Single Genre Research Articles

CNG AND HCN CHANNELS: Two Peas, One Pod

Cyclic nucleotide-activated ion channels play a fundamental role in a variety of physiological processes. By opening in response to intracellular cyclic nucleotides, they translate changes in concentrations of signaling molecules to changes in membrane potential. These channels belong to two families: the cyclic nucleotide-gated (CNG) channels and the hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-modulated (HCN) channels. The two families exhibit high sequence similarity and belong to the superfamily of voltage-gated potassium channels. Whereas HCN channels are activated by voltage and CNG channels are virtually voltage independent, both channels are activated by cyclic nucleotide binding. Furthermore, the channels are thought to have similar channel structures, leading to similar mechanisms of activation by cyclic nucleotides. However, although these channels are structurally and behaviorally similar, they have evolved to perform distinct physiological functions. This review describes the physiological roles and biophysical behavior of CNG and HCN channels. We focus on how similarities in structure and activation mechanisms result in common biophysical models, allowing CNG and HCN channels to be viewed as a single genre.

Modeling timbre distance with temporal statistics from polyphonic music

Timbre distance and similarity are expressions of the phenomenon that some music appears similar while other songs sound very different to us. The notion of genre is often used to categorize music, but songs from a single genre do not necessarily sound similar and vice versa. In this work, we analyze and compare a large amount of different audio features and psychoacoustic variants thereof for the purpose of modeling timbre distance. The sound of polyphonic music is commonly described by extracting audio features on short time windows during which the sound is assumed to be stationary. The resulting down sampled time series are aggregated to form a high-level feature vector describing the music. We generated high-level features by systematically applying static and temporal statistics for aggregation. The temporal structure of features in particular has previously been largely neglected. A novel supervised feature selection method is applied to the huge set of possible features. The distances of the selected feature correspond to timbre differences in music. The features show few redundancies and have high potential for explaining possible clusters. They outperform seven other previously proposed feature sets on several datasets with respect to the separation of the known groups of timbrally different music.

Christine de Pizan: A Casebook (review)

Reviewed by: Christine de Pizan: A Casebook Stephanie Downes Altmann, Barbara and Deborah McGrady , eds, Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, New York, Routledge, 2003; hardback; pp. xiii, 296; RRP £65; ISBN 0415939097. This collection of essays edited by Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah L. McGrady embraces Christine de Pizan in all her guises: poet, polemicist, feminist, politician, historian. In their introduction, the editors suggest that the 'challenge' for twenty-first century scholars of Christine 'is to nuance our understanding of her uniqueness' (pp. 1-2). This carefully worded exhortation avoids casting Christine in any one critical mould, and alludes instead to the fluidity with which sheherself navigates theoretical boundaries. The Christine that emerges from this volume is distinguished chiefly by her 'unique'ability to elude categorisation. The Casebook also professes its own 'uniqueness', as a collation of previously unpublished articles at the forefront of post-millenium Christine scholarship. The collection begins with a brief review of the critical reception of Christine in the twentieth century: Charity Cannon Willard's anecdotal and entertaining foreword maps out her scholarly interest in Christine in the twentieth century with a light, personal touch. Altmann and McGrady acknowledge this legacy of academic study in their introduction, but stress that the volume's intention is to reflect, and even to generate, a 'new shift in Christine studies' (p. 2). Part I, 'Christine in Context', proposes readings of Christine's oeuvre within the historical, social and political context of fifteenth-century France. It includes instructive essays by major scholars Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinsksi, Lori J. Walters and Earl Jeffrey Richards. Margarete Zimmerman's intriguing 'Christine de Pizan: Memory's Architect' concludes the first section by exploring Christine's attention to memoria, and her promotion of her work, both textually and visually, to secure its future survival. Part II reviews the feminist approach to Christine, with a particular emphasis on feminine space: Rosalind Brown-Grant reminds us that the defense genre provides the foundation of the Cité des dames, while Roberta L. Krueger accentuates the [End Page 187] female domestic sphere in her examination of the link between the spiritual and economic well-being of women in the Livre des trois vertus (also known as the Tresor de la cité des dames). The exploration of feminine space culminates with Judith L. Kellogg's article, 'Le livre de la cité des dames: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Reimagining Gendered Space', which focuses on Christine's representation of a feminine body politic, where the physical space in which the City of Ladies is constructed is ultimately grafted onto the female body. The miscellany of textual analysis of Christine's works in Part III, 'Christine's Writings', lacks the engaging internal unity of Parts I and II. But the collective eclecticism of the contributions, might be interpreted as indicative of Christine's versatility in her own century, as well as in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship. Tracy Adams's article, which focuses on the Cents balades,sees Christine channelling her own experience in life and love stylistically into her ballade cycles. Marilynn Desmond re-examines the three letters Christine contributed to the early fifteenth-century epistolary debate, the Querelle de la rose, arguing for their significance in relation to Christine's corpus and to the Early Modern Querelle des femmes, while Andrea Tarnowski elucidates Christine's deliberate representation of herself as both a 'fictional character' and a 'producer of texts' (p. 182) in the oft-appraised Chemin de long estude. Liliane Dulac and Christine Reno's article on the Livre de l'advision Cristine expicitly articulates the generic elusiveness of Christine which underpins the volume: 'The autobiographical and political dimensions of the Advision are thus inextricably linked to such a degree that it is impossible to classify the work neatly according to a single genre that would exclude or downplay the importance of one or the other' (p. 209). It seems to me that the same could be said of the collection as a whole. Willard's intimate prefatory remarks spill over into the collection itself, and the result is an attempt to cancel out anachronism by recovering Christine on a personal level. The foreword resonates throughout the entire volume, but perhaps...

Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression (review)

Gabino La Rosa Corzo. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression. Translated by Mary Todd. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.292 pp.Gabino La Rosa Corzo wrote los palenques del oriente de Cuba: Resistencia y acosa nearly twenty years ago, and the 1988 Cuban publication has continued to exert influence on scholarship, especially among Cuban academics. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression, a new translation, brings this important study to a new audience and should prove to be a significant addition to the English-language historiography of Cuban slavery. It is an ambitious work that sets out to create a new and more comprehensive framework for understanding the complexity of runaway slave communities throughout Cuban history. This is a critical study because it moves beyond general overviews of slave resistance tactics to focus on a single genre of methods slaves employed in struggling against oppression. Focusing on one mode of resistance enables La Rosa Corzo to explore a variety of conditions that contributed to and facilitated slave flight and attempts at resettlement. This allows his readers to gain insights into the nature of slave society and nascent Afro-Cuban culture in ways other studies have only suggested.The author begins with a historiographie overview that explicates the difficulties in the existing scholarship. One of the central problems La Rosa Corzo identifies in earlier works is the reliance on anecdotal accounts as evidence due, in part, to difficulties in uncovering sources. As a solution he proposes the use of a wide array of materials to create a broad empirical base for his study. Anticipating the methodology of more recent works, La Rosa Corzo incorporates documents such as diaries of slave hunters (several of which were unknown or never used before), oral histories, and fieldwork that included tracing the routes of slave hunters and locating the sites of long abandoned palenques (runaway communities). La Rosa Corzo also tackles the question of geographic difference. Many early investigations of runaways treated the problem as an island-wide issue. He establishes from the outset that his focus is on the eastern region of Cuba. Attention on this area is consistent with the evidence he reveals that there were more runaway communities in eastern Cuba and that the phenomenon had distinct characteristics by region. La Rosa Corzo discusses the reasons for difference and disparity at several points in his text. This allows the author to situate his study both conceptually and geographically. Following the historiographie introduction, he builds a chronologically organized case that establishes a typology of runaways, providing a more useful avenue of analysis than previous scholarship on the topic.La Rosa Corzo proposes a categorization of runaway slaves that encompasses a range of behaviors - actions and reactions - and he supports his model with a number of well-supported cases. …

From Orientalist to Postcolonial Representations: A Critique of Indian Theatre Historiography from 1827 to the Present

This essay offers a comparative critique of all major Indian theatre histories written during the modern era. It reveals three distinct representations of Indian theatre and argues that each was a manifestation of a discrete historiographic approach, shaped by its particular historical and cultural moment. Theatre histories of the Orientalist period offer a narrow and elitist construction of Indian theatre as synonymous with a single defunct genre, the ancient Sanskrit theatre. Histories of the high nationalist phase make a token acknowledgement of the Sanskrit and traditional genres but define Indian theatre as comprising primarily of the modern genre. Postcolonial histories construct a democratic and comprehensive Indian theatre – embracing the Sanskrit, traditional, and modern genre – but with an unpersuasively high significance assigned to the modern genre's post-Independence phase. Such different representations of Indian theatre show how theatre historiography in the modern period, like theatre historiography in any era, regularly refashioned itself under the pressure of changing historical, political, and cultural conditions.

Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Small corpus studies and ELT: Theory and practice ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy, Alex Henry, Robert L. Roseberry Niladri Sekhar Dash Small corpus studies and ELT: Theory and practice. Ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy, Alex Henry, and Robert L. Roseberry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 420. ISBN 1588110354. $125 (Hb). The preface of this volume defines issues related to the size of the corpus while the introduction justifies its publication in the present context of corpus research and application. In Section 1, Ch. 1 refers to the use of language in some real situations and shows how analysis of corpora can reveal some important linguistic issues that can alter understanding of language and discourse. In Section 2, Ch. 2 demonstrates how using language processing tools on small corpora can generate new output to be used in second-language classroom teaching as well as for evaluating learner’s vocabulary. Ch. 3 argues that using text analysis software on small corpora can extract a great deal of new information required to enhance the comprehensibility of a literary text. In Section 3, Ch. 4 shows that applying concordances to specialized text corpora can bring out examples of linguistic patterns useful for designing course books and learning materials. Ch. 5 argues that linguistic information obtained from a corpus belonging to a single genre can be effective for preparing useful language-teaching materials. Ch. 6 argues that information about the use of various functional units in specific lexico-grammatical patterns in certain small corpora can help in examining language variation across genres within a given discourse area. Ch. 7 demonstrates how analysis of the textual genre of personal advertisements can provide important clues for making comparisons between the languages preferred by men and women as well as for identifying cultural backgrounds that may help in shaping their preferred linguistic choices. In Section 4, Ch. 8 shows how classroom investigation of small corpora annotated with features of discourse and wording have been useful in improving language proficiency as well as in promoting language awareness among ESL students. Ch. 9 examines a corpus of definition sentences, points out the limitations of functional grammar, and advocates local grammars devised from specialized corpora. In Section 5, Ch. 10 describes the theoretical background and practical experience of creating a multilingual corpus as well as its application in translation and discourse analysis. Ch. 11 proposes a crosslinguistic comparative analysis on some parallel corpora that might help learners explore the ways language is used for achieving particular communicative goals. Ch. 12 uses parallel corpora to compare thematic organization in source and target languages to find the degree of correlation between the two, which may help in teaching, translating, and identifying text-types across languages. In Section 6, Ch. 13 shows how findings of collocational patterns, pragmatic appropriateness, and discourse features from learner corpora can be coupled with expert corpora to design teaching methodology and materials. Ch. 14 argues that both teacher and learner require knowledge of content, writing process, context, and language system for writing a text and advocates comparative analysis of corpus methodologies as a strategy for developing such capacity. In sum, the volume highlights the relevance of small corpora in both language learning and teaching. In addition to the description of basic corpus analysis tools, it covers various issues (compilation and use of learner corpus, comparison of genres, crosslinguistic comparison, teaching-materials design, description of local and functional grammars) important for language education and research. [End Page 346] Niladri Sekhar Dash Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

“I just want to be a decent citizen”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For instance, Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983) both use melodrama to engage the sympathies of the audience, while making liberal arguments for labor unions and against workplace exposure to hazardous chemicals, respectively. Christine Gledhill, Steve Neale, and Linda Williams have each argued that melodrama functions as a cultural “mode,” with a sphere of influence wider than a single genre. As part of this argument, Williams (, p. 42) has noted that melodrama constitutes the principal mode of film‐making in Hollywood. Although I find this position convincing, in this paper I have focused specifically on melodrama as a discrete film genre rather than an overarching mode. In fact, one might suspect that the left's suspicion of affect, emotion, and bodily response corresponds to the decline in leftist rhetorical agency and appeal in the last decades of the twentieth century. While the film overwhelmingly corresponds to the genre, it does depart from melodramatic conventions in a few ways. In one notable deviation, it does not foreground a musical score or theme song [unlike Norma Rae or Titanic (1997)]. The film also downplays its romance narrative, subordinating it to plotlines featuring Brockovich as a professional and a mother. Although a heterosexual couple is formed—a convention upon which many melodramas and almost all Hollywood films rely—the couple's status at the end of the film remains ambiguous. Instead, Brockovich's professional and maternal commitments are given precedence over her romantic relationship. Although by advocating mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs for mothers on welfare, conservative politicians might seem to have conceded that mothers can work and still be good mothers, their agenda has been chiefly to promote a work ethic rather than to legitimate working mothers. One might even suspect these legislators of seeking to punish poor mothers by preventing them from behaving like traditionally good mothers and staying home with their children. Thanks to Hiram Pérez for pointing this out. While this list is by no means comprehensive, the proliferation of angelic, ailing mothers in domestic melodramas of the last decades of the century suggests that these films represent a mournful elegy for a disappearing, idealized, entirely domestic mother. As increasing numbers of mothers work outside the home, these melodramas testify nostalgically to the decline of the stay‐at‐home mother, figured by her literally dying body. This list also raises the possibility that Erin Brockovich succeeds as a mother because of her good health, a notable attribute in a film about the toxic effects of chemicals upon the body. The film thus suggests that one of the dangers posed by corporate pollution is that it prevents women from being effective mothers. The film also earned the distinction of being the first movie starring a woman to sell more than one million DVDs, an arena primarily dominated by action films with male protagonists (Lew Irwin ). Conservative writer Michael Fumento also decries the payment Brockovich received, as well as other aspects of the film and the historical events it represents (2001). Neither Norma Rae nor Silkwood, for instance, have fairytale endings. Norma Rae, though empowered and triumphant, remains poor at the end of the film, while Karen Silkwood, in accordance with historical fact, is killed. Phillip Lopate (), for example, argues that Erin Brockovich ultimately advocates complicity with corporate power: “If you can't beat them, join them. There is no perceptible alternative.” Ann Douglas ([] 1998, p. 4), for instance, has characterized nineteenth‐century sentimental fiction and its twentieth‐century counterparts (popular songs and movies) as purely passive exercises in emotional consumerism. See Flo Leibowitz (1996) for a different response to this charge. Elaine Roth is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches Screenwriting, Film Criticism, Women in US Film, and Introduction to Film Studies, among other courses. She is currently working on a project on Steven Soderbergh's films. E‐mail: elaroth@iusb.edu

De schilderijenverzameling van baron Willem Vincent van Wyttenhorst

De schilderijenverzameling van baron Willem Vincent van Wyttenhorst

Catalogus Van Nog Bestaande Schilderijen

Catalogus Van Nog Bestaande Schilderijen

The Ode as an Oratorical Genre

A seminal text in Russian formalist genre theory, Tynianov's previously untranslated essay on the ode is both an historical case study of a single genre and a investigation of broader principles of poetic structure and generic evolution. Applying his "systemo-functional" model of genre, Tynianov first analyses the structure of the Russian ode as exemplified by the eighteenth-century poet-critic Lomonosov, then traces a complex series of transformations that the genre undergoes in the hands of his rivals and successors, connecting these to other developments in literature and to contemporary critical debates about lyric poetry and language. Tynianov argues that the dominant characteristic of the Lomonosov ode is its orientation to oratory, the non-literary "speech series" it most closely resembles, and shows how the declamatory principle - involving a particular intonational system and the pursuit of maximum emotional effect - organises every element in an ode's construction and creates a special condition of language. After Lomonosov, the oratorical function weakens and the ode splits into two strands, dubbed "dry odes" and "senseless" odes, which evolve separately. In the nineteenth century, the genre mutates further, orientating itself instead to conversational speech or to music, and combining with other genres such as elegy or romance. The essay concludes with some speculative remarks about how the ode survived "as a tendency" even though the genre itself was largely defunct.

The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America

Presented as the authentic testimony of the disenfranchised, the colonised, and the oppressed, has in the last two decades emerged as one of the most significant genres of Latin America's post-boom literature. In the political battles that have taken place around the formation of the canon, the testimonio holds a special place: no other single genre of literature has taken up such a large part of current debate. Initially hailed in the 1970s as a genuine form of resistance literature, testimonio has since undergone a significant change in its critical reception. The essays in The 'Real' Thing analyse the testimonio, its history, and its place in contemporary consciousness. Although the literature of testimony arose on the margins of institutional power and its ends were in large part political change, the canonisation of testimonio by the academic Left has moved it from margin to centre, ironically bringing about the institutionalisation of its transgressive and counter-hegemonic qualities. Discussing Latin American works ranging from Salvadorian writer Roque Dalton's Miguel Marmol to I...Rigoberta Menchu, a work that earned its author a Nobel Prize, this collection explores how critical writing about testimonio has turned into discourse about the institution of academia, the canon, postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of Latin American studies generally. The 'Real' Thing provides a view of a particularly revealing moment in contemporary literary history and a perspective on the place of the intellectual within the academic institution. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and comparative literature. Contributors: John Beverley, Santiago Colas, Georg M. Gugelberger, Barbara Harlow, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras, Margaret Randall, Javier Sanjines, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris Sommer, Gareth Williams, George Yudice, and Marc Zimmerman.

Operationalizing the Concept of Discourse Community: A Case Study of One Institutional Site of Composing

Takes a systematic approach to defining and operationalizing the notion of discourse community, drawing on data from an ethnography of writing in a workplace setting. States that a single genre varied in form and function depending on the specific discourse communities in which it was used--writing events took on layered meanings in relation to other communicative activities.

Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon

Arthur P. Davis Forging The Way For The Formation Of The Canon Jennifer Jordan (bio) Contrary to the belief that all the tools an anthologist needs are a pair of scissors and a pot of glue, anthologizing is an exacting art/science. A great anthologist needs an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter, the critical skill to determine which artists and texts are both great and/or representative, the patience to assure accuracy and clean copy, and the tact to discourage the many friends, relatives and acquaintances who press to have their work memorialized. Amiri Baraka, despite a previously expressed disdain for Black American anthologies (Home 125), found how rare these skills are when he edited Black Fire (1968) with Larry Neal. Their problem of selection seemed to be resolved by including every Black male writer of nationalist persuasion on the East coast. The editors still had to issue an apology in the paperback edition for leaving out the movers and shakers of the Midwest movement, such as Don L. Lee / Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, Ron Milner and Jewel Latimore, and for ignoring the brilliant woman poet, Jayne Cortez of New York City. In the end Baraka blamed the omissions on “accidents” and the white “devils” of the William Morrow Company (xvi). Such “accidents” are possible even when an anthology such as Black Fire has as its goal the relatively limited objective of gathering together like-minded souls in an ideological and/or aesthetic assault on the literary mainstream. Mistakes can be made even when one has the benefit of a number of distinguished prototypes. One thinks immediately of Alain Locke’s New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance journal, Fire, which probably inspired the name of the Baraka/Neal collaboration and which shares its sort of in-your-face aggressiveness. Such anthologies, when they fill a cultural vacuum with vibrant yet overlooked art or trumpet the arrival of a significant literary and political moment, are important. But they do not call for the same kind of talents necessary to edit an anthology that purports to be an accurate record of the entire literary output of a whole race of people. Arthur P. Davis has always understood how much work and skill such a record requires and the importance of anthologies in preserving African-American literature—a literature cultivated in struggle and sown in improbably infertile ground. Laws existed to prevent its birth, and neglect tried to insure its death. So when Arthur Paul Davis, then of Virginia Union, Sterling Brown of Howard University, and Ulysses Lee of Lincoln University (PA) produced The Negro Caravan (1941), they were engaged in a war to establish a literary tradition and to prevent its perversion by either cultural provincialism or racist distortion. Theirs was not the first anthology of Black [End Page 450] literature, but, as they explained in the preface to Caravan, the preceding collections, such as James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; rev. ed. 1931) and Benjamin Brawley’s Early Negro American Writers (1935), were usually limited to a single genre or to a specific time frame. The editors of The Negro Caravan were interested in producing an anthology that would be a scholarly and complete presentation of the literary and folk production of African Americans. This meant unearthing early novels long out of print and including material that seemed in those days outside the limits of literature, such as speeches and general essays. Brown, Davis, and Lee had a definite critical perspective based on a desire to apply aesthetic standards to their analysis of the texts, an insistence on including a fair sampling of the available material, and a belief in the essential Americanism of African-American literature (“Introduction”). However, this critical position was not used as a tool of exclusion and censorship. The result was a catholicity that made The Negro Caravan far superior to two earlier collections of Black literature that claimed to be comprehensive—V.F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) and Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges (1931), edited by Otelia Cromwell of Miner Teachers College (subsequently D.C. Teachers), Lorenzo Dow Turner of Fisk, and Eva B...

Body art and archaeological theory

In my current research project, an ethnoarchaeological study of indigenous body art, I isolate a single art genre, body art, and consider its stylistic variation across a range of Australasian and Asian societies. My aim is to develop an understanding of how social processes affect style within a specific art genre by systematically evaluating the relationships between body art and social context. The conjunction of recent theoretical advancements in the study of style (e.g. papers in Conkey and Hastorf 1990) and the established value of ethnoarchaeological research, points to a clear need for ethnoarchaeological research into indigenous artistic systems.

Poetry and prophecy: the beginnings of a literary tradition , and: Piers Plowman and prophecy: an approach to the C-text (review)

Reviews 195 abbreviations Bede's Historia ecclesiastica appears as Historia ecclesia. The analysis of Domesday values is duplicated at pp. 110-11 and in Appendix B (pp. 152-3), and the three values for Norton (p. 153) are wrong: they were£6, £3 and £6-10-0, not £6, £4 and £5. This work clearly needed a great deal more editorial direction, control and proofreading. A piece of work should hardly have this number of errors. Useful though it may be in suggesting a model for approaches to the study of local andregionalhistory, on other matters lector caveat. John Walmsley School of History, Philosophy and Politics Macquarie Univeristy Kugel, James L., ed., Poetry and prophecy: the beginnings of a literary tradition (Myth and poetics), Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth and paper; pp. xii, 251; R.R.P. US$34.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper) plus 1 0 % overseas. Steinberg, Theodore L., Piers Plowman and prophecy: an approach to the C-text (Garland studies in medieval literature), N.Y. and London, Garland, 1991; cloth; pp. xx, 154; R.R.P. US$20.00. Therelationshipbetween poetry and prophecy is a topic whose time has come. A n increasing number of scholars suspects that inquiry into the relationship may reveal 'the beginnings of a literary tradition', to use the subtide of Kugel's essay collection. If so, its results may entail a revision of Middle English literary history, in which Chaucer has been cast in the role of inaugurator. For it is his maverick contemporary, Langland, who represents any such literary tradition in English. Kugel's volume is a collection of essays arising from an important conference on 'Poetry and prophecy' held at Harvard in 1986. A major contributor at the conference was the great Middle English scholar, Morton W. Bloomfield, w h o gave a paper entitied 'Poetry in prophecy and apocalypse', apparendy drawing both on his wide reading in comparative literature and on his lifelong expertise in Piers Plowman. Bloomfield died before he was able to revise his paper for publication, and his essay is therefore a major absence from the collection. In it, Bloomfield tried to rephrase recurrent questions about Piers Plowman and its association of the political and the spiritual, and used the notion of prophecy to redraw the boundaries between technique (poetry) and content. 196 Reviews Theodore Steinberg's Piers Plowman and prophecy appeared in 1991, the year after the conference proceedings. It is influenced by Bloomfield's work, as all Piers Plowman scholarship is, but otherwise shows no awareness of the Harvard enterprise. Steinberg's work is therefore a sign of the timeliness of his ideas, and acts as a useful introduction for those who might wish to ask questions about therelationof poetry and prophecy in Langland's poem alone. It proposes that prophecy is a formative genre of Piers Plowman, an idea put forward by Stephen Barney in 1988, though it is equivocal about what this may mean. At times Steinberg writes as if prophecy is the key, and gives the lie to all those who deny that the poem has a single genre. This is the viewpoint that enables him to give a rather patronising account of Donaldson's pioneer work on minstrels in the poem, and then note that Donaldson overlooked 'the correct conclusion' (p. 54). At other times he locates prophecy as one genre among many, and denies that his work sets out to override other views of Langland's poem. A third version of Steinberg's argument is prophecy as portmanteau, the use of which explains all sorts of features once thought to be anomalous such as the poem's 'careless' structure, its 'disjunctive style' (p. 90) or its 'discontinuity and cavalier treatment of space and time' (p. 88). Steinberg is not afraid of adducing as support the fact that 'there are also a great many passages in the poem that simply sound prophetic' (p. 91). In some respects the oscillations of Steinberg's argument mimic tbe poem itself, but they do suggest a certain vagueness about the main thesis. Tbe problem is that Steinberg does not follow through from his initial, and unexceptionable, statement: 'Piers Plowman ... is a...

Preface

Preface The year 1993 saw the four-hundredth anniversary of George Herbert's birth. Although the author of only a single volume of poetry, published posthumously in 1633 as The Temple, Herbert has rarely been without readers; in fact, he has rarely been without a significant readership, and a plausible case can be made that no other poet from the English Renaissance has built so substantial and longstanding a reputation on so slender a body of work. Where many of Herbert's greatest literary contemporaries chose to spread out their literary activities over a lifetime and across several genres, Herbert's achievement was the product of a few intense years and remained exclusively within the domain of a single genre (or more narrowly yet, within a few of its furrows, fertile though they were to become in the seventeenth century): that of sacred lyric itself. In our own time, concerned as we have become with questions about how literary reputations are fashioned and canons formed, Herbert reminds us of the special potential of lyric to speak across many generations and to many different kinds of readers and to give pleasure and instruction alike. But pleasure and instruction of a particular kind, too. As the essays by Joseph Summers and Peter Sacks suggest, Herbert is a poet's poet in more than the appreciative sense of that phrase. For all his attention to formality, Herbert has a long history of inviting imitation — of proving to be remarkably hospitable to later writers for literary as well as creedal purposes; and the most recent chapter in the history of Herbert's influence may well be the most interesting. As Donne helped to provide Eliot and many poets of Eliot's generation with a new conception of poetry, so Herbert has been an especially resonant sounding board for poets who have come of age in the second half of this century, as Professor Sacks's essay helps to explain. Perhaps because in Herbert the auditory and the verbal so deeply interanimate each other in the manner described by Donald Friedman, the boundary between reading Herbert andwriting Herbert, or writing like Herbert, has seemedunusuallypermeable. (In viJonathan F.S. Post a brief aside, Helen Vendler even speaks of her mother as having been a poet of "perfectly constructed Herbertian stanzas.") An otherwise prosaic Robert Overton, as Sid Gottlieb demonstrates, was tempted to "re-versify" large portions of The Temple during one of several lengthy stays in prison in the middle of the seventeenth-century; like the Psalms, Herbert's poetry has had a profound impact on those "in captivity." And only a few years down the road, in part because Herbert was thought to be acceptable instructional fare for an increasingly literate female readership, he could be "personalized" by Dame Sarah Cowper, as Helen Wilcox shows, in staking her claim that The Temple was "woman friendly." Some two-hundred years later, having dreamed about being visited by George Herbert, Elizabeth Bishop was to fulfill this possibility in ways barely imaginable in the seventeenth century. The essays collected here were, for the most part, initially presented at the Clark Library in November of 1993 during a twoday conference sponsored by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and bearing the same title as the one used for this book. In this commemorative context, it is only natural that issues of reception would figure into the formal presentations and ensuing discussion, although I doubt many present would have predicted in advance the novel interpretive possibilities that would be generated by thinking of Herbert as "our contemporary." (I write this as someone conscious of having enjoyed something of a busman's holiday from the Renaissance during part of the conference.) But reception is not the only story told here, nor are the accounts meant to be historically exhaustive. If some participants sought to trace out new lines of influence, or perhaps more accurately to identify new readers and new modes of reading The Temple, other scholars addressed topics of long-standing interest to Herbert scholars. In an essay that is equally about the life, mind, and art of Donne and Herbert, Donald Friedman writes on the subject of...

“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune Laurence de Looze I N HIS SEMINAL CONSIDERATION of genre and (medieval) lit­ erary history, Hans Robert Jauss took the important step of situating the conventions of genres in the reader’s reception as much as, or more than, in the pages the reader reads.1One does not simply read, Jauss maintained, because one is always reading as: what a work is is not separable from what it is received as being. This results in a reader sens­ ing genre—i.e., reading according to certain generic conventions—most keenly precisely when he also senses that the bounds of a genre are being transgressed by a particular work: when, that is, the reader is unable to read comfortably according to his usual generic expectations. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the most exemplary texts of a par­ ticular genre are inevitably those which are perceived as going beyond the established conventions of the genre and provoking the reader’s horizon of expectation. Jauss contrasts these “ chefs-d’oeuvre” to “ stereotyped” works which are entirely conventional, which do not transgress, pro­ voke, resist, in which he finds the proof of generic atrophy. It follows that great examples of a genre will almost always be generically mixed (for the features which transgress the conventions of a genre will them­ selves have to be read “ as something” —namely, as something else) and that “ pure” examples of a single genre are fossilized, stereotyped con­ structions. The greatest examples of a genre will inevitably be, in certain respects, “ other to themselves.” Now, generic identity is never stable, even if one must occasionally freeze its motion in order to carry out analysis. Genre is as shifting as human perception itself, and as varied as the perceptions of different readers and different historical periods. One could chart the mix, even the evolution of perceived genre, in a particular work in terms of its mediation of a dominant genre by an “interprétant” genre, as Kathryn Gravdal proposes in this issue.2One would need to post a caveat, how­ ever, to the effect that the roles of dominant and subjugant may meta­ morphose from reader to reader, place to place, or period to period. In other cases, no one set of generic expectations arises, leading to a tussle between generic expectations. VOL. XXXIII, NO. 4 73 L ’E sprit C réateur As an example of the insoluble contestation of two genres, I will take up that of what has been designated, albeit somewhat loosely, as the medieval “ pseudo-autobiography.” Critics generally agree that it reaches its apogee in the fourteenth century, and that its practitioners include, among others, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan in France, Juan Ruiz in Spain, and Geoffrey Chaucer in England. This consensus is extraordinary given that critics have not been able to define what the pseudo-autobiography actually is. Here I will set forth briefly a theory of the pseudo-autobiography,3 and then examine a particular example, Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Remede de Fortune.4 One of the few attempts to formulate a definition of the medieval pseudo-autobiography has been that of Gabriel Gybbon-Monypenny: This genre [which] I would call the “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” . . . is an account by a poet, usually in verse, of an episode or episodes of his supposed love life, into which are interpolated a number of his own lyric compositions. The songs are said to have been com­ posed in connection with the love affair described, and the narrative serves, among other things, to explain their genesis.5 Though the various works subsequently cited are in general excellent examples of the pseudo-autobiography, the definition is problematic, for the taxonomy “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” presupposes an undefined notion of “ pseudo-autobiography.” If the erotic pseudo-autobiography is defined somewhat redundantly as nothing more than a pseudo-auto­ biography in which the protagonist’s erotic life figures prominently, the question remains: what is a pseudo-autobiography? Now, since the pseudo-autobiography is dependent on a notion of autobiography, which is itself dependent on an implicit recognition of biography, the pseudo-autobiography...

Rational Choice and the Limits of Theoretical Generality

Claims that rational choice analysis represents a general theory of social processes raise questions not only about rational choice but about the very idea of theoretical generality. Logically, a truly general theory ought to offer analytical means to all legitimate ends of social inquiry. This article holds, however, that no theory based on any single genre of social processes (rational calculation included) can serve the full range of descriptive or explanatory purposes properly addressed by sociologists. Rational choice thinking, like other claimants to the status of theoretical generality, misleads when its proponents doggedly insist on posing accounts invoking rational calculation to explain outcomes where other social processes are actually crucial. Acknowledgment of this fact can be expected to lead to the qualifications and amendments identified by Smelser as “theoretical degeneration.”

Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century 'Lied'

In spite of its ubiquity, and its singular claim to represent a natural mode of musical expression, song has had a less than decisive influence on the development of music theory and analysis in the twentieth century. Our canonical techniques of analysis have emerged primarily from considerations of instrumental music, not vocal music. And although nothing in principle precludes the application of such techniques to non-instrumental works, song analysis accepts the transfer only with some difficulty.' The marginalization of song as song in the literature speaks to a very real problem, namely, how to account for the syntax of a genre that includes two nominal semiotic systems, music and language. A pursuit of the dynamics of that inclusion relationship cannot be simply reduced to a routine search for patterns of coincidence or non-coincidence between words and music. To embrace the theoretical challenge fully, we need to define song as a single genre and test its semiotic status. And it is because of this need for basic research that the problems of song analysis cannot be left to music historians, who are usually more content to borrow, apply and criticise analytical methods than to develop them in the first place.2 The aim of this essay is to discuss, by means of example, some of the analytical and interpretative issues raised by the German art song of the nineteenth century. Theory-based analysis of song is notoriously lacking in models. The literature is dominated by individual 'readings'. But the failure to construct explicit models does not necessarily reflect the genre's resistance to theoretical definition. This is not to deny that the balance in disposition between words and music in song shifts at different moments in the history of European music the songs of Zelter and Schubert, Schumann and Loewe, and Brahms and Wolf present marked contrasts in the relative weighting of words and music. Such differences, however, are more stylistic than structural, more concerned with individual composerly preference than with song itself. Just as it was necessary for Schenker and

Personal Narrative, Melville's "The Confidence-Man", and the Problem of Deception

Students of expressive culture must, by definition, assume that the aspects of culture they study express something, whether about a social group or an individual human being. We might ask, for example, what the songs and stories of an Appalachian woman have to say about Appalachia or what they have to say about that woman (or, of course, both). Of all the genres of folklore, the personal narrative seems logically to be the single genre most revealing of the individual narrator or performer. But the fact that human beings are capable of deception, that we are able to fabricate something that sounds like a personal narrative but that has absolutely no truth to it, makes problematic this basic assumption. In this essay I will examine this problem using as my text Herman Melville's 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The action of The Confidence-Man takes place aboard the steamer Fiddle on the Mississippi river between dawn and midnight of April Fool's Day. A great number of odd and engaging characters appear, starting with a deaf-mute in cream colors; many of these characters seem to be engaged in swindling their fellow passengers. The common reading of the novel has it that there is one Confidence-Man who