Piece Of Criticism Research Articles

Penman’s Devil: The Chirographic and Typographic Urgency of Race in the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African

When Ignatius Sancho, an Anglo-African former slave, died in 1780, editor Frances Crew assembled his extant letters (fig. 1). Crew worked with printer-publisher John Nichols publish first edition of Sancho's correspondence under title Letters of Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life (1782). Earlier publications of Sancho's correspondence with Laurence Sterne piqued curiosities of those who condescendingly saw him as a novelty likely fueled some demand for Letters, but a great many subscribers were Britons engaged in growing tide of abolitionist antislavery sentiments escalated during closing decades of eighteenth century. (1) The urgency in producing this collection lay in these Britons' desire represent a black man as a reasoning, feeling, civilized being who would be accessible white audiences. According her editorial note, Crew hoped demonstrate that an untutored may possess abilities equal an European; still superior motive, of wishing serve his worthy family (4). Crew believed this demonstration would do much counter doubts about humanity mental capacities of men women. (2) In light of overt connections Sancho his readers made among race, ethnicity, physical materials of writing, printing, reading, it is surprising more scholars have not explicitly brought concerns of history media studies bear on Letters. (3) Leon Jackson Joseph Rezek have made similar observations about relative lack of intellectual exchange between historians scholars of their respective domains, American culture Black Atlantic. (4) A clear expression of neglect they observe can be found, ironically, in critic Sukhdev Sandhu's work on Sancho's manuscript practices. In his analysis of Sancho's orthography punctuation, Sandhu cogently argues his dashes, digressions, textual games (Ignatius Sancho: An African 51) were a means of sardonically critiquing contemporary racialist theory, which held dark-skinned men women were innately unable to perform linear functions (London Calling 39-40). Sandhu asserts Sancho's nonlinear style exposed intellectual impoverishment of Enlightenment racism. Yet, despite his willingness credit disruptive visual appearance of orthography punctuation as a radical form of protest, Sandhu elevates virtuosity of verbal performances deemphasizes significance of material texts in his final assessment of Letters' political import, asserting Sancho's literary criticism philosophical passages ... over above very existence of his book, forced proponents of negro inferiority reframe their critiques of black writing in terms of aesthetics (Ignatius Sancho: An African 70). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Sandhu's elevation of verbal expressions over material texts is deeply problematic for two reasons. First, the very existence of [Sancho's] book could lead what Rezek has recently described as hierarchical thinking about race (Print 33). Rezek reminds us the texts of print Atlantic come us mediated through institutions of dissemination, institutions which authors ... often found themselves subject in which, rarely, they wielded considerable power (39). This state of subjection is especially true of posthumous Letters. Producers consumers often used its paratexts (5)--the print materials, reviews, editorial apparatus accompanied printed volumes their reception--to racially inscribe Sancho's body construct him as an emblem for intellectual moral abilities of all men women. (6) The second problem with Sandhu's reading is Sancho's intertwining of linguistic and material content provides as important a counter racist dismissals of his letters as any piece of criticism or philosophy (McGann 13). …

Housman's contribution to poetry criticism

The survey deals with the critical work of the well-known English poet Alfred Edward Housman. Based on the aesthetic principles of past pest epochs the piece of criticism is considered archaic and incompatible with the modern poetic and critical trends. Our analysis focuses upon the main aspects of Housman's treatise such as the emotion that is conveyed from author to reader through poem, the intellectualism which, as a negative factor, obstructs the acquisition of full poetic insight, and the poetic devices and figures of speech which are of great importance for poets. The conclusion we reached implies that certain aspects of Housman's poetic doctrine should be reaffirmed since the meticulous implementation of the standards he established undoubtedly opens new possibilities for experiencing poetry.

Joyce and the Spanish Ulysses

Joyce and the Spanish Ulysses Gayle Rogers (bio) Antonio Marichalar . . . asked me for something for [Juan Ramón Jiménez’s review] Índice, and I suggested my article [on Ulysses], freely and out of the love of making Joyce known to the people of the land of María Santísima. (Molly Bloom in Gibraltar, reading about herself in a Madrid review.) Valery Larbaud to Adrienne Monnier, 24 March, 19221 Valery Larbaud’s parenthetical comment in the epigraph above conjures a fascinating scenario that connects the world evoked by a fictional text to a critical world in which it circulated: James Joyce’s Spanish-Irish heroine Molly Bloom reads an analysis of herself (as depicted by an expatriate Irish author) in an actual Spanish periodical in the 1920s. Even if it would require Molly to return to the disputed territory of Gibraltar of her youth and to remaster the “little Spanish” she has mostly “forgotten” (U, 4.60–61), Larbaud’s vision of her reading his own influential article in translation raises several intriguing questions: how did Spanish critics initially receive Ulysses and interpret Molly’s character and avant-garde monologue, in contexts that dramatically contrasted those of their Anglophone and continental counterparts? What political critiques did they see entwined in Molly’s Hispanicity and in the Spanish and Irish affinities staged throughout the novel? As writers and intellectuals in Spain searched for new, foreign literary forms that would regenerate the culture of their marginalized “land of María Santísima,” what kind of map did they see in Joyce’s postcolonial Ireland integrated within an imagined post-imperial Europe? That is to say, when Stephen Dedalus overhears the Irish man of letters [End Page 255] Dr George Sigerson’s claim that Ireland has no “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” and that its “national epic has yet to be written,” Joyce points unawares to a challenge that many Silver Age (1898–1939) Spaniards saw for a country whose national epic from its Golden Age had become outdated, if not altogether irrelevant (U, 9.308–309). How does all of this bear on present readings of Joyce, his complex cosmopolitanism, and the politics of Ulysses, tied as they were to a country where civil war broke out in 1922? To answer these questions about the reciprocity between the “Spain” within Ulysses and Ulysses in Spain, this chapter begins with a close reading, rooted in Anglo- and Hispanophone literary-critical history, of the embedded and multilayered political narratives in the novel. Widely circulated throughout Europe but largely unavailable in the emerging Irish Free State, Ulysses spoke to a generation of Spaniards living under dictatorship who modified Joyce’s sketch of a future continent to be rebuilt after the era of provincializing nationalist cultures. This work was both inaugurated and, in many ways, crystallized by Antonio Marichalar, the first critic to use Ulysses as a means of linking specifically Ireland, Spain, and Europe, and the first to translate portions of Ulysses into Spanish. Marichalar, who became the interwar era’s leading intermediary between Anglophone and Spanish modernist cultures, did not translate Larbaud’s piece, as suggested in the letter above. Instead, he published his own groundbreaking work, “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” (“James Joyce en su laberinto,” 1924), in the Revista de Occidente (1923–36), which would become the most influential Hispanophone periodical of the interwar era. Here, in a medium edited by Spain’s leading intellectual and most vocally pro-European figure, José Ortega y Gasset, it became one of the most important pieces of interwar Spanish-language literary criticism, and in a loose pan-European network of reviews, became a broadly disseminated touchstone for Spanish-European modernism. It also launched Marichalar’s career along paths that led to Sylvia Beach and briefly to Joyce himself. A review in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion proclaimed rightly that Marichalar’s essay was not only the best that could be imagined for readers in Catholic countries, it also—and the two things are not unconnected—has claims to being the best estimate of the intellectual significance of Joyce that has appeared in any language so far.2 The Spanish-Irish alliance posited in...

GRAHAM HOLDERNESS, Shakespeare and Venice.

SHAKESPEARE in Venice, the latest book from Graham Holderness, the distinguished author of, among others, The Shakespeare Myth (1988), Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2002) and Textual Shakespeare: Writing and Word (2003), focuses on the relationship between two of the most evocative toponyms in Western culture. Holderness's study is confessedly ‘bold’ and ‘liberal’ in approach, ‘allow[ing] for the possibility that Shakespeare's knowledge of Venice may have been deeper and more extensive than a reliance on the obvious but fairly minimal sources’ available to him (16). In its task of reading Shakespeare's plays as ‘documents of their time’ and also a ‘text of our own time’ (15–16), Shakespeare and Venice is both a perspicacious and challenging piece of literary criticism. Viewing the city of Venice as an ‘intertext’ (21) the book begins by describing the complex diffusion of mythology and reality in delineations of Venice both during and since Shakespeare's time. In doing so, it covers an impressively-broad range of sources. Thus the Venice of the Nineteenth Century literature is evoked by way of John Ruskin, Lord Byron, and Henry James, while the Venice of the Renaissance traveller is elucidated by references to Marco Polo, William Thomas, and Edmund Spenser. This endeavour, while initially overwhelming, serves to establish the key thesis of Holderness's study, namely that Venice is not ‘bifurcated … into real and ideological’ (139), but that instead it ‘always exists in an incongruous and paradoxical dualism between binary opposites’ (100).

Obituary: Andrew Sarris (1928–2012)

A ndrew Sarris, a member of Film History’s Editorial Advisory Board since our first issue in 1987, passed away on 20 June 2012 from complications of an infection following a fall. A tribute from his students at Columbia University, where he taught for over forty years, can be found at http://earthwize.org/wordpress/directortalk/ where links to tributes from David Bordwell, Richard Corliss, Kent Jones, Armond White and Film Comment magazine can also be found. Like many other cinephiles of my generation, I read Andy’s columns in the Village Voice (where he wrote from 1960–1989) while a student in high school, and was tremendously influenced by them. Andy’s columns and books – not just the seminal The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (1968) but its predecessor, the groundbreaking American Directors issue of Film Culture (No. 28, 1963), as well as his exquisite Museum of Modern Art monograph on the films of Josef von Sternberg (1966) – functioned as my film school. We all used the American Cinema book as a map of the terrain of American cinema, tracking down the films mentioned in it at film society screenings, commercial retrospectives (the New Yorker was preferable to the Thalia, but let us never forget the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Elgin, and even the Carnegie Hall Cinema), and museums (MoMA and the New York Cultural Center at the Huntington Hartford museum). My education continued as I earned my cinespurs writing film reviews for The Village Voice under Andy’s nurturing wing (those of you who knew him will laugh at the cliched nature of my prose here). Believe it or not, he published my first piece of real criticism – “Griffith: Not only Great but Good,” making the trendy Voice one of the last papers to finally review Orphans of the Storm (1922). My Ph.D. came when I became his colleague at Columbia and we shared an office for eight years. Between bites into an egg salad sandwich and glances at the New York Post, Andy took my education into hand. But my best conversations with him came at dissertation defenses. (Students had learned they could eat up time in the defense by getting Andy and me into discussion with one another, thus dodging difficult questions addressed to them.) Marathon, all-day department meetings revealed the keen political strategist and master rhetorician (Andy was Greek after all) as Andy fought for the interests of history, theory and criticism against the onslaught of screenwriting and production. Those battles are surely the Film History, Volume 24, pp. 357–358, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

The "Political" Barthes: From Theater to Idiorrhythmy

Although Roland Barthes was never one of these public intellectuals who mingle with and vocally discuss matters, he had a moment of glory in the 1950s. The publication of Mythologies in 1957, a volume gathering most of the articles he had written from 1954 to 1956, under the title of les mythologies du mois as a regular column in the journal Les Lettres nouvelles, brought him immediate public attention. These brief pieces of social criticism on current affairs, ranging from satirical commentaries on new commodities such as detergents or the fashionable Citroen DS, to more straightforward ideological issues such as his counterattack on the anti-intellectual Poujadism, all denounced the mystification of the petty-bourgeois ideology and its pervasive infiltration into the very fabric of the everyday collective unconscious. Barthes, who quickly made a name for himself as a talented essayist, viewed himself as a critique engaged. (1) During the same period, Barthes was also regularly reviewing theater events in articles that were no less politically charged--indeed, perhaps even more--than the petites mythologies. Between 1953 and 1961, he wrote more than seventy articles on contemporary theater, most of them for the journal Theatre Populaire, which he never collected into a volume equivalent to Mythologies. (2) Among them, more than fifteen were devoted to Bertolt Brecht, whose theater he celebrated as an authentic synthesis between the rigor of the project (in the highest sense of the word) and the freedom of the dramatic art. (3) Around i960, however, Barthes distanced himself from theater. He stopped attending performances, a shift in interest that coincided with a noticeable restraint from his use of the lexis. In the 1960s and 1970s, when he revisited Brecht's writings, his focus was no longer on the dramatist's project, but on more theoretical and general concerns of discursivity. The late Barthes turned further away from politics. In the courses he gave at the College de France (1977-1980), he never addressed issues in any substantial way. Moreover, he voiced an increasingly vigilant skepticism toward the notion of community. His first year lecture course, devoted to the theme of to Live Together, (4) ended on a strong note of disenchantment vis-a-vis all major forms of cohabitation. Only one model managed to survive: the Utopian fantasy of idiorrhythmy, a concept he had discovered while reading Jacques Lacarriere's L'Ete grec. (5) Borrowed from the Greek orthodox monastic vocabulary, idiorrhythmy refers to the distinctive organization of monks, who, while administratively attached to a monastery, live alone, separated from their brothers. Its principle consists in allowing each member of the community to live freely according to his own rhythm. The word and the concept of idiorrhythmy seem to have instantly crystallized one of Barthes's deepest fantasies, that of a collectivity that would not infringe on individual distance. Unfortunately, Barthes did not fully develop the social and implications such an archaic and Utopian form of living-together had for him. How should one understand Barthes's evolution from the early pugnacious social critic who described himself as a Sartrean and Marxist (6) to an intellectual with a critical spirit whose dream had become that of a withdrawal from social demands? How did the early political Barthes turn into a late apolitical Barthes? Is it excluded that in spite of this change, Barthes's ways of dealing with the political remained relatively constant? If he embraced idiorrhythmy, his last model of community, as a fantasy-like Utopia, was some form of this Utopia already at work during his militant years, present at the core of his involvement with Popular Theater? Barthes's self-comparison with Brecht on their respective relations to politics might be a good way to approach these questions. …

Tasteless Beckett: Towards an Aesthetics of Hunger

Tasteless Beckett: Towards an Aesthetics of Hunger Alys Moody (bio) The language of starvation is a commonplace in discussions of Samuel Beckett’s writing. His texts are described as emaciated and skeletal, as famished and anorexic. His language, characters, plots, settings, form, content, bodies, style, structure, syntax, and contextual reference are all open to charges of being starved, deprived, or wasted, of going hungry. Terry Eagleton is concurring with a majority view, and making exemplary use of a common metaphor, when he speaks of Beckett’s “anorexic texts,” crafted from “[s]tarved words, gaunt bodies and sterile landscapes” (25).1 Such language is at once pervasive and under-examined, signaling a relationship between hunger and Beckett’s writing that has received much passing acknowledgement but surprisingly little sustained attention. It implies a connection that goes far beyond a simple thematic interest in starvation, infiltrating the very structure of his texts, working its way into their very bones. This essay will argue that this critical intuition actually identifies a central element of Beckett’s postwar aesthetics, in which Beckett uses hunger and related experiences as a way of thinking through his ideas about art and language. In this sense, Beckett’s postwar work develops gropingly towards what might be termed an “aesthetics of hunger”—an aesthetics that takes its structure from hunger. Starvation becomes pervasive in Beckett’s work after the Second World War. Living out their lives against a backdrop of constant, grinding deprivation, his characters of this period almost never have enough to eat. In Waiting for Godot (1953), only Pozzo is genuinely well-fed; Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon can only beg for his leftovers and trade an ever-diminishing stock of root vegetables. The characters of Endgame (1957) are similarly deprived, inhabiting a world of gradual depletion, in which there are no more sugar [End Page 55] plums, no more pap, and no more pain killers. The characters of the post-war novels are similarly starved. In Molloy (1951/1955), the title character famously sucks stones to pass the time and to “forget his hunger, forget his thirst,” while Moran, Molloy’s “other half,” gradually loses his hearty appetite over the course of the novel, reduced to his double’s lack of taste and lack of appetite. The expiring protagonist of Malone Dies (1951/1956) survives on a bowl of soup once every two or three days, until even this meager diet disappears in the latter half of the novel. This essay will show that this omnipresent starvation is not merely a thematic concern, but rather lends its structure to Beckett’s aesthetic theory and practice in this period. My primary concern here, therefore, will be with two central texts that develop this aesthetic of hunger most explicitly, by drawing hunger into a direct dialogue with art and language. The “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” a 1949 piece of experimental art criticism, provides the first such text. Often read as one of Beckett’s key statements on art and aesthetics, these dialogues rely on the figure of starvation in their promotion of a new art without an object. The “Three Dialogues,” therefore, offer a theoretical manifesto for an aesthetic of hunger. If this aesthetic is realised or aspired to in all the hunger-wrought texts of this era, The Unnamable (1953/1958), the final novel of Beckett’s Trilogy, is the only postwar text to stage a sustained confrontation between issues of food consumption, and language itself. This novel therefore offers a unique analysis of the relation of such an aesthetic to literature as such—and of its pitfalls and impossibilities. It brings Beckett’s aesthetic of hunger to a crisis. The abstinence and absolute deprivation of the “Three Dialogues” is confronted with the obtrusion of language and the “obligation to express,” both figured as external objects forced upon the helpless narrator. By figuring language and the world as precisely the kind of force-feeding that is commonly used to break a fast, The Unnamable stages the point at which the aesthetic of hunger is forcefully violated. This novel therefore dramatises both the struggle to realise an art of hunger in a literary medium that seeks to force...

Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory Robert Emmett Finnegan S. H. Rigby. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 329. €119.00; $169.00. Wisdom and Chivalry is a deeply researched and closely argued piece of historical criticism. Stephen Rigby chooses as his analytical tool for The Knight's Tale Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum, a mirror for princes composed circa 1280 for the future Philip IV of France. Giles, a student of Aquinas, synthesizes the political/religious ideas of his—and Chaucer's—day with respect to the personal and public qualities a ruler ought to possess, and demonstrate. The De Regimine, which shows the [End Page 365] influence of Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, survives in some 350 manuscripts, mostly Latin, some vernacular. John Trevisa translated it into English; Thomas of Gloucester, Richard II's uncle, possessed a Latin copy. It is, then, an appropriate touchstone for a study of this sort. Indeed, a reader/listener who had internalized Giles's ideas might well find that “in idealizing Duke Theseus . . . The Knight's Tale seeks to offer a confirmation of the ‘dominant’ ideology of late medieval England” (285) and that “Duke Theseus embodies the virtue which political theorists demanded a ruler should possess as an individual, as the head of a household, and as a sovereign ruler” (276). Rigby structures his analysis in terms of this tripartite division: Part I (“Ethics: The Good Rule of the Self”) deals with Theseus's personal ethics; Part II (“Economics and Politics: The Good Rule of Others”) shows these personal ethics in public action; Part III (“The First Mover and the Good Rule of the Cosmos”) views Theseus's rule of self and others in the wider context of Jupiter's/the Christian God's dominion over the universe. Rigby, then, evaluates Theseus's conduct from the microcosmic-personal to the macrocosmic-universal. There is no ambiguity here. By every measure, and in all circumstances, Theseus comports himself as Giles, and political theorists roughly contemporary with Chaucer— Dante, Boccaccio, John Gower—think an ideal ruler should. We learn, for example, that the duke had every right to send Palamon and Arcite to prison forte et dure and set the “pilours” on the fallen Thebans; he had shown his banner on the march against Creon, and this gesture counted to Chaucer's contemporaries not only as a formal declaration of war but also as an indication that little, or no, quarter need be expected. Later we discover that Saturn, whose intervention concludes the strife in heaven, can be understood as representing the wisdom of old age. We are also told that Theseus's First Mover lecture is informed not only by Boethius but by current ideas of the Christian God's control of the universe and everything in it. There are numerous such interpretations, all positive; Rigby consistently sees the duke's actions as ideal and exemplary. But this need not necessarily be so, even for a reader steeped in the De Regimine. A Gilesian reader might recognize Theseus's right to conduct himself as he does on the Theban battlefield, but yet question the charity of his so doing. Given the dynamics of the poem, such a reader might well find it odd that Jupiter, who attempts to resolve the contention in [End Page 366] heaven—“Juppiter was bisy it to stente” (2442)—signally fails. If our Gilesian could trace the semantic range of “bisy” and “stente,” he would find, perhaps, the terms suggesting that Jupiter worked for a solution over a significant period of time and became worried and distressed when he did not succeed. Saturn's malevolent self-characterization embodies the worst violence depicted on the walls of the temples of Mars, Venus, and Diana. Our Gilesian reader might find an in bono interpretation here a very large order indeed, and discover little in the text to warrant an assertion that “the agency of Saturn, in resolving the conflict between Mars and Venus, can actually be seen as an instrument of Jupiter's power” (269). Again, our Gilesian might...

<i>Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought Carolyn Haynes Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, by Myra H. Stober. Stanford University Press, 2011. $35.00 (cloth). 219 pp. ISBN : 978-0-8047-7231-0. Having been an interdisciplinary faculty member for almost two decades, I have long thought that the biggest indicator of effective interdisciplinary learning, teaching, and scholarship is the interpersonal maturity of those involved and their capacity for building relationships. Even if one overcomes the standard institutional barriers, such as the disciplinary bias of promotion and tenure and reward structures, the time-consuming nature of interdisciplinary work, and the acquisition of the necessary funding, interdisciplinary work (to coin a phrase from Stanley Fish) is “so very hard to do”—precisely because it typically involves people—people who come from different backgrounds and must talk to one another. Myra Strober’s book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, confirms this point by analyzing the perceptions of various faculty members who participated in year-long seminars at three private research universities. The six seminars addressed topics ranging from broad ones such as social sciences, science studies, and ethics to more focused ones such as inequality, ethics, representation, and consilience, yet all were designed to promote interdisciplinary exchange and ideally the creation of courses, research projects, and greater understanding of other disciplinary worldviews. All seminars included postdoctoral fellows along with faculty members from different departments, and most involved administrators. To collect her data, Strober engaged in ongoing conversations with seminar leaders, visited one session from each of the six seminars, and interviewed forty faculty members about their experiences with the different seminars. This book will be of interest to administrators heading interdisciplinary programs and faculty involved in interdisciplinary research, teaching or other collaborative projects. It complements the work of other interdisciplinary scholars who have theorized the interdisciplinary research process and the critical role of collaboration within it. For example, Kockelmans (1979), Newell and Green (1982), and Repko (2008) have underscored the need for interdisciplinarians to establish common ground when confronting conflicting disciplinary perspectives by “bringing out potential commonalties underlying the conflicting disciplinary and theory-based insights so that these can be reconciled and ultimately integrated” (Repko, 2008, p. 272). Newell, Szostak, and Repko (2011) have gone so far as to offer strategies for creating common ground, such as redefining concepts, extending theories to encompass other disciplinary concerns, [End Page 803] or transforming thinking by placing opposing insights on a continuum. Other scholars have reinforced the critical need for productive collaboration in the interdisciplinary process of knowledge construction (Amey & Brown 2004; Boix-Mansilla, 2006; Derry et al., 2005; Klein, 2008) and the importance of strong leaders in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations (Bronstein, 2003; Casey, 2010; Klein, 2010). Strober’s study enhances this literature by revealing that interdisciplinary exchange is thwarted for more fundamental reasons than the difficulty of translating terminology, reconciling conceptual conflicts or facilitating collaborative input. Surprisingly, she found little evidence of significant interdisciplinary communication among the seminar participants. Although some participants perceived the seminars as valuable (offering them new awareness and insights into other disciplines and disciplinary colleagues), none ended up collaborating with other faculty to create new courses or research proposals. She concludes that the reason for the seminars’ lack of tangible outcomes is that the leaders and participants were unable to accept the contrasting ways that colleagues from other disciplines understand knowledge—that is, their conceptions of what constitutes truth, their methods of evaluating and generating ideas, and their habits of interacting. After presenting an overview of interdisciplinarity—its definitions, differences from disciplinarity, challenges and assets— in Part 1, the book focuses in Part 2 on a detailed description of the seminar conversations. Part 3 presents her findings, including her explanations for why the goal of producing interdisciplinary teaching and research projects was not met, a review of the challenges of interdisciplinary work, and suggestions for how leaders can foster productive interdisciplinary communication. The book is at its best when the author describes and analyzes vivid and problematic examples of conversations, such as when a direct piece of criticism from an economist evoked the anger of a humanities seminar participant. The economist likely “did not think consciously at...

The Critical Voice and the Narrative Voice: Robert Penn Warren’s Essay on Coleridge and All the King’s Men

GWEN LE COR University of Paris 8 The Critical Voice and the Narrative Voice: Robert Penn Warren’s Essay on Coleridge and All the King’s Men So I had it after all the months. For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. (All the King’s Men FE 228) Oh, nothing is lost, ever lost! Iat last you understood. (“Original Sin: A Short Story” 179) For nothing we had, Nothing we were Is lost. (Brother to Dragons 195) WHEN ASSESSING ROBERT PENN WARREN’S WORK ONE IS STRUCK BOTH BY its diversity and by the fact that it resists categorizing. Novelist, poet, playwright, short-story writer and critic, Warren had a rare capacity to experiment with all genres. The successive versions of All the King’s Men and Brother to Dragons are a case in point. Starting in one form and evolving into another, they can be seen as literal experiments across genres. For Warren, novels and poems stem from “the same germ,” “spring from the same source” (Talking 232-33), suggesting a close connection between genres. The many facets of Warren’s works thus appear as a coherent whole in which each piece resonates with the others, or which, in the manner of his spider web metaphor, “ripples to the remotest perimeter” of his work (All the King’s Men FE 188, RE 266). Because the coherence of his work1 deserves a longer treatment than can be provided within the scope of a single paper, I will limit my purpose here to one of the ripples and focus on the interrelatedness of criticism and fiction writing. 1 Several critics have emphasized the coherence of his work. Cleanth Brooks, for instance, speaks of “a highly unified and consistent body of work” (98) and Victor Strandberg notes the “fundamental coherence” which “unifies Warren’s whole body of poetry” (Poetic Vision 33). 120 Gwen Le Cor Warren repeatedly asserted the need for a unified approach to the fiction and nonfiction works: “Whatever we do—teaching or reading criticism or practicing it a little—has an effect on us. It gets inside us. We can’t throw it away, except by a feat of total amnesia” (Talking 141). Or, as many fictional voices could say, “nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost” (FE 228, RE 319). The most obvious manifestation of that unity is probably to be found in the numerous allusions and direct references to other writers which permeate Warren’s work,2 but what I find even more significant is the connection which Warren formulates as a direct influence of his critical practice on his fiction writing: “I am sure that criticism has modified my writing” (Talking 130). What I am interested in, then, is the way his critical practice molds his writing. Several critics have analyzed Warren’s non-fiction writing as a way to gain insight into the fiction. Victor Strandberg, for instance, very rightly views Warren’s criticism as both “admirably reasonable and elucidating in its own right” and as serving “the secondary purpose of illuminating and often vindicating his own practice in literature” (Poetic Vision 34). Warren’s critical response to other writers can indeed often become a useful commentary on own work. Yet, limiting the role of the criticism to that of comment or “gloss” for the fiction (Poetic Vision 34) does not account for the closer link which Warren’s remark suggests. I would like to examine that question by focusing on what is perhaps Warren’s best known piece of criticism, his essay on Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and on the ties that link it to All the King’s Men. My purpose here is to re-read All the King’s Men through the prism of the essay, and to examine the imprint the essay has left on the themes and structure of the novel. I Coleridge’s influence on Warren’s fiction and poetry has been well established. Lesa Corrigan believes that “A Poem of Pure Imagination” helped Warren recover his poetic voice (124) and James Grimshaw that it “provides further understanding of Warren’s development as a poet” (20). Similarly, for Strandberg, the “essay, onTheAncientMariner, turns...

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman

This essay argues that in the conspicuous absence of psychological studies examining the intergenerational transmission of a specific form of trauma experienced by “comfort women’ during World War II, Nora Okja Keller provides two compelling psychological portraits in her rendering of a fraught mother-daughter relationship in her novel Comfort Woman. It is always a challenging task to navigate multiple disciplines in a single study and here it is worth clarifying for readers that my essay is meant to be read primarily as a piece of literary criticism that uses resources from the field of psychology and especially the study of trauma.

‘Say it with Georges Auric’: Film Music and theesprit nouveau

AbstractAlthough he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire'sesprit nouveauhe was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 filmA Nous, la Liberté!Although the music was composed after theesprit nouveaumovement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction Jochen Petzold (bio) Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction. By Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann. New York: Routledge, 2009. Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa by Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann is a very “political” piece of literary criticism, as it analyses, exposes and explicitly denounces cases of anti-Africanism in recent fiction for young readers. The authors divide their study into three parts: The first part, “Background,” offers three brief chapters that examine the history of imperialist misrepresentations of Africa and the failings of the contemporary American book establishment—particularly in making ill-advised choices for prestigious prizes. The second part, “Neo-Imperialist Stories, 1994–2008”, comprises eight chapters (three of which are reprints of journal articles) that discuss thirteen novels and one short story by eleven “Western” authors. All text fall into what could be broadly termed a “realist paradigm” and while many of them have received favourable reviews and even won literary prizes, Maddy and MacCann show all of them to be more or less seriously flawed in their representation of Africa and Africans, either because the texts do not adequatly reflect cultural or political realities, or because they perpetuate traditions of imperialist thought. The final part, “Rewarding the Best,” praises a collection of short stories by the South African writer Beverley Naidoo as an example of well-informed and non-racist writing about Africa. The volume is rounded off with a selected bibliography and a helpful index that keeps the material accessible. As this short overview already suggests, Maddy and MacCann have written a book with a mission—and this makes it a difficult book to review. Clearly, the authors have an axe to grind about a culture-industry that is not sensitive enough to latent or blatant anti-Africanism that still dominates (some of) its products, and about an institutionalized system of book appraisal that similarly fails to detect cultural imperialism at work. After centuries of imperialist mis-representations of Africa, care is certainly needed when (Western) pens present Africa and Africans to young readers. Finding even some fault with a study that criticizes racism and calls for true multiculturalism all too easily provokes the reproach of being reactionary and Eurocentric oneself. Yet, alas, the book may be well intended, but as an academic study it is not without its problems. While the authors do an admirable job in making their readers aware of underlying currents of racist thought in texts that might at first sight seem “liberal” and “open-minded,” they also often over-reach in their aim. For example, in their introduction Maddy and MacCann declare that “contemporary stories about Africa sustain the idea that Whites constitute a superior class of persons” (3). They do not qualify this claim and thus suggest that it pertains to all (Western) stories about Africa—and given the analyses that follow, this seems to be the case. However, this general applicability is never discussed or substantiated. The authors [End Page 300] do not reveal how they arrived at their choice of texts, or to what extent these fourteen texts can be taken as representative of the market at large—and it is a large market: a search in internet bookstores produces over 400 relevant titles (though not all of them published between 1994 and 2008). Their severe criticism of the culture-industry suggests that these fourteen texts are representative, yet at the same time Maddy and MacCann explicitly mention “The Children’s Africana Book Award” as a counter example to what is presented as a neo-imperialist mainstream. While praising ‘good’ books about Africa is not the aim of the study, its credibility would have been helped by a discussion of the relationship between the anti-African ‘mainstream’ (if it is one) and the books recommended by CABA. At various points in the analyses one gets the feeling that the authors are trying to hard, interpreting as intentional what might just as well be unintentional (which is, of course, no excuse for offensive imagery), nonchalantly passing from the statements of first...

Book Illustration, Taxes and Propaganda: The Fermiers Généraux Edition of La Fontaine's 'Contes et nouvelles en vers' of 1762 by David Adams

MLR, I03.3,2oo8 857 of the two,The Confessions du Comte de ***, treats issues similar to those of the Considerations, but with greater concision and with considerably less gravity, though both prefer euphemism toobscenity, abounding inmischievous ironies and allusions, but always within a framework ofmoral values, if liberally conceived. It is replete with witty epigrammatical observations thatmay be favourably compared with La Rochefoucauld's maxims. Douglas Parmee's new translation of these excellent tales combines accuracy with elegance, and succeeds well inpreserving the playful tone of the original textswhile being readily accessible to themodern reader. Parmiee prefaces his translationswith an informativeand entertaining introduction. The volume is,then,an altogether wel come addition to that small library of French literary texts available to those who cannot read French. Itmay also be of use to French degree students who need the support of parallel texts.However, it isdoubtful that thepotential market for such a publication is very large.This is to be regretted, since, a prominent member of the literarysociety of his day, and an author of nomean talent,Duclos deserves tobe read bothwithin and outside France. The Confessionswent through sixteen editions in the eighteenth century, and thework was certainly read byRousseau, who may even have borrowed the title forhiswell-known autobiography. It ispossible, too, that the tales inspiredDiderot (Les Bijoux indiscretsand La Religieuse), Laclos's Les Liaisons dan gereuses, and perhaps even Sade's Justine, narratives which echo themisfortunes of Madame de Luz, theheroine of thefirsttale in thisvolume, thesemi-historical Histoire de laBaronne de Luz. Recognizing the quality and importance ofDuclos's contribu tion to literature,Sainte-Beuve wrote a detailed study of a corpus ofwork whose gentle ironies and humorous attitudes to sexual liaisons, balanced by a shrewd psychological insight, are as instructive and entertaining today aswhen theywere first written. LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY JOHN PHILLIPS Book Illustration, Taxes and Propaganda: The Fermiers Generaux Edition ofLa Fon taine's 'Contes et nouvelles en vers' of I762. By DAVID ADAMS. (SVEC, i) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2oo6. 428 PP. ?65. ISBN 978-0-7294-0885-I. This book is a labour of love and awonderful piece of scholarship and criticism. In the I750S the company of royal tax gatherers decided to procure an edition of La Fontaine's saucy verse taleswith newly commissioned illustrations byCharles Eisen. In one sense David Adams's work is the story of thisbook. The fermiersgeneraux no doubt saw theirventure as a commercial exercise: finebooks with lavish illustrations could sell for a lot ofmoney to the growing numbers of rich bibliophiles. But it is Adams's contention that thechoice of textand Eisen's manner of illustrating itcan be seen as thefermiers's assertion of the freedomwith which theywent about pursuing their own interests and advancement. They were, of course, an unpopular group. Adams sums up their reputation as 'rapacious, cruel and sybaritic' (p. 48). Unfor tunately (for them), they suffered increasing numbers of polemical attacks and, not long after thevolume had been published in 1762, theywithdrew itfrom sale.Adams suggests that thiswas because the ideological implications of thevolume would serve only to fan the flames of hostility.The poems and illustrations can certainly be seen tocelebrate personal freedom. But the images of folly,duplicity, immorality,freedom from all conventional restraintmight also be taken to reflectdirectly on the fermiers and, furthermore, might offend all readers by suggesting thateverybody is as bad as theyare. The withdrawal did not prevent thework being sought after (then, as now) as amajor achievement inbook illustration.And indeed Adams's argument depends crucially on the illustrations.He is fullyaware of theother editions of La Fontaine's 858 Reviews contes then available: most unillustrated, some illustrated by Romeyn de Hooghe, others by Charles-Nicholas Cochin. Adams claims that it is the use and nature of Eisen's illustrations thatmake the I762 edition so distinctive and thatunderline the ideological reading appropriate to its tax-gathering begetters. Only the I762 edition uses full-page illustrations thatcapture details suggesting a libertarian disrespect for authority (especially royal authority).Adams's approach has determined thestructure of his book. Between two long introductory and concluding chapters are sandwiched two chapters looking in turn at each of the twovolumes of the I762 work...

LEON RAPPOPORT, Punchlines: The case for racial, ethnic, and gender humor

Leon Rappoport, Punchlines: The case for racial, ethnic, and gender humor. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp. xv, 181. Hb $44.95.Written in a student-friendly style, Punchlines examines the state and development of racial, ethnic, and gender humor in the contemporary United States. The social psychologist Leon Rappoport's main objective is to save the reputation of this kind of humor from its “politically correct” critics. Specifically, Rappoport sets out to debunk two pieces of criticism: that this type of humor is inherently prejudiced against minorities, and that it contributes to anti-minority prejudice in society. The author argues that humor cannot be the automatic vehicle of prejudice because its reception is inevitably context-dependent. Different audiences react differently to the same words at different points in history. Also, racial, ethnic, and gender humor is widely performed and enjoyed by members of minorities. As to the second piece of criticism, Rappoport hypothesizes that this kind of humor, the often outrageous comedy of performers like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, renders intergroup hatred ludicrous and thus contributes to the destruction of prejudice and the decline of the significance of ethnicity in America. Ethnic humor immerses increasingly sophisticated mass audiences in the risky but entertaining and cathartic mud bath of human folly (racism, homophobia, misogyny) and then has them emerge cured from their own prejudices and hypocrisy.

Aidan Chambers: Master Literary Choreographer (review)

Reviewed by: Aidan Chambers: Master Literary Choreographer Jennifer Sattaur (bio) Aidan Chambers: Master Literary Choreographer. By Betty Greenway. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Aidan Chambers is one of the best-known and well-loved British authors of young adult fiction, as well as an [End Page 78] influential and widely read critic of children's literature. In recognition of Chambers's importance in the area of young adult fiction, Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature has just released a volume devoted to him. Aidan Chambers: Master Literary Choreographer, written by Betty Greenway, combines a study of the fictional texts, critical work, and biographical details of this award-winning literary figure. The book is separated into seven chapters, loosely based upon the chronological ordering of Chambers's six best-known young adult works, referred to collectively as the "Dance Sequence" (Breaktime; Dance on My Grave; NIK: Now I Know; The Toll Bridge; Postcards from No Man's Land; and This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn). The first chapter is devoted to his early life and works, and each subsequent chapter arranges the facts of his life around the production of each novel in turn. Greenway's treatment of Chambers's fictional works is thorough and insightful. Organized with a focus on the six "Dance Sequence" novels, the book draws out the main themes, techniques, controversies, strengths, and weaknesses of each novel, relating them back to the whole canon of Chambers's writing and to his life. For example, in Chapter 3, which deals with the novel Dance on My Grave, Greenway draws on Chambers's personal Web site, an interview that she conducted with Chambers, her email correspondence with Chambers, and two of Chambers's published pieces of literary criticism (from The Horn Book and Booktalk) to show the ways in which Chambers's critical ideas correspond to the themes that appear in the novel. In the beginning of this chapter, Greenway cites a quotation by Chambers in which he comments on his interest in television instant replays as a narrative technique. Greenway goes on to demonstrate the use of this technique in the boating incident that opens the novel, and she critiques its effectiveness. Throughout this chapter, Greenway shows how the novel reflects Chambers's views, theories, and life experiences. She brings in relevant biographical details, such as Chambers's first job at Southend-on-Sea, which is where the novel is set, or the connection between a character named Jim Osbourn, who is an influential teacher in the novel, and Chambers's own charismatic teacher of the same name. Because Greenway concentrates on the connections between Chambers's life and his young adult novels, her treatment of his critical work is scattered and much less in depth than her examination of his fictional work. Greenway is not concerned in this book with providing a thorough analysis of Chambers's critical work. Instead, his critical works are referred to throughout the chapters where and when they relate to the novel under discussion and are used mainly to illustrate his views on a particular fictional device or technique. This is hardly a drawback, however, as more attention on the critical works would have been out of sync with the aims of the book and would have distracted from the flow of the discussion. Despite its slimness (only 133 pages of actual material, including [End Page 79] the chronology), the book provides a thoroughly researched and well-balanced discussion of the six novels that make up Chambers's "Dance Sequence." The book also contains a lot of original interview material with Chambers in which he lays out his philosophical and critical positions on many of the topics under consideration. The experience of reading this volume leaves the reader with a sense that Chambers's work and life make a coherent whole (not to mention an inspiring story). I recommend this book not only to anyone with an interest in Aidan Chambers's work but also to those more generally interested in contemporary young adult fiction. Jennifer Sattaur University of Wales Jennifer Sattaur Jennifer Sattaur is currently a PhD student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, writing on the development...

Kitses Rides Again

Kitses Rides Again David Boyd (bio) Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, by Jim Kitses, BFI Publishing, 2004. The original version of Horizons West, published back in 1969 as part of the British Film Institute's Cinema One series, was a tightly packed little book focusing on three filmmakers whom Jim Kitses persuasively argued could "be said to have found their essence within the Western": Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. At the time, Kitses' three directors of choice were probably more or less equally well-regarded by Western aficionados and more or less equally disregarded by everybody else, but over the subsequent decades their critical fortunes were to diverge radically; Mann has been largely (and unjustly) forgotten, while Boetticher has become a minor cult-figure and Peckinpah the subject of an academic growth-industry. Kitses' little book, however, has consistently, and rightly, continued to enjoy an esteem quite separate from that of its subjects. It was, and it remains, one of the most influential books ever written on the Western, and an exemplary piece of generic criticism. Thirty-five years later, Kitses has come riding back into town toting an altogether heftier tome in his saddle bag. The new version of Horizons West is more than twice as long as the original, and more than twice as expansive in its historical scope, extending from Stagecoach (John Ford, US) in 1939 (with brief glances back at John Ford's silent westerns) up to Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, US) in 1992. The original chapters on Mann and Boetticher reappear with only minor additions (Mann made his last western in 1960, and Boetticher his in 1969), but the Peckinpah chapter is considerably extended to include his later films, with a particularly persuasive and eloquent section on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (US, 1973), "a languorous dirge, a drifting death-poem, a post-modern lament for an earlier America," which Kitses regards as "Peckinpah's ultimate statement." (229) The enlargement of the book results primarily, however, from the addition of chapters on Ford—with a detailed study of his fourteen westerns from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, US, [End Page 106] 1964) as long as the original book—Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. Despite its extended historical range, however, and despite Kitses' unsettlingly Leavisite claim that "these six can be seen as constituting a great tradition of the western genre," the book makes no attempt to present itself as a comprehensive history of the genre. (1) Instead, Kitses confines his attention to directors whom he sees as western "specialists"; not just directors who made distinguished westerns, but whose directorial profile was defined by their westerns, unlike, most obviously, Howard Hawks, "whose films are equally accomplished and personal regardless of genre." (201). The inclusion of Eastwood in this company seems debatable at best, and becomes increasingly so with each new Eastwood film: only four of the twenty-five films he has directed are westerns, and it would surely be hard to argue that Mystic River (US, 2003) and Million Dollar Baby (US, 2004) are less central to his directorial output than High Plains Drifter (US, 1973) and Pale Rider (US, 1985). Kitses' "basic premise is that at its core the Western marries historical and archetypal elements in a fruitful mix that allows different filmmakers a wide latitude of creative play. Where Ford and Peckinpah generate an epic historical canvas, Mann, Boetticher and Eastwood explore archetypal and existential aspects of the frontier experience." (14) These relationships between authorship and genre, and between history and myth, although greatly elaborated here, were equally central to the original edition of the book. But the critical context in which the new edition appears is, of course, very different, and it is certainly no longer possible to claim, as the original did in its opening sentence, that "the western has yet received scant critical attention." On the contrary, the genre has been subject to a barrage of critical attention in recent years, most of it ideological in its concerns. Although Kitses insists that "such latter-day interpretations do not invalidate the auteurist and thematic analyses they build on," and although he unblushingly and...

Elgar's Invention of the Human: Falstaff, Opus 68

Falstaff, Elgar's tragic symphonic study, is at once program music, a minor piece of Shakespearean criticism, early modernist tonal and structural experiment, and a cynical musical commentary on humankind's "failings and sorrows." A satisfactory analysis of the work calls for a discussion of the program, the Shakespearean literary criticism that Elgar based his interpretation on and cited in his own published analysis of the work, and a structural analysis that can make sense both of a variety of generic implications (sonata, rondo, and multimovement deformations) as well as the complex associations between keys, motives, persons, and ideas in the work, together with its overall tonal structure. As this multilayered piece is examined from these different angles, Elgar's interpretation of the character of Sir John Falstaff (as presented by or inferable from Shakespeare) is revealed as an idiosyncratically gloomy view of human relationships and existential possibilities. It is also an intensely personal exploration of late-tonal musical language, its symbolic potential, its structural logic, and its relation to the musical tradition--Elgar's most complex, adventurous, and rewarding.

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (review)

Reviewed by: Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations Donna Parsons (bio) Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, by Ruth Solie; pp. 223. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004, $39.95, £26.95. During the past 25 years, scholars have focused more attention on appraising the musical lives of the Victorians. Musicologists as well as literary scholars have shown that in nineteenth-century Britain, a place once branded as "the land without music," musical aptitude, ambition, and careers flourished both within and outside of London. Simply [End Page 468] put, the Victorians cultivated music. It permeated every aspect of their lives, through private performances in front of family members and friends, musical at-homes before select audiences, church services, and regular concert attendance. Although England was a great importer of music and musicians from the Continent, the country itself was not devoid of natural talent; rather, it was deficient in its nurturing of native musicians. Lacking needed patronage, access to advanced musical training, and venues in which to perform or have works performed, British musicians were often forced to relegate their musical activities to a secondary or subordinate role. Over time, their contributions to Victorian musical life have been submerged or even forgotten. Ruth Solie's Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations allows "the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that tell us so much about what musical experience was like among the Victorians, what music actually meant to them" (2) to take center stage. I find her notion of "subterranean conversations" appealing, as this dialogue reveals subtle and rarely considered aspects of nineteenth-century culture and musical life. Solie's grasp of both music and literature—the disciplines that ground these conversations—is as impressive as her ability to interweave the two is thought provoking. Although several chapters have appeared in various forms elsewhere, their inclusion in this volume forms a cohesive whole that paints a vivid picture of musical life in the nineteenth century. Solie's discussion ranges from ideological commentary on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1824) to the proliferation of musical themes in Macmillan's Magazine during George Grove's tenure as editor, the socialization of girls via piano studies and in-home performances, the connection between Schubert and Biedermeier domesticity, the dynamics of cosmopolitanism and canon formation in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), and the opera box as a trope in American fiction. We must keep in mind—as Solie acknowledges in her "prelude"—that she uses the term "Victorian" geographically to cover Europe and North America and does not apply it as a "style- term" (3). Victorianists might be skeptical as to how a study with such a broad scope could benefit our understanding of nineteenth-century England, but Solie's opening chapter quickly puts such reservations to rest. Her exploration of nineteenth-century commentary on Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony examines "the ways in which religious, philosophical, and political ideologies are reflected in the interpretation of music during the nineteenth century" (6). The most intriguing aspect of the study is her discussion of the connection reviewers made between the Ninth Symphony and Deronda. Examining the commentary that links Eliot to Beethoven—which she characterizes as typical—Solie provides literary scholars with a new method by which to interpret and understand both the reception of the work and Eliot's stature as a novelist. Citing Edward Dowden's 1877 review of Middlemarch (1871–72) and Deronda as a prime example, Solie observes that he invokes the later works of Beethoven and Turner as a means to contrast the complexity of Eliot's late novels with the simplicity of her earlier ones (34). Dowden reminds readers that they should have matured individually, just as the novels collectively did (33–34). Solie also examines George Bernard Shaw's 1893 review of the Ninth in The Musical World, a piece of criticism that links multiple listenings of the Ninth to multiple readings of Deronda, and implies that the novel may profitably be reread as a means of self-improvement: as with the symphony, each new encounter with the novel yields something more (33). [End Page 469] Solie also makes further comparisons between the Ninth Symphony and...

On Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: On Enlightenment Graeme Hunter (bio) David Stove. On Enlightenment. Edited by Andrew Irvine Transaction 2002. xxxvi, 185. US $34.95 When he died in 1994, David Stove enjoyed an excellent reputation both as a Hume scholar and as a philosopher of science. But it was as an essayist, rather than as an academic writer, that he built up a large and loyal readership across the English-speaking world. To anyone who has never encountered Stove the essayist it will be difficult to explain the nature of his charm. The first popular essay of Stove's I encountered was a piece of social criticism called 'A Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics and Feminism.' When this essay appeared in the mid-1980s the topics it discussed were among the current idols of the cave, and untenured professors like myself were expected to worship them. Religious dissent and religious tolerance were unknown. Those were the days when universities were described as 'islands of repression in a sea of freedom.' To learn that there was a professor somewhere in Australia courageous enough to put these idols in question, and witty enough to lampoon three of them in a single essay, was intoxicating. Not since puberty had I discovered anything as dangerous and delightful. The person who introduced me to this side of David Stove was Andrew Irvine, a former student of Stove's, now a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and the editor of the present fine collection of essays. It does not include the paper of which I have spoken, but contains fourteen others, each of which is just as good. They concern the nature of the Enlightenment and its legacy. On the one hand, Stove fiercely defends the reasonableness for which the Enlightenment stood, while on the other hand relentlessly exposing both the intellectual pretensions of its progenitors and the follies of its contemporary progeny. It is difficult to find a general category for these essays and it might be a mistake to try. In that respect they resemble their author, of whom Roger Kimball writes in the preface to this volume: 'Stove was that rarest of creatures: a genuinely independent thinker. His allegiance was always to the best argument, the most persuasive reasoning. This made him difficult to categorize, impossible to pigeon-hole.' One unifying thread running through the collection, however, is provided by the critical scrutiny to which it subjects many of the key ideas [End Page 425] of the Enlightenment. And since these tend to be the ideas we take for granted today, readers who are prepared to reconsider some of their conventional assumptions are likely to profit most from this book. Stove offers searching criticisms of utilitarianism, egalitarianism, sociobiology, pacifism, and affirmative action. He explains how it is possible for socialism to make relentless progress even in societies which massively reject it and how conservatism can be so much wiser than liberalism, yet never as popular. And this is accomplished with unfailing clarity and a good deal of humour. Is there a weakness in this collection? There is one. It is too short. Graeme Hunter Graeme Hunter, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa Copyright © 2005 University of Toronto Press Incorporated