Radical Disruption Research Articles

Hatred of the System: Menacing Loners and Autonomous Cells in the Netherlands

In this article, the violent threat emerging from “menacing loners” and autonomous cells in The Netherlands is being historicized and contextualized by providing quantitative and qualitative insight into this threat and illuminating some of the most dramatic incidents. Although beyond the core purpose of this mainly empirical article, some tentative remarks will be presented as possible explanation for both continuity and change. We argue that the shift from political violence originating from groups and networks to political violence perpetrated by individuals, and the shift from ideologically motivated violence to performative violence, are both shifts within a continuum, not radical breaks with the past. It is a difference in degree. Further, we argue that these gradual shifts in types of violence can only be understood as dependent on parallel manifestations of counter-policies, technological developments, and broader trends within society, rather than as attributable to indigenous terrorist developments as such. We postulate a shift from ideologically motivated to performative violence, resulting to a large extent from the possibilities offered by the Internet and social media, and from a broader cultural trend defined as the emergence of the “casting society.”

Degradation process of fuel cell membrane observed by positron

To investigate degradation process due to radicals in fuel cell membrane by means of positron annihilation spectroscopy, three kinds of radicals, HO•, H• and O2•- are produced through water radiolysis. The results show that the cluster structure and proton conductivity was greatly affected by reductive radicals. This is because the oxidative radical is responsible for the dissociation of sulfonic group, whereas the reductive radical breaks down the cluster in the membrane and disrupts proton conduction, which is consistent with solution analysis.

Scorbutic nostalgia

Scurvy was a nutritional disease with many unpleasant physical symptoms, but it was attended by some unusual accompaniments in the sensory apparatus and in the emotions. These were specified by Thomas Trotter in the 1790s and included an over-stimulated imagination focused on images of food and home, capable of inducing fits of ecstatic pleasure and dismay. Joseph Banks called this excitement ‘nostalgia’, actually suffering from it in the Arafura Sea when sailing home in the Endeavour. Trotter called it scorbutic nostalgia, noting how often its victims would give way to floods of tears after having dreamed of home, only to wake to the dismal reality of the ship. Calenture is not a nutritional disease, but it induces a fantasy almost identical with that of scorbutic nostalgia. The victim hallucinates a pastoral landscape on the ocean's back, and does everything possible to enter it. The hallucination is not specified as home but it is, to borrow the French name for nostalgia, a maladie du pais, in which a fantasy of earth replaces the fact of the sea. In this article I argue, along with Thomas Trotter, Erasmus Darwin and Jean Starobinski, that in their effects on the senses and the passions, calenture and scorbutic nostalgia are in effect the same: they are both ecstatic states of nervous excitement arising from a radical disruption of the victim's sense of position in time and space. How this disruption comes about in cases of scurvy I attempt to explain not as a yearning for the reality of home or land, but as an obsessive engagement with an experience that is present but accessible only through the imagination, either as a vision of delights intolerably impalpable or as one luxuriously and voluptuously enjoyed.

Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (review)

WILLIAM KUSKIN, Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi, 390. ISBN: 978-0-268-03317-0. $40. William Kuskin's book, Symbolic Caxton, concentrates on Caxton's role in the production of cultural capital and the printer's response to the dominant ideologies at work in the fifteenth century. It expands many of the themes found in the earlier collection of essays Kuskin edited, Caxton's Trace (published in 2006 by the University of Notre Dame Press). In Symbolic Caxton, Kuskin aims to focus critical attention on the history of texts and the symbolic and material profit made possible by the fifteenth-century print trade. For Kuskin, terms such as capitalism or print culture are too 'monolithic' to represent the intricacies of early print production, which are better illustrated through an historical model that 'seeks out relationships within an ongoing reproduction cycle' (18). In support of this historical model, Kuskin frames the incunable period as 'part of an enduring culture of the vernacular book' rather than 'the beginning of a linear movement toward print culture' (18). Kuskin focuses on the production of Caxton's printshop from the middle of the 1470s to the early 1490s, a concise period of time that he reads as a continuation of ideas and cultures rather than a break between the ideologies of the medieval and early modern periods. Symbolic Caxton is ambitious in its scope and Kuskin arranges the book into three comprehensive sections that attempt to examine all aspects of Caxton's book production. The three sections focus on print marketplace ('Capital and Literary Form'), ideas of authorship ('Authorship and the Chaucerian Inheritance'), and the formation of a reading public in England ('Print and Social Organization'). Everything from the wool trade in which Caxton began his career as a mercer, to the demand for the printer's books by bibliophiles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is addressed. In each of these sections, Kuskin discusses a wide array of topics while addressing the issues of periodicity by consistently emphasizing the need to reevaluate the idea of radical breaks between historical periods. The topics covered show how ambitious Kuskin is in his approach. Along with periodicity, he covers a variety of important subjects from the difficulties of the mechanical reproduction of books to the sophistication fifteenth-century buyers and sellers of books in England brought to their trade. In the first section, Kuskin organizes his discussion around Caxton's influence on the process of book production. He argues that Caxton did little to innovate the production of books, but rather that he capitalized on already existing trends within the profession. …

Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Charles Piot. Nostalgia for the Future: West Af rica after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 200 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibiography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $20.00. Paper. Charles Piot's landmark 1999 ethnography, Remotely Global, showed that societies of the savanna region of northern Togo, far from being static, insular polities on the margins of the nation-state, lying history and isolated from global forces, have always been influenced and preoccupied by the outside world. In this new book, Piot argues that the ending of the Cold War brought about a decrease in the power of both the state and local chieftaincy in Togo, the emergence of a radically new political economy centered on NGOs and Pentecostal churches, and new, future-oriented social imaginaries, modes of subjectivity, sovereignty, and storytelling. Piot's tide indexes Togolese longing for a future that replaces untoward pasts, both political and cultural. Such longing is represented not only in Christian End Times narratives and die universal quest for exit visas but also in the embrace of a thousand development initiatives that hail youth and leave elders behind (20). Utopian yearnings find expression in a passion for playing the green card lottery, fantasies of fictitious marriages with foreigners, membership in churches that promise supernatural abundance, Internet searches for exit strategies, and a turn to the transient pleasures of sex, drugs, and music for an instantaneous sense of affective power and presence. This emphasis on inwardness and self-fulfillment stands in dramatic contrast to the prevailing ethos of a traditional culture, where duty, forebearance, and respect for elders imply a stoic acceptance of life as one finds it and the suppression of thoughts and feelings that challenge the status quo. Traditionally, lip service was paid to the idea that one must sacrifice personal gratification and spontaneous self-expression to make sociality viable (the implication being that what is good for the many will prove good for die individual). Collective rituals and everyday practices of commensality, neighborliness, and mutuality reinforced the common weal. Modernity reverses these assumptions. Personal development through education, travel, and purchasing power becomes the royal road to social development, a precondition for the wider social good. This revolutionary change in worldview does not occur adventitiously. It follows radical disruptions to the social fabric - civil war, famine, epidemic illness, mass migration or displacement, and urbanization. Piot paints a grim picture of the anomic background against which the new social imaginarles emerged in the 1990s. These changes burst onto this socio-cosmological stage like a comet from the sky. Disconcerted by the violence against Kabre in the cities of the south, puzzled by those strange new keywords democratie and droits de l'homme, attacked by the Pentecostal churches, stung by currency devaluation and state withdrawal, and increasingly neglected by cash-strapped diasporics, this authority system was shaken to its roots (99). …

The politics of self-defence: beyond a legal understanding of international norms

This contribution considers an alternative approach to the research on the use of force, a field that has been largely dominated by international legal scholars. I argue for application of an evolutionary approach to international (legal) norms, one that complements current legal approaches and moves the discussion of norms beyond their dichotomous legal/illegal understanding. This kind of research highlights the role of politics in international law and allows us to determine factors influencing dissemination of international norms. Through a study of seven post-Second World War cases, I trace the development of both narrow and expanded notion of preemptive self-defence and conclude that while ascertaining legality of specific actions is vital for understanding established international law, one cannot talk about radical breaks in development of the law on the use of force. The expanded concept is in fact a product of the evolution of (societal) norms on self-defence and an accumulation of previous successful challenges in metanorms on the use of force.

Dickinson, Blake, and the Hymnbooks of Hell

Many early critics found affinities between William Blake and Emily Dickinson in their radical disruption of poetic language, their penchant for gnomic utterance, and their cryptic imagery that hinted at a complex private mythology, all of which contributed to a view of Blake and Dickinson as mystics or poet-prophets with a message accessible only to initiates. Later twentieth-century scholarship, however, turned toward a closer investigation of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson and Blake produced their poetry—in particular, their relationship to the Protestant hymn tradition exemplified by Isaac Watts. Scholars have examined the ways in which Dickinson and Blake individually appropriated this tradition only to subvert it, but none has undertaken a synoptic examination of works in which both writers perform this subversion. Since there is no evidence of Dickinson having read Blake, the point of inquiry into the relationship between his writings and hers is to examine the ways in which their common sources—the Protestant hymnodists—inform both their poetics and their social consciences. Setting texts by Blake and Dickinson alongside those of Watts allows for an assessment of congruences and divergences in the ways in which these poems and their authors challenge the theological, educational, and stylistic hegemonies the hymn tradition advanced.

From Incentive to Stewardship: The Shifting Discourse of Academic Publishing

Abstract We examine the effects that opposing metaphors have on the practices of academics and publishers—in terms of policy initiatives, litigation, and technological advances—and argue that a new set of rhetorical strategies should be deployed to create a vision for copyright laws and publishing practices. We draw from the work of Kenneth Crews to define alternative metaphors and strategies for more effective management of copyrights: stewardship, unbundling of copyrights, and processes of negotiation, for instance, rather than ownership and control. Such terms provide a radical disruption to publishing-as-usual and may serve as the necessary incentive for creators and publishers to foster more co-equal, reciprocal relationships and publishing contracts. The results of such negotiations may become more consistent with current tenure and promotion practices that drive faculty attitudes about academic publishing practices. We believe this because the profit reward for publishers is increasingly at odds with scholarly rewards that accrue from expanded readership, increased citations, expanded accessibility, and accelerated production of new knowledge. We conclude by applying metaphors to practices of open access, institutional repositories, and commercial publishing as a way to understand why disciplinary work in computers and writing and the field of composition as a whole have been slow to change despite the dramatic changes in technologies, publishing practices, and online communities over the past decade, and also to envision a way to move forward. We suggest that academics and publishers alike are too fixated on the products of intellectual work rather than the processes of use.

Innovation, Technology, or History: What is the Historiography of Technology About?

Innovation, Technology, or HistoryWhat is the Historiography of Technology About? David Edgerton (bio) Our brief in this symposium is to look at "both the continuing significance of some long-lived patterns in the scholarship of this field, and the importance of newer emergent trends and themes," particularly in relation to "big questions that scholars—not just historians—might ask about technology, culture, and the world." Bruce Seely further asked us for "insights about where historians of technology and the Society should be directing their scholarship and activities in the years ahead." This is a tall and problematic order: what exactly is the field we should be considering, since the study of technology is clearly not confined to self-proclaimed historians of technology? How can we even begin to give a picture of its accomplishments? Indeed, ought we not distrust narratives that purport to tell us where the historiography (and other studies) of technology has been, is, and is going? Furthermore, should we not bear in mind that exhortations that fields are shifting or ought to shift to one particular method, problem, or period often repress rather than stimulate novelty, and reflect a narrowing of conversation and debate, perhaps inevitable in diverse fields, but no less regrettable for that? In this essay I hope to avoid some of these problems by asking an even bigger prior question: what is the history of technology (in [End Page 680] many different guises, and in many different modes) the history of? What, in practice, is meant by technology in histories, and what is meant by history in histories of technology? Our thinking about technology, and indeed our thinking about the historiography of technology, is, I suggest, uncritically focused on some, but not all, novelties. In the last generation, public policies in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the rich world have placed enormous rhetorical emphasis on the need for increased "innovation," which has been reflected in increased institutional support for implicitly instrumentally useful social and historical studies of technological change.1 In the historiography of technology too there has been a strong focus on novelty, on radical breaks with the past. We in the academy are supposed to have got past unreflexive progress-talk, and are now (in theory, and in Theory) eclectic, playful with time, and open to the marginal. But, in historiographical pronouncements that introduce and summarize new work, a very old-fashioned and narrow progressivism is prevalent.2 Authors invoke the specter of a darkly ignorant past, an enlightenment in "recent years" (embellished with a citation to a work decades old), and a contemporary revolution. They attack paper tigers like "whig history," "technological determinism," and "linear models" as if they were made of scholarly living flesh and bone. For example, in 2003 technological determinism could still be described as a "fast-dying horse," when it was surely either never alive, long dead, or, to labor the point, the slowest dying horse in the annals of veterinary science.3 From its creation in the 1980s till today, the "linear model" is attacked despite having been an object of attack from its very creation. Such caricaturing of analysts of the past has led to the caricaturing of what happened in the past, for example giving the impression that the linear model was central to belief about and policy for science and technology in recent times.4 In the academy, as in technology and in politics, novelty-mongering does not necessarily reflect novelty, much less progress. During the 1980s [End Page 681] historians of technology were invited to embrace, as a supposed novelty, applied sociology of scientific knowledge—although this meant applying to science what was already known about technology/politics/history, as well as embodying the view (explicitly rejected by many historians of technology) that technology is applied science.5 While this approach (SCOT, in shorthand) did open up new questions for some historians of technology, others were already alert to alternatives, to paths not taken, to the reality that not all change is progress, and to an understanding that the invocation of theory is not in itself a sign of methodological or historiographical sophistication.6 Other approaches taken to...

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State , and: River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (review)

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. By Stephen Aron. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. 301. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $21.95.)River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain. By Thomas Ruys Smith. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 232. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Ann OstendorfJust as the American public turned attention to the Mississippi River at the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, so too have scholars begun revisiting the significance of the river region to the nation. Although both Stephen Aron's American Confluence and Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams present studies of this river, their questions, methods, and approaches present very different but very useful stories of this place.In American Confluence, Stephen Aron tells the tale of what he calls the or the area surrounding the eastern Missouri, western Ohio, and middle Mississippi rivers, from its earliest Native history to Missouri's first years of statehood. This is story whose parts have been told multiple times in many ways before; however, Aron attempts to unify the disparate interpretations by re-imagining them within new framework. Using primarily secondary sources and drawing on approaches from global history, Aron describes place where interculturai interaction, accommodation, and cooperation dominated. The word refers not only to the joining of rivers but also to the meeting of people. By leaving the boundaries of the confluence region purposefully vague, the author successfully expresses history of the place more as contemporaries experienced it; moveable, fluid, and changing. The region remained place of transition for both Natives and colonials, where new trading partners passed through, new arrivals found home, and new colonial administrators divided and redivided their territorial claims. That is, until the arrival of the Americans.Thus, the story reverts to the more familiar political history of aggressive frontier expansion at the expense of the accommodationist precedents, which had been carefully and consciously maintained by the French, Spanish, British, Osage, Shawnee, and Delaware. Although the rivers continued to merge, the confluence of people ended. With American hegemony, the borderland disappeared. Without the ability to play one colonial power off another, Native lost power in the confluence region, especially with the flood of Kentucky and Tennessee settlers after the War of 1812. During this deluge, squatters swept away generations of inclusive intercultural relations (158-59), system Aron implies existed as mutually beneficial to natives and colonists alike. Despite the familiar ending, Aran's retelling of the regional events avoids assuming the inevitability of Missouri statehood and American domination, with more emphasis on how the American actions were radical disruptions with jarring effects on the Native and colonial population already in the confluence region.Although it does not deliver any new research, it is Aron's approach that is most useful for scholars of the region. In some ways this work is an application of Richard White's middle ground theory applied to the region further south. Aron re-envisions the Mississippi Valley historically as place of exchange and adaptation, describing the confluence region as moving, like other borderlands, from contested boundaries between colonial domains to frontier - which he defines as a meeting place of peoples - and eventually to place of oppositional border states (xiii, xvi). During this first change, the Osage dominated; however, their position deteriorated once the region ceased being meeting place between people and became meeting point of north, south, east, and west with the birth of the border state of Missouri. By the 1820s, Missouri's border state status, as opposed to its borderland position, had thoroughly reshaped the interactions of the population. …

Close Range: Targeting Regulatory Reform

Since the onset of the financial crisis, regulatory reform has held a central place on the political and academic agenda. An intense and broad discussion about a “New Financial Architecture” belies the idea that finance is “too complex” to become the subject of public debate. An abundance of statements have been made to underline that a new regulatory era is beginning. It is not surprising in this context that the G20 economic summit on November 15, 2008 was presented as a “Bretton Woods II” or that Nicolas Sarkozy arrived to the meeting declaring that “the all powerful market that is always right is finished” (Augar 2009). However, there are surprisingly few radical changes or radical breaks with the past. The main outcome of the G20-summit was the reincarnation of the “financial stability forum” as a “financial stability board.” As the Economist reassured its audience: “fortunately, the G20's attitude to global finance seems realistic. The communique was not a grand manifesto but a pragmatic acknowledgement of the tension between a globalising capital market and national regulation.” This contribution reflects on the widely agreed upon need for radical reforms and their absence. It suggests that to understand this situation, it is useful first to consider reformers’ taken-for-granted understandings of reform—the reform doxa —as well as their reform practices that together produce a “close range” of reform options. The “sociological approach” inspiring this short argument is the “reflexive sociology” of Bourdieu and the many scholars who written on the economy working in this tradition. 5 The close range of financial reform process is intrinsically tied to its anchoring in reformers’ shared understanding of financial markets; a doxa that shapes the regulatory discussion among financial regulators. Although there is plenty of room for critique and even if the doxa may evolve in time, it …

Socle de savoirs et savoir-faire, innovation et renouvellement des territoires. Les cas du Canavese dans le Piémont et du bassin minier de la Provence

Cet article compare la capacite qu'ont deux anciens systemes localises d'innovation et leurs territoires, le Canavese situe dans le Piemont (Italie) et le bassin minier de Provence (France), a se renouveler a partir de/ou en rupture avec le socle de savoirs et de savoir-faire qui avait fait leurs succes anterieurs et leur cohesion sociale. Il se demande si un socle de connaissances accumulees est un avantage pour innover ou s'il entraine des irreversibilites qui rendent difficiles les modifications radicales de trajectoire productive. Existe-t-il differentes facons d'innover et de renouveler un territoire qui a subi des evolutions radicales ou des ruptures dans sa dynamique ?

At the Walls of Athens: What Remains?

In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their (aesthetic) implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall (or hedge), as representative of both the politics of oppression (in the case of Van Riebeeck’s hedge of bitter almonds in Kirstenbosch Gardens, Cape Town) as well as the politics of reconciliation (in the case of The Wall of Names in Freedom Park, Pretoria). The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy.

Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks

In the light of new historical experiences of popular struggle to build alternatives to capitalism, debates about the process of social change are unavoidable. Intolerable social conditions under capitalism may fuel resentment and rebellion. The development of productive forces may render possible a society in which all can share equally and freely in a decent, secure, fulfilling existence. The realization of such a society depends on human beings becoming aware of their powers and possibilities, and consciously transforming their world and themselves. Yet how can such consciousness develop under capitalism’s alienating social conditions? As Mehmet Ufuk Tutan and Al Campbell put it in their contribution: “To build the new society one needs transformed humans, but to have transformed humans one needs a new society.” They argue that this chicken-and-egg problem can be resolved dialectically, but requires an understanding of how change occurs, alternating between processes of incremental change and moments of radical rupture.

Can the World Wean Itself from Fossil Fuels?

Shaping a pathway for global development in light of climate change and oil depletion need not imply radical disruption or widespread social harm.

The art of useless suffering

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that modernism in the arts might have in articulating the uselessness and incomprehensibility of physical and mental suffering. It is argued that the experience of illness is frequently resistant to interpretation, and as such, it will be suggested, to conventional forms of artistic expression and communication. Conventional narratives, and other beautiful or conventionally expressive aesthetic structures, that presuppose the possibility and desirability of an harmonious and meaningful resolution to conflicts and tensions, may fundamentally misrepresent the patient's experience. By drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (on useless suffering) and the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and T. W. Adorno, it will be argued first that a faith in the possibility of harmonious resolution of suffering is misplaced and does violence to the experience of suffering. Second, it will be argued that the expression of suffering lies not in finding words, images or sounds that communicate the experience of that suffering to others, but rather in the persistent and radical disruption of any illusion of meaning and coherence that might be imposed upon the experience, so that the very possibility of communication is also disrupted.

The Oxford English Literary History, Volume X: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement by Chris Baldick (review)

246 Reviews in reproduction. Lawrence's account of Loerke's appearance is similar to known portraits and photographs ofMoest. Bullen puts forward a convincing case forbeliev ing thatMoest's 'strong,but mainly unpleasant, impression on him, and his Godiva statuetteexemplified forLawrence something of theemotionally cold aloofness of early twentieth-century aestheticism' (pp.26I-62). This isa scholarly and challenging book, demonstrating an impressiveunderstanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-centurycriticism and cultural developments. There are, however, a fewproof-reading lapses. The comparison of Spencer Gore's painting of the public viewing post-impressionist paintings at the StaffordGallery in I9II and Gauguin's Visionof the Sermon,forexample, ismade even more striking when, as here (pp. 222-23), the images have been transposed! KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON LEONEE ORMOND The OxfordEnglishLiterary History,Volume X: I9IO-I940: TheModern Movement.By CHRIS BALDICK. Oxford: Oxford University Press.2004.xvii+ 477PP.?32 (pbk ?I8.99). ISBN:0-I9-8I8310-0 & 978-0-I9-8I8310-5 (pbk 0-I9-928834-8 & 978-0-I9-928834-2). Chris Baldick believes that academic literarycritics generally misrepresent the period 1910-I940 as the triumphof the revolution thatwe callmodernism amovement that 'was in itsown timeaminority current' (p. 3). For Baldick thedominant tendency in the poetry of theperiod was 'not thatof "modernism" but of realism' (p. IO7),and he argues that it is misleading to seemodernism as a revoltagainst realism. So far as prose fiction isconcerned, he remarks that 'theopposite of realism isnotmodernism; it is,as ithas been forcenturies, romance, or fantasy,or fable' (p. 212). His case restson a narrower than normal definition of modernism: forBaldick literary modernism inEngland can be limited topoets Eliot, Pound, and Sitwell; novelistsRichardson, Hueffer/Ford,Joyce, andWoolf; and two 'polemical outriders' T. E. Hulme andWyndham Lewis (p. 399). He pours scorn on the recent tendency to discussW B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence as modernist writers, arguing that 'both could be better understood as lateRomantics', and he asserts thatHenry James, Joseph Conrad, andW B. Yeats 'were not committed to radical disruptions of form' (p. 399). Such standpoints can be contested, but theyresult in a history thatdoes not focus in detail on a small number of writers, but surveyswith a broad sweep 'thework of about twohundred modern authors' (p. 14), including thosewho produced non-literaryworks. Some major authors are discussed at length,and well D. H. Lawrence, for instance but the main virtue of thisbook is its wide scope and itsdrawing of oftenunexpected connections between the canonical and the non-canonical. Baldick must surely be the firstto claim, forexample, thatP G. Wodehouse's giftfor making something freshout of anything stale 'meritsserious comparison with theJamesJoyce of Ulysses' (p. 298). This comes in a chapter entitled 'Modern Entertainment: Light Reading', one of the tenchapters devoted todifferentliterarygenres and subgenres thatconstitute the second of thevolume's threemain sections. The firstsection includes chapters on themodern literary market (useful informationon suchmatters as theNet Book Agreement, literary agents, and book tokens),modern authorship, and modern English usage. The final YES, 37, 2007 247 section, 'Occasions', includes chapters on England and the English, theGreat War, Childhood and Youth, and Sex and Sexualities. The volume also includes nearly fifty pages of author bibliographies, and suggestions forfurtherreading. Amongst Baldick's 'two hundred' are several little-readwriters whose work many readerswill be tempted to investigate. (One regret:Baldick devotes a single sentence to Ernest Bramah's blind detective character Max Carrados, but omits anymention of Bramah's wonderfully funnyKai Lung stories. They do not deserve their present neglect.) Baldick isgenerally a reliable guide to his chosen literary texts,although inevitably one can quarrel with some of his readings. It issurelynot thecase, forexample, that the reader of E. M. Forster's A Passage toIndia 'knowsAziz to be innocent from the start' (p. 323). And describing Noel Coward's Cavalcade as 'amedley of patriotic song, nobly endured military sacrifice,and flag-waving' (p. 320) ignores commentaries thatdetect a concealed and subversive vein of ironic pacifist critique in Coward's ostensible patriotism. Baldick's attitude to literaryvalue ispragmatic rather than thesis-driven. He advances no strongdefinitionof literary worth (although he notes that Angela Brazil's novels have none; p. 360), and no thesisconcerning the relationship between sociocultural change, biographical detail, and literaryproduction. Nevertheless, his book...

The Question of Land in Cambodia: Perceptions, Access, and Use since De-collectivization

Introduction Cambodia is one of the countries in the world which experienced the most radical disruption of its land tenure. Almost its entire present adult population has been forced at one time or another to leave its lands and houses, whether because of the American bombings (1969-1973) which were particularly murderous in the south-eastern part of the country (the bombs’ holes are still visible from an airplane); or on a far greater scale, during the Democratic Kampuchea regime, called th...

The marriage paradox: modernist novels and the cultural imperative to marry

Departing from the tradition of reading literary modernism in terms of formal innovation, Pines' study examines literary modernism through the lens of marriage. She considers the marriage plots of selected modernist novels by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf in relation to the social and legal restructuring of marriage occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain and the U.S. In particular, she identifies and explores the strategies by which the modernist critique of marriage paradoxically reinforces the institution and the social imperative to marry. Despite a preoccupation with the changing nature of marriage, she argues, modern literature and culture do not imagine alternatives to marriage. By examining these novels in their social, legal, and historical contexts, Pines provides insights into how a critique of marriage can paradoxically contribute to a commitment to the institution. Ultimately, she argues, this critique undermines the definition of modernism as a radical disruption of social and cultural norms and raises questions about the persistence of marriage in Anglo-American culture. In treating marriage as a social and cultural institution, Pines departs from previous feminist examinations of modernism that focus on gender roles or consider the modern marriage plot in less historical and more formalist terms. And, finally, by setting texts of High Modernism alongside texts from the Harlem Renaissance, her study argues for a more expansive definition of literary modernism.

“Going All to Pieces”: A Farewell to Arms as Trauma Narrative

Bullet wounds do not cause severe bleeding unless they happen to injure some large trunk or smash one of the larger bones. Wounds caused by fragments of shells or bombs tear larger holes in the skin and lacerate the muscles and are, therefore, more often the cause of serious bleeding. --Injuries and Diseases of War (15) In the final chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the narrator and main character, Frederic Henry, describes the protracted labor of his partner, Catherine Barkley. When the attending physician recommends a cesarian section, Frederic anxiously inquires about the dangers associated with the procedure. Assuring him that the risks should not exceed those associated with an ordinary delivery, the doctor responds to Frederic's question regarding the potential aftereffects of the operation: are none. There is only the (321). Although this reply suggests that remains will be of no lingering concern, A Farewell to Arms nonetheless testifies to the persistence of wounds, both visible and invisible. Frederic's particular narration of the events and experiences that mark his wartime years must be understood in such terms, for his entire narrative--no ordinary delivery--inscribes a continued struggle with the debilitating aftereffects associated with shell shock. He suffers from the compulsion to remember and retell his traumatic past from the standpoint of a survivor both unable and perhaps unwilling to put that very past into words; the novel stands as a record of his narrative collision with the violence of trauma. (1) Frederic's troubled recollections find expression in apparently embodied and disembodied ways: as pain that registers at the level of the body, breaking apart the perceived unity of the physical self in the presence of terrific bodily suffering; and as trauma that registers at the level of consciousness, breaking down time, language, and the perceived unity of the subjective self in the face of incomprehensible violence. However, in staging an ongoing dialogue between inside and outside, A Farewell to Arms also challenges us to reconsider the mind/body dualism that keeps the wounds of the body from the wounds of the mind. For Frederic's narration--of his body, his memory, his wounds--destabilizes such distinctions in an effort to hold together a broken past that remains, in the present, a nexus of uncertainty and contestation. In accord with Tim Armstrong's emphasis on the interpenetration of machine and human in the modernist period, and with his identification of the thinking (3) involved in the repair and augmentation of bodies in the face of radical disruption in warfare, Frederic'ss narration enacts a kind of prosthetic thinking: he repairs and augments his past as a countermeasure for the pain and trauma that plague him still. (2) Looking back on events, reconstructing his memories, Frederic reveals a desire for a whole and perfect retelling of the past; his narration functions as a prosthesis meant to stave off a sense of the self as a disarticulated scar. His embodied subjectivity, like the wounds he suffers to represent, calls out for prosthetic completion. But as Elaine Scarry notes, what is in the body is remembered (112), and Frederic's narrative prosthesis cannot hold the wound closed. His traumatic memories bleed into and disrupt his present; his narration operates both as scar and wound, as tissue stitched together and lacerated apart. Though his prosthetic version of events insists on the potential for a separate peace (243), Frederic's telling of his past instead goes all to pieces (322) in the enduring presence of pain and trauma too well remembered to be left behind. For years, analysts of the novel understood that Hemingway himself was doing the remembering--the author recalling his Great War experiences through his cipher, Frederic Henry. (3) While it seems to me simply impossible to imagine anyone's being wounded in war and not having it affect his or her writing of a novel about war memories and characters who are wounded, I am not principally interested in either the text or the trauma of Hemingway's life but rather in the text of his narrator's trauma. …