Principal Characters Research Articles

Formal analysis and principal architectural character of Caunus Theater

Formal analysis and principal architectural character of Caunus Theater

Morphological characterization and genetic diversity analysis of interspecific hybrids of sugarcane

Interspecific hybrid derivatives involving Saccharum spontaneum, S. robustum and S. barberi were morphologically characterized with twenty two qualitative and six agronomic traits. Principal component analysis (PCA) of qualitative traits revealed that first nine principal components with eigen value > 1 accounted for a cumulative variance of 62.40%. The traits viz., ligule shape, auricle type, internode shape and its alignment, cane thickness, dewlap color, leaf blade width and curvature, leaf sheath hairiness, bud cushion and bud groove were identified as principal discriminatory characters which will be useful in preliminary screening and identification of interspecific hybrids. Cluster analysis of qualitative traits grouped hybrids into seven clusters. Maximum inter cluster distance was between cluster IV and VI followed by cluster I and III, III and VII and between VI and VII. Metroglyph analysis of agronomic traits categorized hybrids into ten groups. Groups III, IV, V, VIII and X with highest mean index scores were identified as genetically most distant. Thirty eight superior interspecific hybrids with high index score for agronomic traits (from metroglyph analysis) and wider inter cluster distance were identified as prebreeding stocks and utilized in further backcross programmes. BC1 progenies of SBH 12–45 x Co 0303 and SRH 12–275 x Co 0240 were significantly superior for single cane weight and brix %. Elite recombinants from back crosses SSH 12–158 x Co 0209, SSH 12–409 x Co 09014 and SRH 12–119 x Co 94008 surpassed commercial check for cane yield and were on par for quality.

Wayang Kulit Kelantan: A Study of Characterization and Puppets

This paper examines the principal characters of the Malay versions ( Hikayat Seri Rama and Hikayat Maharaja Wana ) of the Hindu epic Ramayana , which provides the source material for the Malaysian shadow play, wayang kulit kelantan . The characters are organized into several categories according to whether they are gods, human beings, demons, apes, or lesser creatures. Following that, the paper makes an analysis of eleven characters selected from the categories mentioned, as well as puppets representing them, through the Indonesian-Malay halus-kasar (refined-coarse) theory of aesthetics. Although important and appropriate to proper appreciation of Indonesian and Malay arts forms, the theory has not previously been applied to wayang kulit kelantan .

Case Study #5: Bartleby, the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville

“Bartleby” is the name of the principal character in Herman Melville’s short story about the relationship between a manager and an employee. Bartleby is the employee. His job is to be a scrivener, or a copyist.The setting is a small law firm on Wall Street a century and a half ago — long before computers and photocopy machines, or even typewriters and carbon paper. A scrivener’s job was to copy a document clearly and accurately using the information technology of the day: paper, a bottle of ink, and a sharpened quill.You’ll find that the office technology may be different now than it was in Bartleby’s time, but people are much the same as ever. As you read this story, ask yourself what kind of employee Bartleby is. What kind of boss does the attorney make? Does the story have to end the way it does?

Tyranny and Tragedy: Paradigms of Surveillance in Theodor Storm’s Aquis submersus and Carsten Curator

Theodor Storm’s Novellen Aquis submersus (1876) and Carsten Curator (1878) stand out from other nineteenth-century representations of surveillance because of their intensity. Surveillance dominates the relationships between the principal characters, provides the driving force in the narrative action, and constitutes an essential mode of metaphorical expression. Aquis submersus documents an abuse of power: surveillance, in the control of correspondence and the use of informants, is the tool of a corrupt and petty aristocracy. Here, surveillance is depicted as a perverse evil, a transgression of natural justice that stands in the way of love. The text’s ending modifies this critique, however: Katharina’s child drowns as the lovers embrace, a fact that is interpreted and recorded in a painting as paternal negligence, making surveillance a moral duty that impedes the freedom of the observer as well as the observed. Carsten Curator explores surveillance failures in different ways. Carsten’s identity derives from guardianship, and it is his son’s forays outside the paternal field of vision that lead eventually to Heinrich’s death. Yet Carsten’s morality of surveillance is exposed as ideological and emotional self-control: a picture of Carsten’s father and Heinrich’s resemblance to his mother determine Carsten’s actions, functioning as absent observers whose imaginary surveillance Carsten both fears and craves.

Star Trek at 50, or, Star Trek beyond Star Trek

Star Trek Beyond (Lin US 2016) features (yet again) the apparent destruction of the USS Enterprise, this time at the hands of a swarm of tiny insect-like metallic drones ploughing through its hull. It is a familiar scene. The Enterprise is beaten within an inch of its life in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer US 1982) - costing Spock (Leonard Nimoy) his life in the process - and is then destroyed for real in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy US 1984). A new Enterprise-B is practically totalled on its maiden voyage in Star Trek: Generations (Carson US 1994), a film that ends with The Next Generations (US 1987-94) beloved Enterprise-D crashing into a planet and being permanently scuttled (and in the meantime drops a bridge on Captain Kirk (William Shatner)). By that point we had already seen the explosive end of the Enterprise-C, too, in a famous episode ('Yesterday's Enterprise' (19 Feb 1990)) whose time-travel mechanics innovated a way to kill off Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) a second time. The Enterprise-E manages to survive the TNG film franchise, but Data (Brent Spiner) does not. Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) more or less dies at the end of Deep Space Nine (US 1993-9), a series that had already killed off series regular Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) while plunging the once-peaceful, once-utopian Federation into a cataclysmic, brutal war with the authoritarian Dominion. Voyager (US 1995-2001) killed off all of its principal characters multiple times in alternate timelines and other dimensions, especially Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) - and on at least two separate occasions ('Deadlock' (18 Mar 1996) and 'Course: Oblivion' (3 Mar 1999)) pseudoscientifically generated exact duplicates of the entire USS Voyager ship and crew specifically for the purpose of killing them all by the end of the episode. And the course of the prequel series Enterprise (US 2001-5) kills not just series regular Chief Engineer 'Trip' Tucker (Connor Trineer), but millions of citizens of 2153-era Florida to boot.After Enterprise-the-series died (and with it the entire TNG-era production apparatus of Star Trek) the whole Prime Universe did - abandoned to the also-ran status of tie-in novels, comics and games, while the film property moved on to a 'reboot' timeline with younger versions of The Original Series (US 1966-9) actors. The new film universe begins by killing off the Romulus-Remus double planetary system before killing Kirk's (Chris Pine) parents, Kirk himself (he got better), Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) (he did not), a huge portion of the population of 2259 San Francisco, and, perhaps most famously and most gratuitously, all but a tiny sliver of the entire Vulcan race. For long-time fans of the Star Trek franchise - who already had to accommodate themselves once to the death of their beloved twenty-fourth century with the end of VOY and the move to prequel series in ENT - the rebooting of the entire Trek universe into the Abramsverse felt like a death on multiple levels: not simply the now-inescapable loss of the original actors portraying those roles (most strongly tokened by the death of Leonard Nimoy early in Star Trek Beyond 's preproduction, and then echoed by the death of the actor playing the new Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) in a freak accident shortly before the film's release),1 not simply the obsolescing of the decades of characters and stories set during the original timeline, and not simply (let's just say it) by what Star Trek turning 50 says about how old some of us seem to be getting, but also the death of the ethos of optimistic, utopian futurity that had driven creative works set in the Star Trek universe since its inception in 1966.The new Star Trek universe - crafted by J.J. Abrams, who wore his lack of interest in the original Star Trek as a badge of honour during publicity for Star Trek (US 2009) - was something else entirely. Trek only in name: Roddenberry's utopia was replaced by a paranoid and militaristic Federation, scarred and traumatised by loss, seeing space as a site of horror, threat and murder rather than wonder. …

Didymodon hengduanensis (Bryophyta, Pottiaceae), a new species from the Hengduan Mountains, Southwestern China

Didymodon hengduanensis is described as a new species from the Hengduan Mountains in the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan, China. It is characterized mainly by its lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate and appressed-incurved leaves when dry, acute leaf apices, recurved to revolute margins, the yellowish color in KOH, percurrent to subpercurrent costa, and marginal basal cells forming a distinctly differentiated area of smooth and transversely thick-walled cells. Drawings and light microscope photographs of the new species are provided. The principal characters that separate it from the most similar species are discussed.

“Obedience doth not well in parts”: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Atlantic Archipelago

ABSTRACTBy considering Shakespeare’s Henry V through an archipelagic comparison with Jonson’s subsequent The Irish Masque at Court, this essay participates in the recent reconsideration of English literature’s early modern inter-island context. Considering Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s different reflections on Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic archipelago provides access to changing early seventeenth-century differences in English, metropolitan attitudes toward Ireland. While there has been more discussion of English literature understood archipelagically over the last two decades, including some consideration of Shakespeare and Jonson in inter-island contexts, there has been little reference to this slim text by Ben Jonson. In it, Jonson takes up the question of Ireland with all the playfully cruel benefit of hindsight not available when his rival, Shakespeare, wrote Henry V, his play that most famously and directly addresses Irish geopolitics within a new, emerging inter-island kingdom. Jonson’s later masque, with its four principal characters, offers a re-reading of Shakespeare’s earlier Four Captains scene, particularly of the role of MacMorris.

Two new species of the genus Habrobathynella Schminke, 1973 (Syncarida, Parabathynellidae) from the southwestern peninsular India.

The genus Habrobathynella Schminke, 1973, comprises 14 species: two from Madagascar and 12 from the peninsular India. Two more new hyporheic species of this genus, viz. H. muvattupuzha n. sp. and H. adishankara n. sp., from the southwestern peninsular India, are described and illustrated, and their position in the genus is discussed. Both new species are more closely related to each other than to their hitherto known congeners. H. muvattupuzha n. sp. has a unique combination of characters: male Th VIII small in size, with protopod distinctly expanded latero-externally, and basipod balloon-shaped; uropodal sympod with inhomonomous row of five spines, with penultimate spine longer and thicker than others, and ultimate spine same as proximal spines; paragnaths with minaret-like smooth coupler and short lateral lobes; fifth antennular segment with only two long aesthetascs; and first maxillary segment with two setae. H. adishankara n. sp. is distinct from its congeners in having a unique set of characters: uropodal sympod with inhomonomous row of six spines, with penultimate and ultimate spines as in the preceding species; paragnaths with thumb-like, smooth coupler and small lateral lobes; first antennary segment nearly as long as the second one; fifth antennular segment with three long aesthetascs; and first maxillary segment with one seta. The principal morphological characters and their states among the Habrobathynella species, with special reference to the new species, are briefly discussed. Also, brief notes on the ecology and biogeography are given, as is an updated key to Habrobathynella species.

Business Suit, Briefcase, and Handkerchief: The Material Culture of Retro Masculinity in <em>The Intern</em>

Business Suit, Briefcase, and Handkerchief: The Material Culture of Retro Masculinity in <em>The Intern</em>

Dynamical spacetime symmetry

According to the Coleman-Mandula theorem, any gauge theory of gravity combined with an internal symmetry based on a Lie group must take the form of a direct product in order to be consistent with basic assumptions of quantum field theory. However, we show that an alternative gauging of a simple group can lead dynamically to a spacetime with compact internal symmetry. The biconformal gauging of the conformal symmetry of n-dim Euclidean space doubles the dimension to give a symplectic manifold. Examining one of the Lagrangian submanifolds in the flat case, we find that in addition to the expected SO(n) connection and curvature, the solder form necessarily becomes Lorentzian. General coordinate invariance gives rise to an SO(n-1,1) connection on the spacetime. The principal fiber bundle character of the original SO(n) guarantees that the two symmetries enter as a direct product, in agreement with the Coleman-Mandula theorem.

Cylindric partitions, characters and the Andrews–Gordon–Bressoud identities

We study the Andrews–Gordon–Bressoud (AGB) generalisations of the Rogers–Ramanujan q-series identities in the context of cylindric partitions. We recall the definition of r-cylindric partitions, and provide a simple proof of Borodin’s product expression for their generating functions, that can be regarded as a limiting case of an unpublished proof by Krattenthaler. We also recall the relationships between the r-cylindric partition generating functions, the principal characters of algebras, the minimal model characters of algebras, and the r-string abaci generating functions, providing simple proofs for each. We then set r = 2, and use two-cylindric partitions to re-derive the AGB identities as follows. Firstly, we use Borodin’s product expression for the generating functions of the two-cylindric partitions with infinitely long parts, to obtain the product sides of the AGB identities, times a factor , which is the generating function of ordinary partitions. Next, we obtain a bijection from the two-cylindric partitions, via two-string abaci, into decorated versions of Bressoud’s restricted lattice paths. Extending Bressoud’s method of transforming between restricted paths that obey different restrictions, we obtain sum expressions with manifestly non-negative coefficients for the generating functions of the two-cylindric partitions which contains a factor . Equating the product and sum expressions of the same two-cylindric partitions, and canceling a factor of on each side, we obtain the AGB identities.

En spionsag i 1930rnes København

Niels Erik Rosenfeldt & Julie Birkedal Riisbro: Espionage in Copenhagen in the 1930s
 Based on comprehensive source material from Denmark, Germany and the UK in particular, this article sheds new light on a major spy case which was disclosed in 1935 in Copenhagen. The police got on the track of the case in mid-February of that year, when one of the ringleaders, the American communist George Mink, assaulted a young Danish woman in his flat at Elbagade 14 on Amager, where the spies had one of their main bases. In the weeks that followed, a number of foreigners and Danes suspected of involvement in communist espionage on Danish soil but largely directed at Nazi Germany were arrested. Most of them though were released a few months later. However, in July 1935, George Mink and his closest accomplice, the Soviet military intelligence service’s ‘illegal resident’ in Copenhagen, Aleksandr Ulanovskij, otherwise known as Nicholas Sherman, were sentenced by the High Court to a prison term of 18 months, first and foremost for espionage conducted on behalf of a foreign power. The article starts with a brief description of the various and not always fully reliable versions of the story which have previously been in circulation, and then presents the picture that now begins to emerge of what initially happened that February. To further clarify the spy affair, the backgrounds of the principal characters are described. This raises the question: How much was really known at the time? In other words: What became public knowledge based on the more or less rumour-like information which made it into the newspaper columns? And how much concrete information did the Danish authorities manage to gather back then about the identities and activities of the agents? The following sections take stock of how much we know today about the breadth and fields of contact of the espionage affair. They look, among other things, at the connections to Soviet espionage in Finland, France, the UK and the United States. However, on the basis of a previously unused source, special attention is given to the contacts with and the reaction in the key country Germany. Finally, it is pointed out how the Danish police – without knowing whom they had got hold of – in fact detained three leading representatives of the Soviet military intelligence service in addition to the convicted persons. All three, whom the police only knew by their cover names, had been or were still ‘illegal residents’ in Germany. The police action therefore caused considerable consternation in Moscow, and the matter was quickly brought to Stalin’s attention. Shortly afterwards, the head of the Soviet military intelligence service, Jan Berzin, was dismissed from his post as a direct result of the affair in Denmark. All this only became known more than half a century later, but serves to underline the international scope of the Copenhagen spy affair.

Il folle, l'androgino e l'ibrido: elementi grotteschi e carnevaleschi ne L'Incal di Jodorowsky e Moebius

The purpose of this study is to identify, by means of an analysis based on Bachtin’s works, the grotesque and carnivalesque elements of the popular comic culture in Jodorowsky and Moebius The Incal, in order to fully understand the message it is trying to convey. The analysis is primarily focused on three principal characters (grotesque figures par excellence) to establish a comparison between The Incal’s world and the Medieval carnival. In order to demonstrate Bachtin’s theory of ‘the dual body’ as “growth and immortality of the human rac”’, as “mankind’s historic progress”(Bakhtin, 1984: 324), the study proceeds by analysing the graphical and linguistical images of the “material bodily lower stratum” related to ‘scatological substances’, to the themes of ‘semen-fecundity’, ‘splitting of the body’, ‘aging’ and ‘pregnant death’. The result of the analysis is the identification of a positive and utopic message in a social satire based on a dystopian-science fiction narration.

Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas by Christa Dierksheide

Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas. By Christa Dierksheide. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. [xvi], 279. $45.00, ISBN 978-0 8139-3621-5.) Just as World War II is often dubbed a war, the clash between abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is often imagined as a rare conflict with clear forces of good and evil. In Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, Christa Dierksheide problematizes simple duality, asserting British and American pro- and antislavery advocates actually shared much in their visions of slavery and empire. Both factions, Dierksheide maintains, promoted for slaves--defined as gradual improvement--as part of envisioning empire as a positive, civilizing force for humanity (p. 1). One side just anticipated amelioration within slavery, the other through abolition. The book focuses primarily on slaveholder ideologies. Part 1 highlights Virginia, with a chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson's argument ameliorating slavery would supposedly prepare enslaved peoples for abolition in some distant future. Chapter 2 turns to antebellum Virginia and the debates between slaveholders Thomas Dew and John Hartwell Cocke, stressing while Dew defended slavery and Cocke pushed abolition and colonization, both advocated amelioration; Dew just believed reform made slavery acceptable. Part 2 traces a similar trajectory among slaveholders in South Carolina. In the early national period, Henry Laurens was inspired by his emerging national identity to seek amelioration for slaves with an eye toward future emancipation. By contrast, William Harper and other slaveholders argued slavery should be improved but not abolished. In both Virginia and South Carolina, Dierksheide argues, the antislavery amelioration of the Revolutionary era unwittingly paved the way for antebellum arguments reforming slavery made abolition unnecessary. Clear and concise, these sections on U.S. slaveholders offer nuanced readings of their principal characters, demonstrating pro- and antislavery activists were not binary opposites (p. 2). Both sides were condescendingly paternalistic toward enslaved people, and both advocated reforms. It is less clear whether Dierksheide is correct in asserting that historians have so long supposed pro- and antislavery thinkers to inhabit entirely opposite poles (p. …

Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich ed. by Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, and Christian Moser

Reviewed by: Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich ed. by Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, and Christian Moser Kenneth Austin Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich. Edited by Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, and Christian Moser. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2014. Pp. x, 300. $134.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6796-4.) In grand narratives of the Reformation, the Swiss contribution has often been sidelined, and those dealing with conditions after the integration of Zurich tend to focus on the movement’s early leader, Huldrych Zwingli, who died on the battlefield in 1531. This collection of essays exemplifies more recent efforts to challenge these representations, to which many of the authors have already made notable contributions. It explicitly focuses on the period after Zwingli’s death and particularly that overseen by his successor, Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75). At the same time, as the title implies, the volume is concerned with the consequences of Zwingli’s original break with the Catholic Church and the ways in which models and exempla from the past were used in the development of a new church and society. The opening chapter, written by the editors, is a veritable tour de force: it provides a wide-ranging and highly insightful discussion of the various means by which the past, both distant and more immediate, could provide templates that contributed to the leading Reformers’ understanding and helped to shape the direction they took. Despite the radical nature of the break, the connections with the past were also manifest. As the editors wryly note, “The Reformation had to live in its parents’ house” (p. 8). The following ten chapters offer a range of case studies that collectively illustrate this complex dynamic. Mark Taplin examines Josias Simler’s engagement with a range of patristic writings that had an importance for Christological debates in his Scripta veterum (1571); Jon Delmas Wood’s article is concerned with the idea of “collective episcopacy” [End Page 411] (p. 81), derived from the Old Testament and expounded by Bullinger in his Sermones synodales. Torrance Kirby’s chapter offers a close reading of the letter of praise written by Peter Martyr Vermigli on the accession of Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1558 and demonstrates the varied messages that comparisons with Old Testament figures David and Josiah were meant to convey. Christian Moser highlights the vogue for Commentaries on the Book of Ruth in Zurich between 1530 and 1600, compared with only limited interest elsewhere: the principal characters in Ruth evidently provided useful models of behavior for the readers of the text. In similar fashion, Rebecca Giselbrecht examines the transformation of the image of Mary in the Reformation through an examination of her portrayal in the works of Zwingli and Bullinger. Kurt Jakob Rüetschi focuses on two sermons delivered by Rudolf Gwalther in 1533, in which he drew lessons for child-rearing from the childhood of Jesus: only if children were raised appropriately, Gwalther contended, would the Reformation be successful. Urs Leu considers the delicate relationship with classical literature through an analysis of the edition of Martial’s Epigrams published by Conrad Gessner, a teacher in Zurich, in 1544. Gessner censored this work for use in the classroom and, in an accompanying dialogue, offered a more general discussion of the issues raised by this practice. Luca Baschera evaluates Otto Werdmüller’s approach to Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics in a work of 1545. Werdmüller believed that Aristotelian ethics ought to be integrated with the study of a range of academic disciplines. Matthew McLean looks at the interactions between the Hebrew and Old Testament scholars Konrad Pellikan and his student, Sebastian Münster, as a means of examining models of scholarly friendship. Finally, Bruce Gordon analyzes two biographical writings—Pellikan’s autobiographical Chronicon written for his son and nephew, and Johannes Jud’s Historische Beschreibung, a portrait of his father, Leo Jud—to show how the subjects of both works were presented as exemplary and how these portrayals were shaped by familial concerns. Taken together, this collection of essays greatly enhances our understanding of the Reformation in Zurich in these less familiar decades. In addition...

Mimicry in Lolita

In his study of butterflies Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated by mimicry, the techniques of camouflage and defense that the prey uses to protect itself from the predator. Writing to a publisher on Nabokov’s behalf in 1952, his wife Vera confirmed his longstanding interest in this subject: “the question of mimicry is one that has passionately interested him all his life, and one of his pet projects has always been the compilation of a work that would comprise all the known examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom.” In Lolita (1955), Nabokov creates a world where the characters employ human variants of insect strategies. They adopt masks and mirrors, personae and pretense, imitation and illusion to disguise and deceive. Despite the elaborate strategies of protective mimicry, all the characters in Lolita , like insects, have brief lives that end abruptly. Humbert’s mother had been struck by a thunderbolt: “picnic, lightning.” His childhood love, Annabel Lee, had died of typhus in Corfu. His first wife, Valeria, had died in childbirth. All four principal characters are doomed and at the end of the novel they are all dead. Charlotte is hit by a car, Lolita (like Valeria) dies giving birth to a child. In a protracted and vengeful scenario, Humbert murders Quilty, is condemned to death and dies of a heart attack in prison. Uniting lepidoptery and art with consummate style and wit, Nabokov wrote the greatest novel by any writer trained in science.

Les désancrés par Marie-Thérèse Humbert

Reviews 265 dos pour qu’elle se tienne droite, suit le mouvement, s’éveille à la vie par ses discussions avec George sur Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad,ressent même des pulsions criminelles et sexuelles—auxquelles elle ne se laisse toutefois pas aller. Le dérèglement du temps saisi par Hochet ne signifie pas comme dans Shakespeare “le début de la tragédie” (131), et contrairement aux pièces du barde, après le topsy-turvydom provoqué par George, l’ordre ne sera pas rétabli. La fin du roman laisse entrevoir, avec Jack dans la RAF en 1940, un autre dérèglement socio-historique. Jouant de l’inspiration première de ce roman, la vie de l’auteure de A Room of One’s Own, un article paru dans le magazine Elle titrait“Si vous aimez Virginia Woolf, vous aimerez Stéphanie Hochet”— titre racoleur pour un roman certes agréable à lire mais qui n’exploite pas complètement le potentiel et la force de son personnage principal et le laisse disparaître alors qu’il se libère, nous abandonnant avec un épilogue hâtif et peu convaincant. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Humbert, Marie-Thérèse. Les désancrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07014744 -1. Pp. 656. 25 a. After a fifteen-year hiatus, Humbert offers an epic family saga that begins in a real, yet ghostly Louisiana and continues to Vesania, an imaginary island.Artfully revealing via the intermingling of past, future, and conditional tenses where characters’ paths cross at one time or another, Humbert builds a multi-dimensional mind map in which one follows the characters’ memories, emotions, obsessions, fantasies, desires, and frustrations. The heroine, Jane Harcourt, is fleeing a rich southern family by finding refuge on Vesania with her son Vincent, her friend Abigail Dodds (a large and very elegant black woman, daughter of Jane’s father Keith W. Canning and the Canning family cook Betty Dodds) and Abigail’s daughter Sarah. Bound by love and blood, they seal their fate in Jane’s wild hope of finding William, Jane’s second husband, who is nine years her junior, and Vincent’s father. Yet when a detective locates him, Jane claims he is dead. The reader is then left to wonder what exactly Jane seeks while on Vesania and what she is attempting to escape. Forewarned by Humbert in the novel’s “Avertissement”that her goal in writing Les désancrés was not to bear witness to events nor to denounce them. Rather, she takes great inspiration from painting, an art she admires despite her inability to paint. Thus, the reader comes to understand Humbert’s literary motives: “Alors je me suis servie de mon matériau privilégié: les mots” (9). Continuing to speak directly to her readers, Humbert elucidates that what one holds in one hand is “une manière de tableau romanesque, constitué de lieux autant que de fantasmes, et où s’entrelacent un certain nombre de trajectoires humaines imbriquées les unes dans les autres” (9). A family tree of the principal characters originating in Louisiana immediately follows Humbert’s warning. It is key to navigate the troubled, choppy waters of the narrative as the novel opens with “Vestibule: la fille de Kubla Khan,” which could be the beginning or the end of the story as the action takes place in Riverside Home, Louisiana, a few years before or after the stay on Vesania. Born in 1913, Jane is already senile at the age of fifty-four years and ends her days regularly visited by her friend Abigail. In the segregationist Louisiana, the relationship of these two women, one white and one black, is intriguing. The “vestibule” is also the place where Jane’s fantasies and memories are formed. For example, her father, Keith, the great seducer, was nicknamed“Kubla Khan”for having built a palace of Asian inspiration ; and, when she was only five, Jane witnessed the death of her mother, Marie Dufour, by the intermediary of a mirror, which has the long-term effect of Jane always needing some type of intermediary, such as Abigail, to...

“Thou livest and breathest, yet art thou slain in him”: The Absence of Power in Richard II

Richard II begins with a dead body. There is no corpse present XVstage and no funeral procession, yet body of Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester and king's uncle, haunts beginning of play and sets tone for its exposition. It haunts opening scene as two opponents--Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray--accuse each other of various crimes in front of king, among them Bolingbroke's claim that Mowbray murdered Woodstock. As Nicolas Grene writes, the event to which Richard II looks back most immediately is relatively recent murder of Duke of Gloucester. (2) This unexplained death--Michael Hattaway notes that Woodstock died in mysterious circumstances in Calais in 1397--foreshadows future difficulties for king. (3) As I will show, his absent body becomes a vital instrument in plot of Shakespeare's play. Henry Bolingbroke, son of Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, called into king's presence to air their grievances. Richard questions their motives: What doth our cousin lay to Mowbray's charge? / It must be great (1.1.84-85). With corresponding accusations and defenses, scene presents both a polarizing exposition and first impressions of major characters. As John Blades puts it, it is crucial in swiftly introducing principal characters of play: king, his court circle, two of his subjects. (4) John Norwich sums this up, recollecting historical event that on 29 April 1398 ... for first time, two Dukes appeared face to face before King; and it is at this point that Shakespeare raises curtain The Tragedie of King Richard Second. (5) The first scene thus reminds audience of recent historical events of rebellion against Richard by his uncles, an action that is not directly presented onstage but looms over play like a skeleton in cupboard. The accusations that Bolingbroke brings forth at kings request grave indeed: Look what I speak, my life shall prove it true: That Mowbray hath received eight thousand nobles In name of lendings for your highness' soldiers, The which he hath detained for lewd employments, Like a false traitor and injurious villain. Besides I say, and will in battle prove, Or here or elsewhere to furthest verge That ever was surveyed by English eye, That all treasons for these eighteen years Complotted and contrived in this land Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring. Further I say, and further will maintain Upon his bad life to make all this good, That he did plot Duke of Gloucester's death, Suggest his soon-believing adversaries, And consequently, like a traitor coward, Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood--Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries, Even from tongueless caverns of earth To me for justice and rough chastisement. And by glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it, or this life be spent! (1.1.87-108) Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of three crimes, each more horrible than previous: corruption, treason, and murder. His speech is well structured: according to John Blades, he shows full vocal command; his delivery is even and controlled. The third charge is obviously climax to his speech; first two are relatively mild preambles to his most alarming charge. (6) As Hattaway puts it, Bolingbroke's claim of murder is his gravest accusation, casting himself in role of a minister or scourge of God, one sent to cleanse depravity from world. (7) The dead Gloucester thus provokes this quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, and in doing so, proves to be what Blades has described as catalyst to Richards downfall. (8) In response to charge, Mowbray answers with as much force as his opponent, calling him so foul a liar (1.1.114) and accusation mere slander (1. …

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons

Reviewed by: The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature by Cóilín Parsons Vivian Valvano Lynch The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature, by Cóilín Parsons, pp. 247. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. $90. Cóilín Parsons effectively broadens the scope of the British Board of Ordnance’s Survey (1824-1846), which mapped Ireland on the unprecedented scale or representative fraction of six inches to one mile, to yield a novel study of emergent modernism in Irish literature. Mindful of the iconic status of the Ordnance Study maps and declaring his “story” to be “the relationship between a modern mapping project and the emergence of modernist form,” Parsons argues that this signal modern project—the abstraction of landscape so that it could be made to fit the demands of scientific representation … is a defining point in the cultural history of Ireland, and its imprint was felt for decades after the initial survey was completed. In the sphere of literature, responses and challenges to the Survey and its mode of cartographic representation enliven and invigorate Irish writing as subsequent generations of writers grapple with the challenges of representing the geography of an island undergoing rapid and shocking change. Apart from an occasional overreliance on a few literary theorists—a move that slows down his “story” and could largely be condensed and moved to foot-notes—Parsons acquits himself admirably in this project. Parsons’s preamble to handling his four selected literary figures (James Clarence Mangan, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett) demonstrates an ability to present the fruits of exhaustive research into the initiation and progress of the Ordnance Survey. He dissects many of its abundant maps, letters, and memoirs. Together, he avers, these items “present a complex dialectic of change and stasis; loss and preservation; image and text; representation and reality.” Turning to the four authors, Parsons reads the poetry written by Mangan when he was employed by the Survey as a worker on placenames. He points to poetic evidence of Mangan’s growing frustration with Britain as he participates in the imperial scientific venture, particularly noticeable in his reliance on dinnseanchas, the lore of placenames, in his translations. Mangan becomes a commentator, mindful of both the modern venture of the colonizer and the real experience and imagined history of the colonized. The chapter on Synge and The Aran Islands is superb and will serve as a lasting addition to Synge scholarship, and of great value to university classrooms. Parsons painstakingly contends that despite Synge’s evident romantic gaze at Irish peasant life, at “the primitive other,” his repeat visits to the islands yield a [End Page 152] more multifaceted reporter. He writes: “with each passing year [Synge] recognizes the more complex interaction between the islands, the mainland, London, and the world, and gradually the lamentations over the loss of pristine primitiveness cease.” Meticulous examinations of several passages in The Aran Islands in which Synge employs the modernist technique of parataxis deserve attentive reading. One such passage juxtaposes the primitive and the civilized, age-old fishing methods and factory production. Such juxtapositions are delivered stylistically and syntactically through parataxis: Parsons remarks, “Parataxis, with its absence of markers of primary or subordinate statements, refuses to identify scale, to mark the size and shape of the gap between the local and the global—it refuses to identify the relationship between elements, even at times denies the existence of any relationship.” This chapter serves as a fulcrum for Parsons’s story, and he concludes, “Synge’s text, with its fragmented plots and narratives, its sustained attention to scale and geography, and its peripatetic principal characters not only looks backward to the challenges of the Survey, but it could also almost be a scale model for Ulysses, produced earlier and elsewhere.” The transition to Ulysses proceeds with a respectful glance at “Aeolus,” a pertinent discussion of “Wandering Rocks,” then a focus on “Ithaca” as Joyce’s experiment with scale that most directly engages with the actions of the Ordnance Survey. “Ithaca,” of course, mentions the Survey, but Parsons probes much more deeply into the encyclopedic nature of the episode, showing how it “presents a cascade of information, ostensibly...