Poor Devil Research Articles

An immigrant Irish contingent in the crowd at the execution of William Burke in Edinburgh in 1829.

The work of the serial killers William Burke and William Hare, immigrant Ulstermen who came to Scotland in 1818, is well known. When they were finally caught, having murdered 16 people and sold their bodies for dissection, Hare turned King's evidence and after a dramatic trial Burke was hanged in January 1829. The notoriety of the case resulted in a crowd for Burke's public execution that is generally regarded as the largest that ever assembled in Edinburgh for a hanging, being estimated at between 25,000 and 35,000 people. A contemporary journal kept by a medical student named Thomas Hume was recently acquired by The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. It contains new information regarding a contingent of immigrant Irishmen who were present at the hanging. In the lead-up to the execution, they took up a position in front of the gallows and tried to prevent any non-Irish from approaching the area immediately in front of the gallows, a futile aim given the huge, rapidly accumulating mob. On being questioned by Hume on their motives, they said it was bad enough for Burke, 'the poor devil', to be hanged, but they feared he would be mocked and denigrated by the crowd and so they were there to keep the crowd away from him as much as they could. The Irish in Scotland at that time were a marginalised and ghettoised group who saw Burke as one of their own. Therefore, they most likely saw it as their duty to at least try and protect him during, in their view, his final and most harsh mistreatment by a society that had habitually mistreated him and them.

“Poor Devils”: German Contributions to American Flood Relief and the Early Cold War

ABSTRACT In July 1951, the American Midwest experienced one of its worst floods in its history up to that point, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. While ostensibly a national issue, the natural disaster also drew the attention of hundreds of German citizens who donated to the relief effort. In the letters accompanying their donations, these Germans emphasized that they wanted to submit a token of their gratitude to the American people and begin to pay back a fraction of what they felt they owed for American humanitarian assistance in the immediate postwar era. Though the American government did not solicit these donations, it saw value in help publicising the donations and their letters. Locked in a propaganda battle with the Soviet Union, American authorities promoted these donations not only as evidence of German-American friendship, but also as evidence that their humanitarian policy at the dawn of the Cold War had achieved significant cultural, political, and diplomatic goals throughout Germany.

Poe’s Last Jest: The Magazine Prison-House, Colonial Exploitation, and Revenge in “Hop-Frog”

Abstract This article looks at Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” in connection with revenge, one of the oldest and richest themes in literature. As the author has done in connection with “The Cask of Amontillado,” this article offers a generalized biographical interpretation of this 1849 story, linking it to Poe’s February 1845 essay “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” with its emphasis on “fat,” exploitive “editors and proprietors,” as well as his September 1845 “Marginalia” piece about the sorry state of the American publishing industry. Contending that the story must be read vis-à-vis not only enslavement and slave rebellion, as several critics have done, but also colonization, this article casts doubt on claims that Poe used the tale to settle scores with personal enemies or to revenge himself on the reading public. A brief coda argues that in “Hop-Frog” Poe does not simply avenge himself on those responsible both for his own exploitation as “a poor devil author” and the colonization of American literature generally. Rather, he counterbalances the gruesome, fiery climax with a celebratory compendium of many of his greatest hits through allusions to at least eleven of his writings published between 1835 and 1846.

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Мадэрнiсцкi дыскурс у прозе Уладзiмiра Караткевiча пачатку 1960-х гадоў

The article discusses and identifies the renewal of ideological and semantic content of V. Korotkevich’s creative explorations in the early 1960s as well as an artistic-aesthethic development of his talent during studies in Moscow (1958–1960, 1960–1962). The novelty and significance of the obtained results are manifested in scientific and conceptual understanding of the peculiarities of aesthetics, characteristic to the author’s artistic thinking in “The Legend of the Poor Devil and Satan’s Lawyers” and in the novel “The Rook of Despair”. The author reveals the essence of romantic, realistic and fantastic relationships in an artistic image of reality. Not only does the author define principles of using Biblical contents and images, historical facts and literary processes in various epochs but she also recommends to reread V. Korotkevich’s books and find the writer’s understanding and artistic treatment of a Belarusian. Moreover, the author discusses the functions of intellectual aesthetics in the artistic and typological structure of the image of the impoverished Rogochev nobleman Gervasiy Vylivakha and she outlines the nature of the writer’s creative experiments, which determined the intellectual discourse in the novels “Christ landed in Gorodnya” and “Black Castle Olshansky”.

Раман Нікі Ракіцінай Ганітва ў кантэксце развіцця жанру фэнтэзі ў беларускай літаратуры

The article deals with fantasy, a new genre in Belarusian literature. The origins of this genre can be found in the literature of the nineteenth century ( Nobleman Zavalnya, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories by Jan Borshchevsky). Researchers note certain elements of fantasy in the works of Vaclav Lastovsky ( Labyrinth ) and Vladimir Karatkevich ( Boat of Despair , The Legend of the Poor Devil and Satan’s Advocate ). But it is only at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century that Belarusian literature witnesses the appearance of a number of works representing the original varieties of the genre: classical, folk, mythological, technocratic, feminist and anti-fantasy. The author of the article analyzes in detail Nika Rakitina’s fantasy novel Gonitva ( Chase ) written in Russian in 2008. Nika Rakitina’s novel is characterized by the productive use of the national literary traditions and cultural codes, as well as the bold postmodern play upon these traditions and codes.

"My God, the Poor Devils": Performing Violence through Language in Herman Bang’s "Les quatre Diables"

"My God, the Poor Devils": Performing Violence through Language in Herman Bang’s "Les quatre Diables"

Divine Omnipotence and Suffering Humanity: Hawthorne's Answer to Ahab

Keynote address delivered at the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Biennial Conference, June 13, 2014, North Adams, MA From the title my talk, some you might assume that I'll be comparing Hawthorne and Melville, but I should tell you that I'm assuming most you are familiar Melville's quarrel God, as Lawrence Thompson termed it, so evident in Ahab's attempt to take revenge upon Moby Dick. Most what I have to say, therefore, will focus on Hawthorne. In Devils and Rebels: Making Hawthorne's Damned Politics, I assert that Christian pacifism, not unlike that the Quakers, serves as the foundation [Hawthorne's] politics (xvi), and my talk today expands upon the religious, as opposed to political, aspect that assertion. I'm well aware that countless critics have attempted to get a fix upon Hawthorne's religious sensibilities, including a number you in the audience, but I'm going to give it a try here myself, using Melville as a guide and Ahab as a foil. Some 175 years ago, not far from here in North Adams, Hawthorne stopped on his travels and mingled villagers from the area. In his notebook, he recorded his encounter a wretched man, who, like Ahab, had lost parts his body--one his feet maimed by an axe; also, an arm amputated two or three inches below the elbow. Hawthorne describes him visually as disagreeable figure, waning from middle-age, clad in homespun pantaloons and a dirty shirt, bare feet and a grim and grisly beard of a week's growth. (1) This actual amputee, unlike the fictional Ahab, seeks no dramatic revenge against that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms life and thought (156), to quote Ishmael. Hawthorne's dismembered old man, instead, resembles a philosophical Captain Boomer. Once a lawyer, but ruined by alcohol, he has become a smelly soap-maker, willing to sit on a stoop and genially talk about the amputation his arm. Hawthorne records, The man spoke the pain cutting the muscles, and the particular agony at one moment, while the bone was being sawed asunder; and there was a strange expression remembered agony, as he shrugged his half limb, and described the matter. When Hawthorne asks him whether he still seemed to feel the hand that had been amputated, the old man answered that he did, always (8:91). man has studied and practiced phrenology, and he talks to Hawthorne about it with a great deal sense and acuteness. He then catches Hawthorne off-guard by declaring, My study is man. I do not know your name, but there is something the hawk-eye about you too (8:92). moment is fascinating as the observer becomes the observed, and it's as if Hawthorne finds the jolt transformative, for his pity becomes informed respect. He continues, poor devil kept talking to me long after everybody else had left the stoop, giving vent to much practical philosophy and just observation on the ways men ... at last, ... he rose from the stoop, and went his way, a forlorn and miserable thing in the light the cheerful summer Sabbath morning. Yet he seems to keep his spirits up, and still preserves himself a man among men, asking nothing from them. (8:93) Such an early notebook entry, I would argue, and others he made while at North Adams in 1838, presage both the realism and compassion that is foundational to Hawthorne's best fiction. His attention to the old man and his precise description the encounter contain implicit respect. Hawthorne, course, had many flaws. He disapproved slavery, yet did not speak out against it. He admired strong women, yet insisted on separate spheres. In private correspondence, he at times made racist and sexist remarks, which have become notorious, even though they went unremarked at the time. What he acknowledged and worried about most was his perceived inability to share the political and religious passions animating his friends and neighbors. …

“My God, the Poor Devils”: Performing Violence through Language in Herman Bang’s “Les quatre Diables”

Herman Bang's novella quatre (1890,1899) (3) ends on a provocative note: during a trapeze routine performed by the four-member acrobatic troupe, Les quatre Diables (The Four Devils), Aimee--one of the four acrobats--unhooks her partner's (Fritz's) swing and watches him plummet to his death onstage, only to jump to her own death beside him moments later. Silence is followed by screams as the audience comes to realize that this was not part of the act. One might think that such a catastrophic spectacle would be the most opportune moment to conclude the novella, but instead of ending here, the narrative immediately shifts to an exterior view of the theater house, where two gentlemen discuss 'Begivenheden' [the incident]: Den ene af dem slog med Stokken ned i Brostenene: Naa, sagde han: Mon dieu, les pauvres diables. Og lidt efter begyndte de at nynne igen med Ojnene ud mod den myldrende Maengde: Amour, amour, oh, bel oiseau, chante, chante, chante toujours. De solvknappede Stokke lyste. Unge Maend slentrede frem i lange Kapper.... Amour, amour, oh, bel oiseau, chante, chante, chante toujours. var netop den Aften meget livligt paa Markedet. (Bang 1899, 234) (4) One of them struck his walking stick against the cobblestones. Well, he said. Mon dieu, les pauvres diables. And shortly after, they began to hum again while looking out toward the teeming crowd: Amour, amour, oh, bel oiseau, chante, chante, chante toujours. The silver-headed walking sucks glittered. Young men strolled out in long cloaks.... Amour, amour, oh, bel oiseau, chante, chante, chante toujours. That particular evening it was quite lively in the market.) Such a conclusion is disconcerting for two reasons. First, Aimee and Fritz's song (Amour, amour ...) intrudes upon and disrupts the textual layout of the novella's finale. This intrusion is surprising because in the beginning of quatre Diables, the same song appears as the synesthetic representation of Aimee's and Fritz's onstage performances. However, as the story progresses, the song begins to bleed into offstage moments, taking possession not only of the main characters but also of innocent bystanders who unknowingly begin to hum its tune even after Aimee and Fritz have died. Moreover, as the song interjects more frequently, it ends up increasingly defacing or disfiguring the textual layout of the unfolding narrative. The accelerating interjections of this song, the Kaerlighedsvals (love waltz), into the text, interpolates the narrative tempo and speeds it up, creating the literary equivalent of a musical crescendo as the novella approaches its own end. With the produced by the accelerating interpolations, the song seemingly attains symbolic portent as a diabolical force governing the narrative. Put another way, the song no longer functions as an accompaniment to the narrative, but as an omniscient conductor, orchestrating the characters' demise and punctuating the last lines of the novella with its crescendo effect, thereby authorizing itself as the last to speak. This effectively produces what Bang's contemporary Ford Madox Ford called a progression d'effet--a term he used to denote the gradual buildup of tension by which the story can be carried forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity (Parkes 2011, 100). Second, there is the unexpected intrusion of two unnamed gentlemen. By switching scenes from the theater to the anti-climactic aftermath of two anonymous men chatting outside, Bang denies his readers the sensational affect of literary rubbernecking. In this way, the conclusion becomes unsettling because there are two competing finales--the characters' horrific demise onstage versus the narrative's blithe finale offstage: Der var netop den Aften meget livligt paa Markedet [That particular evening it was quite lively in the market]. …

The theatre career of Thomas Arne

Contents Acknowledgements Preface Musical Examples Polemical Introduction Chapter 1: Young Thomas Augustine Arne Chapter 2: Drury Lane 1735-40 Chapter 3: From Cliveden to Dublin Chapter 4: Young Charles Burney Chapter 5: Drury Lane 1744-50 Chapter 6: Divisions and Difficulties Chapter 7: Dublin Encore Chapter 8: The Brent or, English Syren Chapter 9: Harmony in an Uproar Chapter 10: Arne's Orbit Chapter 11: The Great Stratford Jubilee Chapter 12: Arne's Last Operas Chapter 13: Poor Devil of a Crotchet Monger Chapter 14: Decline and Death Appendix 1: Letters between Arne and Garrick Appendix 2: Arne's Will Bibliography

The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe

This is the first book in many years to call back to life the correctors of Renaissance Europe. Poor devils of letters, these men (and a few women) marked up copy, divided books into chapters and composed titles for them, and compiled tables of contents before texts went through the press, and read the proofs and corrected them at the other end of the process. Passionately committed to correct and effective usage, they invented the semi-colon and the proof-readers' symbols that are still in use. Those with the greatest reputation for literary taste and skill worked intensively with authors, creating a collaborative form of writing that still persists, in old-fashioned publishing houses at least. To read their letters to authors, to follow their pens as they mark up preserved copy and proofs, and to examine the archival and literary sources that give information about their lives is to see a lost literary world, humble but vital, come back to flickering life.

The Popol Vuh and the Book of Chan K’in

Should the news media predict the end of the world within two or three months, I feel that most of us -I, at least- would laugh, or sigh, and perhaps wonder what kind of mentality it takes to make some poor devil believe he suddenly became clairvoyant or established supernatural contact with the Omniscient, or more likely, the extremes to which some people will go just to see their names in print. Should such a prediction be followed by the name of a renouned astronomer or geophysicist, however, I fear that our indulgent amusement would come to an abrupt end. Whether we would accept the alleged fact or not, we would realize that responsible scholar would not make such a statement without having some very good reasons - right or wrong- for doing so.

“Authorial Poverty” and Transformations in Readership in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Case of Nicolas-Joseph-Florent Gilbert

Rebuking Voltaire in a chapter called Misere des auteurs from the Tableau de Paris for bitterly mocking, in Le Pauvre diable, indigent writers, Louis-Sebastien Mercier articulates a stark shift in eighteenth-century representations of poverty. (1) The pitiless images in Voltaire's 1760 lampoon of a hapless litterateur chasing fame and fortune drew on a well-established poete crotte tradition that conceived the of the writer to be the manifestation of a certain cultural order. Pursuing a renown and reward that was far beyond his capacities to achieve, the pauvre diable, like his forebears in the seventeenth-century satires of Mathurin Regnier and Antoine Furetiere, ultimately deserved misfortunes that accurately measured an inability to assess his own talents and to rein in his outsized and incongruous ambitions. The pauvre diable's thus put him in his place, that of a porter, not a great man of letters. By contrast, Mercier's critique of the poor devil motif advances an entirely different view by which poverty, as a title of virtue, affirms moral qualities such as disinterest and tireless commitment. Far from delegitimizing a writer's grandiose ambitions as these confront a world indifferent to them, justifies the author, guaranteeing his or her work as the product of a superior character, and therefore as an effective, reliable source of truth and moral guidance. (2) Highlighting Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notorious embrace of personal austerity earned him a reputation as a latter-day Diogenes, Mercier roots his views in ancient philosophical traditions linking the pursuit of truth with deprivation, as well as in Christian associations of and virtue. (3) This essay, however, explores a more circumscribed framework for an eighteenth-century revaluation of authorial which, by the 1834 triumph of Alfred de Vigny's play Chatterton and its lavish dramatization of the anguish and suicide of a distressed poet, had established the wide decipherability of a trope communicating, via images of hardship, the credibility and profundity of a writer. This framework was defined by evolving media environments characterized at one level by the heatedness of the polemics nurtured within them. It is, in fact, difficult to find evocations of from the period that are not sharply inflected by aggressive dynamics of attack and parry. Specifically, the poverty of eighteenth-century writers was most often conceived through the prism of the polemics that surrounded the philosophes and their program for social and political reform, as the references to both Voltaire and Mercier attest. (4) Yet the newly exalted conception of owed not just to the particular spin that this eighteenth-century context gave to it but, more significantly, to its durability as the Enlightenment-era debates faded and carne to be associated with another, larger context, that of the expansion and, to cite Honore de Balzac, commercial transformation of the cultural sphere. (5) It is in this latter evolution that the Voltairean variant ultimately loses its currency, while the Mercier model acquires, in turn, an expanded bearing, reflecting not just local struggles over control of the institutions of eighteenth-century intellectual life but an overarching cultural and sociological crisis, symptomized by distorted markets that failed to reward important work and meritorious writers while heaping riches, praise, and attention on second-tier hacks and their crowd-pleasing schlock. Moreover, with its characteristic gravity, Chatterton marks the ascendency of a key aspect of the transformation, namely a rejection of the rhetoricity that, in its classic formulations, had always infused authorial with its meanings. Instead, the phenomenon's lived, objective relevance is affirmed. Indeed, Mercier's indignation especially targeted Voltaire's insensitivity to the actual suffering that lay behind what the latter mocked; thus rather than make fun of them, Voltaire would have done better to help [indigent authors] with a part of his own fortune. …

Portrait of the Artist as Social Symptom: Viral Affect and Mass Culture in The Day of The Locust

In a historical moment when anything from a blog to a revolution can go viral, we might pause to ask, When did this once troubling biological term come to signify something positive? To contextualize these times of technopolitical optimism, it is worth returning to a certain pessimism about emergent media attending the social, political, and aesthetic concerns of the United States in the 1930s. A decade initiated by the first electronmicroscopic image of viruses seemed similarly destined to chart the implications of its metaphorical menace. On one level, the economic stagnation of the Great Depression counterintuitively fostered a new focus on speed, not only regarding literally accelerated transportation and communication but also as a cultural ethos yieldingboth anxiety and anticipation (Irr 1998, 46-49). Similarly, this era's interest in mass culture was underwritten by a logic of contagion that manifested in the equal and opposite urgency to record and preserve fading folkways (Retman 2011). On the eve of European fascism, Marxian and psychoanalytic preoccupations with group psychology centered on how common feeling comes to take on the speed, potency, and inhuman qualities of the mob, and how mobs might lead to revolutions of the Left or Right. In other words, the 1930s seemed centrally concerned with the question of how collective affect goes viral. These discourses appear to synergistically collide in the American literary author Nathanael last novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), with its representation of the monstrous social worlds produced by Southern California and the early Hollywood cinema industry. The novel's final scene of a riot at a movie premiere is the inevitable culmination, the final fatal symptom, of what W. H. Auden called West's disease, the social malaise of emotional cripples in a democratic and mechanized society (1971, 121, 123). I will argue, however, that disease might not just refer to Auden's cultural lumpenbourgeoisie but also must be seen as a disease of the artist himself; as an ostensibly resistant producer in consumer capitalism, the artist nonetheless appears as an ironic site for viral infection. The Day of the Locust traces a few months in the life of Tod Hackett, a Yale-trained painter recruited to do Hollywood set design. In his spare he labors on his epic canvas The Burning of Los Angeles, meant to represent the rage of those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence (West 1962, 184). Tod becomes obsessed with his neighbors, whom he uses as subject sketches for his masterwork. They include Faye Greener, a gorgeous and vapid seventeenyear-old aspiring starlet; her father, Harry Greener, a culturally fading and literally dying vaudevillian clown; and Homer Simpson, an Iowan suffering from consumption who has come to Los Angeles for his health and does little else than express having time on his hands by means of a tic in his seemingly autonomous hands. In early sketches for Tod's composition, a naked Faye is at the center of the canvas as the object of mob rage. As Tod's observations of LAs dream dump fail to materialize as his portrayal of the revolutionary affect of a nation, he becomes obsessed with increasingly rapacious fantasies about Faye. In a final riot scene at a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard, seemingly sparked by Homer's finally rising to action in assaulting a child, Tod's leg is broken as he attempts to escape while also trying to save girls from being molested in the mob's abandon. Tod's attempts fail under the force of the mob, but on a conceptual level, it is also too late for him to bridge the difference between his fantasy and reality. In pain and pinned in place, he escapes by imagining that he is sketching the final details of his painting: Faye is no longer the central object and focus of the mob's rage but merely another participant in the foreground. …

Chapter 27 fromThe Jungle

Chapter 27 from The Jungle Upton Sinclair (bio) Poor Jurgis was now an outcast and a tramp once more. He was crippled—he was as literally crippled as any wild animal which has lost its claws, or been torn out of its shell. He had been shorn, at one cut, of all those mysterious weapons whereby he had been able to make a living easily and to escape the consequences of his actions. He could no longer command a job when he wanted it; he could no longer steal with impunity—he must take his chances with the common herd. Nay worse, he dared not mingle with the herd—he must hide himself, for he was one marked out for destruction. His old companions would betray him, for the sake of the influence they would gain thereby; and he would be made to suffer, not merely for the offense he had committed, but for others which would be laid at his door, just as had been done for some poor devil on the occasion of that assault upon the “country customer” by him and Duane. And also he labored under another handicap now. He had acquired new standards of living, which were not easily to be altered. When he had been out of work before, he had been content if he could sleep in a doorway or under a truck out of the rain, and if he could get fifteen cents a day for saloon lunches. But now he desired all sorts of other things, and suffered because he had to do without them. He must have a drink now and then, a drink for its own sake, and apart from the food that came with it. The craving for it was strong enough to master every other consideration—he would have it, though it were his last nickel and he had to starve the balance of the day in consequence. Jurgis became once more a besieger of factory gates. But never since he had been in Chicago had he stood less chance [End Page 1] of getting a job than just then. For one thing, there was the economic crisis, the million or two of men who had been out of work in the spring and summer, and were not yet all back, by any means. And then there was the strike, with seventy thousand men and women all over the country idle for a couple of months—twenty thousand in Chicago, and many of them now seeking work throughout the city. It did not remedy matters that a few days later the strike was given up and about half the strikers went back to work; for every one taken on, there was a “scab” who gave up and fled. The ten or fifteen thousand “green” Negroes, foreigners, and criminals were now being turned loose to shift for themselves. Everywhere Jurgis went he kept meeting them, and he was in an agony of fear lest some one of them should know that he was “wanted.” He would have left Chicago, only by the time he had realized his danger he was almost penniless; and it would be better to go to jail than to be caught out in the country in the winter time. At the end of about ten days Jurgis had only a few pennies left; and he had not yet found a job—not even a day’s work at anything, not a chance to carry a satchel. Once again, as when he had come out of the hospital, he was bound hand and foot, and facing the grisly phantom of starvation. Raw, naked terror possessed him, a maddening passion that would never leave him, and that wore him down more quickly than the actual want of food. He was going to die of hunger! The fiend reached out its scaly arms for him—it touched him, its breath came into his face; and he would cry out for the awfulness of it, he would wake up in the night, shuddering, and bathed in perspiration, and start up and flee. He would walk, begging for work, until he was exhausted; he could not remain still—he...

Involuntary Administration of Narcoanalysis, Polygraph Tests and BEAP Test Unconstitutional: Why?

Stephen, Sir James once stated that: “It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing red pepper in a poor devil’s eye than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence.” In this paper I intend to collect the reasons why the Indian Supreme Court banned the involuntary administration of three tests namely Narcoanalysis, Polygraph test and BEAP test in the latest case of Smt Selvi v. State of Karnataka. It is done by using cases from US and role of American Courts. It also investigates Indian precedents and Constitution of India for the purpose of Doctrine Self-Incrimination. It also talks about the scientific reliability of these tests. It also examines the condition of Indian investigative agency before the judgements along with role of media as media shows dangerous clippings of tests on national television. These tests made Indian investigation agencies lazy which resulted in shortcuts.Among other considerations, this article examines the delicate question about the Miranda Warning in Indian Context.

Editing the Rubáiyát : Two Case Studies and a Prospectus

1. little anonymous brown-paper-covered pamphlet The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings of Edward FitzGerald is an enjoyably preposterous example of Edwardian bookmaking--if the latter epithet may be applied to an American product. It was in New York, by Page, and Company, in seven volumes, the first in 1902 and the last in 1903; though published is not quite the right word for an edition which, we are told on a half-title page, consists of twenty-five sets on Japanese paper, one hundred sets on hand-made paper, and two hundred and fifty sets on a specially made paper, all numbered and signed. The copy in the Sheffield University Library is number 22 (of the two hundred and fifty); the number and are in red ink, and the only off note is that the signature is not that of a person: it just reads Doubleday, Page & Company. I doubt that Frank the head of the firm, inscribed all, or indeed any, of the 375 copies. Some poor devil of a clerk did it, even though he might have preferred not to. (1) Suppose we make the humane assumption that the publisher was not wholly mercenary, and that not all the buyers were book-snobs; how should we read the seven volumes of the Variorum and Definitive Edition (henceforward the VD nor do its contents and method of arrangement, attributed on the title page to George Bentham, help to resolve the question of what its first readers thought they were getting. FitzGerald's major publications, in chronological order, were as follows: Euphranor (1851); Polonius (1852); Six Dramas of Calderon (1853); Salaman and Absal (1856); Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859); The Mighty Magician and Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of: two plays translated from Calderon (1865); Agamemnon (1869). Here is the order of texts in the VD Volume II: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (2nd ed. …

Suicide in the Fiction of Georges Bernanos and Stefan Zweig: The Death of Two Female Adolescents

The Encounter of Georges Bernanos and Stefan Zweig The most voluntary death is finest. Life depends upon pleasure of others; death upon our own.--Montaigne 167 Countless superlatives have been used to describe literary accomplishments of two European writers of same generation: French Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), and Austrian Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). Both men died at age of 60. Bernanos succumbed to cancer of liver in a Paris hospital in 1948; Zweig committed suicide with his second wife, Lotte Altmann, in Petropolis, Brazil, in 1942. No lesser an authority than Andre Malraux called Bernanos the greatest novelist of his time (9), (1) while Zweig is said to have been, in his lifetime, the most widely translated writer of works of fiction, biography, and essays in world (Sonnenfeld xi) (2). Little is known about how well, if at all, they knew one another's works. Bernanos is likely to have read some of Zweig's writings because he states in an article in March 1942, shortly after Zweig's death, that he had esteem for Mr. Zweig's talent Chemin de la Croix-des-Ames 344). Stefan Zweig, great Francophile and fluent in French himself, counted Valery, Romain Rolland, Andre Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, and Jean-Richard Bloch among his old and cherished friends (The World of Yesterday 379); there is, however, no documentation to show that Zweig had read any of Bernanos's works. What, therefore, is link between these two very different writers--one being a Catholic monarchist, other a nonpracticing Jew--who hardly knew each other? We do know that Bernanos and Zweig had a single yet crucial meeting in Brazil, their chosen country of exile, in late 1941, only weeks before Zweig's death on February 22, 1942. (3) Zweig had asked a mutual friend, Geraldo Franca de Lima, to take to Bernanos's hacienda in Barbacena. Later, de Lima recalled visit: Never have I seen Bernanos receive anyone with such affection and fraternity.... Stephan [sic] Zweig was depressed, sad, demoralized, without hope, full of dark thoughts. Bernanos spoke to with infinite gentleness, trying to restore hope in him (Jean-Loup Bernanos 223). De Lima also remembered that Bernanos had then invited Zweig to stay with for a few days and had offered Zweig his collaboration in doing their share, as artists, to combat Nazism: [Bernanos] proposed that they unite their efforts to denounce and to condemn, in an appeal to universal consciousness, Hitler's barbarity against Jews, which he, Bernanos, called a crime against (Jean-Loup Bernanos 223). However, Zweig did not accept, went back to Petropolis and chose to end his life with his wife. Upon receiving news, Bernanos wrote in a letter: Poor devils! I hope that they have now been shown into green pastures (Combat pour la liberte 446). Furthermore, French author wrote an article on Stefan Zweig's suicide (Le suicide de Stefan Zweig) which appeared on March 6, 1942, in O Jornal Chemin 343-45). Without lessening his esteem for Austrian as a writer or condemning outright his desperate act, Bernanos nevertheless dismissed Zweig's suicide as an act of deception by which Zweig had taken away all hope from his readers. Thus, in Bernanos's eyes, suicide, committed by a well-respected and idolized public man, one who has a responsibility, if not a duty, toward those drawing motivation and hope from his work, becomes unforgivable in its inevitable provocation of despair and hopelessness among his followers: humanity cannot see, without anguish, reduction of number of anonymous, obscure people who, having never known honours or benefits of glory, refuse to consent to injustice, live on their only possession that they have left: humble and ardent hope. And he added: Whoever touches upon this sacred possession, whoever might fritter away one of its fragments, disarms consciousness of world, and deprives poor wretches Chemin 343-44). …

Of ethically compromising positions and blatant lies about ′truth serum′

Byline: A. Kala When I was eleven years old, I went along with a friend to convey a message to his uncle who worked in a police station. In the courtyard, police were beating a hard-core pickpocket who already had enough beating marks on his body. A very old and thin looking policeman who was going off duty, stopped on seeing this, went to the senior in the beating team and requested with folded hands, Huzoor, if you permit, can I also give him a slap? Permission was given with a nod and the slap delivered. I remembered the incident some months back while watching news on TV, which was showing narcoanalysis being performed on scamster Telgi. The man was lying down, semi-sedated, mumbling some words when prodded by light slaps on the cheeks by the psychologist who was holding a questionnaire. There were other people around, all in white coats. The TV clip itself went on for 20 minutes. The whole procedure must have lasted much longer. The mental health professional in the interrogating team reminded me of the old policeman. Both had no logical or scientific reason to do what they did. And it was certainly unethical to make it degrading by doing it on television. Remember, even if Saddam's death sentence was right, his death video was not and it shocked the conscience of the world. Sometimes, when you talk of ethics in such contexts, the question is asked, Did he think of ethics while killing innocent people? Answer to that is, that this is the difference between him and the civilized society. Sir James Stephen stated in 1883, referring to a practice of police officers in India, is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade red pepper into a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence.[sup] [1] Police have been plagued with a serious and long-standing image problem and have been constantly exhorted by everybody to be more scientific in their interrogation. They seem to have taken this too literally and have come up with this magical way to find truth, which, with its paraphernalia of syringes, drugs and white coats looks every bit scientific. In their over-enthusiasm, they forgot to verify reliability and scientific validity of the method, having been apparently overawed by its name 'truth serum'. Had they enquired, they would have found that it often gives wrong and misleading results and on ethical grounds it is as slippery as, well, rubbing red pepper into poor devil's eyes. While police seem to have a reason to be doing it, why are mental health professionals, who should know better, conniving? The answer, I suspect is, narcissism. Internationally, interest of security agencies in narcoanalysis is quite old, but not sustained. Scientific evidence against it as a method to reach truth has been consistent. It has had a somewhat better lease as a method to treat neurotic patients by exploiting their suggestibility and as a method of emotional catharsis. The suggestibility gets heightened under the effect of sodium pentothal but this can lead to false results when the method is used for detection of objective truth. While in neurotics, it is the perceived truth, which is important from patients' point of view even if it is objectively false, in a criminal investigation it can give wrong and confusing results. Even in neurotic patients, the method ceased to be used in the seventies because of lack of evidence that it was useful. Inbau,[sup] [2] the then professor of law at Northwestern University who had had considerable experience in observing or participating in 'truth serum' tests, is of the opinion that such tests are occasionally effective on persons who, if they had been properly interrogated, would have disclosed the truth anyway. The person who is determined to lie will usually be able to continue the deception even under the effects of the drug. On the other hand, the person who is likely to confess will probably do so as the result of skillful police interrogation and it will not be necessary to use drugs. …

Poor Devils

Science NewsVolume 169, Issue 5 p. 67-67 This Week Poor devils: Critter's fights transmit cancer Carolyn Gramling, Carolyn GramlingSearch for more papers by this author Carolyn Gramling, Carolyn GramlingSearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 September 2009 https://doi.org/10.2307/3982409AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume169, Issue54 February 2006Pages 67-67 RelatedInformation