Reclusive Life Research Articles

SUFFERING IN EMILY DICKINSON’S SELECTED POEMS

This research examines the theme of suffering in Emily Dickinson’s selected poems, focusing on her unique poetic approach and the profound emotional resonance her work evokes. Emily Dickinson, a pivotal figure in 19th-century American literature, frequently explored themes of death, pain, and existential questions. Despite her reclusive life, her poetry is rich with personal imagery and symbols, reflecting her deep preoccupation with mortality and the human condition. The study utilizes a structural analytical approach, combining library research with descriptive qualitative analysis. This method involves a thorough examination of relevant literary critiques and an in-depth textual analysis of Dickinson’s poems. The aim is to uncover how Dickinson’s portrayal of suffering contributes to a deeper understanding of human experience. Findings indicate that Dickinson’s treatment of suffering is multifaceted, often depicting pain as a necessary aspect of the human soul's development and a precursor to joy and peace. Her poems suggest that pain and suffering are integral to personal growth and resilience. Dickinson’s ability to articulate the complexities of suffering through her innovative use of language and metaphor makes her work both timeless and universally relatable. Overall, Emily Dickinson’s exploration of suffering provides a profound insight into the human experience, highlighting the interconnectedness of pain, joy, and personal growth. Her poetry remains a significant contribution to American literature, offering a nuanced perspective on the inevitability of suffering and its role in shaping the human soul.

은둔형 외톨이의 은둔생활 경험에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to understand the reclusive life of reclusive loners. To achieve this, in-depth interviews were conducted with three reclusive loners. The interviews were transcribed verbatim for each participant, and field notes taken during the interviews were analyzed. The analysis resulted in the identification of 55 concepts, 20 subcategories, and 6 main categories. The main categories were ‘Life before reclusive living,’ ‘Timing and triggers of reclusive living,’ ‘Lifestyle during reclusion,’ ‘Challenges of reclusive living,’ ‘Efforts to break free from reclusion and experiences of breaking free,’ and ‘Necessary factors to exit reclusive living.’ Based on the research findings, six specific support measures have been proposed to establish regulations for reclusiveness and social support systems for loners.

A Gendered Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry and her Feminine Consciousness - Taking They shut me up in Prose - as an Example

Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest female poets in the history of Western literature and a pioneer of modernist poetry. Her reclusive life was considered eccentric at her time. Her poetry is unique in style and expression, and she wrote about women’s desire for freedom and independence, as well as her ambition of breaking the restrictions for women in a patriarchal society. She believed that poetry was a superior literary form compared to prose and that women could also express themselves through poetry. This essay focuses on the feminine consciousness expressed in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. By analyzing her poem, They shut me up in Prose - from a gendered or feminist perspective, this essay discusses the relationship between Emily Dickinson’s female identity and her career as a poet: Emily Dickinson’s feminist thought expressed in her poetry was influenced by the women’s rights movement in the 19th century America, as well as her own life and education experience, and poetry was her way to rebel against the patriarchal literary tradition.

Revision of the South American Ninetinae genus Guaranita (Araneae, Pholcidae)

The southern South American genus Guaranita includes tiny spiders (body length ~1 mm) that lead reclusive lives under ground-objects and run rapidly when disturbed. As a result, they have been poorly collected and studied. Here we report on a recent collection of Guaranita spiders from Argentina, describing one new species (G. auadae Huber sp. nov.) and the previously unknown female of G. dobby Torres et al., 2016. In addition, we provide CO1 barcodes for all (now five) known species, first SEM data, and first chromosome data for the genus. The diploid number of Guaranita goloboffi Huber, 2000 (2n♂ = 11) is among the lowest in araneomorph spiders with monocentric chromosome structure.

17세기 澤堂 李植家의 『家訓』 저술과 편찬

This study analyzes Taekdang Yi Sik's Family Motto in the 17th century to examine the process by which an individual's social experiences are shaped into norms for their descendants. Yi Sik's life, which served as the backdrop for the formation of the family motto, was divided into three periods based on his past rank, government service, and writing activity. The first is the period from his birth to his passing the state examination; the second is the period of his reclusive life after passing the state examination; and the third is the period of his writing activity working as a government official after the Restoration of King Injo. The writings completed by Yi Sik during his lifetime were compiled by his descendants into two volumes of Family Motto after his death. It is characterized by being passed down in an incomplete form because it was not intended to be distributed externally, but only shared with close relatives within the family. The main contents of Family Motto are divided into two main categories: those necessary for the operation of the family and those necessary for the education of the descendants. The contents necessary for the operation of the family were organized into the main rituals of the ceremony and the management of the graves of their ancestors and the contents necessary for the education of the descendants were organized into the study method for passing the state examination and the method of learning sentences. This is understood to be the result of his efforts to ensure the rational operation of the family and the efficient transmission of learning as one of the ways for Yi Sik to pass on the know-how he had accumulated during his life to his descendants.

Analysis of the Similar Characteristics in the Works of Dickinson and Bishop

Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop are both the most influential poets in western literary history. They both lived in a time of great change, and they both were seen as more silent than men. Dickinson lived a reclusive life until her death, she devoted almost her whole life to writing, and created 1775 poems in her lifetime. Her lonely life nourished her poetry, and despite frequent illness and unrequited affection, Dickinson’s relationship with poetry was inextricably inseparable. As for the modern American poet Bishop, she always shuttles between different countries in her life. This experience of displacement and migration is not only her pleasure, but also the source of her loneliness and pain. There are many similarities in the life and creation of Bishop and Dickinson, both of whom have experienced the misfortune of growing up, and both have doubts about the identity as poets and as women. This paper explores the similarities between the two poets’ creations and the causes from the aspects of time, physical condition and spiritual pursuit. The causes are their thoughts of life, death and female identity, as well as their pursuit of peace, which takes modern American poetry to a whole new level.

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

Ghost Written

This visual essay presents a feminist counter-fiction to the likely fictional narratives the media has used to describe Sarah Winchester’s reclusive life in the labyrinthine mansion she designed for herself in the Santa Clara Valley, California (1886–1922). Given Winchester’s continual construction of uninhabited rooms in that house and given her decision to offer no explanation for her designs, the media has projected narratives of haunting and madness onto Winchester and her house. Without dismissing the possibility of those readings, our feminist counter-fiction does not presume to assign a specific meaning to Winchester’s designs. Instead, we ghost-write two soundtracks along the edges of filmstrips that trans-mediate the narratives of so-called yellow journalism and of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of haunting and madness, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), into the sepia tones of early cinematic imagery. Specifically, we visualise Winchester as a media construct and the media’s fabulation about the columns in Winchester’s house and about her would-be seance room, where the public apparently saw nothing more than a woman’s silhouette projected onto a curtained window. While we offer nothing to penetrate that curtain, which we have trans-mediated to a cinematic screen that divides us from her interiority, we see traces of objects and a shadow ostensibly tracing a pattern from behind the curtain. Thus, we draw inspiration from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s uncanny ability to ghost-write the hymenal curtain/screen between Jacques Derrida’s labyrinthine columns of text. Tolling the bell of Derrida’s Glas, this essay positions Winchester’s pendular body in a space where the interiority of her designing pleasure eludes representation because that pleasure is not dependent on the reproduction of meaning. We pastiche certain forms from the Winchester House, but these forms, akin to the impossibility of Gilman’s yellow wallpaper, do not amount to the meaning of a total design.

Tao Yuanming’s Perspectives on Life as Reflected in His Poems on History

Abstract Studies on Tao Yuanming have often focused on his personality, reclusive life, and pastoral poetry. However, Tao’s extant oeuvre includes a large number of poems on history. This article aims to complement current scholarship by exploring his viewpoints on life through a close reading of his poems on history. His poems on history are a key to Tao’s perspectives with regard to the factors that decide a successful political career, the best way to cope with difficulties and frustrations, and the situations in which literati should withdraw from public life. Examining his positions reveals the connections between these different aspects. These poems express Tao’s perspectives on life, as informed by his historical predecessors and philosophical beliefs, and as developed through his own life experience and efforts at poetic composition.

A multi-centre, parallel-group, randomised controlled trial to assess the efficacy and safety of eurythmy therapy and tai chi in comparison with standard care in chronically ill elderly patients with increased risk of falling (ENTAiER): a trial protocol

BackgroundIn elderly poeple, multimorbidity and polypharmacy increase while sensory, motor and cognitive functions decrease. Falls occur in 30% of people aged 65 years and older at least once per year, with injuries at 10–20%. Reducing falls and enhancing physical, emotional and cognitive capacities are essential for healthy aging despite chronic disease. Eurythmy therapy (EYT) and Tai Chi train balance, mobility and concentrative and sensory capacities.MethodsIn eight trial sites (academic or community hospitals), 550 outpatients aged 65 years and older with chronic disease and increased risk of falling (history of imbalance, Berg Balance Scale (BBS) score ≤ 49) will be randomly assigned (1:1:1) to receive either EYT or Tai Chi (each provided in one-hour group sessions, twice, later once per week plus practice at home, for over 24 weeks) added to standard care or standard care alone. Standard care includes a detailed written recommendation on fall prevention and the visit of a primary care doctor. Seniors living a reclusive life or economically disadvantaged elderly will be particularly addressed. A motivation and communication concept supports the trial participants’ compliance with trial procedures and practicing. Public and patient representatives are involved in the planning and conduction of the trial. Falls will be documented daily in a diary by the participants. These falls as well as injuries and complications will be ascertained during monthly phone visits. The falls efficacy scale, BBS, cognition (MoCA), Mood (GDS-15), quality of life (SF12), instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), use of medical and non-medical services (FIMA) and adherence will be assessed at months 3, 6, and 12 and inner correspondence with practices (ICPH) at month 6. The trial is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF 01GL1805).DiscussionThis study will determine whether EYT and Tai Chi reduce falls, injurious falls, fear of falling and healthcare utilisation and improve mobility, cognition, mood, quality of life and functional independence. A reduction of fall risk and fear of falling and an improvement of mobility, autonomy, quality of life, mood, and cognition are highly relevant for older people to cope with aging and diseases and to reduce healthcare costs.Trail registrationwww.drks.de. DRKS00016609. Registered 30th July 2019.

Poseban monaški status svetogorskog keliota Save, njegov karejski pečat i neopravdane optužbe Dimitrija Homatijana

After departure to Holy Mount Athos and becoming a monk in Vatopedi monastery, a young monk Sava, former Prince Rastko, the youngest son of the Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, performed, along with other coreligionists, prescribed way of life and obedience, practised strict fasts, prayers and night vigils, expressed forbearance and devotion, deadened and tortured his body by walking barefoot across stones, wore coarse cloth and exposed himself to chill. All the sources tell that Sava spent some periods of his life in the most important centres of monastic asceticism of that time and that the character of his reclusive life was determined by the fact that he was the offspring of the family of rulers and then the head of the church. Sava was received as an official, with highest honours, in accordance with his descent and position, and one can speak about some kind of 'aristocratic eremitism' which was well-known on Athos. Having regard to the autonomy of Serbian monastery of Hilandar on the Holy Mount Athos in the context of ideological imperial programme of Serbian rulers concerning highlighting the identity of the state, the building of Hilandar cell with a church of monk Sava and shelters in Karyes was a logical result. Ohrid archbishop Demetrious Chomatianos (1217-1219), in his criticism, talks about certain autonomous and "free" life of archbishop Sava after his becoming a monk. The criticism of Chomatianos was considered tendentious because it was associated with his disapproval of and opposition to the independence of the Church of Serbia. Chomatianos failed to mention that Sava did not have the status of an ordinary monk. Sava became Karyes monk with a special status before 1196. Karyes cells were built or were hired by people of remarkable origin, who became monks and lived there from their own resources, chose this or that way of life; exempt from labour they were entitled to special nourishment, carriage and monastic and other accompaniment, as well as to the right of free movement with an only obligation of informing the dean about that. As a monk of a special monastic status and the elder of his Karyes cell, Sava was its legal representative and he had the right to participate in the assembly of the Holy Mount Athos and the right to have his own seal. On account of this right he made the Typikon which he validated with his monogram "Sava" by cross like sealing: "In the name of the Father - Sava, and of the Son - Sava, and of the Holy Spirit - Sava, Amen - Sava." In this way, which we believe to be the right one, great viciousness of Ohrid archbishop Demetrious Chomatianos is emphasized and the justification of his strong accusations against the archbishop Sava I is denied.

Literary Aspiration and the Papers of William Gosse Hay

This article sets out to explore the literary aspirations and career of the early post-federation Australian writer William Gosse Hay through the extensive collection of personal papers he left behind him. Hay was born into an affluent Adelaide family in 1875, and attended Melbourne Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before marrying and settling down to a reclusive life in the Adelaide foothills to begin writing full time. He eventually published six novels and a collection of short stories. Many of these were favourably reviewed, but they failed to attract significant commercial success. After a brief revival of critical interest in his writing after his death in 1945, Hay once again faded from prominence – remembered only in passing as an enigmatic figure who fell outside of the mainstream of Australian literary production. In tracing Hay’s pursuit of literary success and popular notoriety through his personal papers, the article draws on recent archival studies research to explore Hay’s career from the ‘inside’ and considers the role of the archive itself as a factor in his quest for recognition.

Bennett’s Dickinsons

Bennett’s Dickinsons Páraic Finnerty At the beginning of her review of Alexandra Socarides’ Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics (2012), Paula Bernat Bennett reminds scholars of the connection between an “indeterminacy” that most agree is foundational to Dickinson’s poetry and the passionate and personal quests they undertake in pursuit of her writing’s “ever-elusive meanings.”1 Dickinson’s evasive style of writing and her reclusive life invite investments and interpretations that often reveal more about readers than about the poet herself. Drawing on ideas from Robert McClure Smith’s The Seduction of Emily Dickinson (1996), Bennett suggests that the process of “self-seduction” continues apace in Dickinson studies as scholars’ “conscious and unconscious obsessions and ways of configuring both literature and life” shape and reshape “not only who Dickinson is but what she wrote.”2 Recalling Smith’s critique of her work, Bennett reflects that “the Emily Dickinson I fashioned in Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet is the one I saw through the lens of my own passion,” adding that “part of Dickinson’s greatness lies in the way she serves as a Rorschach for her readers’ obsessions, and it is a good bet that the number of Emily Dickinsons will only grow in the years to come, which for the future of Dickinson [End Page 214] Studies everywhere is just as well.”3 This essay reviews Bennett’s engagements with and interventions in critical and theoretical developments in Dickinson scholarship over the last four decades. Her passionate and personal conceptualization and reconceptualization of Dickinson have helped shape Dickinson’s contemporary status as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest poets. What emerges are some of Bennett’s Emily Dickinsons: the feminist icon, the lesbian and queer poet, the peer of other nineteenth-century US women poets, and the wartime dramatic lyricist. Spurred on by the 1970s women’s movement, Bennett, whose PhD was in early modern literature, sought to study a woman poet and chose Dickinson as “unquestionably America’s greatest woman poet” and “the greatest writer of short lyrics yet to grace these shores.”4 Although always sensitive to the interpretative possibilities and resonances in Dickinson’s poetry, Bennett was initially concerned with what the poetry revealed about Dickinson the woman. In one of her earliest publications on Dickinson, “ED and the Value of Isolation” (1979), based on a 1976 talk, Bennett argues that Dickinson’s much-discussed retirement from the public world represents “one of the most extraordinarily productive psychological and spiritual retreats in human history”; it reflects not only Dickinson’s sense of isolation from, skepticism about, and questioning of her culture, but was also the result of her hidden fury at others’ “rejection or apparent rejection.” Examining Dickinson’s writings addressed to male and female figures, Bennett notes how the poet figures personal neglect as death or a death-like experience, conjuring up “the rage of a woman who feels she has been emotionally ripped off and abandoned,” who feels “an over-wrought combination of frustration, anger, need and an inordinate sensitivity to affront.” From the beginning, Bennett recognizes Dickinson’s personal and poetic complexity: “unable to deal with others, ED went within. In poem after poem she exhibits an awareness of [End Page 215] the inner life and the ghosts which haunt it.” Although her powerful poems prove the benefit of isolation, they are animated by specters of insufficiency and by the world she renounces: “The Stimulus of Loss makes most Possession mean” (L364).5 Developing these initial ideas in light of emerging feminist approaches to Dickinson, Bennett’s 1984 review essay, “Elusive Emily,” presents an artist who demonstrates an “almost obsessive devotion to craft,” “ill-served by those who have claimed the competence to bring her work to the public at large.”6 She particularly chastises the condescending, paternalistic, and trivializing approach of chauvinistic critics who dispute Dickinson’s professionalism and fail to recognize her rebelliousness. In contrast, Bennett’s Dickinson is a woman who “behaved in her lifetime in singularly outrageous and deviant ways: she preferred art to life, she withdrew from society, she never married, she mocked and conspired against the male figures who knew, supposedly, more than herself...

V S Naipaul, a Queer Trinidadian

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The University of the West Indies in Trinidad named 2007 as the ‘Year of V S Naipaul’. A visit by the Nobel Laureate, the provocatively titled symposium ‘V S Naipaul: Created in the West Indies’ hosted by the St Augustine Department of Liberal Arts, the Special Issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and the edited collection, Created in the West Indies (2011) all indicate a move towards reassessment and the possibility of homing. 2. The landlord character is broadly based on Naipaul's actual landlord, Stephen Tennant — the aristocrat socialite and aspiring writer who had been the lover of Siegfried Sassoon but subsequently led a reclusive life. 3. For a wonderful resource that indicates the richness of this project, see the International Research Network's website, ‘Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean — Complexities of Place, Desire & Belonging’, which offers ‘a digital multimedia collection of activist reports, creative writing, critical essays, film, interviews, music, and visual and performance art reflecting the complexities of homophobias in the Caribbean, while also expanding understanding of Caribbean sexual minority experiences and activism in the region and its diaspora’. See <http://www.caribbeanhomophobias.org/>.

Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell

Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell

Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space &amp; the Solitary Life by Liz Herbert McAvoy (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space & the Solitary Life by Liz Herbert McAvoy Marcus Harmes McAvoy, Liz Herbert , Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space & the Solitary Life (Gender in the Middle Ages), Woodbridge and Rochester, D. S. Brewer, 2011; hardback; pp. 211; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781843842774. Liz Herbert McAvoy has published extensively on medieval anchoritic traditions and this, her latest monograph, examines both male and female anchorites. Her emphasis, however, is firmly on the feminine nuances of anchorholds and reclusive religious practices. Surveying hermits, monks, holy men and women, and anchorites from sources including St John Cassian's Conferences up to the Book of Margery Kempe and the Revelations of Julian of Norwich, McAvoy aims to show that male anchoritic practices are, overall, gendered in their expression. More particularly she argues that male anchoritisms are 'haunted' by femininity. In particular, she reads a number of medieval commentaries on reclusive religious lives as suggesting anxiety that, while being an anchorite was a clearly holy practice, it could complicate the expression of male identity. She suggests that the language describing anchorites' experiences makes male bodies seem the objects of penetration (however that term is interpreted), in opposition to the usual action of the male body. Towards the end of the text, she turns her attention to a place that was territorially, geographically, and politically unstable, the Welsh Marches and the area around Chester. McAvoy suggests that the unstable political and cultural identity of this area is contiguous with the sense of unstable gender identity that emerges from local writings on reclusive lives. McAvoy is clearly on her firmest ground when she is looking at the later texts, including those of Julian, Margery, and an anonymous writer from Hampshire. She has published extensively on these Middle English sources and demonstrates a particular skill in textual analysis of the writings. The chapters on the earlier medieval texts, including John Cassian, the Rule of St Benedict and Grimlaic's Regula, are less interesting in that she is more obviously indebted to specialists from this period. McAvoy skilfully uses a range of theoretical perspectives, notably Kristeva and Foucault. These assist in bringing meaning to the textual analysis, rather than feeling inelegantly inserted into the work, as can so often be the case with attempted integration of theory and medieval writings. Some of the language is, however, heavy handed (and the term 'concerted' is misused throughout). [End Page 330] Marcus Harmes University of Southern Queensland Copyright © 2012 by the Author

The American Hermit and the British Castaway: Voluntary Retreat and Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture

From Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay's (1681-1759) decision to live self-sufficiently in a cave as a protest against slave labor, to African American recluses such as Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts (b. 1769/70), and Henry Box Brown (1815-c.1879), to iconic figures like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), John Muir (1838-1914), Thomas Merton (1915-1968), and Edward Abbey (1927-1989), many Americans have expressed their critical voices through voluntary reclusion from society. last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, however, appears to have been an especially busy time for the American hermit. During this period, American printers published an unprecedented number of tales and anecdotes about the lives of hermits such as James Buckland's Wonderful Discovery of a Hermit.... (1786); Samuel Brake's An Account of the Wonderful Old Hermit's Death, and Burial (1787); The Hermit's Soliloquy (1788); Abraham Panther's A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady.... (1788); the narrative of Amos Wilson's hermitic withdrawal as a result of his sister's trial and execution for infanticide (A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth Wilson.... [1786] and Victim of Seduction!...... [1822]); Lavinia's The Hermitess; or, Fair Secluder (1790); Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert's Fair Solitary; or, Female Hermit (1790); and Peter Longueville's English Hermit (1795). (1) These seemingly ephemeral texts were reprinted numerous times in the 1790s, attesting to a sustained cultural interest in both male and female hermitic figures during the post-Revolutionary period. (2) This article examines the ways in which both the figure and practices of the American hermit are taken up as culturally resonant analogies for early American political subjectivity. first part of the article considers the popularity of the hermit in poems, almanacs, waxwork exhibits, and choral music of the 1790s to reveal a persistent fascination with the political relevance of hermitic life. article then attempts to delineate the generic parameters of what I am calling the hermit's tale, a previously unrecognized American literary genre characterized, most interestingly, by its rejection of the Robinsonade as a viable model of American political existence? Comparing American hermit tales alongside British antecedents such as Daniel Defoe's Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.... (1719) reveals how certain writers deployed the hermit to figure, on the one hand, American political and cultural independence from Britain and, on the other hand, a democratic practice grounded in studied deferral and nonpartisan deliberation. final sections of the article discuss the theological and philosophical implications of this critical stance by examining the Pennsylvania Hermit in Amos Wilson's Sweets of Solitude!.... (1822) and the hermitic Democrat in John O'Sullivan's essay Democracy (1840). study of the American hermit provides a unique lens through which post-Revolutionary American authors conceived of republican democratic practice as existing in the pause or retired moment between cultural binaries. hermit's political significance derives from his or her capacity to confront the aporetic conditions of a post-Revolutionary American national identity situated precariously at the boundary between solitude and society, public and private, Federalist and anti-Federalist, and Britishness and Americanness. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE POLITICS OF THE AMERICAN HERMIT Perhaps the most significant indication of the young republic's interest in hermits is the persistent republication of British poems on hermitic life. From the 1750s well into the nineteenth century, Thomas Parnell's The Hermit, James Beattie's The Hermit, and Oliver Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina (excerpted from Vicar of Wakefield) continued to be prominently published by American printers in numerous poetic anthologies of British verse, as individual texts, and as epigraphs to various nineteenth-century American novels dealing with reclusive life. …

Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism (review)

Reviewed by: Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism M. Jason Reddoch Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. By Adrian Kuzminski. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Pp. xiv + 155. Hardcover $65.00. Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism, by Adrian Kuzminski, is a short monograph of four chapters in which the author argues that Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 365–270 b.c.e.) developed his form of skepticism after coming into contact with Indian philosophers on his journey with Alexander the Great. Although the subtitle suggests that the primary focus of the study will be to develop this argument for historical diffusion, the book is more of an apology for Pyrrhonism, which Kuzminski thinks can be better understood by emphasizing its striking similarities with Buddhism. While presenting a plausible scenario for historical diffusion, he emphasizes parallels specifically with the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism in order to provide a better understanding of Pyrrhonism's meaning, purpose, and potential. Kuzminski is persuasive in his use of Buddhism to clarify Pyrrhonism and to correct previous misinterpretations of Pyrrhonism by Western philosophers, but his treatment of historical and philological issues is often neither thorough nor totally persuasive. In what follows, I will present a summary of the book followed by some critical remarks. Kuzminski's focus is on Pyrrhonism, but I will provide more discussion of his treatment of its similarities and contact with Buddhism. In his first chapter, "Why Pyrrhonism is Not Scepticism," Kuzminski argues that in contrast to the dogmatic and nihilist approach of the Academic skeptics who held that truth cannot be known, Pyrrhonism is best understood as a nondogmatic therapeutic philosophy that promoted suspension of judgment. This distinction is supported by the account of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus (fl. second century c.e.). In order to stress Pyrrhonism's practical and soteriological goals, Kuzminski contrasts ancient accounts of Pyrrho, who is described as living a tranquil and reclusive life, with those of Arcesilaus (fl. third century b.c.e.), the first head of the skeptical Academy, who is said to be somewhat pompous and prone to extravagant displays. Kuzminski blames the confusion between these two schools of thought on a number of prominent modern philosophers and contemporary scholars, including David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, M. F. Burnyeat, and Martha Nussbaum. Kuzminski considers Arne Naess the closest to a contemporary Pyrrhonist. In chapter 2, "Pyrrhonism and Buddhism," Kuzminski undertakes his most direct comparison of the two traditions.1 He emphasizes the plausibility of historical diffusion by pointing to both general evidence for sustained contact between Greece and India via trade routes and the Persian empire and possible references to Ionian Greeks in the middle-length discourses of the Buddha. Kuzminski rejects the claims [End Page 424] of Richard Bett, who argues on the basis of a later Greek fragment of Aristocles (fl. second century c.e.) that our sources for Pyrrhonism do not actually go back to the historical Pyrrho and that Pyrrho was more of a nihilist.2 According to Kuzminski, the account is biased and reflects the same misunderstanding many modern scholars have had. Kuzminski's point of departure for his specific comparison of Pyrrhonism and Buddhism is Everard Flintoff's 1980 article in which he argued that a persuasive case could be made for the necessary historical relationship between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism not on the basis of individual parallels but by considering the combination of similarities as a whole.3 Kuzminski, however, is critical of Flintoff on a couple of points such as his claim that the quadrilemma is unprecedented in Greece prior to Pyrrho. When Kuzminski turns to his specific comparison of Pyrrhonism and Buddhism, he refers primarily to Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakārikā and Candrakīrti's Madhyamakāvatāra. Both traditions share the idea that their philosophy is better understood as a method rather than a doctrine, and Kuzminski argues that the Pyrrhonist method of producing contradictory arguments in order to be led to a state of suspension of judgment (epochē) and then tranquility (ataraxia) is paralleled in the text of Candrakīrti. Both consider it necessary to accept involuntary sensory impressions and thoughts but to reject inferences...

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall: Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall:Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings U. C. Knoepflmacher (bio) In 1888, the year in which he published The Happy Prince and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde explained that his fairy tales were only "meant partly for children," since they also addressed "those who have kept the child-like faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness" (Letters 215). He seemed to have changed his mind, however, after the 1891 appearance of his Dorian Gray. In a letter in which he boasted about having become enmeshed in "red roses of pleasure," Wilde abruptly dismissed fairy tales as a tepid and bloodless form unsuited for "bodies of flesh" and "souls in turmoil." He thus advised a friend who had sent him a fairy tale manuscript to abandon "such fanciful, winsome work," proclaiming that those who truly "know what passion is, what passions are" should clothe them in "their red raiment, and make them move before us" (315). Yet near the end of his career, Wilde signaled still another turn. In De Profundis, the confessional work written after his humiliating imprisonment, he claimed that tales such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Young King" might well offer some salutary alternatives to "the primrose path" he had taken (De Profundis 92). Oscar Wilde's oscillations provide me with a frame for this essay's contention that The Wind in the Willows can be read as Kenneth Grahame's attempt to distance himself from the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement with which he had once been identified. For the book that begins and ends with acts of house-cleaning undertaken by Grahame's band of male friends tries to domesticate Walter Pater's and Oscar Wilde's more extravagant versions of "The House Beautiful."1 Begun in 1906, The Wind in the Willows appeared in 1908, a bare three years after the posthumous publication of De Profundis and in the same year in which Robert Ross brought out a fourteen-volume edition of Oscar Wilde's Complete Works. [End Page 1] Grahame's lyric exaltation of the benign pastoral haven shared by Mole, Rat, and Badger is in keeping with his much earlier insistence, in his 1893 Pagan Papers, that it was "good to get back" to unencumbered and "sequestered" natural sites (Pagan Papers 23, 28). The comic mis-adventures of Mr. Toad, the garrulous speedster who is thrown into jail for his social transgressions and whose ancestral Hall becomes possessed by the anarchic inhabitants of the Wild Wood, now act as a foil to the wholesomeness of a reclusive life that features a de-eroticized male bonding. Unlike his more decorous animal friends, the attention-seeking Mr. Toad is childishly uninhibited. As I will try to show, Toad bears more than the casual resemblances to Oscar Wilde that both Seth Lerer and Annie Gauger have noted in their recent annotated editions of The Wind in the Willows.2 Still, Grahame's mockery of a cigar-smoking Toad he dresses in drag is not his only means to signal a retreat from the excesses of the 1890s. As I will show at the end of this article, even the most reliable of the river-bank's band of male friends, Water Rat, must be drained of any proclivity for untrustworthy Wildean "passions." The pastoral river bank that acts as the prime setting for The Wind in the Willows is a version of the landscape to which Kenneth Grahame and his motherless siblings were transported when he was but five years old. In 1906, two years before the book's publication, Grahame resettled in Cookham Dene in Berkshire after more than thirty years of life in London. The river-islands, weirs, and backwaters where an imaginative child had once watched otters, moles, water-rats—and toads—were now revisited in a sort of Wordsworthian return. Yet this river-world also contained a very different memorial. As Peter Green notes in his fine Grahame biography, Cookham Dene was "almost in sight of Reading Gaol," a prison bordered by the Thames marshes (Green 284). As the site of Oscar Wilde's incarceration and literary recantations, Reading Gaol must...

All Quietist on the Marina Front?

This article deals with the question of whether Ernst Jünger's long story Auf den Marmorklippen (1939)—the publication of the text itself as well as its contents—should be interpreted as political action or quietist retreat. The author examines the notions that the text advocates fatalism and escapism, both of which could be seen as tenets of (anti-)Catholic Quietism, of which Fénelon is cited as a practitioner. A close reading shows that Jünger's protagonists value their carefree and quiet lives before the story's wars and only join the militant Mauretanian order because of its promise of serene detachment. Jünger's world is imbued with manifestations of the divine—much unlike the Quietists'—and as such is worthy of the protagonists' sustained intellectual attention. They arrive at a thorough appreciation of the prevailing social and political situation and develop a new language to capture it. They understand that resistance against the ruling party is futile but do not reject their own responsibility for their friends and neighbors. The article concludes that Jünger presents the protagonists' escape at the end of the story as a temporary solution. He writes a complex narrative that leaves its interpretation and application to his readers. He neither fashions himself as a national redeemer-poet nor do his protagonists content themselves with a reclusive life forgetful of their surroundings.