and the mystery-lady revered; terms drawn from the realms oflordship and knighthood in which certain pieces awaited their public recompense, as opposed to their most private one. In this repertory, the relationship ofthe name or epithet to the melodic structure is almost never indifferent. In the most striking examples, naming while singing comes, in a sense, to define the song itself. The Name of the Poet The first ofour musical transcriptions1 is drawn from the works of Marcabru (fl. ca. 1 130-1 149),2 whose Dire vos vuoili ses doptanssa (PC 293, 1 8) includes a remarkable act ofself-naming: the celebrated phrase, "Marc e brus filh marc e bruna" (Fig. I).3 The well-known passage is quoted in the Vida of MS K.4 Coming, as it does, at the end of the poem, it bears no musical notation of its own. The composer — reputed, partly because of this very stanza, to have been a foundling — here assigns to himself linguistically consistent origins, exclusively matrilineal ones. In so doing, he raises the act ofnaming to exponential heights. The musical setting of the mother's name — a feminine variant ofthe composer's nom deguerre — is a slightly ornamented version ofthe same three notes to which the poet's name is sung. To install such close word/music relationships in a strophe other than the first is an admirable feat. The passage points to the critical importance ofthe authorial persona and suggests that, in this case at least, the music may have influenced the creation of the words. VINCENT POLLINA Figure 1 Marcabru, Dire vos vuoili ses doptanssa (PC 293,18) MS R (Paris, Bibl. Nat., fonds français 22543), fol. 5 Va I 2 .14 5 ft7 (X) ? ¦ ? ¦ >1 ? '? 1 l'I) di - revosvuelh ses dup - tan - sa X I- ? marc e brus filli marc e bru - na Figure 2 Bernart de Ventadorn, Amors, e que us es vejaire? (PC 70,4) MS R (Paris, Bibl. Nat., fonds français 22543), fol. 56Fa-I^ I : ì 4 5 t,7 (K)(Y) 1 ) a - mors e queus es 2) Iro - Ku/ pusloima·* can ! mi \'* -—· 3) que eu - jat/. vos quieti sia mai - re f ? ?«: que janoi iruep mer - ce | 10 NAMED IN SONG Amor Amors, e que-us es vejaire? (PC 70,4) of Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. ca. 1 147-1 170) opens with a lengthy apostrophe to love personified (Fig. 2).5 "Amors" — thus named — is set to the only instance in the melody of immediate reiteration of"C." This stark interpellation is followed by yet a third sounding ofthe note, which in turn will serve as springboard for the rising tones that follow. Once applied to "Amors," the pitch of "C" will function throughout the rest ofthe piece as a kind of melodic anchor. The first line ends and starts on this same note; significantly, so does the tune as a whole. The hypermetric line 3 begins with a far less majestic expression than "Amors": the interrogatory "que cujatz vos".6 The melody appears to mark this change, replacing the twofold "C" of line 1 with a twofold "D." The notes set to the remainder of the third line reproduce those ofthe correspondingportion ofthe incipit, with a single case ofneumatic redistribution (sylls. 7-9). The motif of the repeated "C," however, is reserved to the initial setting of "Amors."7 A Sense of Place Some geographical references are, so to speak, merely topical in nature; others, charged with affective significance, may refer to a crucial place in the personal history ofthe composer. In a call to the fourth crusade — Ara pot horn conoisser eproar (PC 392,3) — Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (fl. ca. 1 1 80-1 205), the inveterate transalpine voyager, alludes equally...

Extracellular Matrix Modulates Expression of Cell-Surface Proteoglycan Genes in Fibroblasts

Cell-surface proteoglycans are involved in many functions, including interactions with components of the extracellular microenvironment. They also act as coreceptors that bind and modify the actions of various growth factors, cytokines, and the extracellular matrix (ECM). This study investigated the regulation by the ECM of the expression of cell-surface proteoglycans (CD44, syndecan-1–4, betaglycan, glypican-1). We examined the changes in the expression levels of cell-surface proteoglycan genes in intact tendon, monolayer culture, and under various culture conditions. There was a significant increase in the expression of CD44 and syndecan-4 mRNAs during cell isolation from the tendon. With the switch to a 3D culture environment, there was a significant increase in the expression of CD44 at each passage point relative to its expression in 2D at those passage points. Syndecan-4 mRNA also increased steadily at each passage point in 3D culture environment. This influence on cell surface proteoglycans gene expression may indicate that collagen gel culture mimics in vivo tendon environment. This study provides further insight into the regulation of cell-surface proteoglycans in ligament and tendon fibroblasts by the ECM and 3D culture conditions.

Three—failure Match

The passage points out the disadvantages of current systems for various football matches by analysis and comparing several main football match systems adopted in current football games and meanwhile, on the base of it, suggests a new system by the name of Three—failure Match (TFM). The knowledge of probability and emulating by computer are used to have a quantitative analysis and comparison for this new system and the current ones, and the result shows that TFM sums up the advantages of elimination and group round match and also avoids the disadvantages of them. Therefore, TFM is a rational football match system and it applies to all sorts of middle or short term football matches.

Toll and Tribute: A Political Reading of Matthew 17.24-27

The pericope of the coin in the fish’s mouth (Mt. 17.24-27) has lent itself to an unusually large number of disparate interpretations. This article argues for a political reading, not withstanding the identity of the tax in question. By means of careful attention to the text, and through an appeal to the corroborating hermeneutical approach applied by Luther, it is suggested that the passage points to an element within the Jesus tradition that, while not denying a role for political authority in the world, does not affirm as God-given such worldly structures of power. It is argued that the passage maintains a duality in the present, in common with Mt. 13.33, rather than anticipating an eschatological resolution, as has sometimes been suggested.

>unDELETE science education:/lives/work/voices

Over the past 2 decades, ethnographic, historical, and philosophical studies of science and technology have revealed the central role inscriptions play in the construction of knowledge. Inscriptions take this central role because they can be circulated intact, as immutable mobiles, in large actor networks. Inscriptions reduce the complexities of lived experience into a small number of dimensions: In the process of their production, the lives, work, and voices of those being inscribed and of many who participate in their inscription are made invisible and deleted. Inscriptions are produced and circulated in complex actor networks. Some actors take crucial positions in network at obligatory passage points, which confer power. Inscriptions are boundary objects when they are used in multiple communities. In this situation, inscriptions can be used to articulate and coordinate the activities across different communities despite their different inscription-related discourses and meanings. In this article, we first develop the analytical framework in which inscription and actor network are the central notions. We then exemplify this framework in a case study of grades and grading practices. Our analyses indicate how one type of inscription, grade, and its associated practices are aspects of knowledge and power, in Foucault's sense, that bring about and stabilize an educational actor network. We conclude by showing how the framework can be used to provide constructive poststructuralist analyses and how the efforts of critical and liberation pedagogies are undercut by the stability of existing networks and the grade-based technologies of differentiation they embody. J Res Sci Teach 35: 399–421, 1998.

Katherine Anne Porter: The Illusion of Eden (review)

Reviewed by: Katherine Anne Porter: The Illusion of Eden Janis P. Stout Thomas F. Walsh . Katherine Anne Porter: The Illusion of Eden. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992. 277 pp. $37.50. Professor Walsh's posthumously published book on Katherine Anne Porter's engagement with Mexico is the culmination of research carried out over a twenty-five year period. His admirable knowledge of the subject was developed not only by thorough research in newspaper archives and government [End Page 378] documents, but by extensive personal interviews with Porter herself and study of her unpublished papers even before they became generally available. For all of this, Walsh was peculiarly well qualified. There has rarely occurred so perfect a match of scholar and subject. Fluent in Spanish, intimately acquainted with Mexico through family ties and spending part of every year at a second home there, he headquartered in Georgetown, near Porter's Washington and College Park residences, where he conducted his interviews. Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico is and can be expected to remain the definitive historical study of its subject. It casts light on a multitude of previously dark areas in our understanding of Porter's Mexican period and the complex relationship between her fiction, her nonfiction, and her personal experience. Not that it provides a reductive causal explanation of Porter's achievement; despite his willingness to see her stories as reflections of her sexual and familial anxieties, Walsh respects the art of this "writer's writer" and recognizes its inherent mystery. He does, however, illuminate the murky complexities of the political scene in Mexico during Porter's years there, providing needed information and leading the way toward our understanding of the displacements that went into the shaping of her work. Walsh's elucidation of the political scene in the nineteen-tens and twenties is not always easy to follow. Not only is the cast of historical characters unfamiliar to most readers, but the events he traces out were often tangled in complications and cross purposes. These chapters deserve and indeed demand multiple readings. Entering so baroque a scene, Porter might have been expected to show caution and to doubt her own powers of penetration. She did neither. Instead, she plunged into political intrigues which, as Walsh attempts to demonstrate, led to at least one assassination, then retreated in a rush of fear when her name appeared on the non grata list during President José Obregon's 1921 purges. Except in "Flowering Judas," her published writings give little of this story. As Walsh astutely observes, she always tended to conceal her real adventures and create false ones in their place. The work is at its best, perhaps, in Walsh's thorough exploration of the making of "Flowering Judas" and his careful study of early non-fiction works such as "The Fiesta of Guadalupe" and "The Children of Xochitl," essays that, as he says, mark the poles of her despair and her idealism. It is probably at its weakest in those few passages in which he rides too hard his interpretive thesis of the deeply insecure and elaborately egotistical woman. One example: he uses a quotation from a 1932 letter Porter wrote to her brother—"I do not have to explain anything or listen to explanation, and I do not have that feeling of being at odds with society because I am an artist"—to buttress an argument that she "wished to be a rule unto herself." In context, however, the passage points in a very different direction: Porter was explaining why she preferred living in Paris to living in Texas. There, she said, she did not have to explain anything, etc. [End Page 379] Thomas F. Walsh's papers have recently been donated to the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, where they will be available alongside the Porter papers, enabling other scholars to continue the work Professor Walsh himself brought to such admirable fruition. His rigor in pursuing the study of a clearly defined, indisputably important subject has set an example for those who come after. Janis P. Stout Texas A&M University Copyright © 1993 Purdue Research Foundation

Allan Bloom’s Philosopher Who “Does Not Love to Tell the Truth"

The Review of Higher Education Spring 1988, Volume 11 No. 3 Pages 297-310 Copyright © 1988 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved 1 Review Essay: Allan Bloom’s Philosopher Who “ Does Not Love to Tell the Truth” Marshall Gregory /\ llan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) has created a furor not only in academe but in society generally, a furor so strong as to be bewildering. Although his book has received passionate responses in nearly every major journal and review, Allan Bloom is not a philosopher of education and has never before achieved national recognition. Bloom himself has repeatedly expressed incredulity over the amount of attention he has received. In a Publishers Weekly interview he says, "It's a little as though I had made a home movie and ended up winning the Academy Award" (1987b, 25). The home-movie metaphor accurately captures the idiosyncratic and deeply personal character of Bloom's book. In light of the impersonal, bureaucratic tone of many reports about education, Bloom's "home movie" approach may be in large part responsible for the book's phenomenal success. Especially in Parts 1 and 3, Bloom's voice creates a picture of the writer as vivid as a hologram. But though Bloom acknowledges that many of the reasons offered to explain his success "might be Marshall Gregory, who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, is Professor of English Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis. 297 298 Spring 1988 Volume 11, No. 3 sufficient to cause the phenomenon . . . they're all invented [after the fact]" (1987b, 25). Clearly, Bloom has touched a nerve, a powerful sensitivity about liberal education among both academics and nonaca­ demics. It comes as a surprise that that nerve can still make the body politic flinch. Despite sporadic curriculum reforms and alarming reports, popular wisdom has been announcing for the last fifteen years or so that liberal education has been killed by technical and pre-professional education and, fur­ thermore, that only a few diehards care. The reception of Bloom's book suggests that popular wisdom may be wrong. There may be no wide agreement about what liberal education is or how it should be conducted; but since Bloom has vivified the discussion anew, it may be helpful to ask: What is Bloom's vision of liberal education? Is it a vision we can embrace or is it one we must reject? If the former, what does it offer us that is new or fresh? If the latter, what in that vision is objectionable? In short, does Bloom help or hinder liberal education? Near the beginning of Part 3, Bloom asserts that "the philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is an intellectual virtue. He does not love to tell the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one's thought" (1987b, 279). In spite of its quirky, undeveloped assertions and latent contradictions, this statement is revealing. It is quirky for Bloom to contend, for example, that moral virtues are less binding on philosophers than intellectual virtues. He vaguely implies that philosophers, like mystics, may be tuned in to superior truths which they are under no obligation to share with the rest of humanity. This view is not only difficult but impossible to reconcile with traditional theories about liberal education. Bloom states in one breath that the philosopher does not love to tell the truth—meaning that he refuses to engage in controversy and dialogue with a wide audience of nonphilosophers—and then, in the next breath, tries to mow as wide a swath with his own ideas as possible. In spite of unexplained contradictions, however, Bloom's passage points to one of his deep-structure assumptions: that the philosopher must remain aloof and detached from the ordinary, everyday world of power, money, and influence. "One has contempt for the crowd," he says in the Publishers Weekly interview, "but at the same...

Second Words: Selected Critical Prose by Margaret Atwood

Leavis, one may continue to believe that what is central is the nature of criticism, and of creativity in any genre, and in life. J o h n Ba x t e r / Dalhousie University Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982). 444. $19.95 I could tell you about Margaret the Magician, Margaret the Medusa, Margaret the Man-eater clawing her way to success over the corpses of many helpless men. Margaret the powerhungry Hitler, with her megalomaniac plans to take over the entire field of Canadian Literature. This woman must be stopped! All these mythological creatures are the inventions of critics, not all of them male. (227) The above words are, for this reviewer, cautionary. But the element of fun or hyperbole in them is also worth noting at the outset, a leaven that keeps working in Margaret Atwood’s prose — as it does less obviously in her verse — and that does not take away from its seriousness. If some of her critics have boxed her, the boxes she has chosen to name here reflect a fascination with monsters, things, or conditions that draw her as a writer while they repel her as a person. One of her strengths is that she does not flinch; another is that while she often parries the monstrous with laughter, she does not by any such means dismiss or claim to dispel evils. The passage is telling for another reason. It is both personal and imper­ sonal. It is personal in drawing, as many of the essays in this collection do, on her own experiences; impersonal in that it is not a confessing or express­ ing of self but a projecting of her own case to make points about the writer, the woman writer in particular, in this time and place. The Margarets she names are not ones she recognizes as her selves, but the context from which the passage comes in “The Curse of Eve” is a brief life-history — her own as a writer. Finally, the passage points to a primacy in this collection, miscellaneous in kind but carefully selected and arranged. In her critical prose, Atwood speaks first as a writer. She speaks often as a woman, often as a Canadian, more often as a Canadian woman writer. However engaged she is with issues of nationality or sex, she claims authority primarily as a writer — a poet and novelist first, a reviewer, essayist, and speaker second: “I am not primarily a critic but a poet and novelist, and therefore my critical activities, such as they are, necessarily come second for me” (11). So she explains one of the reasons for her title, Second Words. ” 3 Most of the fifty pieces in the collection are short, three-or-four-page reviews or essays a few pages longer. They are arranged chronologically in three parts: 1960-71, the pre-Survival years; 1972-76, the years of most direct engagement with the issues of nationalism and feminism; 1976-82, the years of “growing involvement with human rights issues, which for me are not separate from writing” (14). This division reflects a central concern of the individual pieces and of the collection as a whole, that of finding out for herself what her vocation as a writer entails. In view of the primacy of this concern, it is not surprising that in her critical pieces, the reviews and essays about specific works and authors, she glances only in passing at matters of form or technique. As a writer of poems and novels, Atwood has not been simply a writer engagé, but in her “second words” she has clearly become increasingly one. In the thirteen pieces of Part I, ten of them reviews and three more general essays, a number of concerns emerge. Self-cautioning occurs in the very first piece, a 1961 review of Margaret Avison’s Winter Sun : One always runs the danger, when speaking of a poet’s “reality beyond the finite,” of branding the poet as a floaty-footed and cloudy-headed mystic whose vision, although it may be directed upwards, tends to encounter nothing but fog. . . . To identify Miss Avison with the cliché would be sticking...

Reading Difficulties in Studying Content Subjects

The successful study of content subjects-such as history, geography, mathematics, and science-is conditioned largely by the ability to read effectively. Pupils who are retarded in reading are likely to be seriously handicapped in study activities. Pupils who are not retarded may encounter difficulties in performing certain reading activities. For example, a pupil may be able to interpret a passage in history intelligently but may have difficulty in selecting from the passage points which are pertinent to an assigned problem. Similarly, a pupil may have learned to read narrative materials satisfactorily but may not have learned to do the more intensive type of reading necessary to interpret a descriptive passage in mathematics. These two illustrations suggest that pupils who pursue content subjects effectively must be able to perform numerous kinds of reading activities. The study reported in this article was undertaken to determine the kinds of reading difficulties which pupils encounter in studying various junior high school subjects.