Privileged Subject Research Articles

Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book Revised: The Structure and Development of “Block 7”, on Pastoral Privilege and Responsibility

The so-called Commonplace Book of Archbishop Wulfstan refers to a family of manuscripts that preserves a corpus of miscellaneous material ostensibly assembled by Wulfstan in the first two decades of the eleventh century. Despite its immense importance to the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, the Commonplace Book remains poorly understood as a coherent textual entity in its own right. This study attempts to shed some light on the method of production, the principles of organization, and the development of the Commonplace Book. In considering these issues, some important aspects of Wulfstan’s literary and editorial habits are brought to light, namely his proclivity for correcting his own and others’ works, his practice of creating new works by revising older ones, and his custom of producing instructional libelli for distribution among the English priesthood. All of these habits are exemplified by a series of Latin texts on the subject of pastoral privilege and responsibility, three of which - De veneratione sa...

<i>Strindbergs dramatiska bildspråk</i> (review)

Egil Tornqvist. Strindbergs dramatiska bildsprak. Amsterdam Contributions to scandinavian Studies 7. Amsterdam: Scandinavisch Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2011. Pp. 251. For over forty years Egil Tornqvist has been a leading Strindberg scholar with extensive contributions in the fields of drama, theater, film, and media studies. Many of his works explore questions of signification, translation, and transposition from language to language, from culture to culture, and from page to stage to the silver screen and television. Strindbergs dramatiska bildsprak is no different in that it investigates the of Strindbergian drama both as a property of the drama-text accessible to the reader and its physicalization in the theater for the benefit of the spectator. Tornqvist's methodology draws primarily on the critical traditions of structuralism and semiotics. The choice of Swedish as vehicle for the present volume is justified by the subject matter: the study of images implicit in language, as the Swedish word for textual (bildsprak) succinctly indicates. An introductory chapter clarifies some important distinctions when dealing with texts written for the stage, most notably between the language of signs and the language of images. On the stage everything is a sign, in that objects and bodies represent something other than what they actually are. In addition to functioning as a sign, says Tornqvist, an image must be endowed with some extra symbolic value. While a set piece in the theater, such as a house constructed of cardboard, might be perceived by the audience as representing a real house, it turns into a image only when the characters actions and speeches elaborate its symbolic function: whatever makes it more than a house (13). For the purposes of his study Tornqvist divides dramatic imagery into two main categories: images implied in the stage directions, here termed det auktorala bildspraket [authorial imagery], and images embedded in the dialogue, termed det firgurala bildspraket (10) [figural imagery]. Within the context of each examined play, he then sets out to explore who uses imager)', when, where, how, and to whom (16) and considers how images are distributed throughout the text among the characters, among acts and scenes, and among the different textual elements of the play. The typology of poetic tropes provides another context for investigating as linguistic constructs, including metonymy, allegory parable, personification, synesthesia, synecdoche, and others. Intertexrual references, frequently occurring in Strindberg's drama, constitute a special category of in that they connect the textual world of the play with texts outside that world thus expanding a tightly constructed signifying system. Tornqvist consults previous studies of and finds that Shakespeare is a privileged subject of such inquiries. Not surprisingly, he finds Strindberg a modern Shakespeare when it comes to the frequency and complexity of his use of imagery, but while Shakespeare's blank verse accommodates imager)' naturally, Strindberg's prose dialogue must conform to what gives it an illusion of natural speech (23). Within Strindberg scholarship, Tornqvist finds an engagement with lacking. He cites Karl-Ake Karnell's 1962 study of in Strindberg's prose fiction, but finds no comprehensive critical study of images in the plays. Strindbergs dramatiska bildsprak aims to fill that gap by showing the uniqueness, evolution, and novelty of Strindberg's imager)' via close readings of Fadren, Froken Julie, Fordrinqsagare, Till Damaskus I, Pask, Karl XII, Dodsdansen I, Ett dromspel, Ovader, Branda tomten, Spoksonaten, and Pelikanen. The decision to select twelve representative Strindberg plays--each devoted a separate chapter--was made to ensure an in-depth understanding of Strindberg's use of images through the lens of works that stretch over his entire oeuvre. …

Impact of Socioeconomic Deprivation and Area of Residence on Access to Coronary Revascularization and Mortality After a First Acute Myocardial Infarction in Québec

BackgroundSocioeconomic status (SES) and area of residence are known to impact access to invasive cardiac procedures. Low SES adversely affects long-term mortality after acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Most of the data were derived from private healthcare systems. Our objectives were to evaluate the effects of SES and area of residence on access to coronary angiography, revascularization and mortality after a first AMI in a publicly-funded healthcare system with a high supply of catheterization facilities. MethodsQuébec administrative databases were used to identify all patients with a first AMI between 1997 and 2001. The SES was determined with the population deprivation index, which has 2 dimensions: material and social. Six-month access to angiography, revascularization and 1-year mortality were considered in proportional hazards survival regression analyses measuring the effect of deprivation and the geographical area of residence, accounting for several other covariates. ResultsThe study cohort consisted of 50,242 patients. The most materially and socially deprived patients had a 16% (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.08-1.25) and 13% (95% CI, 1.05-1.21) relative increased hazard of dying within 1 year respectively compared with the most privileged subjects. This mortality gradient could not be explained by meaningful differences in access to angiography or revascularization. Geography did not influence access to revascularization procedures. ConclusionsDespite universal healthcare system, SES measured with a material and social deprivation index, had significant adverse effect on 1-year mortality after a first AMI. Such findings were not explained by lower access to coronary angiography or revascularization.

Reprivileging Reading

This essay explores intersections between reading and privilege and moves out from a survey of faculty reading practices to consider what is at stake in distinguishing between “real” and “instrumental” reading. Allen argues that, as privileged subjects, teachers can best help students approach reading as the negotiation of uncertainty when teachers themselves undertake such negotiation. That is, instructors do well to consciously inhabit and emotionally integrate their own contradictory desires for reading—the desire for institutional viability associated with instrumental reading, on the one hand, and the desire for the leisured thought of real reading, on the other.

"Distant Reading": Victorian Investments in History And the Novel

"Distant Reading":Victorian Investments in History And the Novel Christopher Kent Henry, Nancy and Cannon Schmitt, eds. Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. x + 250 pp. $24.95 paper. Jaffe, Audrey . The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. x + 138 pp. $24.95 paper. Wagner, Tamara S. Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. viii + 232 pp. $44.95 cloth. "Distant reading," according to Audrey Jaffe, is the visual metaphor used by Franco Moretti "to describe a literary analysis that relies on data rather than the close reading of texts" (102). Such distance can be either spatial or temporal. Although Moretti's version of distance seems to be mainly temporal, Jaffe's version seems largely spatial. As a historian I can relate particularly to Moretti's version of the metaphor, which evokes the losses and gains temporal distance gives to the study of any past, where gains from knowing large outcomes are balanced by loss of fine detail. While we are all of necessity "distant readers" of Victorian Britain, literature scholars are perhaps more comfortable with the gains, the privileged position of knowing what the Victorians did not—"how [End Page 498] it all turned out"- than are historians. Distant reading facilitates the finding of patterns and making of generalizations essential to theorization. Here too historians, members of a profession notoriously suspicious of theorizing, tend to be less at ease than literature scholars. Conscious of the inevitability of presentism—we cannot renounce our temporal privilege—historians worry about its cost, the danger of reading the past as if its known outcome were the only one possible, and losing the sense of what it was like for the Victorians to live with complex contingencies and an open future—the human condition—that only the fading details can give us. And we may be tempted to supply our own details to make up the loss, thus overfamiliarizing the past. That temptation is particularly strong in teaching undergraduates to help them relate to the past. The best way of resisting presentism, history students are assured, is to get into the sources, the documents created by those we are studying. What better source, then, for understanding Victorian Britain than the novels it produced in profusion, particularly those novels that subscribed to the dominant literary ideology of realism, those novels whose purpose was to accurately represent the world in which they were set? Now that students, in North America at least, are more likely to get their British history from literature than from history classes, it is all the more important to think about the complex relationship between the novel and history, their longstanding rivalry as claimants to the terrain of the real, and how we read and teach them. The three books reviewed here make valuable contributions to our understanding of that relationship. Audrey Jaffe's and Tamara Wagner's are the work of literary scholars. Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt's is a collection in which literary scholars and historians are equally represented. The current hegemony of the novel as history is strengthened by changes in the historical profession. Forty years ago social history was at high tide, strongly driven by a left-leaning desire to recover the lost history of the working class, and scornful of its oppressors, a middle class whose shameful history was unworthy of the social historian's attention. The history of the bourgeoisie was best left to that bourgeois institution, the novel, and to its custodians in English departments. The latter were not entirely comfortable with their charges, and directed almost all their attention to a select few novels that met the requirements of a canon defined by purposefully nonhistorical criteria. How different things are now. The middle class occupy stage center in Victorian history, the working class have faded as its privileged subject, and English departments have largely abandoned the canon, their members lavishing attention on novels whose lack of literary merit is compensated for by their historical interest. Historians themselves have recovered interest...

A qué huele en Dinamarca

Within a context of the progressive weakening of the social regulation of employment characteristic of European labour companies, organized in accordance with one of the various welfare systems, the Danish model of the labour market, which appears to synergically combine flexibility and security (flexicurity), has become, in recent times, a privileged subject of analysis. In this article, we set out the fundamental features of the model, discussing the possibility of its generalization throughout the European Union as a whole and proposing a hypothesis regarding its possible future evolution.

Shaking up the historical (Film): Christophe Gans's Le Pacte des loups/The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

ABSTRACTAt a cost of nearly $29 million, Christophe Gans's Le Pacte des loups/The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) was one of the most expensive French films ever made. Packed with stunning visual effects, long and carefully choreographed fight scenes, and elements of gothic horror and porn, the film has often been seen as an action-packed blockbuster made with the intention of rivalling Hollywood rather than a serious work in keeping with the auteurist ideals of French film-making. This reading of the film, however, obscures the fact that Le Pacte des loups probably has more in common with the French heritage film than with American action films, and that its subject matter—the French Revolution—is one of the most privileged subjects in French historical film-making. A closer reading of the film reveals that it functions to explore the nature of history and historical narrative, and particularly the relationship between history and cinema, and that it asserts the representational nature of all historical narratives, be they official histories or historical films.

Three Ethics of Coalition

Three Ethics of Coalition

The use and relevance of archaeology in the post-modern world: views from India

The use and relevance of archaeology are often questioned by those in developing nations where economic development has a higher priority. Although archaeology is considered useful to contemporary society, it is not considered equivalent to privileged subjects such as science and technology, healthcare and economics. However, archaeology can be used to a certain extent for the development of the community in areas of tourism and education through museums and parks, independently of, and also additional to, natural heritage tourist attractions. Applied archaeology can be beneficial to contemporary society but needs serious research and implementation. This paper surveys certain issues related to the use and relevance of archaeology, and discusses how it can be used for the betterment of contemporary and future generations in the context of India and other developing nations.

METODOLOGIAS DE PESQUISAS COM CRIANÇAS

Este artigo diz respeito às escolhas teórico-metodológicas que procuram valorizar e tomar as crianças como sujeitos privilegiados nas pesquisas sobre a infância e a sua educação. A pretensão é abrir caminhos promissores na definição da participação das crianças pequenas nas pesquisas. O estudo demonstrou as polêmicas que geram controvérsias à participação das crianças nas pesquisas; evidencia-se que o crescimento de pesquisas com crianças aumentou a produção de conhecimentos sobre as infâncias, bem como o interesse em desenvolver metodologias e procedimentos não convencionais de pesquisas que qualifiquem as vozes das crianças. 
 
 Palavras-chave: Metodologia; crianças; pesquisa.

Borderlands Studies and Border Theory: Linking Activism and Scholarship for Social Justice

This article traces contemporary trends in borderlands studies and border theory and argues for a feminist revisioning of border studies as a mode of praxis, linking activism, and scholarship. I trace the trends from early borderland studies and Gloria Anzaldua’s analysis of la frontera to the institutionalization of border theory in the academy. Scholars influenced by Anzaldua’s work view borderlands as sites that can enable those dwelling there to negotiate the contradictions and tensions found in diverse cultural, class, and other settings. Critical perspectives of this view include concerns that there is ‘the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid … into a new privileged subject of history’ (Vila 2003. Ethnography at the Border, University of Minnesota Press). I examine tension between social science based borderlands studies and cultural studies-oriented border theory, address the limits and possibilities of an interdisciplinary border studies, and discuss the dilemmas associated with academic institutionalization and interdisciplinarity. I illustrate the feminist revisioning I recommend with three case examples chosen from contemporary feminist and queer border studies that link local struggles with cross-border organizing against violence against women, labor rights, and sexual citizenship.

Later Medieval Perspectives on Intentionality. An Introduction

Historians of medieval philosophy have always paid attention to the topic of intentionality. This is not surprising. For medieval authors, the analysis of the metaphysics and the mechanisms of human cognition became over time one of the most important instruments for approaching a bundle of basic philosophical and theological questions, such as the nature of universals, the mind-world relation, the explanation of divine knowledge, and the like. For this and other reasons, theories of cognition have been a crucial theme for historians of medieval philosophy and a privileged subject in the literature. The present volume presents a collection of articles devotes to later medieval perspectives on intentionality. Chronologically speaking, they cover the period from Thomas Aquinas to John Buridan. The reason is easy to explain: in this period, historians of medieval philosophy encounter accounts of intentionality of such a structure and sophistication that they can be compared, in a philosophically suitable way...

Jacint Verdaguer, national poet of Catalonia

Jacint Verdaguer’s vast and rich work makes him the most outstanding Catalan writer of the Romantic period, and even of the whole nineteenth century. Doubtless, he is also one of the classic Catalans of all times. His work was not only of an intrinsic and lasting quality, it was also of historical importance.Verdaguer brought with him the consolidation of the literary language of the Renaixenca1 which was the foundation for later literature. Furthermore, his prestige as a writer resulted in a measure of international recognition for the Catalan literature of the Renaixenca. Interest in the figure of Verdaguer often related with the polemics around his biography, an interest that is still alive nowadays. This interest has created a field of its own, the verdaguerisme, that in the last thirty years has turned him into a privileged subject for study in the world of Catalan philology, with doctoral dissertations, critical editions and essays, besides a specialised academic review (Anuari Verdaguer) and a scientific society devoted to him (Societat Verdaguer).

Empire’s Past . . . Empire’s Future

In February , as I was writing this paper, the Financial Times reported at length on an upcoming British Museum exhibition on 16 th -century Persia: “the third in a series on great world empires,” following a “hugely popular show” featuring the terra cotta soldiers of the great Ch’in emperor, a second exhibition on Hadrian, and to be followed in turn by a show on the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. The director, Neil MacGregor’s “overall concept for the series is to study the ‘instruments of cohesion’ that held those empires together and ask what the consequences of their dominion have been in the long term.” 1 And so by means of their artifacts, suitably displayed, empires past radiate their light downward to the present, like stars after extinction, allegedly educating us all, as Director MacGregor intends, in the interconnections of our species. Is it “interconnectedness,” as MacGregor believes, that makes empire so compelling a theme? Perhaps. A good exhibit does startle or delight us by revealing connections between remote societies and ultimately our own—whether of art, or beliefs, or commodities, alphabets and calendars, or germs and pathogens. After all, connections are the basis of one major contemporary approach to international history—that is they are the privileged subject of the contemporary effort to write “entangled histories” or what the French call histoires croisees, and the history of what many colleagues now like to call “cultural transfer.” And just as economists have developed the theory of the firm, as a way of minimiz ing the so-called transaction costs of contracts among buyers and sellers, Empires, in a sense, have been an institutional device for internalizing such cultural transfer. An empire provides a political structure for extending cultural transfer through time and space. Historians divide, as did policy makers, on the nature of that structure. For some of us it is a harsh one, built on power and domination; for others it has softer outlines and processes that we describe in terms of negotiation. Every subaltern people has agency; hence every transaction is negotiated—a flight of dubious logic, it seems to me. And for many, empire has the sentimental redolence of a wonderful and idealistic project. As a Swedish journalist explains what he termed the longest-term geopolitical project in world history, “The empire is gone, but the sun never

Kinsey and the Politics of Bisexual Authenticity

This article examines the epistemological status of bisexuality in North America since the mid-20th century. It argues that the status of bisexuality remains marginal because of its capacity to destabilize a monosexual order. Using Alfred Kinsey's research to anchor the discussion, the author demonstrates that the persistent rejection of bisexuality as a sexual identity category (and as a critical perspective) acts to contain the crisis of identity that haunts the supposed naturalness of the two privileged subject positions: homosexuality and heterosexuality. It also demonstrates how that same order is upheld by the epistemological and material banishment of the intersexed.

Ambiguous Semantics: Reflections on Jewish Political Concepts

THE HISTORY OF JEWISH POLITICS is a notoriously complex and complicated issue insofar as it deals with a subject matter that is traditionally thought to be external to the Jews as a Diaspora population. Although diasporic populations are obviously familiar with the implementation of various forms and practices of influence, of persuasion, and intercession, the core instruments of power, generally deriving from the ability to exercise force or threaten its use, are seemingly alien to them. Power is, by and large, the dubious privilege reserved to territorial entities-to states and nations. In the past, during the high days of historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, when states (and nations) were perceived as the most exalted subjects in history, the existence of the Jews as a diasporic population was-if at all-of interest only to Jews. Yet since that tune, the modes of historical thinking have changed. And with this transformation, key concepts, methods, and subject matter have also changed. Its formerly privileged subjects -state, power, and rule -have lost their predominance. After the dominant, even exclusive, importance of the state declined in historical inquiry in favor of sociologically based inquiry, interest in the Jewish experience grew; and this interest became more pronounced when even softer concepts-the concepts of memory and culture - advanced to the forefront of historical investigation.Nonetheless, we still find that the state -and with it, power, domination, and the threat and use of force - remains with us in the world. And this brings us to the main question of modern Jewish political history. Namely, how and to what extent can we conceive of a political of the Jews at all-if we understand the Jews as the ultimate diasporic population beyond and above the nation-state? Can we apply the still regnant concepts of politics and power to the Jewish experience? I question such a presupposition and argue that it is very difficult, even presumptuous, to apply the conceptual apparatus of political proper to the Jews.Resisting the political historical mode can be traced back to the time of emancipation.1 The founding fathers of modern Jewish studies were extremely cautious, overtly hesitant, indeed even to apply the term to the Jews. Leopold Zunz and his contemporaries obviously preferred the more traditional, neutral, and philologically oriented Wissenschaft des Judentums - the German Jewish translation for the traditional enterprise of hokhmat Yisra'el. He and others were intuitively aware of the fact that history implied a secular remterpretation of the world, and that historical thinking as such accelerates the rate of profanation. This process could endanger the eternal connotation of Am Yisra'el (the Jewish people) whose existence rests on sacred time and sacred law. History with a capital H challenges Jews and Judaism twice: in its profane understanding of the human condition and of human development; and in its association with categories and concepts of power, state, territory, and nationhood. In contrast to the core concepts of modern historical inquiry and to the meaning of profane time and concrete place in modern politics, Diaspora existence is highly related to sacred tune.What does this mean for modern Jewish politics and for Jewish political action? In order to do justice to our object of interest-the Jewish experience in this world-one has to acknowledge the kmited value of applying concepts drawn from territoriality and statist nationality. In such cases, the Jews as a fundamentally diasporic population would be burdened with false expectations or even falsely blamed for massive deviance or clear anomalies.More dramatically than ever before, the disparity between the diasporic existence of Jews, on one hand, and the expectations placed on Jews by the political semantics of nation, state and power, on the other hand, was greatest in the most radical crisis faced by the Jews - the second World War and the Holocaust. …

“Vizcaínos en un berenjenal”

El presente ensayo trata de explicar la “coincidencia” de que el morisco Cide Hamete Benengeli tome el relevo como historiador de cabecera de don Quijote precisamente en pleno combate de éste con el vizcaíno Sancho de Azpeitia, en virtud de una tesis vascoiberista aceptada en la época, emparentando “a las tácitas” a los vascos con los moros. La hipótesis refuerza así la unidad estructural de los caps. VIII y IX de la 1.ª Parte del Quijote puesto que Cervantes plantearía en ambos un reto –digamos ya un órdago– a la sociedad feudal/foral vasca del s. XVII –desde el pueblo llano o la naciente burguesía burocrática al clero y la alta nobleza–, poniendo en evidencia la impostura común a su estatuto de súbditos privilegiados del Imperio. Amén de satirizar la presunta nobleza del –merced a su “endiablada” expresión– satánico vizcaíno, el autor habría ridiculizado los falsos cronicones –técnica estructural que se desvela en esta aventura–, velando –tal como aventuramos– la identidad de los frailes benitos –los vizcaínos PP. Haedo, supuesto autor y editor respectivamente de la historia del cautiverio en Argel–, así como la de uno de los “historiadores de La Mancha” –el cronista guipuzcoano afincado en Toledo Garibay–; eso por no hablar del resentimiento hacia la alta nobleza con privilegio de “pase a Indias”. Y ello, en un episodio de conflicto entre tres lenguas y culturas cuya complementariedad y perspectivismo fingen la imposible verdad del Hombre moderno coetáneo del autor.

From Drill Sergeants to Maternal Negotiators: Mass-Mediated Business Strategies in the 1980s

By drawing on Foucault's theory of governmentality, this essay posits that media discourses helped to create, deliberate upon, and circulate proper practices for U.S. white-collar working women in the 1980s. Analysis of discourse circulating in mass media about the woman manager, the saleswoman, and the woman union leader shows that media outlets claimed each would offer innovative solutions to counteract the volatile economy in the 1980s. For example, the logic of maternal management propagated in these discourses valorized a “return to the home” for women while simultaneously claiming that men were better maternal managers than women. The privileged subject ultimately emerging in this discourse was a feminized businessman, rather than a maternal or feminized businesswoman.

Ética e Cidadania na Formação do Jornalista

Como pensamos o mundo? Qual é o papel do comunicador como sujeito privilegiado na construção do imaginário social? Informação a qualquer custo, com métodos nem sempre lícitos? Em que medida é inadiável o jornalista, o “historiador do cotidiano”, o “contador da história imediata” pensar e refletir sobre a informação como instrumento de poder e, ao mesmo tempo, de transformação social?

Rusų formalizmas ir anglų bei amerikiečių naujoji kritika

The problem of the General and the Particular seems to be the pure philosophical one. The Notion or Idea seems to be the privileged and self-sufficient subject of reflection. The article outlines the possibility to place these problems simultaneously in aesthetical and social-anthropological perspectives thus revealing something like the genealogy or background of the metaphysical preoccupation with the Unity and Multiplicity.