Rhetorical Gestures Research Articles

European perspectives of teacher education and training

Despite broad agreements on professional mobility, there has been little movement towards consensus across the European Union on what constitutes the good teacher and therefore on common features in training and qualification. Political declarations have not led to significant action by national politicians. Impetus towards a European dimension in the training of teachers has diminished in the last decade. Explanations may be sought in different historical contexts, situations and understandings. Recognition of differences may be a better foundation for professional mobility than a quest for communality, and case studies of experiences of teaching in other European contexts may lead to improvements in training for transfer. Whilst there are still rhetorical gestures towards convergence, a case study of the regulation of professional mobility to England, now more transparently controlled by the new General Teaching Council, illustrates achievable problem solving as a way forward.

Suspicious Readings of Joyce's 'Dubliners' by Margot Norris (review)

Reviews Reviews between I9I5 and I939 and the supremepoetic output of Yeats during this period, often in responseto these public crises.The majesticoracularpower that we associate with the laterYeats, such as we find in TheTower volume of 1928,is what ranks Yeats alongsidethe greatestfew poets of the Englishlanguage. Some reviewerssaid that the firstvolume baulked from readings of the verse but no-one could charge Foster with neglecting the poetry here. His literarycriticismis restrained,elegant, perceptive, and often attentive to prosody. But it is the detailed research, wellservicedby a gracefulliterarystyle, which makes this work so valuable and enduring . The dust of the archivesnever cluttersthe narrativemomentum. This is partly a testament to the propulsion lent the tale by the full, varied, and engaged life that Yeats led, but it is also a tribute to the tight and unobtrusivestitching of the narrativestructure.In short, it is a biographicalachievement worthy of its subject. UNIVERSITY OF READING RONAN MCDONALD Suspicious Readings ofJoyce's'Dubliners'. By MARGOT NORRIS. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. ix + 281 pp. $49.95; C35. ISBN:0-8122-3739-0. Though her area is the whole of modernism,it remainsfair to say that the abiding criticalpassionof Margot Norris remainswithJoyce, in a criticalcareerspreadover nearly three decades. She began near the end of Joyce's writings (TheDecentered Universe ofFinnegans Wake,1976)and turnsnow, here, to some of the earliestwork in Dubliners, focusing on this in a mode of 'suspicion'.In the book under review, her massive eruditionin the field ofJoyce scholarshipand the extraordinaryimmersion in the texts of the whole of Joyce's writing are always apparent. This version of Dubliners is full, rich, rewarding:it sheds new light not only on the individualstories of Dubliners, but also on how those stories relate to each other and on how they prolepticallyforecastcertain key moments in otherJoyce texts. The fundamentalgambit that shapes the interpretationthroughoutis that, in all the stories,there is a structuralact of occlusion byJoyce. Further,obscured narratives operate in such a fashionas to include the reader,radicallyand fundamentally, in the very enactment of the narrativeitself.Norris describesthis, in her account of 'Eveline'as 'a narrativecomplicitwith seductionand betrayal'(p. 56);and this, as a literally'intriguing'structure,brings the reader fully into play. Thus, for example, "'Araby"the story, the ornate but empty narration, doubles "Araby,"the ornate but empty bazaar'(p. 46), the consequence of which, in this account, is that we can ask'Is the storyor narrationof "Araby"the very thing the boy was actuallyseeking' in a gesturethat allowsNorristo argue that, in this story, 'The boy's closing confession of vanity, which the narrativeurges us to disbelieve,becomes the final rhetorical gesture of empty doubling:the creation of a moral fable with a specious moral' (p. 54). This is but one of a whole series of refreshinginsightsthat Norris provides here, in argumentsthat consistentlyreveal rich seams of new interpretivepotential. The book is organized as a series of chapter essays, dealing with each of the stories in turn. Although this may at first seem a rather too easy way to structure the book, it in fact servesitspurposewell. Not only is there a cumulativesense of the weight of Norris'scase, but also there is a developing sense that we have here not a series of essays but a collocation of argumentswhose cumulative force is not only sequential but consequential. Key here is a fundamental ethical insight. In her between I9I5 and I939 and the supremepoetic output of Yeats during this period, often in responseto these public crises.The majesticoracularpower that we associate with the laterYeats, such as we find in TheTower volume of 1928,is what ranks Yeats alongsidethe greatestfew poets of the Englishlanguage. Some reviewerssaid that the firstvolume baulked from readings of the verse but no-one could charge Foster with neglecting the poetry here. His literarycriticismis restrained,elegant, perceptive, and often attentive to prosody. But it is the detailed research, wellservicedby a gracefulliterarystyle, which makes this work so valuable and enduring . The dust of the archivesnever cluttersthe narrativemomentum. This is partly a testament to the propulsion lent the tale by the full, varied, and engaged life that Yeats led, but it is also a tribute to the tight and unobtrusivestitching of the narrativestructure.In...

VII-Rights as Enforceable Claims

Unless rights are claimable, it is sometimes argued, they are no more than rhetorical gestures which mock the poor and needy. But what makes a right claimable? If rights are to avoid the charge of emptiness, I argue, they must be effectively enforceable. But what does this involve? I identify three conditions of enforceability, and four sets of broader circumstances in which these conditions can be met. I discuss the implications of this analysis of rights for multicultural societies, and conclude that the conditions in which appeals to rights are useful are more limited than many contemporary theorists allow.

Rights as Enforceable Claims

Unless rights are claimable, it is sometimes argued, they are no more than rhetorical gestures which mock the poor and needy. But what makes a right claimable? If rights are to avoid the charge of emptiness, I argue, they must be effectively enforceable. But what does this involve? I identify three conditions of enforceability, and four sets of broader circumstances in which these conditions can be met. I discuss the implications of this analysis of rights for multicultural societies, and conclude that the conditions in which appeals to rights are useful are more limited than many contemporary theorists allow.

The “Otherness” within “Ownness”: Reading T. S. Eliot's “Ash-Wednesday”

Although he was often criticized for the near papal authority with he made his critical pronouncements, T. S. Eliot claimed in Poetry and Propaganda (1930) that our literary judgment is always fallible According Eliot, the fallibility of critical judgment is due an inevitable lack of objectivity--the unavoidable overestimation of poetry a view of can understand and accept. (1) For Eliot, balance is the key. We are not really entitled prize such poetry so highly, he warned, also make the effort enter worlds of poetry in are (qtd. in Zabel 106-07). Despite the stance of objectivity, Eliot's use of the pronoun we is more than a rhetorical gesture; it resonates with an entire set of cultural assumptions. That view of which can understand and is Western and Christian, while those worlds of poetry in are are the products of cultures as yet unredeemed. (2) Although the aim of the reader, according Eliot, is to come rest in some poetry that shall realize poetically what ourselves believe, this cannot be achieved unless pass in and out freely among the various worlds of poetic creation (qtd. in Zabel 106). Reversing the cultural hierarchy implicit in Eliot's comment, the following essay is an attempt on the part of one Jewish reader enter such an alien world--the post-conversion poetry of Eliot. Even more, it is an attempt find an answer the question of why I have returned again and again a poet so thoroughly committed doctrinal Christianity, a tradition that grew out of, differentiated itself from, and often opposed my own. What might a poetry that embodies a view of life that I do not accept contribute a reader who resists its theological premises? Conversely, what might a reading from within a Jewish perspective contribute an understanding of Christian religious poetry? Finally, does reading from the point of view of the Other always and only produce an adversarial reading? In the context of current critical concerns, the issue of the relationship between poetry and may seem a quaint, outmoded holdover from a bygone era. It is probably safe assume that for many postmodern readers religion and belief have become either ideological positions or functions of language, both of can be scrutinized under the cold light of recent theory. These views, however, deflect an important modality of reader response or, perhaps, neutralize it within an overarching secular world view. The particular theological or religious system of the poet and of the reader is important, I would argue, first because it illuminates one way of making meaning in the world (Boyarin 129) and, second, because readers and writers from different historical and theological orientations have something contribute each other by maintaining, even by highlighting, their differences. Paul Ricoeur's effort account for the particularities of both past and present, text and reader, in the interpretive situation, without setting up a binary opposition between them, provides one set of terms--distanciation and appropriation--that can mediate the uncharted ground between identifying and resisting reading. Distanciation involves the realization that are dealing with the text of an Other, one who is non-coincidental with ourselves in time, space, and orientation. For Ricoeur, the inevitability of distanciation is synonymous with the impossibility of total appropriation, and this situation appears bear a positive valence for Ricoeur. However, one reads, Ricoeur insists, in order make the mind of another part of one's own some extent. This is why reading is consequential, why it has an ethical impetus and significance for the way one leads one's life. Partial appropriation is, for Ricoeur, a non-narcissistic process of self-enlargement, a creative activity; both reader and text are made anew, some extent, in the hermeneutic act (43-44). …

Rhetorical gesture and response in ancient Rome

Rhetorical gesture and response in ancient Rome

Playful Disruptions

This article challenges the 'ghettoisation' of play in Early Years contexts and argues for a reassertion of its underlying importance for learning throughout the primary school and beyond. It argues for a rethinking of play in terms of 'flow' and the implications for teachers' understanding of their role when they intervene and participate 'inside the flow' of children's play. It illustrates and addresses these issues, which are crucial if 'lifelong learning' is to be anything other than a rhetorical gesture, through the experiences of teachers, trainees and children and challenges the 'mindblindness' of many current attitudes towards teaching and learning.

The ABCs of The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne's troubled relationship with premier antebellum children's publisher and literary entrepreneur Samuel G. Goodrich is a well-known feature of development of Hawthorne's career. Though Hawthorne complained that Goodrich was particularly trustworthy and a rogue on basis of bitter experience, it was Goodrich, not Hawthorne, whose successes in two decades leading up to publication of The Scarlet Letter read as an antebellum model of literary productivity and best-selling popular acclaim. (1) Just as shape of Goodrich's career suggests that connection with children's literary market was often linked to prosperity and fame more generally, The Scarlet Letter calls out for reconsideration in part as a reflection of Hawthorne's own conflicted intimacy with writings for children. By reading The Scarlet Letter as a primer for adults--a novel that challenges definition of literacy itself in its refusal to articulate that word for which novel's title presumably stands, and whose very structure as a mystery or detective story foregrounds process of reading more generally--I suggest that The Scarlet Letter is inextricably linked to what be called Hawthorne's own education in and indoctrination into mysteries of antebellum literary marketplace through production of writings for children. In a love letter to Sophia Peabody written in fail of 1840, Hawthorne includes an ironic reference to his children's work Grandfather's Chair(1840), a book that he had hoped prove a cash cow but whose poor sales led to compensatory labors in barns of Brook Farm. Published by Sophia's sister Elizabeth earlier in 1840 and already hanging heavy on their collective hands, Hawthorne remarks: And this reminds me to ask whether thou hast drawn those caricatures--especially one of thy husband, staggering, and puffing, and toiling onward to gate of farm, burthened with unsaleable remnant of Grandfather's Chair. Dear us, what a ponderous, leaden load it will be! (2) Despite Hawthorne's self-deprecatory cheer, he would continue to be haunted by remainders of his foray into realm of children's literature as well as by what these books reminded him about his pecuniary failures in world of antebellum publishing more generally. In following months neither Brook Farm nor his writings for children were able to produce solid returns he sought. After joining community in April of 1841, he left only to return again in fall of that same year in yet another fitful attempt to patch together his finances, an effort whose urgency was underscored by what was continuing to be a frustratingly lengthy engagement to Sophia Peabody. In June of 1841, he wrote a letter that reeks of humiliation to Elizabeth Peabody about her attempts to interest publishing house of James Munroe in remainders of Grandfather's Chair. First published without illustrations--a serious error of judgement in world of antebellum children's publishing--a new edition with cuts, Elizabeth was confident, would sell respectably, even though a sizeable quantity of first edition was still languishing unsold. (3) In a rhetorical gesture that conveys extent to which author wished to distance himself from yet another financial chastening, received this time from parental arm of antebellum book-buying public, Hawthorne speaks of himself tersely in third person: Hawthorne particularly desires that bargain with Mr. Munroe, in respect to remaining copies of Grandfather's Chair, may be concluded on such terms as Miss Peabody thinks best, without further reference to himself. As Hawthorne angrily surmises, Being wholly ignorant of value of books, author could do no other than consent to any arrangement that Miss Peabody might propose. (4) Hawthorne's use of third person signals an ongoing quarrel with Elizabeth Peabody over what quite literally seems to be the value of books; for, although Peabody did manage to interest firm of Tappan and Dennet in a new edition (with illustrations by Sophia), she was still unable to dispose of remainders of first edition, and later advertised them for sale at half price, provoking another angry letter from …

The Foundations of Eclecticism

The heated debates between proponents of rational-choice, culturalist, and structuralist (or historical institutionalist) analysis over method and substance derive from differences over philosophical issues. This article relates these differences between ideal-typical rationalist, culturalist and structuralist analysis to their positions on two fundamental problems in social theory: (i) the epistemological significance of structural principles vis-a-vis agency; and (ii) the relative significance of the material and ideal dimensions of social processes. This suggests that many recent efforts at `synthesis' (e.g. through `analytic narratives') end up being rhetorical gestures since the fundamental assumptions identified with a given approach are not significantly relaxed. A more pragmatic position has been outlined in `structurationist' perspectives that build on Weber's social theory. Such perspectives are consciously agnostic about epistemological first principles in order to permit more question-driven analysis. Structurationism does not represent a novel paradigm for comparative analysis, but its epistemological flexibility makes it an ideal foundation for eclectic scholarship intended to transcend and engage the debates among rationalist, culturalist, and structuralist analysis.

Adolf Loos and the Aphoristic Style: Rhetorical Practice in Early Twentieth-Century Design Criticism

Adolf Loos has been described in annals of architectural and design history as individual most responsible for introducing principles of abstract, austere, orthogonal design into numerous pre-World War I Viennese buildings.' His early commissions-the Steiner House of 1908, Scheu House of 1910, and others-are generally interpreted as embodiments of maxims contained in his most famous 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime. As one of most radical polemics of design criticism of twentieth century, this essay gained Loos considerable notoriety in way in which it violently denounced, and then claimed to close door forever on, an arbitrary use of ornaments that had predominated in Viennese architecture and applied arts for decades. Employing a series of grand rhetorical gestures to denounce nineteenth-century historicism as well as newer styles being explored by Austrian Secession, Deutscher Werkbund, and Wiener Werkstatte, Loos's written and built works generally are credited with inventing forms that inspired countless modernist architects to embrace abstraction and International Style of 1920s.2 Succeeding generations of scholars and architects have treated Loos with varying degrees of sophistication, analyzing his buildings as expressions of his cultural polemics, connecting him loosely with other Viennese cultural innovators, or mining his writings for justifications of new directions in late-twentieth-century architecture. Among most illuminating analyses of Loos's complex, anti-systematic philosophy are those of architectural historian Stanford Anderson. Anderson has argued that Loos's critical breakthrough consisted of developing an awareness of how competing conventions and practices-drawing, photography, master craftsmanship and building, and production of art-could constructively criticize one another from within respective, sovereign domains of praxis.3 Instructive for understanding Loos's approach to process of building and making, Anderson's work nevertheless leaves open question of how Loos used language in particular ways to advance his ground-breaking design philosophy. This article contrasts Loos's celebrated early design criticism with certain rhetorical practices in his writings, insofar as field of rhetoric traditionally has concerned itself with the way discourses are constructed in order to achieve certain effects. This 1 This line of interpretation was inaugurated by Nicholas Pevsner in Pioneers of Modern Movement From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 188-92. 2 For example, Loos is said to prefigure International Style by at least eight years in Kenneth Frampton, Modem Architecture: A History(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 90-95. 3 Stanford Anderson, Critical Conventionalism: Assemblage /(1986): 6-23, quoted in Stanford Anderson, Critical Conventionalism: The History of Midgard: Journal of Architectural Theory and Criticism, 1: 1 (1990): 47. The architectural theorist Massimo Cacciari characterizes Loos's philosophy as negative thought that seeks to give an order to absence of synthesis. See Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On Philosophy of Modem Architecture, trans. by Steven Sartarelli (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 37. ( Copyright 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues: Volume 16, Number 2 Summer 2000 75

Raging in the Streets of Medieval York

In the processional performance mode that was the norm for biblical cycle plays in several English towns in the Middle Ages, the area of the pageant wagon stage was a restricted one. Modern 'original staging' experiments have shown that off-wagon performance has advantages of additional playing space and the enhanced contact between performance and audience occasioned when the actors appropriate the space otherwise occupied by the observers. A stage direction in a sixteenth-century pageant text from Coventry indicates that off-wagon performance was used in some performances of the Nativity pageant, where Herod was seen 'raging in the street'. This article examines the possibility that the Coventry practice was followed in York. It begins with a review of the records of the stage history of Herod, from Chaucer to Shakespeare. From the evidence available, we can learn about the use of rhetorical gesture and props in the expression of the tyrant's rage, but not about movement around the stage area or into the audience space. The discussion considers the common tendency of scholarly investigators to assume that off-wagon playing was widely employed in York, and outlines evidence for it in implicit stage directions in the York texts. It also explores the advantages and appeal of performances confined to the pageant wagon stage. It draws on modern 'original staging' experiments with the York texts in 1992 and 1998, and the work of Shakespearean scholars as well as medievalists. It concludes that we should keep an open mind about the viability of on-wagon performance and should not privilege off-wagon playing in our thinking about the York Play.

Intensification and the discourse of decline: a rhetoric of medical anthropology.

Our use of academic rhetorics does not just deliver old arguments more eloquently, but rather serves an epistemological purpose that enables us to ask new questions. The rhetorical strategy of intensification contests and dislodges unnoticed and untheorized presuppositions in academic arguments by redefining taken-for-granted uses of language, by reemphasizing the often overlooked social imbrication of metaphors presented as neutral scientific descriptions, and by reopening the textual and conceptual "black boxes" that allow authors to evade responsibility for their rhetorical choices. As deployed by Emily Martin (1987) in The Woman in the Body, intensification reveals how rhetorical gestures rooted in negative sociocultural attitudes toward women's bodies sometimes masquerade as "scientific" or "medical" knowledge. Martin reveals a pattern of medical metaphors that incorrectly associate menstruation and menopause with processes of decline and decay. Intensification enables Martin to contest the discourse of decline in accounts of menstruation by underscoring how it is shaped by cultural metaphors of production and information processing, by fore-grounding its anachronistic voices and their outmoded language and attitudes about women's reproductive systems, by calling attention to the persistently negative terminology that permeates discussions of women's reproductive processes, by emphasizing the different languages used for women's reproductive physiology and for similar but ungendered physiological processes, and by accentuating the celebratory language used for men's reproductive physiology. Intensification serves to demonstrate that these metaphors misrepresent or suppress fundamental aspects of physiology, inappropriately impose gendered attitudes on processes more accurately represented by nongendered terms, and negatively influence representations of women, their physiological processes, and their medical needs.

"O My Mother Spain!": The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing

“O My Mother Spain!”: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing Diego Saglia “One loves the house that one has built and that one has handed down.” Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” 1 The study of nationalist ideology in Romantic culture is beyond doubt one of the significant themes in the present critical mood, and particularly within current descriptions of British Romanticism as a plural and often contradictory literary period rather than a cohesive movement. Yet Romantic nationalism still has not been investigated in connection with the Regency interest in things Spanish, nor has it been related to the cultural atmosphere of the Peninsular War (1808–1814). Indeed, the anxiety with which Regency Britain followed the events in the Peninsula triggered both the usual demand for war bulletins and chronicles and a remarkable output of novels, poems, and travel narratives evoking the Spanish landscape, people, culture, and history for an eager reading public. But although Spain was an exotic elsewhere for British readers, reading about it was rather different from reading about other distant places such as India or Egypt. During the Peninsular War the other character of Spanish history and civilization seemed annulled by the Spaniards’ rebellion against Napoleon and their alliance with Britain. As the preface to a novel published in 1809 put it: At a period when the eyes of all Europe are directed to that awful scene of heroic enterprize now displayed in Spain and Portugal; when the heart of every Briton is animated to support the cause of oppressed nations; the most trivial incidents relating to that part of the Continent may be capable of exciting some degree of interest.2 Relatively new for an English public, Spain was narrated in a variety of ways ranging from recreations of its medieval past to adventures set during Wellington’s campaign. The Iberian country might be included [End Page 363] as a descriptive tour with little bearing on the overall structure of the text, as in the novel by Mary Hill from which the above quotation is drawn. But Spanish geography and culture might also condition the whole narrative development as, for instance, in Honoria Scott’s The Fair Andalusian (1810) and Alexander R. C. Dallas’s Felix Alvarez; or, Manners in Spain (1818). 3 In all of these novels, however, the theme of exotic Spain is constantly related to an investment in the discourses of nationalism. The quotation from Mary Hill’s Forest of Comalva insists on the fact that Britons’ hearts are primarily moved by the predicament of a heroic and oppressed nation. By this rhetorical gesture, Hill depicts both Britain and Spain as national communities at one fell swoop, while conversely offering the nationalist theme as a viable justification for Spain’s overwhelming presence in contemporary fiction. British literature deployed the Spanish theme as inseparable from nationalism, and from a Peninsular conflict often construed by the press as a crusade in aid of a fellow nation usurped by France, which in this scenario was no longer the Grande Nation but rather an encroaching, tyrannical (and paradoxically Jacobin) empire. Images of Spain originated beside and within a wider Romantic discourse on war which displaced violence outside the reader’s horizon of experience, or rewrote the military as a site of nationalism as a way of excluding the immanence of death, defeat, and the collapse of the state.4 In this context, the literature about Spain and the Peninsular War combined the exotic and the military with a national ideology that was still quite unclear, connecting older forms of loyalty to newer ideas about political representation, the state, and the influence of the public sphere on politics. Anticipating the later expressions of Philhellenism or sympathy for the Italian carbonari, the narratives on Spain defined a pattern of images and themes which circulated across poetry, drama (as tragedy, opera and pantomime), and narrative fiction. 5 Furthermore, by charting the relations among nationalism, war, and the exotic, literature on Spain written during the Peninsular War offers a continuous output of texts closely linked by subject and temporal contiguity. Finally, although these works of fiction combine intimations of the literature of sensibility with...

Tough Babies or Anger in the Superior Position

Tn this article, I use the label baby, adapted from Adorno, to designate a specific complex of rhetorical gestures that forms a coherent authorial image-a rhetorical ethos or persona. In Hudson Review, Joseph Epstein displays some of the rhetorical characteristics of the tough baby a polemical commentary against the left academy, where he speaks disparagingly of academic feminists as angry. The feminists roll on, perpetually angry, making perfectly comprehensible the joke about the couple their West Side Manhattan apartment who, having been twice robbed, determine to protect themselves, he wanting to get a revolver, she a pit bull, and so they agree to compromise and instead get a feminist (28). Epstein presupposes and relies on our agreed-upon understanding of what may count as (unjustified, unreasoning) textual anger and what may count as humor when he provokes all feminists in general without closely examining any arguments in specific. By equating feminists with revolvers or pit bulls, his anecdote represents feminists as pure instruments of attack-as people who are angry by nature, rather than as thinking subjects who have decided to become angry (albeit at targets that

Representing Nationality in This Land is Mine

In its very title, This Land is Mine (Renoir, 1943) registers both the historical crises the film seeks to represent and the representational crises this history engenders. Like those of other war-time Hollywood melodramas that deal with European fascism-The Moon is Down (Pichel, 1943), for instance, or Hangmen Also Die (Lang, 1943)-Renoir's title produces by way of its earnest sententiousness, its pared-down declarative grammar, a forceful rhetorical gesture of reclamation. Yet the title's blunt assertion of ownership necessarily recalls the interrogative challenge to which it responds: Whose land is it? In answer to this otherwise unasked question, in fact, the title may be understood as asserting either reclamation or usurpation, signifying either the triumphal liberation the film's rhetoric heralds or, alternatively, the fascist occupation of a small European town that its narrative chronicles. In spite of the title's first-person form and the sense of immediacy it implies, the sentence is spoken by no character in the film itself, but appears as the patriotic slogan at the head of a leaflet distributed by underground resisters of the occupation. At a crucial moment in the narrative, the meekly apolitical schoolmaster Albert Lory (Charles Laughton) pockets the leaflet instead of discarding it, leading to his subsequent arrest. The Nazi officers who discover the leaflet on his person understand the slogan as evidence of Lory's guilt, but since the audience has witnessed Lory's repeated failures to resist the occupation, his arrest invests the title with a third potential level of significance, designating a third position possible in relation to the titular assertion of ownership, that of ideological neutrality. One of the lessons

ABSTRACTS

Dennis Danielson. “Sin, Theodicy, and Milton's Pastoral Poetry.”Lars Engle. “Milton, Bakhtin, and the Unit of Analysis.”Robert Thomas Fallon. “Council and Consult: Milton's Governments.”Philip P. Fehl. “Milton and Bernini's Buldacchino in St. Peter's.''John Guillory. “From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost, Books 7 and 8.”Lee A. Jacobus. “Milton Hero: The Rhetorical Gesture of Monody.”Robert A. Kantra. “The Aeronautical Perceptions of Ariosto and Milton.”William W. Kerrigan. “John Milton, Poetess.”Michael Lieb. “Milton's Celestial Drama: The Dialogue in Heaven in Paradise Lost, Book 3.”Carolyn Lund. “Milton and the Tradition of the Failed Son.”Philip McCaffrey. “The Fallen Object.”Mark J. Miculan. “Signification and Civil Authority in Milton's The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.”Anna K. Nardo. “Samson, Sung and Proverb'd for a Fool.”Mary Ann Radzinowicz. “Eye and Ear in Milton's Late Plain Style: Psalms and the Poetic Medium of Paradise Regained.”Carter Revard. “The Timeliness of That Two—Handed Engine.”Stella P. Revard. “Milton, Euripides, and the ‘Bad Woman’: Dalila as Euripidean Heroine.”David Roessel. “Servility with Freedom to Contend: Xerxes and the Persian Wars in Paradise Lost.”Peter L. Rudnytsky. “'Here Only Weak': Sexuality and the Structure of Trauma in Paradise Lost.”James H. Sims. “Biblical Texts and lnterpreters in Paradise Regained: Exempla for Today.”Mindele Treip. “Milton and Allegorical Ceiling—Cycles in Rome: 1638–39.”Julia M. Walker. “The Un—True Image: Renaissance Women and Mirrors.”

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order

We may begin, as Beethoven did, with hovering open fifths, pianissimo, a missing third, a sense of expectancy, soon to be fulfilled by a quickening into life and the forceful emergence of a theme and a definite tonality. The opening of the Ninth Symphony functions, like similar rhetorical gestures in the Seventh Symphony, the Hammerklavier Sonata, and several of the late quartets, to raise a curtain so that the action may begin, or so that we may witness the unveiling of a distant universe. More than a gesture is involved. There is a sense in which this passage foreshadows in nuce the whole of the future action, inasmuch as it represents an initial ambiguity leading to clarification.' At this stage, however, though we know that we have begun, we cannot imagine where Beethoven intends to take us: we do not know what to expect, we do not know how, or even if, the cluster of harmonic, thematic, and rhythmic riddles offered in these measures will be solved. We do not know why this oversized orchestra and massed choruses and soloists are assembled before us. We may even discover that each step toward clarification opens upon a new ambiguity, in a constant interchange of questions and answers. Thus, although we have come to know that the Ninth Symphony is implicit in its opening measures, we cannot predict the Ninth Symphony from them. As the work unfolds, we soon 19th-Century Music X/1 (Summer 1986). ? by the Regents of the University of California.

Toward a psychopathology of totalitarian relationships.

In order to achieve maximum efficiency, anyone engaged in research is justified in narrowing his project and exercising, with lucidity, a certain reductionism. When all parameters can be controlled, it is necessary to designate the choices and exclusions decided upon clearly, and then to justify them. On the other hand, but not in a contradictory sense, a methodological amplification exists that can greatly aid research in the human sciences. Instead of isolating a given phenomenon, this amplification attempts to discover the more general class to which it belongs. This does not entail confusion and losing sight of the objectivity of limits, but rather looking for the meaning of the phenomenon through analyzing the largest possible field of related phenomena. If the class is correctly constituted, important observations may be the result. To illustrate this method, we shall take as an example the dramatic situation of drug abuse. Whenever the subject of youthful drug addiction is brought up, typical themes are immediately evoked and described, including the tendency toward marginalization, antisocial behavior coupled with the rejection of adult values, the frequency of acting out, rhetorical gestures and expressions of nihilism, maladjustment with respect to the contours of social time, etc. However, with respect to the greater part of the criteria that have previously been used, emphasis should be placed instead on the youth of these individuals rather than on their addiction. For example, when one compares young drug or alcohol abusers to juvenile delinquents without this history, to sexual offenders of the same age, to youthful suicide, to those who engage in highly dangerous games or sports, to young therapeutic objectors, to radical university students, to young nomadic groups, etc., common characteristics become blurred and relative. Without a doubt, in at least one of these conditions one aspect will prove to be more prominent than others, but they will be represented to a certain degree. The young drug abuser is, first and foremost, a young person. Another observation can be made: in Europe, where we have a large number of adult heavy drinkers, the opposition between drug addicts and alcoholics seems to be very pronounced, but this is very probably due to a lack of perspective on the part of the observer. Studies of young opiate addicts and young alcoholics show many more similarities than differences among the two groups. On the other hand, "reformed" drug addicts and former alcoholics seem to fit into the same category. In fact, what appears to be the most pertinent criterion is a certain type of relationship to a very particular object. This object, which we shall call "totalitarian," may be either drugs or alcohol, but it may also involve an ideology, belonging to a sect, or having an overriding passion for gambling. Addicts of any age, in this case, belong to the vast group of individuals involved in a totalitarian system. Indeed, whether it is a question of drugs, fanatics, sectarian groups, gamblers, or acts of blind jealousy, etc., the ensemble of their systems of interactions, relationships, influence, and of appropriation is dominated by the bond to a "totalitarian objects." It predominates over everything: work, love, simple curiosity, profit, transcendence. The individual involved in a totalitarian system is no longer in a "situation." He can no longer cope with the organization of his own life, the structure of its system; he does not consume but is "consumed." As long as this totalitarian bond continues, nothing is possible. Certain drug addicts are able to become abstinent without, however, ceasing to maintain a symbolic totalitarian relation with drugs with respect, to ideas and representations. From this perspective, one can understand why the totalitarian object often coincides with expressions of devastating nihilism: common social values are overshadowed by the absolute and individual object; they no longer play a part in the systemic horizon of the individual. This alienation, which is not shared by the world of the nonaddicted, explains and justifies the disturbing reactions that ensue when this world is confronted with the problem. Even more than the drama of madness, addiction, whether the result of drugs, alcohol or other sources, creates a breach, an emptiness. In order to fill it, the primary task should be to try to discover the lack, the loss and the mourning so deeply felt that the totalitarian relationship attempts to repair and to dissimulate.

Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania and the Needs of the Rural Poor

Therefore, the Union of Tanzanian Women will be: (a) An organization which will unite all Tanzanian women and enable the revolutionary ideas of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi on Socialism and Self Reliance and the liberation of women to reach them and be understood wherever they are (Kazuni Za Jumuiya Ya Wanawake Wa Tanzania, 1978). First, you must intensify the struggle against us for the purpose of doing away with loopholes and laws that prevent equality between men and women. Second you must overcome mental attitudes imposed on women by social orders. As a result of social systems, women have become either slaves or flowers (Nyerere, 1976). Men will have to learn to accept women as equals in social production and women must cultivate a new personality, a new consciousness of freedom and rebellion against male exploitation and domination (Tanzania Daily News, 29 Oct., 1976). One of the greatest weaknesses of the UWT … is the incompetence of its leadership to penetrate to the grassroots level. … (Madabida, 1974: 18). As the first three quotations with which this paper begins suggest, the rhetoric of “women's liberation” became quite acceptable in Tanzania during the 1970s with President Nyerere himself taking the lead in identifying existing inequalities between men and women as an impediment to socialist transformation. At the international level as well it had become clear–with the declaration in 1975 of a “UN Decade of Women” as the most obvious rhetorical gesture–that the neglect of women as objects of, much less as actors in development projects and programs was seriously undermining the success of such efforts, with negative consequences for development in general and devastating consequences for women in particular.

The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature by Roger Asselineau (review)

Studies in American Fiction117 published elsewhere, and the rest could have been more appropriately placed in suitable journals. The reader who picks up this volume for the overview promised in the title will, I fear, be disappointed. Harvard UniversityJoel Porte Asselineau, Roger. The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1981. 189 pp. Cloth: $17.50. One approaches this book with high expectations. The subject is of great importance: everybody acknowledges the prominence of Transcendentalism as a motif in American literary history, but no one has charted it systematically. Roger Asselineau, long known to students of Transcendentalism as the author of the best study of Whitman's personal and poetic development (volume 1 of his Evolution of Walt Whitman, 1954, tr. 1960), would seem to be an ideal person to fill the gap. The Transcendentalht Constant, however, is not the book its title suggests. It is instead a loosely connected assemblage of twelve essays written over a period of years. It begins promisingly with "Dreaming on the Grass," originally an article in the Houston Forum (1976), discussing the pervasiveness of grass as symbol in American writing and the cosmic consciousness it betokens. But by itself the essay is not much more than a catalogue of instances; and it is followed up not by a thorough analysis but by eleven self-contained single-figure studies. Five are on Whitman; six are profiles of the "Transcendentalist" element in other American writers (Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Walter Lowenfells). The quality of the separate chapters, furthermore, is uneven because the method of discussion is too similar throughout. The book adheres, for the most part, to what might be called an introductory overview style of presentation: tidy, hard-hitting generalizations intermixed with extensive quotation and anecdote. Asselineau handles this style with urbanity and resourcefulness, but it is not always appropriate. Where the subject or angle of interpretation is comparatively untapped, the method works well; where the field has been well ploughed beforehand the result is banality. To hear that Lowenfells is "the most neglected American poet of the twentieth century" (p. 163) is at least invigorating, if not convincing. To be told that Whitman is "nowadays . . . universally considered the greatest American poet" is unnecessary as rhetorical gesture and inaccurate as statement of fact (p. 17). Asselineau's theory of Transcendentalism is also somewhat defective. In his hands it becomes almost a rubber-band term, applicable to all who, as he says of Williams' characters, "prefer the infinity of dreams to the finite material world" (p. 160). On this level, everyone is a Transcendentalist sometimes, and the original Transcendentalists are not to be distinguished from romantics in general. This problem of watering down the meaning of "Transcendentalist" is of course something any literary historian must struggle hard to avoid when tracing the Transcendentalist presence in American writing. But what is especially troublesome here is that Asselineau betrays no awareness of the problem. Nevertheless The Transcendentalht Constant has merit in portions if not as a whole. The chapter on Lowenfells will not convince most readers that his poetry is as good as Asselineau thinks, but the essay does succeed in calling attention to Lowenfells' historical 118Reviews importance. The Hemingway chapter is built around a provocative comparison of the growth of the Hemingway hero and Hemingway's own identity to Carlyle's model in Sartor Resartus, although Asselineau greatly overestimates Hemingway's understanding of the nature of love. The Dreiser chapter usefully links Dreiser's mysticism with his admiration for the Transcendentalists and directs notice to his little-known experiments in free verse. The essay on Whitman's humor takes that subject one or two steps further than Richard Chase. Another Whitman chapter, the book's closest approximation to an intensive scholarly article, appraises his mixed feelings toward Taine's theory of literary history. And the first essay in the collection, on grass as cosmic symbol, is suggestive albeit underdeveloped . Were it not for Asselineau's prior reputation, this book would not have been published . American literary studies will not be much affected by its appearance. But now that the book exists, it is definitely worth at...