Scholarship Boy Research Articles

Ritual Process and the Family in the Chicano Novel

In an autobiographical article entitled Going Home Again: The American Scholarship Boy, Richard Rodriguez made a provocative observation about novel. He speculated that the novel ... is not a form capable . . . of being true to basic sense of communal life that typifies culture. Rodriguez argues that novel is best capable of depicting a solitary existence against a large social background. Thus, he argues, Chicano novelists nearly always fail to capture breathtakingly rich family life of most Chicanos and instead often describe only individual in transit between Mexican and American cultures.' This speculative opinion would probably be negligible were it not for fact that it appeared in The American Scholar and an anthology of rhetoric.2 Thus, like his recent media-acclaimed autobiography, it is more accessible to American literary and academic mainstream than more informed opinions, which often appear in less widely circulated publications. While this opinion, first published in 1974, may be accurate in describing some novels, most notably Jose Antonio Villareal's Pocho, it seems to have been written with no acknowledgement of fact that Tomas Rivera's Y no se lo trago la tierra and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima had been in circulation since 1971. Both of these novels show

Class Underside and Ethnic Outside

Thanks to England's 1944 Butler Education Act, in the immediate postwar years a generation of gifted working-class youngsters like Martin Burgess Green (b. 1927), Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart made their way from the English provinces to Oxford and Cambridge. Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (Basic Books; 395 pp.; $12.50), was one such scholarship boy—one of the “école de Butler,” as the ever kindly Evelyn Waugh would put it—who in 1945 went to Cambridge and read English, and who experienced the university's pervasive ethos of gentlemanliness as a form of domestic colonialism. He soon entered the circle of Downing College's brilliant F.R. Leavis, editor of the influential literary quarterly Scrutiny.

Russell's Philosophical Development

The story that is told in Lord Russell's recent book My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin, 18s.) is one that has been told before, by him and by others, but this particular presentation of it stands out by reason of its comprehensiveness and its authority. It is a rather austerely intellectual autobiography, sticking firmly to the topic announced in its title, and the non-philosophical aspects of the author's character and interests take as modest a place in it as Collingwood's do in his not altogether dissimilar Autobiography. What makes a comparison of these two intellectual self-portraits so tempting is the almost diametrical opposition of their authors. Russell is an aristocrat, an influential public figure too lively and multifarious to be contained for long in a university, a communicator who writes to be understood and believed, a mathematician still despite many years away from mathematics, a moral and political radical, an atheist and a lifelong defender of science as the most solid and enduring achievement of the human intellept. Collingwood was a scholarship boy, the son of an unsuccessful literary man, a pure example of the obscure and ineffectual don, who made out that he was too busy to answer criticism or to take part in college administration or university politics, an elaborately conscious stylist, almost as much a historian and an archaeologist as he was a philosopher, essentially a reactionary for all his autumnal flirtation with Marxism, a Christian (up to a point) and an embattled critic of the pretensions of science.

10. The place of geometrical optics in the teaching of light in schools

A scheme is outlined for the treatment of light up to university scholarship standard. In this, geometrical optics has its customary prominent place. An argument is presented against its being displaced by a wave theory treatment, while its limitations can be indicated even to beginners. It is suggested that in the treatment of curved mirrors and thin lenses there is need for much simplification and rationalisation, but a drastic departure from traditional methods does not seem advisable. There is a considerable need for modernising the treatment of photometry in general. Up-to-date knowledge is not readily available and most textbooks are either out of date or misleading on this branch. A suggestion is made concerning the further treatment of light for the "scholarship boy."