Sense Of Irony Research Articles

Fun for Them, Fun for Us and Fun for All: The ‘Far Side’ of Field Work in the Tropical Lowlands

A common sense of irony may often be at the core of shared fun for anthropologists and the people who study them as they are studied; but this is possible only where epistemological contexts converge.

“Timeless England Will Remain Hanging in the Air”

This essay explores the two types of cosmopolitanism encountered in Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri's travelogue A Passage to England (1959): “metropolitan cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism.” I argue that Chaudhuri's acknowledgment of England as the center of the world has contributed to a notion of cosmopolitanism – citizen of the imperial metropolis as citizen of the world – now considered politically retrograde. However, the travelogue is also characterized, at the same time, by knowledge of “timeless England” as fantasy, a finely wrought plurality of alliances as well as a puckish sense of irony that foregrounds the more democratic form of cosmopolitanism incipient in Chaudhuri's writing. It is this dialectic inter-play of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” that allows a nuanced reading of A Passage to England to emerge.

Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. Sebald

Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. Sebald Mark R. McCulloh I For all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque. Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art: Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2 The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 : At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty. (p. 176) The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair . . ." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to...

Rainbow to Dark Clouds

THIS YEAR IT WAS MY HONOR TO HAVE BEEN THE COMmencement speaker at 3 medical schools: Drexel University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Texas at Houston. On each occasion, I felt the same euphoria that I had at my own graduation and at the other commencements in which I spoke or, as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, helped with the proceedings. It is exhilarating to experience, up close and personally, the enthusiasm and excitement of so many new physicians who clearly sense their potential to help those who will seek their care, and who want to fulfill their dreams of doing so. One of the most touching of all moments in this year’s ceremonies occurred at UCLA. The “benediction” involved 24 graduating physicians joining the chaplain on stage to speak in the native language of their ethnic groups, no matter whether they were 1stor 10th-generation Americans. The 24 languages spoken ranged from Afrikaans through Gujarati, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrinya, and Urdu to Vietnamese. The phrase each graduate spoke was, “May we leave here to cure when possible, and to care always.” What could be better wishes for healers to declare publicly? I wept along with most in the audience. Early the next morning, I flew to San Diego to speak at an international meeting of subspecialists; which subspecialty is unfortunately irrelevant because it could have been almost any one. The geographic distance is 111 miles; the psychological distance was an eternity. As I walked off the plane, I was greeted with several ads prominently placed in the airport inviting physicians to visit one exhibit booth or another. It’s a free country, so why not? It was too early to check into the hotel, so I went to the convention center to register. On the way I passed hundreds of people (many certainly were physicians) walking from the center with identification cards in plastic cases hung around their necks on a ribbon emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company. They were also carrying cloth bags adorned with large logos of several pharmaceutical companies—oh, and also the name of the subspecialty society. I politely declined both when they were offered to me, much to the chagrin of the sweet woman who worked the registration desk. When I arrived at the room where I was to speak, a giant placard outside listed the names of the speakers and times of presentations—and the announcement by the names of several speakers that their presentations were sponsored by a particular pharmaceutical company. Of course, there were statements all over the podiums and in the rooms stating that all “sponsored” discussions involved funds from “unencumbered educational grants” that had nothing to do with the choice of speakers or topics. The spirit displayed at the conference was in such contrast to that displayed at the previous day’s commencement. What happened to the altruistic, “above all, help the patient” spirit? After completing my presentation on conflicts of interest (the conference committee apparently had a sense of irony), I returned to the hotel to register. I was handed my room key: a plastic card with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company on one side and an invitation to “visit us at booth #1501.” Once again, I wept—this time, alone.

Detecting the Real Fictions of History in Watershed

Late into Percival Everett's 1996 novel Watershed, the narrator and protagonist Robert Hawks, hydrologist who has felt compelled to investigate the murder of two FBI agents near the (fictional) Plata Indian Reservation, considers I had done so much to remove all things political from my life. As disinterested scientist disinclined to care about even the applications of his work, he is accustomed to seeing himself an objective, hired gun, regardless of whether the state or the Naturalist's Conservancy is calling on his expertise.1 As with the emotional distance that Jake Gittes, the private investigator in the film Chinatown, usually puts between himself and his clients (in story in which water also plays leading role), so with Robert's cool, studied, and guiltless indifference to the social and political realms: his detachment is, in the end, not immune to the entanglements of the personal and political past, to the history in the water. The to know about case in which he is not involved turns into a longstanding, unanswered, personal (153) to understand his grandfather, an atheist and doctor who committed suicide while on hunting expedition with the young Robert. This desire to know more also becomes historical quest that leads Everett's narrator not only to discern the connections and differences between Africanand Native American experience under American colonialism, including the narrator's personal experience at the hands of white police officers, but to participate in minor act of revolution alongside members of the Plata Creek tribe, in which he acts no longer as objective scientist but as human subject with borrowed gun. Part mystery, part western, Watershed is novel in which history weighs heavily, perhaps more so than in any other of Everett's works. If Everett's other westerns, God's Country and Grand Canyon, Inc, are mischievous re-workings of generic conventions that call to mind Mark Twain, then Watershed is non-formulaic but equally revisionist western more like John Sayles' soberly searching film Lone Star, in which an investigation into the incestuous western past has both personal and political consequences for the curious. Seen together, Everett's western novels both exhibit and tackle one of the central literary problems in literature of the American West: how does western writer free his imagination and at the same time respond to the demand for historical authenticity that readers for two centuries have brought to this cultural landscape (whether real or imagined) of conquests and land-grabs, of national myths and regional realities? The formula Western (in its most popular version and with little sense of irony or parody) often responds to the history of American expansion and colonialism with

Words of Warning: Global Networks, Asian Local Resistance, and the Planetary Vulgate of Neoliberalism

Globalization is the first and last word in the vocabulary of media pundits, cultural commentators, economists, politicians, and activists. Its attributed characteristics are many. It is first cause and last effect, the ultimate constraint, the final enabler, the absence of freedom, the latest greatest hope. So diverse, so opposed, so contradictory are these coexistingothers that onemight almost describe the term as the final resting place of an earlier harbinger of momentous change, dialectic. So spaecious (spacious and specious) is its semiotic play that, with a greater sense of irony, one might describe it as the most significant floating signifier of the new century.1 Yet when the meaning of lived human being is at stake, diversity, opposition, and contradiction rarely make for peaceful coexistence. Rather, such significance, such weight of time and place, facilitates practices of compaction, constriction, and exclusion. Neoliberalism is the loudest voice, a first among unequals in the discourse of globalization. According to Pierre Bourdieu, neoliberalism

A view from the other side: the place of spirits in the Tongan social field.

Spirits are part of everyday life in the Kingdom of Tonga. This study explores beliefs about the supernatural by analyzing discourse on spirits and death and by examining two examples of contemporary cultural practice related to spirits and death. The anthropological concepts of the body and its cultural construction and of thirdspace as a landscape of the Tongan islands that emerges out of the physical and the perceived provide the framework for this investigation. Research findings suggest that spirits participate in the natural order of Tongan society and thus serve to help maintain cultural identity in the face of uncertain social change and a popular but contested prodemocracy movement. Spirits also function as a system of representation, mirroring an image of an ideal self, something that is continually under negotiation. Encounters between spirits of ancestors and their living descendants suggest an uneasy acceptance of death and a sense of irony about its inevitability.

Race, Culture, Nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan

An avid reader, Edith Wharton devoured volumes of philosophy and religion. As R. W. B. Lewis observes in his biography, she owned more books on religion than any other subject (510). (1) At every stage of life, Wharton searched in religion and philosophy for answers to pressing metaphysical and ontological questions. Among other things, she used these insights to intensify her already complex social and moral portraits of fictional characters. It is not surprising, then, that she would have read one of her age's most highly esteemed historians and philosophers, Ernest Renan (1823-92), especially since she shared with him standpoint of rationalism and religious skepticism, sense of irony and the ironic play of ideas, of life as an amusing ideological spectacle (Chadbourne 104), high regard for French criticism, (2) and an esteem for France as the epitome of civilization and culture, able to weather any series of disasters. Wharton is on record for praising not only Renan but also SainteBeuve, Anatole France, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom were influenced by Renan. (3) Renan affected Wharton in two major ways. His rational positivism fueled her developing skepticism about the role of faith in post-Darwinian world increasingly based on science and empiricism. And his ideas about nation and nationhood helped her come to terms with her own expatriation and questions about the preservation and dissemination of cultural value in the early twentieth century. Wharton read Renan on at least two occasions, one in 1911 and the other in 1917. A catalog of her library indicates that she owned six books by Renan, some annotated, as well as book about him written by William Barry. (4) Although no record of her opinion of Renan exists, one might speculate how the French thinker affected Wharton personally and influenced her work. It is clear that Wharton appreciated and even propounded many of the ideas with which Renan is identified. He was certainly read and discussed in Wharton's circle. Morton Fullerton, for example, in an essay about Henry James--a piece Wharton admits to having had a hand in creating (Letter to William Brownell, qtd. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 300)--favorably compares James's and Renan's standards of probity and faithfulness to their own principles (Fullerton 306). It is likely in particular that Renan's ideas helped Wharton grapple with monumental issue in the nineteenth century: the balance between faith and reason; or, in the case of Renan, between faith and history. Renan mapped theory of history, science, and religion that Wharton could apply not only to personal questions of faith but also to her understanding of the larger workings of culture. A skeptic with keen ironic wit, he also provided Wharton with literary outlook and mode of execution compatible with her own. Born in 1823 in Brittany, Ernest Renan was raised Roman Catholic and educated in seminaries. At age 22 he left the seminary and the church in order to pursue science. In 1848 he wrote The Future of Science (L'avenir de la science), in which he introduced ideas that he would develop all his life. Science, by which he meant rational inquiry, would eventually supplant religion, he maintained, and guide the direction of human progress. Renan's thinking epitomized the positivism and rationalism in vogue during Wharton's time and mirrored in the progression of her ideas. As Lewis remarks, Wharton's childhood passion for sermon reading and stray wonderings about the vagaries of religious doctrines (510) were supplanted by the rational positivism taught to her by her mentor, family friend Egerton Winthrop. The effect of this body of thought was imposing during Wharton's agnostic years. Although Wharton did not follow in Renan's footsteps--she toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism at the end of her life--she did find reassuring his suspicion of blind faith, his notion of religion as way to strive for perfection, and his view that this perfection actually existed in the Greek civilization that created art, science, and philosophy. …

Australian responses to threats of bioterrorism

Australia has been a ?lucky country?, using Donald Horne?s term from the 1960s, but without his sense of irony. Yet our world is changing fast. The 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney provided a time for national celebration. However, before the Games it was not widely known that defence and civil authorities had been working quietly to prepare for any terrorist or bioterrorist incident.

Art, Irony and Ambiguity

This article examines Howard Goldstein’s contribution to social work, not least his enduring interest in social work as a humanistic endeavour wherein artistry, morality, spirituality, and values feature prominently. He believed that social work could be greatly enriched by literature and the arts and by what the humanities had to teach, and he constantly reminded us of the need to balance our scientific and humanistic projects. He was and will continue to be a source of great inspiration to many, for through his passion for writing he has left us many wonderful books, scholarly articles and essays. Through his wisdom he enriched the social work landscape. He lifted our minds and our souls and made us appreciate the complexities of the human condition that only artists could truly understand. ‘The social worker as a performing artist has the talent and will to move beyond the constraints of method and technique and respond imaginatively and creatively to the impromptu, unrehearsed nature of the special human relationship’ (Goldstein, 1998b: 250). For this she needs wisdom, which she gains when she begins to respect knowledge and information as incomplete and provisional, ‘when it is tempered by scepticism, curiosity, and perhaps a sense of irony, [by] the processes of reflective and analytic thought’ (Goldstein, 1998b: 251). There is no better way to understand the art of helping than to read what Howard has to say about passion, imagination, creativity, reasoning, judgment, reflective wisdom, morality, and choice. Such literature can only come from one who has involved himself in critical life situations, one who enlisted in the search for meaning at a moment when meanings were no longer fixed, one who enlisted in the quest for principle and ideal when the codes were no longer given (Green, 1966).

Our own petards.

Our own petards.

Digital Rights Management

It was only three years ago that I was told that publishing valuable digital content on the Internet would not take off for 10 years. Today it is happening all around us with MP3 music files being swapped by our children and market research reports openly passed between business colleagues. The problem is that the intellectual property owners lose control of distribution through publishing content on the Internet – in its raw essence, an unregulated global arena – and then, more often than not, do not get paid for use of a large percentage of their content, This is perhaps the greatest reason why publishers have been unwilling to place valuable content online. Historically low-value content has taken up the vast majority of what we have been able to access online with companies hoping to recoup costs through advertising revenue. The reason is simple; conventional Internet technologies do not have any facilities for enforcing copyright, but the problem is that advertising revenues are dwindling so publishers need to find other ways of generating revenue. We can now look back with a sense of irony at straplines from major technology companies saying “Information at your finger tips”, “Information where and how you need it” as this is exactly what they are now trying to prevent so that they can keep an element of control.

Songs of Experience: Commentary on “Dyslexia the Invisible” and “Promoting Strategic Writing by Postsecondary Students with Learning Disabilities: A Report of Three Case Studies”

Conducting high-quality, qualitative research within the field of learning disabilities is becoming an increasingly desirable goal. Evidence of this may be found in an ever-growing trend toward adopting qualitative methodologies such as interviewing, participant observation, and audiotaping of instruction while engaged in quantitative inquiry. two research studies by Berninger and Butler et al. presented in this special section are excellent examples of researchers using qualitative research methods in this fashion, as opposed to conducting qualitative research in the traditional sense. By presenting fascinating examples of contemporary case-study research on instruction, these studies join a tradition of reflective studies of intricate issues in practice (Ball, 1993; Englert & Tarrant, 1996; Klingner, Vaughn, Hughes, & Arguelles, 1999). Ultimately, they produce songs of (Blake, 1794/1975 version)-reflective personal essays on the experience of teaching students with learning disabilities. METHODOLOGY methodologies of both articles are similar. In the Butler and colleagues' article, the nature of the research design is well stated: specifically, multiple in-depth case studies were embedded within a pre-/posttest design (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 1994) (p. 198). purpose of the case studies is also made clear: The in-depth case study data were collected to document individuals' progress over time, as well as the relationship between instruction and students' development of (p. 198). Berninger also presents multiple, though less detailed, case studies to similarly document student gains. Whereas Butler et al. highlight the relationship between the nature of instruction and growth in students' sense of self-regulation when writing, Berninger explores the relationship between the nature of instruction and students' growth in the ability to read. Reading ability is assessed with a wide variety of standardized measures, including measures of reading connected text with understanding. Both methodologies are somewhat atypical for case-study research in that the researcher is not detached from the instructional events that are documented, described and analyzed. Additionally, neither article fits into the qualitative research tradition of using a wide array of data sources and perspectives to help illuminate a complex problem or situation. In each case, the researcher reports on her own instructional intervention with a potential for loss of perspective. Thus, one doesn't find the sense of detachment that traditional qualitative researchers such as Miles and Huberman (1994) or Yin (1994) think is essential for case-study research. Similarly, the sense of irony that researchers such as Ball (1990) brought to their qualitative research on instruction is also missing. two methodologies differ from each other in that Butler et al. maintain more of the trappings of traditional qualitative research, utilizing many standard qualitative procedures such as audiotaping interviews with participants and using field notes that give the reader a flavor of instruction. In contrast, Berninger relies heavily on interpreting student profiles of growth on a wide array of quantitative measures. It thus seems best to consider these articles as reflections on the researchers' experiences while providing high-quality instruction to individuals with learning disabilities. They offer a glimpse at two very different, yet powerful means for enhancing the reading and writing abilities of students with learning disabilities. They also provide numerous fascinating insights into the teaching of students with learning disabilities. Similarly, they serve to provide the reader with a solid sense of what are reasonable goals and expectations. CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE CASE STUDIES Postsecondary Writing Instruction Butler et al. do an exquisite job of capturing the problems of the young adults enrolled in their expressive writing project. …

'This Machine Is Obsolete'

'This Machine Is Obsolete'

ARCHITECTURAL SERIALISM

The serial form employed by Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk since the late 1960s undermines a representational model of architecture and offers a productive use of repetition of profound consequences for practice and criticism. In light of the argument made by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze that repetition is not a reiteration of the same but a dynamic process of affirming difference, die lateral repetitions made by Eisenman and Hejduk can be seen to dissolve the distinction between origin and copy, form and idea. These distinctions are preserved, albeit with a sense of irony, in the appropriation of historical examples which is consistently regarded as the defining practice of postmodern architecture. Thus, the series and repetition in Eisenman's and Hejduk's work has consequences for the recent history of architecture in addition to its effects on their subsequent work and the challenges it presents for us now faced with technologies of repetition which take these operations to new speeds and intensities.

The Brier Poems by Jim Wayne Miller (review)

ness ofstereotypes undermining the truth ofthe region. And as a university professor he filled a career in higher education. Finally, in his writing he turned to the novel, looking back from his home in Kentucky to his first home in North Carolina to tell the story of Robert Lee Wells, his family and an ever widening community offriends. Folk beliefs and characters from earlier poems echoed pleasantly in these pages. Ever-old, ever-fresh, this is the coming-of-age story that has engaged great tellers and ready readers through the centuries. In Newfound, Jim Wayne explores the mystery, to their children, of parents' differences, but he never exploits the pain created by their divorce . With sentiment that never spills over into sentimentality, he evokes a boy's subtle and complex relationships with others, and his response to the seasons, the natural world. Perhaps the real pleasure of Newfound is Jim Wayne's sense of irony, his sustaining humor that invites readers to laugh with, but never at, his people, his world. Itwas appropriate that ourlast briefvisit tookplace last Julyin Hindman at the ninetieth birthday celebration ofhis friend and mentor, James Still. To say that Still's classic, River ofEarth, and Miller's Newfound have much in common is not so much to compare their achievement as to appreciate the quiet, profound sense ofsimple humanity that they shared. And that they continue to share with us. —Wilma Dykeman Miller, Jim Wayne. The BrierPoems. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997. 159 pages. Paperback. $14.50 This compilation ofthe late JimWayne Miller's The MountainsHave Come Closer (1980) and Brier, HisBook (1988) includes also some recent work. Typically, these poems describe an Appalachian scenery, a scenery both of the eye and ofthe heart. For the most part, the sentiment springing from this landscape seems deeply felt, and poems here can turn eyesores into things ofbeauty (ifnot joys forever). Presumably, the thread that binds this collection is the persona of Brier. "Brier" is a pejorative term sometimes given to Appalachians, but Miller's Brier assumes the roles of preacher, philosopher, commentator, possibly seer. Rather, I should say, these roles are conferred upon him by a narrator who remains strangely and awkwardly more remote than Brier. It is not clear why Miller chose to present so many ofthese poems in the third person. 66 The imagery and metaphor are good; the monosyllabic rhythms, entirely appropriate. But the sentiment remains questionable, in part because the omniscient narrator seems incapable ofsuch intimacywith Brier's black thoughts. This book has other limitations, certainly. In a poem called "The Country ofConscience" (dedicated to CzeslawMilosz) Millerwrites about tyranny: "This history hires plainclothes operatives/ with two rolls offat on the backs oftheir necks." (Oh, iftyranny were only so obvious in its appearance!) Miller is not the first poet who has written not well about political and social oppression. For some reason, politics and poetry often (at least in our generation) mix badly. It seems that one or the other, the poetry or the politics, must suffer in this endeavor, and it is probably better that it is so often the poetry that does. Miller's voice is strongest and most convincing when the poet is focusing on the commonplace and the domestic, things that we share beyond boundaries ofcountries, regions, and ways oflife. He, like his Brier, is at his best when he assumes the role of observer or reporter. In "The Brier's Pictorial History ofthe Mountains," Miller demonstrates that clean reporting is more powerful than the editorializing and that metaphor is still the most subtle form ofargument known to mankind: Green trees pale before deadening axes. The woods fall back, heading for high ground. Fields follow, pushing the woods uphill, taking all the ground up to the rib rock. When Miller is using this kind ofsubtlety, he can render truthfully the abstractions oflife as well as any poet can. In "His Mother's Story," Miller manages to move us with the story ofa small truth that is literally locked in the foundation ofa house. An injustice is visited upon the Brier's mother when she is a child: she has been punished for losing one ofher father's tools...

Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty (review)

Reviewed by: Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty John T. Matthews Sylvia Jenkins Cook . Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991. 301 pp. $37.50. We think of Erskine Caldwell today—if we think of him at all—as the purveyor of a distinct brand of Southern grotesque: the erotic exotica to be found down the tobacco roads and cotton rows of Caldwell's Georgia. Leaving the excesses of Southern history to Faulkner, religion to Flannery O'Connor, [End Page 154] and psychology to Welty, Caldwell first flourished by remembering that sales and the salacious belong together. Once Jack Kirkland's 1934 Broadway adaptation of Caldwell's 1932 novel Tobacco Road —with its leering Jeeter Lester and writhing Ellie May—became a sensation, Caldwell's reputation as a popular writer was secure. The play's success stimulated the modest sales of his two most recent novels (God's Little Acre had appeared in 1933), and led to mass market paperback sales that stagger the imagination. By the mid-sixties, Caldwell's works had sold at least 40 million copies, and God's Little Acre had surpassed its coeval Gone With the Wind by a million buyers. Although popular literature has earned increasingly serious scholarly consideration, the kind of appeal made by Caldwell's squirming, sex-starved, murderous deviants still tends to embarrass reputable critics. In the recent Columbia Literary History of the United States, for example, Caldwell receives passing mention as a leftist Southern writer on social issues and no discussion of his work—a treatment slimmer than Steinbeck's, Plath's, and even Leslie Fiedler's. Sylvia Jenkins Cook makes the case amply for Caldwell's need to be reckoned with, however, as she surveys the immense output of a long career, appreciates Caldwell's engagements with social and aesthetic questions central to post-World War I America, and cites the impressive testimony of other writers to his influence and achievement. There is no gainsaying the sheer quantity and diversity: across six decades beginning in the 1920s, over fifty books and hundreds of magazine pieces—novels, story collections, works of photo-journalism, autobiographies, edited volumes. Cook quotes the staggered Truman Capote: "Just to TYPE that much, let alone WRITE." Other writers offer more substantial tributes, too. Faulkner frequently named the early Caldwell as among the best novelists the South had produced; the French included him among "Les Cinq Grands" (with Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck); contemporary critics accorded him genuine respect, Kenneth Burke, for example, writing a shrewd, if bemused, appreciation of Caldwell's fascination with "balked religiosity" (The Philosophy of Literary Form); and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez identified his two masters as James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell, with, Cook observes, no sense of irony in the combination. Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty acknowledges the contradictions in Caldwell's writing as its point of departure. Cook shows how Caldwell's dedicated study of the experimental short fiction in the little magazines surprisingly taught him formulae for commercial success. Swiftly efficient beginnings, narrative concision, stylistic spareness and economical repetition merge avant garde and mass market procedures. American Earth (1931) collected these earliest stories, and the novel The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936) consolidated his experimentalist phase. The stories in Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935) show Caldwell's emergence as a significant socialist-leaning realist. The novels of his cyclorama of the South (including the famous two mentioned above as well as the important Journeyman [1935] and Trouble in July [1940]) yoke convictions about deterministic social and [End Page 155] natural forces with a contrary interest in personal turpitude and questions of will. Caldwell's fiction continually negotiates social analysis, farcical humor, and sentimental pity, while his later photodocumentary work (especially on the South in You Have Seen Their Faces [1937]) mediates worries over respect for his subjects, aesthetic exploitation, moral indignation, and political despair. Cook serves as a thorough and reliable guide to Caldwell's oeuvre. As readers of her earlier fine study of the poor white in Southern literature (From Tobacco Road to Route 66 [Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1976]) might expect, Cook offers sensible...

Facts for the imagination

Abstract Whenever physical facts drawn from the world are brought within the confines of a viewing frame, human desire mounts to make sense of the material within it. The photographer who deals in facts which are very commonly combined is often dismissed as conventional, even when these cliches have been reactivated by an artist who puts them to new use. In this sense, some of Winogrand's best pictures are perfectly traditional. In one cityscape of New York (Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, p. 96), the troping of vehicles with a high building is no less conventional than Constable's famous cart in front of Salisbury Cathedral, even if here the cart is replaced by a bus and a car and the cathedral by a ‘National Hotel’ carrying advertising hoardings. The lineage of such a trope in the American context probably derives from Lee Friedlander's truck at the foot of a skyscraper or Walker Evans's Ford car in front of a frame house. But the Winogrand image also evidences a wit, a sense of irony, of the kind contributed to the Szarkowskian stable of photographers by Walker Evans. The contradictory drives and impulses of the culture are represented by the billboards: HYGRADE' S all beef FRANKFURTERS next to NO-CAL COLA (‘People who drink no-cal have nothing to show for it’).

A Feminist Scholarship You Can Bring Home to Dad?

I make these comments from a position which entaA¼s humUity, irony, and discursive dA©jA vu. The humUity comes from being caUed to comment on two complex and sophisticated papers, both drawing upon post-structuraUst theory to construct histories of feminist discourse, both proposing creative strategies for dealing with some of the more vexed issues in feminist theory and poUtics today.1 My comments, however, wA¼l not directly engage the arguments or strategies advanced by Newman's and WiUiams's papers. Rather, it will pay them the potential compliment of attempted imitation. I too wA¼l sketch a discursive history in which I feel the implidt, as opposed to offidal, histories constructed by these papers can be placed. In first reading these two papers, which mark but also address the entry of post-structuralist discourse into feminist work, I was struck by a sense of irony that is historical in several ways. As someone once trained to be a Uterary critic, I witnessed the entry of post-structuralist discourse into what I thought of as my field some fifteen years ago. I experienced its rise to hegemony in that field, and some ten years later I observed, with no small relief, the beginnings of a widespread feminist critique. Those who advanced the critique were often feminist critics or theorists who had been and were even yet deeply immersed in post-struc- turalist discourse.2 Thdr criticism focused on the tendency of some non- feminist, usually male-authored, post-structuraUst theorizing to deny the possibility of subjectivity, meta- or even large-scale theory, human agency, and progressive social change. These denials, it was usuaUy taken note, emerged just at the moment when women, white women and women of color, and men of color, too, had begun reconstructing subjec- tivity, large-scale theory, agency, and sodal change for their own purposes.3 In the wake of feminist critique and of neo-marxist critiques as weU, the hegemony of post-structuralist discourse in literary studies has decUned. Indeed, the last few years have seen the rise of a orthodoxy or at least fashion, widely referred to as new historicism.4 The latter, largely in reaction to the studied focus of much post-structuralist practice on isolated prides itself on situating the literary work in relation to other cultural texts, such as institutions and events. It goes so far in fad as to identify itself with a turn or return to history. IronicaUy, of course, the disdptine of history is in some sense no longer there to be returned to, being itself in the process of moving on—toward Uterary criticism, post-

Studying My Movement: Social Science Without Cynicism

While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis on Ikhwan in the Sudan,1 a Sudanese colleague of mine working in a related area used to joke that we have all become “Orientalists.” There was a certain sense of irony—and truth—in this “accusation.” Our endeavor was either the negation and supersession of Orientalism, or its final triumph. For here we are, fiery Islamic militants, squatting meekly and dutifully at the feet of our Orientalist sheikhs, hoping to drink at their hands the cup of knowledge on which we had simultaneously turned our backs. Is this conceding defeat or starting an invasion?