Problematic Text Research Articles

Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries. Continuities and Discontinuities around 1900 and 2000 by Ernst Grabovszki, James Hardin

258 Reviews inevitably, given its content) is so densely written that one wonders how many people, other than scholars who plan towrite on 'Ein Brier, will actually make their way through it, and thus how much of an impact itwill have on our collective understanding of this problematic text. Related to G?nther's focus on the philosophical subtexts of the letter, further problems emerge. Recent commentators on 'Ein Brief, including this reviewer, have insisted that the conventional reading of the letter as evidence of Hofmannsthal's Sprachknse needs to be qualified by the recognition that this crisis of language is inextricably bound up with a crisis of cognition that precedes it: to quote from 'Ein Brief, 'Es ist mir v?llig die F?higkeit abhanden gekommen, ?ber irgend etwas zusammenh?ngend zu denken oder zu sprechen' [emphasis added]. If anything, G?nther goes too far in the opposite direction; though he does consider 'Sprache' as one among many categories discussed, he does not (inmy view) pay sufficient heed to the fact that this fictional letter iswritten by an artist whose medium is language, whose writings bear witness to his intensive and ongoing meditations on language, and who insists (among other places, inhis 1896 lecture 'Poesie und Leben') that thematerial of poetry is words, and that a poem (and, by extension, other literary texts) cannot be understood without attention to this concrete element. Further, there is the overall paradox that G?nther's abstract philosophical prose represents precisely the kind of discourse against which Chandos rebels, in favour of a highly metaphorical speech. G?nther iswell aware of the key role played bymetaphor, as displayed by his subtle analysis of themetaphor of the 'Taubenschlag' and others, but this does not resolve the paradox by any means. In sum, Timo G?nther has presented the scholarly world with a substantive and mostly original analysis of this much-discussed text, one that makes a significant contribution by demonstrating the subtexts thathave eluded previous commentators. But themanner of his presentation, and to some degree even the nature of his argument, place significant limitations on itsusefulness for our collective understanding of 'Ein Brief. University of Arizona Thomas A. Kovach Literature in Vienna at theTurn of theCenturies. Continuities and Discontinuities around igoo and 2000. Ed. by Ernst Grabovszki and James Hardin. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2003. + 232 pp. $75.00; ?50.00. isbn 1-57113-233-3? Despite its title, this collection of essays is not confined to literature, but also offers contributions on the cultural fields most associated with the Viennese Jahrhundertwende of 1900, namely psychoanalysis and architecture. The book isa mixture of essays with a defined focus and contributions that attempt overviews of a century of Austrian women's writing, architecture and cinema. Temporal markers are habitually welcome as a framework for conferences and other cultural events, so how could a fin de si?cle in combination with a AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I3, 2OO5 259 turn of a millennium not be used to inaugurate a publication? However, as one reads through this collection, the feeling that it is an accidental assemblage rather than a compelling cultural enquiry into a century prevails somewhat; and the ambitious claim of Ernst Grabovszki's introduction that 'the articles in this book aim to explore the contrasts and similarities of both turns of the centuries around 1900 and 2000 and to show how the aesthetics of literature and itshistorical background have influenced each other and how they changed during a century' (p. 1) seems too tall an order. By asserting that any great poem 'represents a turning point in language' (p. 52), R?diger G?rner frees himself up for a vivid discussion of selected poems by Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Jandl and Ransmayr, and their possible relevance to the socio-cultural situation in 1900 and 2000 respectively. A sensible way to explore temporal markers is to ask why, ifand how artists and intellectuals have attached meaning to them. Famously, Freud postdated the first edition of his Traumdeutung by one year, so as to announce confidently a momentous change in the ways inwhich we name, perceive and analyse our disowned and disenchanted selves. In his contribution on psychoanalysis and literature Thomas...

Introduction: Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial

The Gothic has historically maintained an intimacy with colonial issues, and in consequence with the potential for disruption and redefinition vested in the relationships between Self and Other, controlling and repressed, subaltern milieu and dominant outsider culture. Such things are the context of obvious, visible irruptions of the colonial Orientalistexotic into the genre, whether these be the absolutist power and pagan excesses of Beckford's Vathek (1786), the Moorish demonic temptations of Zofloya (1806) or the perverse, corrupting influence of a western invader upon a primitivised European in the ImmaleeIsadora episodes of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). These are, in a sense, horrors beyond, the exoticism of time and space distancing the problematic text from the comfortable, identifiable world of the contemporary and the homely a reassurance comforting even in a reading of the Irish episodes of Melmoth the Wanderer, where geographical marginality anticipates a borderland as distant from metropolitan sensibilities as effective as those of later writers such as Hope Hodgson, Machen or Rolt. The colonial is both kept at a distance and in a state of suggestive vagueness, of resemblance rather than obvious representation, its horrors accessible though thankfully not immanent

The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass

Melville's "Benito Cereno" is a problematic text that students of color, especially, can find troubling. However, when this story is studied alongside two other narratives of shipboard slave rebellions--Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave--it becomes apparent that Melville is making the same point as these writers about such rebellions through the subtle use of paradox as the key rhetorical strategy. In these texts not only are slave mutinies seen as inherently paradoxical, but so is the status quo that the mutinies seemingly invert, so that mutineers and officers, slave and free, are revealed to be two sides of the same coin--ultimately they are each other. By foregrounding inconsistencies, the use of paradox serves to undermine and invert apparent fixed verities, and then reveals beneath them the organic interdependence of the mirror and its image. Those involved in the rebellions described by Melville, Johnson, and Douglass usually fail to realize this, however, like Narcissus, they cannot recognize the inverted image as themselves. This interdependence, in "Benito Cereno" especially, is therefore found in the story's subtext: Melville's covert means of making a subversive point. Such use of paradox is in fact broadly characteristic of the slave-mutiny narrative genre as a whole, providing a useful approach for studying all such texts.

The A 'lam al-hadith of al-Khattabi: A Commentary on al-Bukhari's Sahih or a Polemical Treatise?

The numerous commentaries on al-Bukh-ri's Sahih have hardly attracted the attention of Western scholarship as an independent subject for research. ('). This is unfortunate, in view of the indispensability of the commentaries for any attempt to understand the important, very often problematic text of al-Bukhiri' s work. In the absence of sufficient up-to-date information regarding the early commentaries, most Islamicists refer time and again to the well-known, relatively late writings of al-Kirmini (d. 786/1384), al-'Asqalfini (d. 852/1448),

At the Sharp End of Waiting: A Study of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras

At the Sharp End of Waiting: A Study of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras1 Élise Noetinger Ce livre n'est pas un livre. Ce n'est pas une chanson. Ni un poème. Ni des pensées. Mais des larmes, de la douleur, des pleurs, des désespoirs qu'on ne peut pas encore arrêter ni raisonner. Des colères politiques fortes comme la foi en Dieu. Plus fortes encore que cela. Plus dangereuses parce que sans fin. —Marguerite Duras, Ecrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 74 ALTHOUGH DURAS HAS BEEN, over the past 20 years, a key author for critics interested in the study of femininity, the attitude and declarations of the author herself can lead to a certain confusion. Indeed, she defined with accuracy what she meant by exploring a feminine territory of writing when she referred to "organic" writing, a "zone obscure," a writing that would reject "plagiarism."2 Jacques Lacan, Danielle Bajomée, Trista Selous, Marcelle Marini, Emma Wilson, Leslie Hill, James Williams, Stephanie Anderson, Janine Ricouart, to cite a few, have attempted, with various degrees of success, to define the territory of textual femininity.3 Sharon Willis refines a definition of Durassian feminine writing when she relates it to the Lacanian notion of "Unreal": "It is neither Reality, nor History, nor a Text. The Real designates that which is categorically unrepresentable, non human, at the limits of the known. It is emptiness, the 'zero point' of death, the proximity of feminine jouissance."4 We do not intend here to develop another study of femininity with reference to La Douleur; my purpose rather is to analyse what could be qualified as féminine in Duras' account of her husband's return from Buchenwald. What does she give us to read and to see that could be essentially feminine? It seems necessary to insist on these notions of "reading" and "seeing," as they combine the double question raised by the bilingual title of the present collection: Ecritures féminines de la guerre/'Feminine Representations of War. From representation to writing, the space of creation is unfolded, a symbolic space, a narrative space, a reading space and a metaphoric space that suspends direct reference in order to allow interpretation.5 To what extent does femininity give this account a different vision of war from that of Robert Antelme, Primo Levi or Jorge Semprun, for instance?6 Why is it not a testiVol . XL, No. 2 61 L'Esprit Créateur mony, a record, a diary or a salvation movement without which life would not have been possible? Clearly La Douleur, published in 1985 shortly after the highly praised L'Amant, is a problematic text. It is not widely studied, considering the plethora of critical works devoted to Duras. Leslie Hill, in Apocalyptic Desires, gives a factual study of the text and pays helpful attention to the various "états du texte" (123-35). Except for a few occasional references in studies on pain in Duras' work, such as that of Bajomée, on body and scream in Willis' analysis, it is hard not to notice the critical void that surrounds this text. It is not a new phenomenon: when La Douleur was first published in its current state in 1985, generic questions (what is this text?), ethical questions (what is her right to write this?) and emotional questions (how could she do this to Robert Antelme, her former husband with whom she had maintained very good contacts?) were raised: "Pourquoi a-t-elle décidé, dix ans après "Pas mort en déportation" (la publication d'un premier état du texte dans Sorci ères en 1976), et quarante ans après les faits, de publier ce livre? Il est dédié à Nicolas Régnier et Frédéric Antelme, le fils de Robert et Monique. Voulaitelle léguer et transmettre une partie de son histoire et celle de son ancien mari à la famille de celui-ci? (...)"7 I would like to argue that the obscenity of war as represented and written by Duras lies less in the obvious images of pain than in the means of expression that frame her writing. The text seems entirely based on the notion...

Les enjeux politiques du changement climatique. Quels instruments pour quelle justice ?

The Kyoto protocol on the reduction of greenhouse effect emissions, signed in 1997 (five years after the Rio Convention on climate change) finally commits developed states to quantitative objectives for reducing their emissions. Why did it take so long to produce such a highly problematic text (it is not known whether the figures are relevant, or how to achieve them, or what will happen in the event of non-compliance)? The cynical interpretation which postulates that the normative framework is merely the rhetorical packaging of sordid interest-peddling, does not dismiss the subject. Values, interest and technical considerations overlap. The development of the political issues of climate change is an example of what could be called, in a falsely paradoxical manner, deliberative bargaining

INFLUENCE OF TEXT GENRE ON ADULTS' MONITORING OF UNDERSTANDING AND RECALL

We examined the influence of text genre on monitoring of understanding and recall in adults. Younger and older adults' sentence reading times, sentence rereadings, and memory for texts containing inconsistent information were assessed in an on-line analysis. Adults' reading times were affected by text genre, with age differences found for expository but not narrative passages. Reading times of all adults were hindered when reading expository passages, with proportionately more disruption for older adults. Although younger and older adults reread sentences more frequently in expository passages, they recalled more information in narratives and were more likely to accurately comment on inconsistencies after reading narratives. Use of a general rereading strategy was related to recall of narrative and expository passages, but the ability to selectively reread problematic text information was related only to expository text recall. Results indicate that adults' evaluation and regulation of understanding is affected by text genre and that effective regulation of understanding, as measured by the ability to selectively reread text problems, is more critical to expository than narrative text recall.

White‐Washing the Black‐a‐Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness1

To speak freely of this tragedy, as it is written, we should recommend parents put none but a castrated edition of it into the hands of youth; and as it is at present altered for the stage, we contend that it can never be played without committing such a violence on the modesty and decency of the house as it is altogether intolerable.... Othello is indeed a most replenished of the goats and monkeys of Shakespeare's brain. Monthly Mirror (1807) Theatrical production of Othello in nineteenth-century America was governed by many of the same institutional conditions that bore on the production of all Shakespearean dramas at the time: the rapid growth of Shakespearean idolatry, the reorganization and social segregation of playhouses, and the emergence of textual piety in American editorial practices.2 Yet the anxieties articulated by the anonymous early nineteenth-century critic quoted above indicate that in both textual and theatrical reproduction Othello was a particularly problematic text. Part of that instability is revealed in the critic's use of metaphor: Othello is simultaneously in need of castration (a sign of its threatening phallic potency) and is a brothel (a place of illicit and socially problematic female sexuality). While all Shakespearean plays were subject to the censor's pen, excising offensive material from Othello was a special project for nineteenthcentury editors3--one that only barely disguised white America's fascination with black male sexuality, the repression of white female sexual prerogative, and a pronounced anxiety concerning miscegenation. Its vilest 'goats and monkeys' (set) aside, Othello was extremely in nineteenth-century American. It ranked as the third most frequently performed Shakespearean play, just behind Richard III and Hamlet (Edelstein 179). But the reproduction of Othello in nineteenth-century America extended well beyond the sanitized bourgeois mainstage--it was parodied extensively on the popular blackface minstrel stage as well. The mainstage and blackface productions of Othello provided the alter-egos of both Othello and Desdemona-- civilized, whitened, and innocent in the former; bawdy, blackened, and buffoonish in the latter. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize how the two genres complemented and foiled one another, offering very similar (and similarly derived) interpretations of both natural and social racebased and gendered taxonomies. Both mainstage and minstrelsy productions of Othello were, I am arguing, part of a larger set of discourses through which white America attempted to control racial signification during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Productions of Othello of both genres had mutually affirming relations with contemporary work in the natural sciences--specifically that of biological determinists. The natural sciences provided justification for critics, actors, and directors regarding specific changes to Othello's and Desdemona's characterizations, and the mainstage and minstrelsy productions of Othello provided scientists with further proof of their scientific formulations. On one level, this paper questions the accuracy and significance of discreet and recalcitrant class binarisms such as high/low, elite/popular, conservative/radical in the analysis of culture. Such dualities are reproduced by many cultural materialist critics despite persistent criticism from post-structuralists, some feminist critics, and (more recently) race critics. At the very least, I hope to challenge the false essentializing of class-based categories, including their transhistorical alignment with political or ideological motivation (Stallybrass and White, 14). However, dethroning class as the organizing principle in cultural studies, only to install race as the new czar, will re-essentialize and re-totalize the way we think about blackface minstrelsy and (more generally) nineteenthcentury American culture. …

Politics of Consumption and Generosity in the Carpet Scene of the "Agamemnon"

W HEN ARISTOPHANES POKED FUN Aeschylus in Frogs, he remarked that Aeschylus used to place characters such grieving Achilles or Niobe on stage, entirely muffled up, sitting silently for long stretches of time without so much grunting (911-13). The silence was powerful dramatic tool,' which Aeschylus skillfully exploited to combine dignity and tension. In Agamemnon, however, Aeschylus goes beyond silence. Agamemnon's unfortunate arrival from Troy and rapid departure for Hades is central event of play, to which returning hero lends his name. He does not, however, appear on stage until line 783 or speak until line 810, almost exactly halfway through play (1673 lines total). Once on stage, his presence is brief. Less than 180 lines later, he vanishes from stage and enters palace, to complete his performance few lines later bloody corpse rolled out before audience ghastly spectacle. Yet, Agamemnon's brief appearance, though just over 10 percent of play, is pivot around which all action turns. This scene dramatizes both visually and verbally transition from victor to victim, using gesture and action to foreshadow and, in some measure, explain fate that awaits returning hero. While some have argued against placing too much emphasis on this part of play, Agamemnon's rapid trip across stage is one of most controversial and complexly signifying events in Aeschylus' most heavily studied play. Students of Aeschylus quickly learn how complex and problematic text can be. Long before modern critics had begun to question whether determinate, normative interpretations were appropriate goal for literary analysis, Aeschylean scholarship had provided ample evidence that consensus on closely studied literary text was not realistic goal. Virtually every sentence in Aeschylean corpus has provoked dispute of one kind or another, and figure of Agamemnon is no exception. To Eduard Fraenkel, Agamemnon presents himself an dvinp ci5oCjh, a pious man. He is lawful monarch who is at pains to emphasize constitutional checks to his authority. Above all, he ap2pears, just before leaving stage, as true gentleman he always is. Lloyd-Jones once even alluded to the

HOW KNOWLEDGE INFLUENCED TWO INTERVENTIONS DESIGNED TO IMPROVE COMPREHENSION

Abstract The purpose of the present study was to compare two interventions designed to improve students’ comprehension of a problematic text. The first involved revising the text to improve coherence, and the second was designed to promote active engagement through asking inference‐promoting questions. Three groups of 18 fifth graders read either an original social studies text, a revised version of the text, or were asked questions while reading the original text. While the quantitative results showed no differences among the three groups in amount of information recalled and the number of questions answered correctly, qualitative analyses showed that those students who were asked questions tended to recall the central points in the passage. The lack of advantage for the revised text is in contrast to findings from previous research on promoting text comprehension through text revision. Explanations for this difference are offered by considering the unexpected effects of students’ knowledge. Further, the...

Putting Politics Back into MicroPolitics: A Response to Richard G. Townsend's 'Toward a Broader Micropolitics of Schools'

Probably the best thing that a social scientist can wish for is to be taken seriously. Richard Townsend's review of my book certainly takes me seriously, and I am grateful to him for that. It may seem churlish then to want to take up an offer to respond to that review, but I think there are some points of general significance, about social science writing, about qualitative research, about grounded theory, and about micropolitics that are worth taking up. Let me begin with some comments about the text itself. Social scientists have only recently begun to attend to the nature and effects of their own writing and such things as the crisis of representation and the problem of inscription (Tyler, 1985; Clifford, 1983). Social science writing is for the most part locked into a limited set of permissible modes and formats and we have failed to consider the implications of those limits for the possibilities they impose upon the adequacy or possibility of our depictions of social reality. Townsend would appear to be a defender of tradition; he clearly wants to preserve the existing constraints upon textual form. I accept that in orthodox terms Micropolitics is a somewhat problematic text. But it does need to be read in the light of the claims made for it, not in terms of criteria imposed upon it for no very good reason. If I claimed that it was a research monograph or a textbook of school organization then it could be faulted for failing to be quite either, but I do not. The first paragraph in the introduction might bear some rereading. What is Micropolitics then? Somewhat grandly I see it as a discursive intervention, an adumbration of theory where no theory exists. It is a first attempt to establish a conceptual framework for a micropolitics of organizations. (Townsend is distressed by my three cautions that the book be read as a tentative and exploratory piece. He wants me, perhaps all social science, to be definitive-and proceeds to read the text as

A Neglected Method in Ezekiel Research

In Ezekiel's final verdict against the Moabite enemy an unexpected detail has troubled many an exegete: the Ammonites are mentioned along with to whom the oracle is addressed (Ezek. xxv 10). will give it (i.e., the Moabite territory) along with the Ammonites to the people of the East as a possession, that the Ammonites may be remembered no more among the nations, and I will execute judgements upon Moab (vv. 10-11)1). J. W. Rothstein2) and many others have judged the Ammonites to be an obvious intrusion: they have no place in an oracle concerning solely the Moabites, for the Ammonites (a) seem to overload the sentence, make it clumsy and almost unreadable; (b) receive their own judgement oracle, which in fact is the preceding pericope (Ezek. xxv 1-7). Accordingly, literary critics have every reason to remove the bny'mwn from the incriminated sentence, and I myself hasten to subscribe to this critical operation and the logic involved. However, one important question remains: how can we account for the presence of the Ammonites who are in fact twice introduced into our problematic text? In this article I try to answer this question which has never been answered conclusively and has thus up to now left the whole critical undertaking without a vital piece of justification. Pursuing this question we hit upon a complicated situation which becomes clear only through a careful analysis of a particular expres-