Stylistic Complexity Research Articles

EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF LYRIC AND EPIC NARRATIVES: INNOVATIVE PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING MIKHAIL LERMONTOV’S “MTSYRI” IN THE 8TH GRADE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

This scholarly article delves into the nuanced methodology of teaching the poem as a literary genre within secondary education, focusing specifically on Mikhail Lermontov’s «Mtsyri» for 8th-grade students. It begins with a critical examination of the challenges inherent in teaching syncretic genres, especially the poem, which embodies both lyrical and epic elements, thereby presenting unique interpretative challenges. Through the presentation of detailed educational scenarios, the article proposes a comprehensive approach to enhancing students’ understanding and appreciation of «Mtsyri», underscoring the poem’s thematic depth and stylistic complexity. The suggested methodology encompasses a blend of providing historical-literary context, engaging students’ initial perceptions, and encouraging active co-creation strategies, such as expressive reading and artistic representation, to foster deeper literary analysis and engagement. Moreover, the article advocates for the use of heuristic and problem-based teaching methods to address the genre’s definitional ambiguities and to illuminate the poem’s stylistic nuances and thematic significance within Lermontov’s broader body of work. Through this elaborate pedagogical framework, the paper aims to not only improve literary comprehension among middle-grade students but also to cultivate a nuanced appreciation for the interplay between lyrical and epic narrative forms.

«Аверкиев едва ли не точнее всех…»: межкультурное взаимодействие на страницах «Нового времени»

The article analyzes the curious plot of intercultural interaction on the pages of the newspaper “Novoye Vremya” by A.S. Suvorin, associated with the name of D.V. Averkiev. It is hypothesized that the approach to the selection of works for translation and Averkiev’s translation strategy itself are determined by his cultural temperament, the desire to introduce the Russian public to the best works of world literature, as well as Suvorin’s publishing tactics, supported on the pages of his newspaper. The significance of “Hamlet” for Russian culture of the late 19th — early 20th century and the presentation of this play on the pages of the newspaper “Novoye Vremya” are analyzed. The comparison of competing translations of “Hamlet” of by Averkiev and P.P. Gnedich, who collaborated with the publishing house of Suvorin, is carried out. The reasons for the preference for the translation made by Gnedich for theatrical productions and the rejection of Averkiev’s version, despite its recognized advantages, are clarified. Among these reasons are the linguistic and stylistic complexity of Averkiev’s translation and the unpreparedness of the Russian public to perceive such material. It is proved that Averkiev’s highly accurate translation of “Hamlet” has served as a starting point for the creation of further translations of Shakespeare with the focus on preserving the original senses of the plays and the author’s style of the English playwright

Study on William Faulkner's Long Sentence Style Based on “The Sound and the Fury”

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of William Faulkner's narrative technique in "The Sound and the Fury," with a specific focus on his use of long sentences and multi-perspective storytelling. Faulkner's innovative approach to sentence structure is examined as a key element in shaping the novel's thematic depth and emotional resonance. Each section of the novel, presented through different characters' viewpoints, is characterized by unique sentence constructions that reflect individual mental states and emotional experiences. The paper explores how these long, complex sentences enhance the reader's understanding of themes such as time, memory, and identity. Additionally, the interaction between Faulkner's elongated sentences and the multi-perspective narrative is analyzed as a crucial device in conveying the fragmented and chaotic nature of the characters' lives and their broader social context. The paper concludes that Faulkner's work, through its stylistic complexity and depth, continues to resonate as a seminal exploration of the human condition.

Characterization of stone tesserae from “The Indian Triumph of Dionysus” Mosaic (Casignana, Reggio Calabria, Italy)

Abstract The archaeological site of Casignana (Reggio Calabria) represents one of the most important Roman sites of Southern Italy thanks to its extension and refinement of its mosaics such as the “Indian Triumph of Dionysus”. Its stylistic complexity is related also to the wide range of polychrome stone tesserae used. For this reason, a minero-petrographic and geochemical characterization of some tesserae was carried out by Polarized Optical Microscopy (POM), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and Electron probe microanalyzer combined with wavelength dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EPMA-WDS). The results suggested the heterogeneity of the stone tesserae in terms of petrographic features and the probable provenance from both local and not sites.

A Survey of Dearth and Trend of Female Literary Writing in English from the Northeast Nigeria

There is an apparent paucity of literary works written by women in English from the northern vis-à-vis southern part of Nigeria in the corpus of the country’s literature. Adopting a mixed-method approach, this paper surveys availability or dearth of female writers in the northern region by focusing on the three north-eastern states of Borno, Yobe, and Gombe states. Quantitative and qualitative approaches, through questionnaires and interviews, and Consensus Workshop, through Focus Group Discussions (FGD), are administered to gather the data for the discussion. The paper found a dearth of women writers in the northeast region and concludes that readership, publication opportunities, level of education, and social choices of the medium of expression are among the factors responsible for the dearth. The paper also found a recurrent motif of love, family, and marriage as the thematic and stylistic complexities of the available female work of fiction that follow theSoyayya trend. Possible amenable measures, which include organizing competitions and book projects, are proffered as recommendations.

Monastic Reform and Romanesque Figurative Capitals at Saint-Bénigne in Dijon

THE CRYPT CAPITALS OF Saint-Bénigne in Dijon (1001–1018) are often considered among the most inventive of early Romanesque figurative capitals. This article demonstrates that the Benedictine reform undertaken at the monastery by Abbot William of Volpiano in the last decade of the tenth century provides a context not only for a new interpretation of the iconography of two capitals facing St. Bénigne’s tomb, but also for the genesis of the contorted monstrous imagery characteristic of the Romanesque style. The iconography of the capitals resembles John of Fécamp’s description of hell in the Confessio theologica. The stylistic complexity of the carved forms sustains the emotional engagement that John deemed necessary for repentance and recalls Odo of Cluny’s prescription in the Occupatio of using devices to maintain engagement. Similarities with Abbot William’s reform in Dijon and the related texts of these Benedictine reformers suggest that the capitals were designed to kindle fear as the first step of repentance in a monastic program of spiritual perfection.

Новая история Птолемея Хенна (Phot. Bibl. 190).

Ptolemy Chennus is a poorly known Roman author who wrote in Greek and lived in the late 1st — beginning of 2nd century ad. His works are enumerated in the corresponding article from the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda: a collection of Paradoxical stories, a historical drama Sphinx, and an epic entitled Anthomerus; his only extant work is the Novel History, probably another title of Ptolemy’s aforementioned paradoxographical collection, which has been preserved as an epitome in the Bibliotheca of Patriarch Photius (c. 810/820–893). By his professional pursuits, apparently initiated in his native Alexandria, Ptolemy is defined as grammaticus, i.e. classical scholar, and the classics in his time were centered primarily on Homer; the tendency to thwart this great authority is evident throughout the Novel History which is teeming with a mass of blatantly unorthodox versions of various mythological stories going back to Homer. It is this unorthodoxy that the compiler of the epitome finds attractive, though unfortunately a mere summary forestalls the possibility to savour the presumed stylistic complexity of the work, as well as to form a well-grounded judgement on how serious was its author’s attitude to the fibs he tells, or on how close these fanciful rehashes came to a deliberate parody; still, it almost seems certain that the original text was truly rich in playfulness, irony, and burgeoning imagination. The publication presents the first full Russian translation of the work, accompanied with sufficiently detailed commentary, paying special attention to Eustathius’ of Thessalonica (c. 1115–1195/6) Commentaria to Homeric poems, the only literary source where some few parallels to the wildly unconventional data provided by Ptolemy may be found.

Translating the Memory of the Holocaust: Thomas Geve’s Memoir

This paper explores the most significant challenges of translating the memory of the Holocaust, focusing on the difficulties of transferring a survivor’s testimonial account to a different linguistic and cultural system. Because the concentration camp experience is inherently multicultural, and survivors have chosen to pen their ordeal in several languages, translation epitomizes a discipline that intertwines directly with the construction of universal collective memory. Consequently, translating Holocaust memoirs poses challenging questions on hermeneutics and deontology. Throughout the following pages, I will critically analyze my own Spanish rendition of Thomas Geve’s memoir, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (1987), so as to delve into the ethical commitments borne by a translator, and into the formal and stylistic complexities inherent to the translation of concentrationary literature.

한국 문인들의 韓愈 ｢送窮文｣변용 창작 試論

Han Yu(韓愈)''s SongQiongWen(送窮文) has its own complex and ambiguous characteristics. So, each previous editors attributed it to a different style in their anthology. These complex features have also influenced the creation of ancient Korean writers who have honored Han Yu''s prose works as a paradigm. These forms of creation in ancient Korea can be summarized as two main ways. First, It is the series of GuShiMaMun(驅詩魔文), which is one of writing form ZaWen(雜文) that has strong fable character. Second, It is the series of SongDuShinMun(送痘神文), which is one of writing form ZaWen or Poetry(詩詞) that has strong character of funeral oration(祭文). These can be attributed to the stylistic complexities of Han Yu''s SongQiongWen. Especially, as series of SongDuShinMun that can be seen as cultural products which were occurred from the backdrop of the cultural environment in the late Joseon Dynasty. Therefore, these are worth the research as an example of the creative form of literature that Joseon writers have adopted and transformed Chinese literature independently.

Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing, by Sarah Allison

Reviewed by: Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing by Sarah Allison Daniel Wright (bio) Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing, by Sarah Allison; pp. ix + 172. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, $49.95. To begin with a reductive reading of a book about the promises of reductive reading: Sarah Allison’s Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing is about how to read at the level of the sentence, the line, or the clause for features of the Victorian novel usually mapped at the level of theme, plot, or the developmental arc of character. In other words, what Allison calls reduction many readers of her work will recognize as the sheer closeness of very close reading. And yet the power of the book lies in precisely this defamiliarizing move, by which Allison shows us how digital methods usually associated with distance and data-crunching can also allow a kind of closeness sometimes unavailable to our ordinary reading practices. Allison’s method derives as much from Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970), with its fine-grained sentence-by-sentence parsing of Honoré de Balzac, as it does from the field of computational literary analysis. I would encourage skeptics of the digital humanities above all to pick up Reductive Reading without delay. One of the great pleasures of reading Allison’s work for non-digital scholars who do not know their types from their tokens is that the method is laid out so persuasively, with an eye to the tight relationship between computation and close reading. The book purposefully makes argument and method difficult to disentangle. Its central question as a work of nineteenth-century novel criticism has to do with “how style relates to moralizing.” The question is disarmingly spare, but for that very reason it is “impossibly complicated,” as Allison points out, demanding the kind of reductive reading not merely allowed for, but required by, computational analysis (3). In her introduction, Allison explains how her desire to read for style “at the level of the grammatical clause” requires a rigorous practice of reduction, one that is modeled most effectively by a methodological norm of computational literary analysis: “the practice of beginning each part of the study with a clear justification for reducing a body of texts to specific features.” Deciding on what kinds of syntactical form to use as a “proxy” for the style of a particular author—and indeed the style within which is embedded a particular mode of moralistic argument—is Allison’s challenge, and this problem itself can work as a kind of proxy for debates about close reading writ large (1). Do not all of us, computationally or otherwise, perform such selections and such reductions? What changes when we use a computer program like Microsoft Excel to assist us in our practice of cutting up a text into the parts we need, reassembling them to make our interpretations hum? In chapter 1, Allison mounts a more extended defense of computational methods for literary study, turning more fully to the method debate. It is a cogent and persuasively [End Page 708] argued defense of the idea that “reduction is valuable rhetorically and argumentatively,” and it makes an original argument about the ways in which polemic in particular—in a dazzling array of examples from George Eliot, Bruno Latour, Eve Sedgwick, and Audre Lorde—relies upon reductive reading in order to generate new and complex ideas (15). Chapter 2 then turns to an extended reading of the Victorian literary review as a periodical genre characterized by the kind of polemical simplification that Allison theorizes in chapter 1, “a reading practice that is designed to counteract the stylistic complexity of a text and thereby help readers see its morals more clearly” (39). Victorian reviewing shows us the ways in which Victorian readers might have unmoored moralistic argument from plot and character, understanding it as a stylistic feature that is obvious, inscribed for all to see at the level of the sentence. In chapter 3, Allison isolates what she calls the “commentative clause,” “the ‘which’ clause that shifts a sentence from past to present tense,” as a pervasive feature of Eliot’s style (61). This chapter is...

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

The Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain

Tales of a Tool Encounter

This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

Tales of a Tool Encounter: Exploring Video Annotation for Doing Media History

This article explores the affordances and functionalities of the Dutch CLARIAH research infrastructure – and the integrated video annotation tool – for doing media historical research with digitised audiovisual sources from television archives. The growing importance of digital research infrastructures, archives and tools, has enticed media historians to rethink their research practices more and more in terms of methodological transparency, tool criticism and reflection. Moreover, also questions related to the heuristics and hermeneutics of our scholarly work need to be reconsidered. The article hence sketches the role of digital research infrastructures for the humanities (in the Netherlands), and the use of video annotation in media studies and other research domains. By doing so, the authors reflect on their own specific engagements with the CLARIAH infrastructure and its tools, both as media historians and co-developers. This dual position greatly determines the possibilities and constraints for the various modes of digital scholarship relevant to media history. To exemplify this, two short case studies – based on a pilot project ‘Me and Myself. Tracing First Person in Documentary History in AV-Collections’ (M&M) – show how the authors deployed video annotation to segment interpretative units of interest, rather than opting for units of analysis common in statistical analysis. The deliberate choice to abandon formal modes of moving image annotation and analysis ensued from a delicate interplay between the desired interpretative research goals, and the integration of tool criticism and reflection in the research design. The authors found that due to the formal and stylistic complexity of documentaries, also alternative, hermeneutic research strategies ought to be supported by digital infrastructures and its tools.

The Irish Joyce

Review Article The Irish Joyce John McCourt Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory, Luke Gibbons (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 286 pages. Voices on Joyce, Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke (eds) (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2015), 346 pages. Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms, Luca Crispi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 336 pages. As we approach the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, an event which for some will surely provide at least momentary shelter from what will inevitably be the more fraught commemoration of the Civil War, it is perhaps apposite to reflect on the evolving state of what is neutrally referred to as ‘Joyce Studies’ and is more polemically known as the ‘Joyce industry’ in Ireland. Ulysses was met by a mixed response both in Ireland and abroad when it first appeared in February 1922. This was because of its undoubted stylistic complexity, because it was the work of an exiled writer seen by many to have ‘forsaken’ his homeland and family, only to then challenge, from his adopted home on the continent, the country’s secular and religious institutions and to interrogate its history, its received narratives and its collective beliefs and pieties. Not surprisingly, what Irish reaction there was to Ulysses was, for the most part, indifferent or hostile. There were many who saw his second novel as just more ‘muck-raking’, to use the term with which the Irish Independent had described Dubliners. In Catholic circles, some fretted about the effect Joyce’s work might have on the moral status quo. In the end, however, Joyce’s books, although ‘afflicted with a shameful mania’, were, as the Catholic Irish Monthly put it – as if to console its readers – ‘but little read by sane folk’. John McCourt Studies • volume 107 • number 428 490 Although there were many notable early exceptions (one thinks of positive reviews by a variety of figures who were increasingly uncomfortable in or had already left the newly forming Irish State, such as Mary (Molly) Colum, P S O’Hegarty, Eimar O’Duffy), Ulysses, along with Joyce’s other works, was simply not read by most people in Ireland in the decades that followed its publication, and it was largely ignored or dismissed by leading Irish critics for decades. As late as 1967, Fritz Senn, Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock, the organisers of the first international Joyce Symposium, which was held in Dublin in June of that year, struggled to find Irish academics who would address the gathering, although an impressive group of local, mostly literary, patrons was assembled: Seán O’Faoláin, despite his deeply ambivalent views about Joyce’s work, served as honorary chairman and was joined by Seamus Kelly of The Irish Times, novelists Benedict Kiely and Mervyn Wall, and Arland Ussher, the Anglo-Irish author of a lengthy and appreciative essay on Joyce in his book, Three Great Irishmen: Shaw, Yeats, Joyce.1 Also prominently present were the architects Niall Montgomery and Michael Scott. Newly appointed University College Dublin Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, Roger McHugh, and A J (Con) Leventhal of Trinity College Dublin also signed up. (Levanthal’s interest in Joyce was life-long and dated from his very early and very positive review of Ulysses, published in 1923 in a Dublin journal called Klaxon). But Irish academic interest was thin, even if Maurice Harmon of the University College Dublin English department did take part and later edited the rather quaintly entitled The Celtic Master: Contributions to the First James Joyce Symposium in Dublin.2 Contributors to the volume included poet, playwright and Dublin District Justice, Donagh MacDonagh, who looked at the importance of ‘The Lass ofAughrim’as background to ‘The Dead’. Other local ‘non-professional’Joyceans, such as Eileen Veale (secretary to the Lord Mayor of Dublin), her daughter, Vivien Igoe (an employee, then, of Eastern Regional Tourism), solicitor Gerard O’Flaherty, J B Lyons (neurologist and later Professor of the History of Medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons), and the Jesuit Brendan Duddy, collectively contributed to a striking Irish presence within the predominantly American...

Conservação, salvaguarda e valorização do Património Arquitetónico: opções, fases e suas vicissitudes

A conservação e salvaguarda do Património Arquitetónico é um processo composto por várias fases cuja orientação metodológica e doutrinal se encontra suficientemente expressa nas várias cartas, convenções internacionais e legislação portuguesa. No entanto, a aplicação destas premissas em imóveis com uma grande complexidade funcional, formal e estilística, deve-se alargar ao todo edificado a que se associa o intangível das vivências e das rugas do tempo. As partes removidas ou as partes acrescentadas são também objeto de salvaguarda como um todo significativo, mesmo quando sobrepostas a uma estrutura de uma outra época, por gosto ou regra diferenciada, podendo consubstanciar leituras difusas nas opções a tomar na intervenção a levar a cabo. O artigo aborda este tema numa realidade concreta, o projeto de conservação, salvaguarda e valorização da Catedral de Beja, debatendo os princípios orientadores e a metodologia gerada no processo de conhecimento, reflexão, projeto e execução em obra, destacando o processo de intervenção no Património Arquitetónico e as vicissitudes a ele associados.

A Stylistic Analysis of Complexity in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

Applying a stylistic analysis on certain texts refers to the identification of patterns of usage in writing. However, such an analysis is not restricted just to the description of the formal characteristics of texts, but it also tries to elucidate their functional importance for the interpretation of the text. This paper highlights complexity as a hallmark of a stylistic analysis in A Rose for Emily , a short story by William Faulkner (1897-1962). The analysis is done by adopting Halliday's (1985) approach to analyzing complexity in sentence structure; and Lauer, et al's (2008) approach to analyzing narrative from a macro perspective in relation to the story acts. The analysis rests upon the assumption that since form conveys meaning, Faulkner's multilayer usage of complexity is extremely functional. This paper tries also to detect and prove that stylistic complexity is manipulated to convey the main themes, events, and successfully leads to identify the distinctive structure of this story. Keywords: Style, Stylistic Complexity, Hypotactic, Paratactic, Functional

Un approccio corpus-driven al linguaggio dell’immigrazione

Abstract – Cultural and linguistic mediation has a role of utmost importance in the process of the integration of migrants into new communities and systems. The activity of mediation starts with and is realized through language, which is the main and most important means of communication between the members of a society and the medium through which reality is experienced and reflected upon. Mediators operating in immigration contexts are, therefore, requested to possess high-level linguistic and cultural skills in order to facilitate migrants’ access to services and benefits such as healthcare, school, or to the hosting country’s legal system. However, the linguistic training of mediators has to focus on a language which is characterised by terminological, syntactic and stylistic complexity being a combination of different languages such as legal language, language of medicine, or of the school system and which is strictly interrelated with the notion of register variation and genre features. This article aims to analyse the language of the Italian website Portale dell’Immigrazione supported by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in collaboration with Poste Italiane (Post Office) and Anci (the national association of communes) dealing with procedures and guidance for visa and permit applications, the language of the Immigrazione e Asilo section on the official website of the Italian Interior Ministry and the language of a section of the British Home Office website, UK Visas and Immigration whose role is to make decisions about who has the right to visit or stay in the country. The texts available in the above mentioned websites will be collected in two comparable corpora, that is to say two collections of texts having in common topic, text types and communicative function. These corpora will be analysed by means of a piece of software for linguistic analysis with the aim of identifying the most frequent words and their patterns of usage in each language and a set of translation equivalents across the two languages. The approach and the tools used in the analyses will prove to be valid in the training of linguistic mediators with important implications on the mediators’ level of specialisation, fluency and pragmatic accuracy.

“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as a Case Study for Critical Approaches to Literature

In this paper, I describe teaching Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as the only novel in a one-semester upper-division English literature course called Research Methods, a course that combines instruction about both theory and practice. I am not arguing that Lolita is unique for this purpose, but I am arguing that it is a special case of the kind of text that instructors can use. Few novels could endure the focus of an entire semester's attention, and perhaps even fewer could generate such intense discussion session after session. Nabokov's Lolita answers these demands. With its depth, its wealth of secondary material, and its steadfast position in scholarly discourse, Lolita serves as an excellent case study for students studying current critical approaches. First published in 1955, the story of Humbert Humbert's obsession with 12-year-old Dolores Haze was deemed brilliant by some and obscene by others. Even its problematic initial publication suggests its usefulness to studying literary scholarship: rejected by four publishers in the United States, Nabokov's agent was pleased to place the novel with Olympia Press in France. Nabokov did not know that this publisher was known for publishing volumes such as The Sexual Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and France eventually banned the novel; subsequently, it was years before the novel appeared in the United States. Regardless, the novel emerged as an immense success. And then there is the story itself. Not only does Lolita generate power- ful responses from students, both positive and negative, it has the stylistic complexity and the breadth to maintain student interest over the course of a semester. To have students approach the novel from first one angle and then another has clear pedagogical benefits because students face the dif- ficulty of developing a reading of the novel based on one series of critical methods and then having to question that reading when given the new data produced by a different critical method, all the time working with a text with which they are able to develop considerable familiarity. Additionally, that there is a mass of scholarly apparatus related to the novel allows the course instructor to create assignments that introduce students to the vari- ous methods that researchers use in creating publishable material.

A place in time: Situating Chauvet within the long chronology of symbolic behavioral development

Since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet (Ardèche, France) in the mid-1990s, there has been a debate regarding the accuracy of assigning this site to the Aurignacian period. The main argument stems from a perceived lack of agreement between the radiocarbon age of the imagery (>32,000 years BP [before present]) and its stylistic complexity and technical sophistication, which some believe are more typical of the later Upper Paleolithic. In this paper we first review the evidence for symbolic behavior among modern humans during the Aurignacian in order to explore the question of whether Chauvet's images are anachronistic. Then, using a database of non-figurative signs found in Paleolithic parietal art, we undertake a detailed comparison between Chauvet's corpus of signs and those found in other French Upper Paleolithic caves. While we conclude that there is substantial evidence to support an Aurignacian date for Grotte Chauvet, we also suggest that it may be time to revisit some of the cultural boundaries that are currently in use in Paleolithic archaeology.

The Can Of Ail: A. E. Housman’s Moral Irony

The Can Of Ail: A. E. Housman’s Moral Irony Donna Richardson (bio) Academic readers have been kinder to A. E. Housman’s poetry in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first half. Critical respect for Housman has increased considerably since the Times Literary Supplement’s fiftieth-anniversary assessment of A Shropshire Lad, which contains a handful of quotations used to exemplify broad themes such as “personal affection” or “external nature,” and which not surprisingly concludes that the popular appeal of his poetry “is not derived from its intellectual or its moral content. Housman is not a philosophical or an imaginative poet: he displays no Wordsworthian insight into the deep springs of human sympathy, no Shakespearean understanding of the range and intensity of human passions.”1 Since then, new critical editions of the poetry and letters have come forth and the Housman Society has been formed. Many more articles have taken his work seriously, for example those cited in the collections edited by Christopher Ricks and Philip Gardner.2 The debt of his poetry to his classical background has been more thoroughly explored; studies relating his work to larger contexts such as his gender-orientation and the historical conditions of late-Victorian society have broadened what had seemed to be the limited cultural scope of his few and simple poems. Not many critics, however, have found enough rhetorical and stylistic complexity in Housman’s poems to justify extended close readings of them. Housman has appeared to discourage such attention, because his prose criticizes many of the modernist philosophical assumptions and corresponding uses of language, especially tropes adapted from metaphysical wit, that evolved symbiotically with the practice of close reading.3 As a result, those interpreters who have given him credit for ironic wit have cited few detailed examples, implying that such wit is less than central to his purpose or practice.4 The one recent study that has done comprehensive close analysis of his poems maintains that Housman uses wit primarily to subvert his “official” level of meaning by creating a homoerotic subtext.5 I will argue, on the contrary, that Housman’s overt use of wit to convey both verbal and dramatic irony is central to his presentation of the human condition. In his first volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad, Housman develops a rhetorical strategy that sets a precedent for interpreting the speakers in [End Page 267] his poetry, whether himself or others, as consciously but never sufficiently self-ironic. If Housman had written only his later poetry, in which he is generally the speaker, readers might be justified in assuming that authoritarian assertion characterizes his poetics and that his tone is the equivalent of William Ernest Henley’s self-congratulatory pessimism in “Invictus.” But in A Shropshire Lad, Housman elaborates on the narrative complexities of Blake and Wordsworth to dramatize an almost postmodern degree of irony about whether any speaker, including the author, can control the meaning of his actions or the implications of his language. Housman implies we can never avoid indulging in human ignorance and folly, even while doing our best to locate and criticize it in ourselves and others. The key to Housman’s strategy is that the speaker in most of this volume, a common country “lad” named Terence Hearsay, is also the author, who directs irony at both his past and present self. Terence has generally been interpreted as an uneducated innocent who seldom serves as Housman’s spokesman. But in LXII, the original end-poem of the volume, Terence implies he is the author of all the poems, and the story he tells of his trip to Ludlow Fair epitomizes the sophisticated self-irony he has already deployed in crafting the poems about his past self. In a pun which informs the entire volume, Terence says that the purpose of his acerbic wit is to help people face the “ill” of life rather than escape into “ale.”6 Yet the worst ill Terence’s language reveals in the Ludlow Fair episode is that he can never learn enough to face fully and resist indulging in the “ail” of his own emotional “ale.” Accordingly, in the preceding poems...