Sudden Revelation Research Articles

An Analysis into Joyce’s Narrative Devices and the Realization of Epiphany in “The Dead”

“The Dead” is the last piece in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Epiphany is the basis of his renowned stream of consciousness. It describes the sudden revelation which is the climax of people’s psychological activities. The realization of the climax of Epiphany in his work not only relies on the characterization and symbolism, but also on the application of various narrative devices. The realization of Epiphany in “The Dead” is linear in protagonist’s mental activity. Joyce mainly uses two narrative devices to promote the mental process of realizing Epiphany, one is the alternation of focalization, the other is the transformation of narrative movements. These two narrative devices are both closely connected with the realization of Epiphany. Studying the process of realization of climax of Epiphany in “The Dead” from the perspective of narratology is not only conducive to exploring its narrative strategy in depth, but also beneficial to exploring the literary value and novel art of “The Dead” in form of expression.

All My Sons

All My Sons

Response to Dan Shen

Response to Dan Shen

Feasibility of the Sudden (Daf'ī) Revelation of the Entire Qur'an on Laylat al-Qadr and Determinism Doubt

One of the important issues of the Qur’anic sciences is the quality of the Qur'an's revelation, which scholars consider to be two types including sudden and gradual. In spite of the sudden revelation of the Qur'an on the heart of the Prophet, it is suspected that all the events during the 23 years of the Prophet's lifetime have been deterministic, the events such as: emigration, wars and other matters mentioned in the narratives of the Asbab al-Nuzūl; therefore, the sudden revelation is unacceptable. So, in this descriptive-analytic study, this question has been answered and the incompatibility of the sudden revelation of the Holy Qur’an on Laylat al-Qadr was proved by the issue of human will with different arguments. Through this research, it was proved that the sudden revelation is a part of knowledge and, first, that knowledge is not the cause of occurrence until determinism is suspected. Secondly, the knowledge of God over the acts of servants is not absolute, but the knowledge of God has been belonged to the authoritative subject issued by the authoritative subject and the compulsory subject issued by the compulsory subject. Therefore, the sudden revelation of the Qur'an, which charts future events and issues, demands that the act of authoritative subject be issued by an authoritative subject and that the act of compulsory subject be issued by a compulsory subject, rather than requiring the authoritative subject be forced or a compulsory subject be authorized. In addition, determinism contradicts the spirit of the teachings of the Qur'an which imply responsibility and duty.

Gordāfarid, Penthesilea and Athena: the identification of a Greek motif in Ferdowsī’s Šāh-nāma and its possible association with Hellenistic art in the East

The description of the duel between Gordāfarid and Sohrāb in Ferdowsī’s Šāh-nāma carries structural resemblances to the depiction of Penthesilea’s fight with Achilles. In the course of combat, the armour of both female warriors is damaged and their true identities are revealed after being defeated by their male opponents. In case of the Amazon from the Greek tale, the sudden revelation of her womanly appeal takes place after her death, whereas Gordāfarid survives the duel, and even manages to go free. A key factor in Ferdowsī’s description is the woman’s “Greek” helmet, a factor that suggests Ferdowsī borrowed from the Greek story, and also made a reference to Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic depictions of armoured goddesses of the type of Athena, who was widely known across the Ghaznavid territory, where Ferdowsī’s work was written and presented.

Sleuthing for Mr. Crow: Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy

Sleuthing for Mr. Crow:Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy T. R. C. Hutton (bio) The lynch mob that formed in Roanoke, Virginia, one day in September 1893 was not the first in the town's brief history, but it was undeniably the largest. After northern capital and the newly consolidated Norfolk and Western Railroad (N&W) had transformed the village formerly called Big Lick into the fastest-growing city in the South, Roanoke's racial and political demographics changed dramatically during the 1880s, creating tensions between employers and workers, as well as locals and newcomers, white and black. The new city had come into being less than twenty years after emancipation, a time when the traditional southern relationship between race and labor was in flux, especially in southwestern Virginia, where most black residents had only recently arrived. Southerners and northerners flocked to Roanoke, ultimately creating a Gilded Age city thrown together without care or planning. In historian Rand Dotson's words, "White migrants from the mountains or countryside and white working-class residents from the North existed in one world, white upper-class natives and newcomers in another, and black residents in yet one more." The year 1893 was particularly tense. City fathers added fuel to the fire by attempting to impose the prohibition of alcohol on a population already suffering from massive unemployment caused by a nationwide economic panic. The sudden revelation of a violent crime allegedly committed by a black assailant was the final catalyst. A white farmer's wife was found bleeding from her head near a midtown produce market. She described her attacker as a young black man wearing a black hat, and soon thereafter a crowd pursued Thomas Smith, a young man loosely matching her description who was seen jumping onto a passing boxcar nearby.1 [End Page 285] Smith was temporarily rescued by a white man named William G. Baldwin, the N&W's chief detective, who arrived soon after the mob had formed. Baldwin spirited Smith away on horseback to a tavern and then, after the alleged victim positively identified Smith as her attacker, to the city jail. Once Smith's location was made known, the crowd gathered outside the jailhouse and compelled the overawed police force (there were fewer than twenty men patrolling a city of more than 20,000) to give Smith up. As he protested his innocence, Smith was hanged, his body desecrated and riddled with bullets. Roanoke's mayor, Henry S. Trout, had tried to protect Smith, but having been injured himself by gunfire from the crowd, he escaped to Richmond aboard an N&W passenger car with Baldwin by his side. For days afterward, a provisional government struggled to return order to Roanoke, while Baldwin zoomed back and forth on the N&W between the two cities, handling public relations for Trout.2 "The guilt of the negro Smith, doubtless, was evident," a letter to the editor of the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star concluded, but "the most serious outcome of this sad occurrence" was the "suspension of Mayor Trout" and "the encouragement of future violence." There were no victors in the affair save the spirit of white supremacy, but perhaps also Detective Baldwin, the one man who emerged from the affray above reproach. In early 1894 Baldwin arrested "one of the most active participants in the September riots," who, in a seemingly adventitious coincidence, was also under indictment for stealing pieces of brass from the N&W.3 The historiographical consensus on Virginia between Reconstruction and World War I suggests a Jim Crow system dedicated to the good of business elites, moderation, paternalism, social order, and hierarchy; it was [End Page 286] a complex system involving, in the words of historian J. Douglas Smith, "equal parts white supremacy and white responsibility" (in contrast to the populism, herrenvolk democracy, and violence associated with other parts of the South).4 The trajectory of William Baldwin's career roughly between 1885 and 1910 concurs with this consensus but also complicates it. His occupation as an independent contractor in law enforcement (as opposed to a publicly funded policeman) was suitable to a state where...

Origin of Human Language in an Evolutionary Context: Evolution-Progression Model

This article approaches what is considered to be a linguistic enigma with an interdisciplinary scientific approach. In this manuscript, the author analyzes the infant developmental stage, human anatomy, animal behavior studies, and anthropological changes. Furthermore, prominent theories in the field, such as the provisioning model, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) theory, and the metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality are considered in an evolutionary context to unravel the origin of language. First, two evolutionary adaptations in humans, bipedalism and delicate muscle movements, resulted in the lack of a need for “hyperfocus”. Second, a relatively safe and rich environment replaced “hyperfocus” with social cohesion. Third, a burgeoning social interaction ushered in natural selection, whereby child helplessness or early parturition supported exceptional self-consciousness (intelligence). The result of concentrated self-consciousness, which involved enlargement of the posterior parietal cortex (sense of self), prefrontal cortex (social cognition), and temporal lobe (language interpretation), was human language. Language was not a sudden revelation; instead, it was a gradual process and a built-in part of the evolutionary sequence. Last, this article implies how language might have begun in accordance with the prior multidisciplinary analysis.

Identification of a Narrative Source of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's The Knight of Malta in Cervantes's Don Quixote

TOWARDS the end of The Knight of Malta by John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Nathan Field (c. 1618),1 the character named Collonna throughout the play suddenly reveals that his true name is Angelo, and that he is a Florentine who was captured during the invasion of the island of Gozo (north of Malta; historically in 1551), in which ‘the Turk bore with him three thousand soules’ (5.2.166), and was subsequently taken to Constantinople as an enslaved captive. There he met a ‘Turkish Damosell’, Lucinda, whose soul, ‘prophan’d with infidelity’ (171), he laboured to attract to the Christian faith, finally succeeding in securing her betrothal and her renegation of Islam. Both had fled from Constantinople, ‘and in that flight were taen againe / By those same Gallies, fore Valetta fought’ (17601–77). The lovers were thus separated, and Angelo served a term in the galleys, keeping his identity secret after being released. This sudden revelation, apparently unforeseen by Lucinda, occurs in the space of twenty lines of verse (161–80), almost at the end of the play.

Marriage or Politics?: Dramatizing Griselda

Marriage or Politics?Dramatizing Griselda Janet Levarie Smarr The final tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron, that of Griselda and Gualtieri, presents a double relationship: one is husband and wife, the other a ruler and his peasant subject. Boccaccio’s narrator Dioneo emphasizes both aspects of the relationship, calling attention first to rulers who “would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men,”1 and then to wives who, when mistreated, may find a lover who will treat them better. It is remarkable how many playwrights sought to dramatize this story, given that most of the narrative consists of two people who, across a largely uneventful and unnarrated span of more than a dozen years, are never in conflict.2 Granted, the final scene, with its ampler assembly and sudden revelation, has theatrical allure; but how can the rest of the story be turned into drama? Playwrights who took up this tale almost always felt the need to add other characters so that, if there is no conflict between the main couple, there may at least be some contrast between that relationship and other relationships. But creating these alternate characters and relationships requires selecting a theme that such contrasts may display, and that has tended to mean choosing an emphasis: marriage or politics? Private feelings or public obligations? Around 1600, the playwrights of two nations independently took up the tale with a focus on marriage and love. Thomas Dekker collaborated with Henry Chettle and William Haughton in a 1599 play entitled Patient Grissil, which sets her marriage against a reverse couple in which the wife (a cousin of the marquis) repeatedly humiliates her socially inferior husband, while the marquis’s sister Julia, observing both couples, vows never to marry at all.3 The play takes on that popular Renaissance theme—to marry or not?—which is Gualtieri’s dilemma in the original tale. As both the marquis and his cousin vow [End Page 221] to become better spouses, the play ends with the henpecked husband urging the unwed Julia to reconsider her decision.4 Peyré observes, however, that the exemplarity of Grissil is undermined by the effects of her example on the two other women, who become determined to reject either male domination or marriage altogether.5 Lope de Vega’s El exemplo de casadas y la prueba della paciencia, written between 1599 and 16036 and first published in 1615, focused on the topic of marriage by greatly expanding the marquis’s initial debate about whether to marry; his judicial review of a series of prisoners condemned for spousal murder adds understandably to his hesitation.7 Meanwhile, Griselda (renamed Laurencia) receives at the same time both a wedding proposal from a wealthy prince who has heard of her repudiation by Gualtieri (renamed Enrico de Moncada) and Enrico’s command to return to the palace to prepare it for his new wedding. The other characters see the preferable choice as obvious (especially given Lope de Vega’s extending the period of her renewed peasant life to five years), and are horrified by Laurencia’s decision to return to Enrico, but the alternative makes her active choice of Enrico clear. She is not merely submissive out of necessity, but faithful to her marriage and her love. Around 1650, as I have written elsewhere, Carlo Maria Maggi wrote what, as far as I know, is the first emphatically political version of this tale.8 He brings in a woman who, in contrast to Griselda, speaks and acts like a Machiavelli, willing to use violence and fraud to accomplish her will, which is to take the recently vacated place as ruler’s wife. In a court full of intrigues and deceit, Gualtieri and his brother spring their trap against suspected traitors. Griselda’s father becomes (I have argued) the central point between the criminal self-assertion and utter masochistic abjection of the two women. It is he, the one complete outsider to the court, rather than his daughter, whose protest to Gualtieri provokes the final revelation and resolution. I have suggested that Maggi, in writing this play as well as some of his poems, was reflecting on the question of what attitude...

Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake

In this article, certain specific meanings that accrued to Lucia Joyce while her father wrote “Work in Progress” are explored. These meanings developed and intensified during her mental breakdown and found their way into Joyce’s text from 1931 onwards. They include female violence and clairvoyancy. A section about “Electra” investigates the former, especially the kind based in animosity between a daughter and a mother, and extends to a discussion about female character development across Joyce’s work. A section about “lightning” looks at second-sightedness and romantic associations with lightning—as a sudden revelation or exposure. A genetic method is used that acknowledges the role of contingency in the composition and the conceptualization of “Work in Progress” and suggests that a secondary tragic linear plot about Lucia is scored across the primary circular plot about human history.

La crisis de la ideología panhispánica en la obra de José María Heredia, "La visión" (1821): una temprana versión desconocida del poema "Las sombras" (1825)

Durante la primera estancia de José María Heredia en México (1819-1821) el ideario político del poeta cubano entra en crisis, dando lugar a una reorientación ideológica, desde una actitud afirmativa ante España hacia una posición abiertamente antiespañola. Este cambio puede notarse por primera vez en una versión desconocida del poema "Las sombras", que se publicó de forma anónima a finales de 1821 en México. La revisión de las manifestaciones textuales de aquella crisis ideológica del poeta en este y otros poemas tempranos sugiere que estamos ante un desplazamiento paulatino, que coincide cronológicamente con una serie de desgracias biográficas concretas.

Extended-spectrum β-lactamases in non-typhoidal Salmonella spp. isolated in the UK are now a reality: why the late arrival?

In February 2004, we reported the first recognition of the presence of an extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) in non-typhoidal Salmonella spp. in the UK; the beta-lactamase was TEM-52. Six months later, an SHV-derived ESBL (SHV-12) was detected in a salmonella strain isolated in York and 6 months after that we have just identified CTX-M-type beta-lactamases in Scottish isolates of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium and Salmonella Virchow (unpublished results). A very recent retrospective study of UK isolates suggests that they may have been in the population for some years but have gone undetected. Even so, compared with reports of ESBLs in Salmonella spp. elsewhere, these results are suggestive of a delayed emergence of the ESBL phenotype in non-typhoidal Salmonella spp. in the UK. Should the British congratulate themselves on warding off the emergence of these important resistance mechanisms in Salmonella spp., or is the sudden revelation of three of the major ESBL types a cause for concern?

Arquitectura y fragmento. Análisis de <i>El Fulgor</i> de José Ángel Valente

El Fulgor constitutes a unique poem built fragmentarily. Its unity comes from the allegorical structure: travel without ending in search of the loved object, daimonic character possessed by eros, cosmic structure of the matter in different orders, isolated moments of sudden revelation and backward, recurrent symbols that form a ritual process. The fragmentary writing, that corresponds well with its allegorical shape, shows a fracture at its beginning and at its end. Each fragment is constituted as a whole which owns a strongly woven phonetic, syntactic and symbolic structure. The poem is ellaborated in an extreme tension towards the absence, matching up then the overflowing and the profusion together with the ellipsis and the oblique nomination; in this way it aims to a trascendence that cannot be reached. The book is shown as the incarnation of the infinite «eros».

Palpable Realities, Politics and Thirties Histories

I take it that, when thinking through notions of literature and history in the Thirties, and of the Thirties text in history, it is essential to look at the ways in which the text has become established within historical narratives of the Thirties, as well as the relationship to history which the text seeks to establish for itself. For the two seem curiously interwoven in the subsequent formulations of the distinctiveness of the period, whereby claims made in the Thirties find their absolute echoes in later narratives of its ideas and patternings. What we might now take to be classical Thirties texts seem to make particular claims over their times and over this particular moment in history which are both appropriative and also - such is their political impetus - at the same time communal in aspiration. Auden's injunction 'Consider this and in our time / As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: / the clouds rift suddenly' is a clarion call to a particular, post-The Waste Land, form of modernity. The 'rift' is as much between 'our time' and the past as it is a signal of sudden understanding or revelation. In place of the anguished allusiveness of the modernist text, the constant 'look' out of the present into the past or through the present to the past, the skies have cleared and we can achieve a masterful and powerful perspective from this moment in history. But this is a poetry that also self-consciously declares a new beginning that, in its own wandering syntax, tenses, and pronouns offers paradoxically a sinister sense of the entrapments of delusion. The poem's final address to 'seekers after happiness' insinuates that 'it is later than you think,' and 'you cannot be away' even though The date was yours; the prey to fugues, Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies After some haunted migratory years To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue.1

The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo

tW ~ # hat is the postmodern response to the truth claims traditionally made on behalf of moments? By visionary moment, I mean that flash of insight or sudden revelation which critically raises the level of spiritual or self-awareness of fictional character. It is mode of cognition typically represented as bypassing rational thought processes and attaining higher or redemptive order of knowledge (gnosis). There are, conceivably, three types of postmodern response which merit attention here. First, in recognition of the special role literature itself has played in establishing the credibility of moments, postmodern writers might draw on the resources of metafiction to parodically lay bare the essentially literary nature of such moments. Baldly stated, the moment could be exposed as literary convention, that is, concept that owes more to the practice of organizing narratives around sudden illumination (as in, say, the narratives of Wordsworth's Prelude or Joyce's Dubliners) than to reallife experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is premised on this assumption. Pynchon's sleuthlike protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself in situation in which clues-contrary to the resolution of the standard detective story-proliferate uncontrollably, thereby impeding the emergence of final enlightenment or stelliferous Meaning (82). It is situation that not only frustrates Oedipa, who is continually tantalized by the sense that a revelation . . . trembled just past the threshold of her understand

Father-Daughter Incest: 25 years of Experience of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with the Victims

This study deals with the immediate and long lasting effects of father-daughter incest through the psychoanalytic-psychotherapeutic investigation of, firstly, a group of 12 adolescent girls during the violent crisis created by the sudden revelation of incest and, secondly, a group of 12 adult former victims with no apparent crisis in their development, the incest having remained unrevealed. Having been a practitioner of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with the victims of paternal incest for the last 25 years the author's main concern in this study is to try to establish the basic theoretical issues that would favour a better understanding of incestuous trauma and a more effective approach to its treatment.

On Paul de Man's War

In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist Herge.1 During the Second World War, Herge's comic strips appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir. Since I wanted to analyze the influence of the rightist thought on Herg6 and Tintin, I borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across Paul de Man's articles, which were sometimes on the same page as the comic strips. I showed these articles to some colleagues related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals; we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man's contemporary thought (he was still alive at that time) and his former intellectual engagement during the Second World War. That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard and in the Boston area (where deconstruction and feminism were and continue to be a recurrent theme) were aware of de Man's former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took five more years for the scandal to appear: why this sudden revelation after several years of silence and dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Herg% had constantly been confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly Paul de Man's secret was kept.

Postmodernist Baseball

Postmodernist Baseball Richard Alan Schwartz (bio) When, in 1835, Abner Doubleday didn't invent the game of baseball in Cooperstown, Ohio, little did he know he was fueling the imaginations of several postmodernist writers. For not only are baseball and its accompanying traditions eminently exploitable for literary purposes, its history, including the dubious accounts of its origin and its unique status as America's pastime, is especially appealing to postmodernist writers who attack conventional perceptions of reality, who challenge accepted versions of history, and who seek to infuse vitality into an uncertain, unknowable world. In this essay I shall discuss how some innovative and imaginative writers have used the world of baseball for these and other ends. Perhaps the most significant feature of postmodernist thought concerns the limitations on human knowledge of truth and reality, and the realm of uncertainty into which those restrictions place us. These perceived limitations are consistent with such scientific ideas as relativity theory, which insists that no point of view is intrinsically superior to or more accurate than any other, and with quantum theory, which undercuts the [End Page 135] idea of causality, places real limitations on what we can know,1 and introduces the principle of complementarity (the union in nature of what seem in traditional orientations to be mutually exclusive characteristics: matter, for instance, can now be described in terms of energy). I cite these scientific outlooks to show that the postmodernist attitudes represent more than the skewed perceptions of socially alienated writers and are, in fact, bound up with the mainstream of twentieth-century thought. Postmodernism, then, pictures a subjective, relativistic world full of contradictions and dependent upon individual observers for its definition. Little, if anything, can be known with absolute certainty. To the extent that their books embody these perceptions, postmodernists can be said to be the new "realists," who are simply describing and reflecting a radically different version of reality from that perceived by such writers as James, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and Tolstoy during the time when belief in a mechanistic world view was at its apex. Most, if not all, of these postmodern characteristics apply to modernism as well. Postmodernism distinguishes itself from modernism largely in terms of tone, audience, and political orientation. For writers and readers who grew up in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, the breakdown of the sense of an ordered universe was not a sudden revelation, as it largely had been for the modernists, but simply a normal circumstance of life, much as the possibility of sudden nuclear holocaust is simply a given for those born since 1945. This familiarity with an absurd universe allows postmodern writers to be less despairing, even to be humorous, and to appeal to a broader range of readers, who are more likely than their counterparts of the '20s to be open to the absurdist viewpoint. Moreover, the experience of World War Two revealed fascism to be a completely abhorrent political means of imposing order, and many postmodernists reject entirely the modernists' search for order within chaos, preferring to advocate an acceptance of uncertainty and chance. And to the extent that the rise of big business and big government after World War Two has restricted individual choices and freedoms, those systems are rejected by postmodernist writers. Thus we find an anticapitalist, though not especially a procommunist stance in much postmodernist literature, particularly in literature written during or immediately after the Vietnam War. Still, like their modernist forebears, postmodernist writers accept the challenge [End Page 136] of reorienting us in a fundamentally disorienting world.2 For some of those writers baseball has emerged as a vehicle for effecting this reorientation. The remainder of this discussion will address how Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, W. P. Kinsella, Harry Stein, and Robert Coover have turned to baseball to promote their postmodernist view of reality and to reorient us within it. The facet of baseball that comes most readily to mind in this context is its affinity to myth. After all, the game regularly involves moments of heroism: confrontations between forces of good and evil, the individual struggles between pitcher and batter, the possibility of someone's performing a great act that can turn certain...

Howard Pyle's Illustrations as Shorthand Icons

Howard PyIe 's Illustrations as Shorthand Icons by Lucien L. Agosta The pleasures of Howard Pyle's prose are many. His Robin Hood, his fairytale collections, his four-volume Arthuriad evince a masterfully created idyllic realm, the innocence and robust freshness of which still propel the contemporary reader through the green borders of Arcadia. Pyle's Arcadia is sun-drenched and invigorating; its habitations airy and spacious; its citizens robust and exuberant, endowed with a delight and youthful wonder at the ample proportions of the land they occupy and at the fullness of creation in general, readers are conducted through this Arcadia by witty, colloquial narrators who relate to their auditors as to intimate friends. Pyle's works for young people, even his more sober historical romances like Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron, are unhurried in their unfolding and elaborated in verbal style, his action-filled plots frequently interrupted by leisurely descriptions of setting and season, by stunningly delineated word pictures which provide a roundness to his created realm. Pyle's deliberate but sprightly prose everywhere demonstrates his joy in the act of telling and, for the patient and literate reader, works an incantatory spell, a pleasant enmeshing in a bright, loose web of colorful words. But Pyle's 19th-century illustrated texts appeal to the visually astute as well as to the verbally sophisticated. The diffuse and cumulative pleasures of the prose are concentrated in the immediacy of vision in Pyle's illustrations. Whereas Pyle's prose offers a measured unfolding culminating in understanding, his illustrations provide exact and instantaneous moments of insight, sudden illuminations, thematic compressions of prose intent. His illustrations are shorthand icons, hieroglyphics which distill character and event in complex but precise and economical ways. Thus, while Pyle's prose yields a temporal/spatial narrative progression-intime , a leisurely accretion of character, setting, and incident, his illustrations provide an accompanying condensation, a crystallization of theme, motive, action. The illustrations provide, at regular intervals, visual vantage points or promontories from which Pyle's readers are able to survey the verbal domain through which they journey. From these pictorial elevations above the narrative field, readers may scan the prose terrain ahead or review the territory just traversed. Ironically, Pyle's illustrations take readers momentarily out of the narrative in order to immerse them more fully in it. The patterned verbovisual counterpointing in a PyIe text thus sets up a rhythmic alternation between verbal diffusion and visual concision, between incremental disclosure and sudden revelation. In this paper I hope to demonstrate how representative illustrations from three of Pyle's best-known works, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Otto of the Silver Hand, and the four-volume Arthuriad, function as condensed visual indices to the concerns of the text segments which embed them, as lookouts or observations commanding overviews of large textual tracts. In his first book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), PyIe perfected this complex verbovisual technique of illuminating his leisurely prose with brilliant flashes of pictorial insight. The work involves a rich prose expansion of the skeletal source ballads into a rounded, coherent narrative studded with metaphor, clever aphorisms, and luxuriant word pictures. To counteract this diffusion of ballad intensity, PyIe employed his illustrations to recapture much of the visceral immediacy of his traditional sources. For example, in Part Seven of the work, PyIe tells of Robin's close call in escaping capture by the King's men, his detailed prose providing for the reader a cumulative and mounting tension. In the complementary illustration for this extended prose passage (241) however, PyIe enables the viewer to share in an immediate and empathetic way Robin's feeling of entrapment, of being hedged round by danger. The wattled enclosure in the background of the illustrations surrounds and seems to trap Robin while the stave fence at right foreground cuts off his escape in that direction. Encumbered by quiver, bow, sword, dagger, and horn, Robin's body is snared between his longbow and its string and bound by quiver and hat straps as well as by the jerkin thongs banded across his chest. Too, the massive, ornate borders at top and bottom burden the...

Mexico's Recent Science and Technology Planning: An Outsider Economist's Critique

There are a number of reasons why Mexico attracts students of economic development. Boasting an impressive rate of economic growth that has been sustained for four decades, yet plagued with discouraging and mounting problems of surplus labor and maldistribution of income, Mexico is one of the prime cases that has sparked the discussion over the distinctions between “economic growth” and “economic development.” Furthermore, Mexico affords a classic test of the validity of some dependency writers’ claim that periphery countries’ subjugation to external control varies directly with the length and intensity of contact with center nations (Frank, 1972: 10). The sudden revelation of Mexico's potential as an energy supplier, the growing concern with the magnitude and consequences of illegal Mexican migration to the United States, and the increasing recognition of the uniqueness and importance of the Mexico-U.S. border economy add further appeal for economists, political scientists, and sociologists.