Telling Tales Research Articles

Theory, practice and telling tales

ABSTRACT Using as a point of departure Alexander Kluge's “telling tales” of “courses of life” caught in the counter-currents of national histories, this review article examines the narrative and analytic treatment of South Africa's unlovely past, its unruly present and its aspirations to future transformation. The genre of “telling tales” (rather than the narrowly academic translation “case histories”) that are no longer just experience, nor yet quite concept allow, in the work of Ari Sitas, Ashraf Jamal and Rayda Becker and other contributors to the Democracy X exhibition and commemorative book, for critical as well as celebratory examinations often years of democratic transformation alongside uneven development and unfinished business.

Bullying and the politics of ‘telling’

This paper reports on a study of pupils’ views about tackling bullying and discusses the findings in the context of related research on ‘telling’ and other coping strategies. The research was undertaken in two related phases. In the first phase, in‐depth focus groups were conducted with pupils in Years 5 and 8 in twelve participating schools across England. This was followed by a questionnaire survey of all pupils in Years 5 and 8 in the same schools. In total, 230 pupils participated in the initial focus group stage of the research and 953 pupils participated in the questionnaire survey. Young people’s perceptions concerning the relative effectiveness of different options for tackling bullying, and the responses of others (peers, teachers, parents and other adults) to reports of bullying, were discussed. Pupils reported a reluctance to tell adults, particularly teachers, about their experiences of bullying, and this tendency increased with age. Only a third of pupils in Year 8 (31%) reported that they would find talking to a teacher about bullying ‘quite easy’ or ‘very easy’, compared with just over half of pupils in Year 5 (51%). Pupils’ willingness to tell parents also declined over time. However, the likelihood of telling friends remained consistently high. This suggests that telling friends is perceived as a less risky option by both age groups, but pupils become increasing wary of telling parents and teachers as they get older. Reluctance to tell may be attributable to a variety of factors. Adult responses that were perceived as ineffective, insensitive or excessive were highlighted, as was the influence of peer cultures that discourage ‘telling tales’ to adults, or other help‐seeking behaviours. The implications of the findings for developments in anti‐bullying policy and practice are also discussed.

A telling tale of a tail and language teaching and/or learning

ABSTRACT Language teaching has traditionally been a task for teachers to teach vocabulary items and grammatical rules and to explain to students how a foreign language works in reference to their mother tongue. For a long time, language teaching was a means to the end of understanding a written culture. This had two practical corollaries: to grade the students on the acquisition of discrete segments of learning and to sort them according to their marks, with a view to preparing them for the world of work in that it helped employers select candidates on their school or university grades. The result of this approach is plain to see: less than a third of the British population can use a foreign language successfully. Findings from research and academic thinking have hinted at different ways to ensure that students learn successfully what is on offer in the world around them. However, for a long time, there was no way of facilitating this concept, until ICT came on the scene. I believe that, with the use of ICT and positive help from facilitators, language learning will exceed our expectations. However, we shall have first to review all our ‘commonsense’ notions on teaching and learning.

Visions of Apes, Reflections on Change: Telling Tales of Great Apes in Equatorial Africa

Abstract:This article explores stories that some central Africans in the middle Sangha River basin and in northern Gabon have told about gorillas and chimpanzees. Such tales have provided opportunities for Africans to debate the consequences of their engagements with outside people, resources, and processes. But their meanings have proliferated in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. Central Africans have used such stories to make claims about access to and control over human productive and reproductive labor, forest resources and spaces, and other forms of wealth; racial and ethnic relations; and human existence and death. These stories provide critical insights into the reasons people hunt or protect great apes, and they illuminate the complex social and political tensions generated by conservation interventions. Great ape tales thus offer conservationists insights into the challenges and promise of managing an important game population, as well as the potential social consequences of their interventions.

Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance Michelle H. Martin (bio) Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. By Katharine Capshaw Smith . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Identifying the Harlem Renaissance as the "dynamic point of origin" of African American children's literature, Kate Capshaw Smith offers a definitive study of the early decades of this genre, concentrating on the first forty years of the twentieth century. Smith labels her work "an inauguration" (xxvi), seeking to spark research interest in a marginalized subgenre within an historically marginalized genre. Firmly grounded in both the history and the literary history of the "New Negro Renaissance," Smith offers three apt justifications for this study. First, because Dianne Johnson's Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (1990) has long been the only book-length critical study of early black children's literature, this study adds to the development of a "more fully historicized account of black writing for children" (xiii). Such a study also contributes to a richer understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. Furthermore, this project initiates the recovery of many worthy black authors of this era such as Jane Dabney Shackelford, Effie Lee Newsome, and Mary Church Terrell, who either should be but are not a part of the African American children's literature canon or who have faded into obscurity altogether. Rather than painting a monolithic picture of black children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Smith problematizes the genre by illustrating how children served as a site of contestation for many factions who all had a vested interest in helping to shape black youths' ideas about racial amity. Smith's chapters draw clear dividing lines between W. E. B. DuBois, the dramatists, southern writers, Carter G. Woodson's Circle, and the longtime friends and collaborators Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Painstakingly researched, Smith's study sometimes resembles detective work because of its level of detail, but it also makes the book a fascinating read that will surely realize Smith's goal of encouraging related research. The first chapter, "The Emblematic Black Child," focuses on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, including children's [End Page 102] literature within the Crisis, the journal of the National Association of Colored People, as well as the Brownies' Book magazine (a monthly journal for black youth, or "Children of the Sun," published in 1920–21). DuBois's belief in the "talented tenth," the idea that racial uplift would occur most effectively through the cultivation of an educated black elite, surfaced in most of the children's texts he wrote and edited, but many disagreed with his idea that adults should prepare children to wage racial battle. Some felt that the home should be a domestic retreat where children could escape the injustices they face daily outside the home, while a small minority felt that the only way to protect black youth from prejudice was to refuse to have children at all. Many of the debates about the role of blacks in American society that occurred in adult New Negro publications also materialized in the Brownies' Book, often highlighting ambivalences that offer a complex and contradictory message to young black readers. Smith dedicates a long section of the first chapter to Effie Lee Newsome, the most prolific black children's writer of the 1920s, who was—along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer—one of the most celebrated poets of her time. In her "Little Page," a column that appeared nearly every month in the Crisis from March 1925 until November 1930, she advocated that children make education and spending time outdoors their primary means of combating injustice. In the second chapter, "Creating the Past, Present and Future," Smith discusses New Negro children's drama, including community and school pageants, history plays, and intimate dramas, which depict "moments of crisis in New Negro education" (97). Smith identifies the factors that contributed to the "reformative educational agenda" of the drama of this era: most black playwrights were teachers whose students would perform their plays; most of the writers lived in the heart of the Little Theater movement, Washington, D.C., which had a prominent black middle...

Andrew Lloyd Webber (review)

Reviewed by: Andrew Lloyd Webber Annette Thornton Andrew Lloyd Webber. By John Snelson. Yale Broadway Masters, no. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004; pp. xiii + 288. $30.00 cloth. Andrew Lloyd Webber is the second installment in the Yale Broadway Masters series, whose aim is to introduce both general readers and students to major Broadway figures. Snelson's book is a meticulously detailed scholarly investigation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical language, dramatic representations, and professional career. With full cooperation from Lloyd Webber through his company, the Really Useful Group, Snelson succeeds in establishing Lloyd Webber as a Broadway master. The book is organized into seven chapters, beginning with Lloyd Webber's personal history and professional collaborations. In chapter 1, "Aspects of Life," Snelson divides Lloyd Webber's life and work into three periods. The first, from 1948 to 1979, includes his collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice, with whom he wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. The second period, the 1980s, establishes Lloyd Webber's growing "personality" (12) with his frequent change of lyricists (Don Black, Charles Hart, and T. S. Eliot), the successes of Cats and Phantom of the Opera, and the public offering of his Really Useful Company. The third period, from 1990 to the present, includes Lloyd Webber's increasing commercial success, his elevation to the House of Lords, and his subsequent adoption of the traditional book musical format. The next four chapters investigate the many influences on and changes of direction found in Lloyd Webber's work. In chapter 2, "Telling Tales: A Survey of the Shows," Snelson unravels the myriad elements of Lloyd Webber's complex musical eclecticism: rock, pop, film, opera, and religion. With detailed descriptions, Snelson's critical approach covers a range of topics for each show, grouped by theme (e.g., Revisiting the Revue; Screen and Stage) rather than chronologically. Snelson highlights through his discussion an underlying paradox in the life and work of Lloyd Webber: "the unexpected and innovative as part of a gradual reassertion of the conventional" (20). He argues that this plays out both in Lloyd Webber's life (the pop/rock rebel who became a British Lord) and in the progression of his work from collaborating on nonbook musicals in the beginning of his career (e.g., Cats; Starlight Express) to writing book musicals later (e.g., Sunset Boulevard). In addition, Snelson identifies Lloyd Webber's strong aural rather than visual motivation early in his career, a result of the [End Page 160] advance publicity release of a concept album prior to the stage production. Although the Yale Masters Series is intended to be written in a nontechnical manner, the next two chapters are difficult reading for anyone unfamiliar with Lloyd Webber's work or without a strong musical background. However, the chapters include important conclusions and insights and are therefore worth the extra effort required to wade through Snelson's sharply tuned musical lens. The chapter "Pop, Rock, and Classical" explores the influences of these three genres on Lloyd Webber's developing style. "'Who Are You, Strange Angel?': Multiple Personalities in The Phantom of the Opera" is an in-depth critical investigation of a pivotal work in Lloyd Webber's career in which the internal life of the characters matters. Snelson expertly demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Phantom, Christine, and Raoul and their emotional states of mind as expertly crafted by Lloyd Webber into the music. An excellent example, as Snelson explains, is Lloyd Webber's development of the Phantom character as moving from a familiar horror-film caricature sound at the beginning of the musical to a more rounded portrayal of antihero at the end. Also of note is Snelson's discussion of the common vocal features of the Phantom and Raoul, rivals for Christine's affection. Chapter 5, "'I'm Ready for My Close-Up': Lloyd Webber on Screen," is divided into three sections: the translation from film to stage musical; the filming of concept albums; and the filming of stage musicals. With excellent character analyses of Che Guevara and Eva Perón vis-à-vis their musical and dramatic functions, and a critique of the successes and failures...

Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (review)

Reviewed by: Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England Jenna Mead Rosenthal, Joel T. , Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xxv, 217; 2 figures, 14 tables; RRP US$49.95; ISBN 027102304X. On 29 March 2006 a conference titled 'Exploring the Social in the Later Middle Ages: A Conference in Honor of Distinguished Professor of History, Joel Rosenthal' was convened at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England is only Professor Rosenthal's most recent monograph after Old Age in Late Medieval England (1995), his joint editorship of Medieval England: an Encyclopedia (1998), Late Medieval England (1377-1485): a Bibliography of History Scholarship 1975-1989 (1994), Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History (1990), Patriarchy and Families of privilege in Late Medieval England (1990) and a plethora of articles published in a wide range of journals. Rosenthal was 69 years old when this study of three sets of documents – witness testimonies of Proofs of Age, the depositions made on behalf of Sir Richard Scope in the Scrope-Grosvenor trial and the letters of Margaret Paston – was published and his examination of these three different sets of documentary witnesses coheres as much through its consistent methodology as through what I want to call its temper. As well as meaning 'mental balance or composure, esp. under provocation of any kind,' temper has the now rare or obs. connotation of 'proper or fit condition.' This is as much a matter of tone – manifested in an always leisurely and sometimes anecdotal prose style – as it is of discriminating judgement that searches out meaning without overstating the results. [End Page 199] Rosenthal's analysis depends upon 'a methodology that will seek to impose social or sociological (if not literary) unity upon a world re-created by weaving together' (p. xv) the selected testimonies, depositions and letters. He aims to show 'how the gulf between kinds of sources can be narrowed, if not closed, depending on who is doing the synthesizing, and when' (p. xxi). 'The three bodies of sources are far from traditional narrative history and differ from one another. But they can be linked, or at least lined up in a row, in keeping with a certain self-explanatory logic; their degree of similarity and compatibility allows me to fold them into a meta-narrative' (p. xxi). The primary means by which Rosenthal achieves this meta-narrative is by coalescing the regularity and predictability that derive from recognising the formulaic nature of his sources with the specificity, veracity and concord produced by these documents as social acts of community memory. The characteristic mode of proceeding is to expound the detail of the documents with care and attention; offering statistical analysis where it will elucidate patterns of occurrence or categories of similarity to organize a mass of material into larger units. Rosenthal has an argument about 'modes of cognition and types of memory' that he adduces from the documentary sources rather than from, say, theoretical studies such as Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture and that operates as a substratum just beneath this detailed treatment. There is no argument that Rosenthal's larger project of the synthetic or meta-narrative is a proper and persuasive task but the status of this species of narrative might, perhaps, have borne a little more scrutiny. At no point does the term 'narrative' enjoy definition or analysis: 'narrative' seems to mean 'record;' 'tale' implies 'story' but without the connotation of 'fiction' (pp. 72 ff). Instead, this capacious term supports deft and suggestive – though fragmentary – discussion of such complex notions as social memory lodged, as this one is, somewhere between social history, cultural analysis and theoretical speculation. Rosenthal concludes his examination of Proofs of Age, for example, by directing us to accept that what they reveal is the way in which men chose to situate memories within the social landscape – controlled by an obligation not to subvert the business and by a desire both to be taken seriously and to foreground themselves among their fellows...

Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (review)

Fairy and Feminism: New Approaches. Edited by Donald Haase, Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 268 pp. As I have sketched it, the agenda for feminist fairy-tale scholarship parallels in large measure the agenda for fairy-tale studies itself (31). With this statement, editor Donald Haase closes his excellent survey of feminist fairytale scholarship, the first essay in this volume. Haase's statement is telling in that while Fairy and Feminism brings together a reevaluation of the feminist critique of fairy tales, it simultaneously attempts to lay a path for what has been, and will be, the contemporary study of the fairy tale. Simultaneously restricted and enhanced by its feminist focus, Haase's collection, stemming originally from an issue of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies (14.1 [2000]), is an excellent representation of the current status of fairy-tale studies as well as a review of the scholarship of fairy tales and feminism since discourse in this area came to critical notice in the 1970s. This volume uses the umbrella of feminism to bring together a wide range of critical approaches and to cross national and textual boundaries. Ruth B. Bottigheimer's essay provides a historical dimension to the fictional and critical stereotype of the fairy-tale heroine in its investigation into the effects of the historical changes in women's control over their fertility in Europe. Lewis C. Seifert too engages the European tale in his work on seventeenth-century French literary tales by women. Like Bottigheimer, as well as Jeanine Blackwell, who examines the literary tales of German writers, Seifert moves beyond the simple examination of women's tale telling as subversive and asks scholars to delve into the ambiguities and contradictions contained in these texts. Having grounded the volume where fairy-tale studies have long been contained-in Europe and in historical studies-Haase then allows the work to move intertextually and internationally beyond where studies of classic European tales (e.g., those of Bruno Bettelheim, Bengt Holbek, Maria Tatar, and even Bottigheimer herself) have so usefully taken fairy-tale scholarship. At this point however, I must note that any reference to Holbek's work is in large part missing from the volume, including the otherwise admirably extensive bibliography of citations used in the essays and fairy-tale scholarship published since 1970 that is included at the end of the collection (213). While Holbek may not have written a women-centered work, I would argue that his psychoanalytic approach as well as his useful (if debatable) schema of feminine active versus masculine active tales warrant inclusion in such a bibliography. This exclusion points to the fact that despite the best efforts of Haase and the authors included in the volume, any centered approach (feminist, psychoanalytic, etc.) may attempt to resist one-dimensional views (x-xi) but can never fully move beyond them once so centered. Regardless of what may have been left out, it is of course Fairy and Feminism's feminist locus that gives it its power and usefulness not only in fairytale studies but in feminist and literary studies as well. While still Euro- and Anglo-American centered, Elizabeth Wanning Harness essay Women's Autobiography and Fairy Tales and Kay Stone's Fire and Water mark the transition in the volume from a European locus and premodern focus to contemporary versions of tales and an international scope. Harries, like Blackwell, asks the reader to examine female responses to fairy tales. In fact, one might argue that as a whole, this volume is less concerned with fairy tales themselves and far more focused on female and feminist responses to them. …

Inferentialism and Holistic Role Abstraction in the Telling of Tales

In Tales of the Mighty Dead 1 Brandom aims to persuade us that intentionality is an essentially social and inherently historical phenomenon. If it is then, as Brandom recognizes, intentionality can be addressed only indirectly and undogmatically, by way of stories about what already has been said or can in the telling be made to have been said, stories that in no way preclude the telling of incompatible stories. Brandom’s first book Making It Explicit is an epic in the genre. Tales of the Mighty Dead follows by turning on itself to tell, along with its stories, a story about the telling of such stories that self-consciously exhibits many of the themes and structures to be found in the stories themselves. It is an extraordinary achievement. On Brandom’s telling, the history of our thinking about intentionality, about the determinate contentfulness of thought, exhibits a certain dialectical structure, one that is developed in detail for the case of properties in Chapter Six, ‘Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology’. We begin atomistically, with the idea that one’s grasp or understanding of a property is immediate, that is, intelligible independent of anything other than one’s sensory experience of something exhibiting that property. This conception is unstable, however; it fails to provide the resources needed to understand the determinate contentfulness of our thoughts about such properties. This first atomistic conception thus gives way to a second strongly holistic conception of properties according to which they are identified and individuated by their relations one to another, in the first instance

Aesthetic Development: A Cognitive Experience

(2005). Aesthetic Development: A Cognitive Experience. Art Education: Vol. 58, Telling Stories, Telling Tales, pp. 48-53.

External Association

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Alvin Jackson, ‘Ireland, the Union, and the Empire, 1800–1960’, in Ireland and the British Empire, eds Kevin Kenny and Roger Louis, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p 123. 2. Jane H Ohlmeyer, ‘A Laboratory for Empire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism’, in Ireland and the British Empire, eds Kevin Kenny and Roger Louis, ibid, pp 28–9. 3. Alvin Jackson, op cit, p 126. 4. Joe Cleary, ‘Misplaced Ideas? Colonialism, Location and Dislocation in Irish Studies’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Cork University Press, Cork, 2003, p 17. 5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Fontana Press, London, 1992, p 247. 6. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Ireland since 1790, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p 183. 7. In particular see Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996; Edmund Burke and Ireland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003; David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post‐colonial Moment, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993; Ireland After History, Cork University Press, Cork, 1999 and Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996. 8. R F Foster, ‘Lifting the Blarney Stone that Held Down History: An interview by Sean Coughlan’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 October, 2001, pp 20–1. Elsewhere Foster has unilaterally dismissed the rendition of Irish history through the tropes of postcolonial theory as ‘a simplistic application of Frantz Fanon’s One Big Idea to an Irish situation sweepingly redefined as “post‐colonial”’, R F Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland, Allen Lane, London, 2001, p 20. 9. Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, 1994, p 30. For a particularly virulent assault on the legitimacy of Irish postcolonial studies see Stephen Howe, Ireland Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 10. Edna Longley, ibid, p 28. 11. Liam Kennedy, ‘Modern Ireland: Post‐Colonial Society or Post‐Colonial Pretensions?’, The Irish Review, Volume 13, 1993, pp 13, 119. 12. Stephen Howe, op cit, p 110. 13. Joe Cleary, op cit, p 29. See also D K Fieldhouse, The West And The Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence And Development, Malden, MA and Blackwell, Oxford, 1999; and George M Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1981. 14. Neil Lazarus, ‘Academic Capital and Canon Formation in Postcolonial Studies’, unpublished version of the essay, 2002, p 1. 15. Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2001, p 110. 16. Colin Graham, ‘Subalternity and Gender: Problems of post‐colonial Irishness’, Journal of Gender Studies: Special Issue: Gender and Post‐Colonialism, 1996, 5:3, p 368. 17. Richard Kirkland, ‘Questioning the Frame: Hybridity, Ireland, and the Institution’, in Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, MacMillan Basingstoke, 1999, pp 225–6. 18. Robert J C Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p 302.

Under Heaven's Brow: Pre-Christian Religious Tradition in Chuuk (review)

Reviewed by: Under Heaven's Brow: Pre-Christian Religious Tradition in Chuuk Ted Lowe Under Heaven's Brow: Pre-Christian Religious Tradition in Chuuk, by Ward H Goodenough. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002. ISBN 0-87169-246-5; xviii + 421 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. US$30.00. Ward H Goodenough makes two contributions in this book, one ethnographic and one theoretical. First, he brings together in one place much of the ethnographic materials on pre-Christian, [End Page 491] precolonial religious belief for Chuuk Lagoon (dating to the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries) that have been collected by several ethnographers. Large amounts of his own previously unpublished ethnographic data is included. He hopes that bringing all of these together into one published source will benefit the people of Chuuk (who have no other written record of many pre-Christian/precolonial beliefs and practices) and also the community of Micronesian scholars and historians who might otherwise have to search a wide variety of different sources, some not previously available in English, for the same material. Much of these original data are presented in several useful appendixes. His theoretical contribution presents a "functional" approach to the comparative study of religious belief and practice, after Malinowski, using the materials from Chuuk as an illustration. A functional view of religious beliefs and practices sees them as addressing the emotionally laden needs and concerns surrounding the maintenance, repair, and transformation of people's inner senses of self and their social selves (ie, how they and others see their various social identities, including roles and reputation) across social contexts and across the life course. These senses of self are the personal and social products of everyday participation in local social life. Goodenough recognizes that religion and ritual can also be about imposing a self-definition on others through the exercise of power and domination, but this is not the emphasis in his analysis. In order to illustrate this theoretical lens in the study of religion, Goodenough must first present a fairly comprehensive summary of local social organization, everyday family production, and typical developmental experiences across the life course. He must then document how fundamental needs and concerns associated with the personal and social construction of self come out of the everyday experiences within these aspects of local social life. Finally, he must show how the religious beliefs and practices he describes address those needs and concerns. Toward these ends, the book opens with summary chapters that describe the social organization of property and community in Chuuk at the turn of the twentieth century and the stereotypical expectations among kin. Chapters concerning the widespread psychological needs and concerns associated with personhood and self follow. Goodenough's efforts in these latter chapters are greatly helped by the ethnographic and psychological materials collected by a number of psychological anthropologists who worked in Chuuk Lagoon in the decades following World War II. Based on his review of the ethnographic and psychological materials collected in Chuuk, Goodenough identifies a number of core concerns surrounding a person's sense of self-that-is-right-with-the-world (ie, well-being). These include the following: avoiding hunger, avoiding giving offense to spirits and demons who can cause illness, having dependency needs met by family and community elders, managing anger and hostility, controlling personal desire, and being respectful and generous to others [End Page 492] while also being brave and effective in accomplishing tasks and achieving personal goals. The succeeding chapters describe a wide variety of beliefs and practices. First, three chapters orient the reader to the locally recognized gods and spirits, their origins and the origins of the people, and the local beliefs in the souls of the living and the spirits of the dead. Eleven very rich chapters follow, discussing rituals involving spirit mediums, divination, collecting and distributing fish and other foods, health and illness, crafts and construction, courtship, communicating with food, sorcery, war, itang (political priests), and the telling of morality tales. The book concludes with the observation that ritual behavior in Chuuk is not about addressing a need or concern over salvation in life after death—even though there was and isa...

Dickens and the Scene of Recognition

Dickens and the Scene of Recognition Michal Peled Ginsburg Several of Dickens's novels include moments of what Aristotle, in the Poetics, refers to as "anagnorisis": moments in which the recognition of one person by another (or others) establishes that person's identity. This recurrence testifies to the survival of an old tradition in Dickens's realist fiction, a tradition first associated with tragedy and epos, then with comedy and romance. Although the ease with which Dickens introduces elements of the recognition scene suggests, as Terence Cave has argued, a "reliance on the reader's knowledge of such scenes and how they operate,"1 this does not mean that recognition plots, because [End Page 75] of their stereotypical nature, always operate in the same way. Indeed, even Dickens's own handling of the scene of recognition differs, in subtle but important ways, in his different novels. Dickens's particular use of the topos of recognition, I shall argue, is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. In analyzing scenes of recognition from Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities, I shall dwell on the variations they offer on Dickens's way of understanding recognition; these variations should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails. In its narrowest sense, anagnorisis refers to the recognition of a person, usually of one's kin. Such recognition can form the basis of a plot only when it has become problematic owing to some rupture caused, typically, by the person's long absence from family and home. Such absence precludes "normal," automatic recognition—that is, recognition predicated on the resemblance between the person one sees and that person when last seen. The returning person has changed so much (because of the passage of time but often also because of the particular experience undergone during that time) that he or she does not resemble himself or herself, is precisely unrecognizable. This is why the returning person, by the very act of returning, makes a claim, a claim to his or her identity: I am so and so. But since from this claim other claims—to property, inheritance, or spousal rights—are likely to follow, the suspicion of imposture frequently hovers around the returning person, whether or not he/she resembles his/her past self, since resemblance, under these circumstances, can be seen as the product of disguise, of an intention to deceive. For recognition to take place, then, resemblance needs to be supplemented by some other kind of proof: an object such as a locket or a piece of clothing; a mark on the body, such as a scar or a birthmark; knowledge of a secret from the past. All these proofs have one thing in common: unlike physical resemblance, which bears upon the entire person, they are partial and particular; in other words, they stand in a synecdochal or metonymical relation to the claimant. Therefore, in the crucial moment of determining individual identity, recognition scenes tend to give [End Page 76] more weight to the metonymical (the particular and contingent) than to the metaphorical (the similar, the general). If, as Cave puts it, anagnorisis is "the mark or signature of fiction, so that even when something like it occurs in fact, it still sounds like fiction" (4), then anagnorisis marks fiction as contingent, accidental, and particular; it resists or questions the generalizing capacity assumed by representation as resemblance or mimesis along with its promise of truth. The material objects and the secrets which function as metonymical proofs in recognition plots involve, or are inserted in, narratives related to the life of the person before the separation; therefore, the establishment of identity often depends on the telling of tales. But since tales can also be told by impostors, and since the evidence that these tales bring in support of the claims they make is purely circumstantial, they cannot dispel doubts. In...

Spatial Representation in European Popular Fairy Tale

Using selected examples, this article investigates the problem of spatial representation in European fairy tales and brings together a number of elements for a systematic analysis of its significance for narration. Aesthetic space, which Ernst Cassirer (30) distinguishes from mythical and theoretical space, constitutes in a general sense an artistically presented reality. The virtual space in narrative art, particularly in the folktale, can be regarded as such an aesthetic space, but one is not independent of the narrators personality and context (i.e., the narrator's performance), of the story's narrative perspective, of national or regional variants, or of oral and written adaptations. The European fairy tale creates two nonhomeomorphic worlds-a magical world of supernatural beings from the beyond, and a nonmagical one of normal human beings-worlds are divided from one another through occasionally fluid but sometimes also inflexible boundaries and frontier regions. With this first structure a second coexists in for the narrator and the listener both worlds belong in any case to the same magic virtual world of the fairy tale, which is clearly separated from their own real one. Between the areas of the here and the beyond there are crossings and frontier regions such as a bridge, river, pond, seashore, well or spring, stone, forest, thorns, and so on. The forest is a passage-way of particular importance. Its name alone (forest, wood) seems to characterize a scenic court (Meder 123). It is regarded, in both the real and metaphorical sense, as a place of mortal danger and forbidden desires (140).1 It is represented negatively as an antithesis of courtly urban society and linked to the stereotypical adjectives dark, huge, and lonely. And yet it is not always possible to distinguish, in the Euclidian sense, the spatial areas of the real and the other world. On the contrary, we are confronted with a fabled shifting of spheres. For example, when the hardworking daughter in the fairy tale Frau Holle (AT 480) is down in the underworld making the bed and energetically shaking out the bolster so that the feathers fly, then it is snowing in the world.2 And the vertical movement of the daughter's jump into the well is at variance with the horizontal movement of her homecoming, which happens not by arduous climbing up out of the depths, but simply by stepping out of the otherworld (Heindrichs 64). While the printed fairy tale relies solely upon linguistic means for spatial construction, the oral storyteller, who performs the tale and uses the additional elements made possible by performance, is able to transform the narrative space (composed of the narrator and the audience) into the narrated scene of the fairy-tale action, to make it visual. He does this by employing not only linguistic means of narration3 but also gestures and significant movements, and by using props or models to illustrate and visualize the story being told: the wine glass he moves back and forth across the table is at one moment the ship on which the hero sails the seas, at another an animal. In this way the space surrounding the storyteller is re-created as the world of adventure (Karlinger 266). At the beginning and end of the fairy tale the two worlds are at variance, and their synthesizing has to be established by narrative or by formula. A Breton storyteller, for example, achieves this in an amusing way at the end of his narrative by asserting he had never had a share of the wedding feast; instead, he had been given a kick sent him flying through the air to land in the chair he was now sitting in.4 His rhyming conclusion draws attention away from the fairy tale to the teller of tales, from the world was being described to the world of the narrator. Whereas the formulas at the beginning set the narrated fairy-tale world in a faraway place and a far-distant time in the past, the formulas at the end serve, among other things, to collate this narrated world with the world of the storyteller, the narrated space with the narrating space (Koll 3). …

Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England

1Cardiff University Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England Joel T. Rosenthal University Park, PA Pennsylvania State U.P. 2003 xxv + 217 N.p.

A telling tale of two London boroughs

Cate Campbell compares early years issues in the two very different boroughs of Hackney and Richmond-on-Thames.

Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History by Herb Wyile

Herb W yile. Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing o f History. Montreal: M cGillQueens University Press, 2002. 318 pp. $75"Cloth. Contemporary theoretical accounts of history and historiography clearly demonstrate the need to rethink received understandings about the rela­ tionship between historical and literary texts. No longer seen simply as a chronicle of events from the past, history, as Hayden White and others have taught us, is not something one finds, but rather something one produces, a reconstruction of the past as we have been led to see it from the context of a particular time, place, and subject-position. In his timely and important study of the uses to which history has been put in contem­ porary Canadian novels, Herb Wyile draws on the work of White, Linda Hutcheon, and others to offer a trenchant and detailed analysis of what has clearly become a salient preoccupation for many Canadian writers. Even a short list of novels produced by Canadian novelists over the course of the last three decades makes clear just how popular a subject the writing of histories has become. Think, for example, of Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood), The Englishman’s Boy (Guy Vanderhaeghe), Ana Historic and Taken (both by Daphne Marlatt), The BiggestModern Woman ofthe World (Susan Swan), Fox (Margaret Sweatman), A Deathful Ridge (J. A. Wain­ wright), Fox’s Nose (Sally Ireland), Blood Libel (Allan Levine), The Afterlife of George Cartwright (John Steffler), Green Grass, Running Water (Thomas King), The Invention of the World (Jack Hodgins), Away (Jane Urquhart), and Obasan (Joy Kogawa), as well as several books by Timothy Findley, Rudy Wiebe, and Michael Ondaatje. These books (and others like them) turn to the past (and, most often, to actual persons and events from the past) in an effort to raise compelling questions about knowledge, power, identity, representation, and social responsibility. Through richly detailed readings of a number of these texts, Wyile focusses on how contemporary Canadian fiction challenges us to think anew about historical processes and priorities. Many of these novels, he argues, invite us to recognize how the project of nation-building in Canada has been played out through narrowly-focussed assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality: they reflect an “inclination toward the telling of untold tales (of natives, immigrants, minorities, workers, and women)” (137), and focus our attention on pasts that have been silenced, repressed, or misread in institutionalized forms of historical representation. In rewriting history from the point of view of those who have been left out 170 IHeble of dominant narratives of the nation, these books encourage us to ask, W ho has the institutional power to determine what counts as history? These, surely, are pressing questions, and Wyile’s wide-ranging, thor­ oughly contextualized, and well-researched account of this important area of focus in contemporary Canadian fiction is certainly a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the topic. I must confess, however, that at times it did seem to me as though some of the arguments and analyses (about the foregrounding of the research process in these novels, about how historical novels comment on contemporary society, about the skepticism towards historical objectivity, about history as process, about history and/as intertext, and so forth) were perhaps a little too familiar: these issues have been amply theorized and documented by Hutcheon and others. True, Wyile extends the lines of argument initiated by Hutcheon in “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction” to engage in detailed read­ ings of textual strategies in a number of more recent novels by Sweatman, Vanderhaeghe, Urquhart, and others; yet it seems to me that this study is at its best not when Wyile is applying familiar kinds of arguments to new texts, but rather when he is framing and entering into bold new debates about shifting patterns of salience. In this regard, Wyile’s response to Jack Granatstein’s diatribe against social history, Who Killed Canadian History?, is particularly resonant. Countering Granatstein’s fear-mongering suggestion that the revisionist focus of social history has resulted in the failure of history graduates in Canada to know the facts of their own nation, Wyile rightly (and impor­ tantly) insists on “a recognition, rather...

A Fable of Film: Ranciere's Anthony Mann

Enterprising editors in sixteenth-century France often launched translations of Aesop's fables to endow a classical genre with a new power of illustration. Wearing a deceptively childish appearance, a fable was a text coordinated with a picture. The combination was aimed to convey a lesson or to impose, often obliquely or through visual strategies, a reassuring mode of conduct.1 But in the play of image and text, as in cinema, enigmas, contradictory readings, and perplexities abounded. These books verified what early modern lexicographers noted about the meanings of fable. Henri Estienne's Dictionnaire françois-latin (1549) cites and translates Varro to register "Devis, et propos, ou conte, soit vray ou faulx," and Terence "une farce, une comédie, that includes "menterie... bourdes et mensonges." Nicot's Trésor de la langue française (1605) associates the telling of fabulous tales with an art of directing action: "raconter une fable, Apologum facere, vel agere." Nicot's analogue, Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (1611) underscores deceit and contrariety at its basis. "Fable: f. A fable, tale, lie, leasing, false tale, unlikely thing repeated; also, a Comedie, or Enterlude." The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694) posts two definitions. One, a "chose feinte, & inventée pour instruire, ou pour divertir," leads to "le sujet, l'argument d'un poëme épique, d'un poëme dramatique, d'un roman," held in a collective sense of "[t]outes les fables de l'Antiquité Payenne" before the definition is inverted as "[f]ausseté, chose contournée. Vous nous comptez des fables." The reversible nature of the form fit the designs of authors wishing to produce enigmas and perplexity, if not counter-meanings, within the frame of clearly drawn parables and moral tales.

A Fable of Film: Ranciere's Anthony Mann

Enterprising editors in sixteenth-century France often launched translations of Aesop's fables to endow a classical genre with a new power of illustration. Wearing a deceptively childish appearance, a fable was a text coordinated with a picture. The combination was aimed to convey a lesson or to impose, often obliquely or through visual strategies, a reassuring mode of conduct.' But in the play of image and text, as in cinema, enigmas, contradictory readings, and perplexities abounded. These books verified what early modern lexicographers noted about the meanings of fable. Henri Estienne's Dictionnairefrangois-latin (1549) cites and translates Varro to register Devis, et propos, ou conte, soit vray ou faulx, and Terence farce, une comidie, that includes menterie... bourdes et mensonges. Nicot's Trtsor de la languefrangaise (1605) associates the telling of fabulous tales with an art of directing action: raconter une fable, Apologumfacere, vel agere. Nicot's analogue, Randle Cotgrave, inA Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (1611) underscores deceit and contrariety at its basis. Fable: f. A fable, tale, lie, leasing, false tale, unlikely thing repeated; also, a Comedie, or Enterlude. The Dictionnaire de l'Acadimiefrangaise (1694) posts two definitions. One, a feinte, & invent~e pour instruire, ou pour divertir, leads to le sujet, l'argument d'un poame 4pique, d'un poame dramatique, d'un roman, held in a collective sense of [t]outes les fables de Y'Antiquith Payenne before the definition is inverted as [f]laussetd, chose contournde. Vous nous comptez des fables. The reversible nature of the form fit the designs of authors wishing to produce enigmas and perplexity, if not counter-meanings, within the frame of clearly drawn parables and moral tales. In tandem with the classical heritage of the genre, Jacques Rancibre writes of cinema as a fable, but not before offering a definition in an Aristotelian clarity that seems deceptive or even unsettling. The cinematic fable would begin as a story well told. It entails the arrangement of necessary or likely actions through the construction of a dilemma and an itinerary that leads to a resolution. Characters move from good fortune to misfortune or from misfortune to good fortune. But, as Jean Epstein intuited in the great years of silent cinema, Aristotle is not a seal of approval that will guarantee a good movie. Life is not fabulous; it is guided to ends neither good nor bad, merely to situations opened in every ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2004 91 SubStance # 103, Vol. 33, no. 1, 2004

Queer Theory in Education

Contents: W.F. Pinar, Introduction. W.G. Tierney, P. Dilley, Constructing Knowledge: Educational Research and Gay and Lesbian Studies. J.T. Sears, A Generational and Theoretical Analysis of Culture and Male (Homo) Sexuality. D. Carlson, Who Am I? Gay Identity and a Democratic Politics of the Self. E. Meiners, Remember When All the Cars Were Fords and All the Lesbians Were Women? Some Notes on Identity, Mobility, and Capital. S. Luhmann, Queering/Querying Pedagogy? Or, Pedagogy Is a Pretty Queer Thing. R. Walcott, Queer Texts and Performativity: Zora, Rap, and Community. N. Rodriquez, (Queer) Youth as Political and Pedagogical. S.R. Steinberg, Appropriating Queerness: Hollywood Sanitation. D. Sumara, B. Davis, Telling Tales of Surprise. W.F. Pinar, Understanding Curriculum as Gender Text: Notes on Reproduction, Resistance, and Male-Male Relations. S. de Castell, M. Bryson, From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: On Finding Oneself in Educational Research. K.G. Honeychurch, Carnal Knowledge: Re-Searching (Through) the Sexual Body. M. Morris, Unresting the Curriculum: Queer Projects, Queer Imaginings. M.A. Doll, Queering the Gaze. A.J. Pitt, Fantasizing Women in the Women's Studies Classroom: Toward a Symptomatic Reading of Negation. D.P. Britzman, On Some Psychical Consequences of AIDS Education. R. Platizky, We Were Already Ticking and Didn't Even Know [It]: Early AIDS Works. W. Haver, Of Mad Men Who Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility. J.L. Miller, Autobiography as a Queer Curriculum Practice.