Events In Text Research Articles

Suspended Crisis in Arab-American and Arabic Literatures: Modernity, Violence, and Afflicted Textuality

Through a comparative and poststructuralist reading, I will examine the artistic manners in which a selection of Arab-American and Arabic literary texts builds a strategy of a poetics-of-suspended-crisis. By conceptualizing crisis through the discourse of violence, I examine three of its dimensions: crisis as a matter of discursive silencing and silence; crisis as a problem of structure in orientalism, and finally crisis as a textual event, which ultimately announces the detonation of silencing and silence. On this account, I distinguish between two modes of representation of crisis. The first concerns itself with narrating the repository of discursive censures over crises in the Middle East, and therefore aims to depoliticize the silences built over crisis. The second mode exemplifies a trend of inscribing crisis as an antagonistic condition of the text and language itself. My argument pays attention to some of the most esoteric and visceral literary strategies that may have remained repressed in Western frameworks of reading “world” or “ethnic” literatures. My selection of these texts is but a small sample concerned with aestheticizing violence as a fundamental mode of imagining crisis in order to allow new counterpoints of thinking it differently outside modern visions of apocalypse, paralysis, and psychosis.

Sexual stereotypes and personality development in Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits

This study aims to readdress Federico Fellini’s reputation in the feminist critical discussion. Feminist perspectives on Fellini’s cinema use his stereotypical depiction of women to make a strong case for the negative in assessing Fellini’s gender representation. Using 8ó and Juliet of the Spirits as points of reference, the argument will proceed that Fellini’s one-dimensional portrayal of women is directly linked to the theme of personal development. This is inspired by cultural trends of the time, amongst which the Jungian idea of individuation seemed to be the most influential on the film-maker. Fellini advocates the idea of personal development through the inner liberation of individuals from outmoded mythologies of the past. His cinematic exploration of these mythologies is invested in the stereotypical images of women that form an integral part of the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns Fellini employs in these films to communicate the ills affecting Italians. Fellini achieves this critical position in two ways: on the level of cinematic representation that subverts dominant modes of spectatorship and on the thematic level through various textual events that dramatise the themes of the cultural determinism and the need for individual liberation.

Descolonizar os livros didáticos: raça, gênero e colonialidade nos livros de educação do campo

RESUMO Descolonizar o pensamento é uma luta fundamental dos movimentos de educação do campo, é um modo de resistência e re-existência de saberes e modos de vida. Considerando que a subalternização dos saberes do campo é produzida pelo monopólio e visibilidade do saber euro-ocidental, assim como pela desqualificação e invisibilização do saber campesino, este artigo se debruça sobre os livros do Programa Nacional dos Livros Didáticos (PNLD) de educação no campo, atentando para os conhecimentos e modos de vida que ali se apresentam e como se apresentam. Por meio da seleção e análise de acontecimentos imagéticos e textuais significativos, são discutidas hierarquias de saberes e modos de vida nos materiais em questão. O artigo resulta de uma pesquisa sobre raça e gênero no PNLD de educação no campo, lançado em 2013. Analisando todos os livros do programa, a pesquisa dá a ver dois acontecimentos centrais nos modos em que raça e gênero performam nesses livros: a colonialidade do saber e o estilo politicamente correto.

Joint Learning of Structural and Textual Features for Web Scale Event Extraction

The web has become the central platform and marketplace for the organization, propagation of events and sale of tickets of any kind. Such events range from concerts, workshops, sport events, professional events to small local events. Single event pages are typically split into a textual event description and a set of core event attributes that are specifically highlighted and presented in the same template for all events of a particular source. In this work, we aim to learn a joint model for the extraction of event attributes from both event descriptions and templates. We also investigate the automatic discovery of event sources and the identification of single event pages within event sources. By considering all three problems as part of an integral system, we can exploit mutual reinforcement between the models derived for each sub problem.

“To Banter the Age”: Sir William Phips and the Wonders of the Modern World

“To Banter the Age”Sir William Phips and the Wonders of the Modern World Joe Conway (bio) Upon William Phips’s return to London from his successful 1687 treasure-hunting expedition to the Caribbean, a broadside titled “An Exact and Perfect Relation” appeared in print to tell the history of this remarkable man and his seemingly magic voyage. The “Relation” claimed that the story of the New Englander and his crew’s exploits, financed by a group of investors led by the Duke of Albemarle, was one “to surmount belief it self ” (1). Indeed, the broadside’s insistence to its potentially incredulous readers that its words constituted “An Exact and Perfect Relation” of true events, howsoever “wonderful,” parallels the recounting within the text of the “Relation” of the serial efforts of Phips to convince Charles II, James II, Albemarle, and other capitalists to overlook the “improbability of the Adventure” and finance it (1). No wonder many balked at funding Phips’s project, and “lookt upon [it] as a Chimera” (1). Claiming to know the specific whereabouts of a long-lost Spanish vessel sunk forty years prior off the coast of Hispaniola, Phips proposed to recover the gold and silver from the bottom of the sea and bring it back to England. Who, the broadside asks, would lend credence (or cash) to such a scheme? “For certainly,” it continues, “to tell Mankind of taking up the Cargo of above 40 years Wreck in full Sea 17 fathoms from any Shoar in nine Fathom Water, would be thought to banter the Age, and turn the same to ridicule” (1). Nevertheless, Captain Phips succeeded, bringing back £250,000 in treasure (mostly silver), a feat for which James II knighted him. Always in desperate need of hard money, the king welcomed an influx of precious metals into his realm. Meanwhile, the public was sent buzzing over Phips’s success that promised, in the broadside’s words, to “fill our Pockets with Coyn, as well as our Ears with astonishment” (1). As this last line indicates, the narrative of Phips’s success stimulated [End Page 271] both public finance and public fantasy. Economic historian Christine MacLeod has shown that the wide publicity received by Phips’s voyage sparked an investment bubble in diving-engine patents throughout the decade of the 1690s (558). People, as one commentator noted, were “tickled in the ear with the vast Wealth of Gold and Silver that should be taken out of the Sea” (Angliae 21). The story’s ability to prompt what the broadside alternately calls “astonishment” and “wonder” in its readers simultaneously “tickled” and troubled many of the authors who wrote about the culture of irrational exuberance that followed in the wake of Phips’s sensational return. Indeed as I will argue in this essay, the affective excess produced out of the textual event that Daniel Defoe called “Phips his Wreck-Voyage” (16) ultimately compelled its many commentators across the Anglo-Atlantic empire of letters to confront the limits of those secular, rational, and scientific discourses that prevailed in the Enlightenment public sphere. If, as many cultural critics have noted, what distinguishes secular modernity is the diminished feeling of enchantment that pervades it, Phips’s story, so often accompanied by literary tropes borrowed from the magic narratives of romance, seems to recall events belonging to more archaic times (the broadside, for example, compares his actions to a scene out of The Odyssey [2]). This is so, even though the obscurely born, unbaptized, and unlettered Phips’s skillful negotiation of circum-Atlantic information and finance networks marked him as a mobile social actor whose secular path through material achievement to social prestige might serve as the very model of a modern life history. The cognitive dislocation that Phips often produced in those contemporaries who wrote about him seems to derive from this liminal position he held in the 1690s Anglo-American imaginary. Phips: both a sign of the present and a spirit from the past. Phips’s success, while celebrated throughout the 1690s Atlantic world, had a direct biographical influence on the three writers I will consider here: Daniel Defoe, Cotton Mather, and Hans Sloane. Of the three, Mather’s...

O resto é silêncio: Uma máquina, outro Aleph e "su atareado rumor"

Este ensaio constitui-se como uma modulação entre o olhar e a voz em "El aleph" (1997), conto de Jorge Luis Borges, dois registros a serem sustentados a partir da cisão estrutural da narrativa: quando a via do olhar fracassa, instaura-se um silêncio que nos convoca à sua escuta. Em um momento subsequente, "A máquina do mundo" (2001), de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, será trazida para invocar o registro da voz na narrativa borgeana: nesse poema, o sujeito poético não cede a uma torrente de imagens, mas implica-se no puro acontecimento textual. O trajeto teórico, então, parte da falência da imagem para posteriormente abrir-se àquilo que se funda como enunciação. Trata-se de uma delimitação dos efeitos inaugurados por dois regimes de leitura: não se pretende dar aos textos uma interpretação conclusiva, mas questionar os modos pelos quais eles ativam o lugar do olhar e da voz.

Breaking Up, Down and Out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's <em>Natural Novel</em>

Her critical remarks pertain to the works of arguably the most prominent contemporary Bulgarian author, Georgi Gospodinov; they constitute an effort to unfold — with minimal immobilization and reduction — the multiplicitous, paradoxical complexities of peculiar (interand intra-) textual events that she nominates razroiavania — a word strange even in its native Bulgarian language. A composite of the prefix ‘raz-’ and a form of the verbal noun roene, the singular, razroiavane, encompasses all of the senses of ‘pullulating’ — engendering, germinating, swarming,

It’s Only the End of the World

Elaborating Barbara Cassin’s category of the Untranslatable, Emily Apter’s Against World Literature demonstrates the Untranslatable’s performative capability to question and displace the voracity of the World Literature industry. Neither a primer nor a how-to, Apter’s new book ranges across a wide assortment of texts to disclose the Untranslatable as a political and textual event indigestible by and unprofitable to the prevailing practices of World Literature. The unpredictable tracks of Untranslatables necessitate a rethought Comparative Literature newly attentive to the textuality of its languages and open to a rapidly transforming world. Apter gives a vivid sense of the scale of the task ahead if anything resembling change in practices of pedagogy and research programs is to emerge from her foray into the nebula of the Untranslatable.

The Perennial Pleasures of the Hoax

ABSTRACTThough popular in the nineteenth century and widespread since, the elements of the hoax form can be traced to the origins of rhetorical theorizing, principally in the strategies of probability and counterprobability developed by the early orators and sophists. This article begins by defining features of the hoax as a textual event and then describes how hoaxes use traditional rhetorical techniques of both probability and improbability to transport viewers from credulity and acceptance to doubt and disbelief, demonstrating technical mastery over rhetorical conventions of the genre to mock their targets and to entertain and instruct their audience.

Chaucer's Prudent Poetics:

Abstract The character Prudence in Chaucer's Tale of Melibee prudently explains to her husband Melibee that he ought to be merciful, interpreting the text's events for him as they unfold. However, her interpretive methodology poses many problems to the reader. Prudence confuses her twin roles as human wife and allegorical virtue; both the content and manner of her speech can sometimes contradict her own advice, and it is far from clear at the end of the story that her husband has actually learned anything. The implication of this incoherence is that interpretive methodologies themselves are the problem. It is Melibee's strict, moralizing adherence to the precise words used by Prudence and his counselors that leads him towards violence and revenge, while Prudence's looser and somewhat contradictory interpretations of proverbial wisdom nonetheless culminate in a clear, consistent notion of charitable mercy.

‘Carolina Hat’: Vona Groarke's Lament for Art O'Leary

Vona Groarke's 2008 version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's famous keen for her husband, Chaoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, features a poetic voice overtly inflected by Irish, English, and American diction and usage. Groarke's poem emphasizes its status as a textual event in more than one time frame as well as another spatial setting. The other time is multiple, including the many translations and discussions of the lament from its eighteenth-century composition until now. The place is also multiple: it might be Dublin or Manchester, Boston or London, or Wake Forest, North Carolina, where Groarke spends part of every year. This new poem stresses the mobility of Eileen's passionate lament: in Groarke's hands, it becomes a poem of the particular place that manages also, intriguingly, to highlight transnational cultural and linguistic implications. This version, another chapter in the history of a work that begins in the fluidity of oral composition and is repeatedly reworked in translations, emphasizes domestic space as generative as well as excessive, the site of desire. Groarke's poem locates itself both inside and, crucially, outside, a place to which one comes ‘carrying nothing’ in order to find, in a seeming paradox, nonrestrictive structures.

Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Coleridge's investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood as an attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world is gained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement that understanding by recasting the stakes of Kant's critical philosophy in terms of a conflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporary accounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essay explores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as a textual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism, which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues, allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of the romantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism.

Mediated Negotiations: A Case Study of a Transcultural Exchange between Lebanon and Israel

This article examines the strategies and practices by which the Israeli news media negotiated and (re)appropriated a Lebanese documentary that was produced in cooperation with a French company and was purchased and broadcast by an Israeli commercial channel. Using this transnational textual event, the article explores the dynamics, opportunities and pitfalls associated with transcultural exchanges that take place in a conflictual, translocal context, and the ways in which such exchanges are shaped by an interplay of material-institutional and discursive-symbolic dimensions. The article also provides a multi-layered framework for analyzing the broadcasting and journalistic practices surrounding such textual events, and establishes the relationship between appropriation and witnessing strategies. I show how the Israeli media—driven by commercial interests and applying complex forms of witnessing and appropriation—worked to sustain national myths and suppress the potentially disruptive aspects of the documentary, while at the same time exposing the weaknesses of these myths, as well as the limits of the State's power. Emerging from this case study is a complex picture of the multifaceted roles played by national news media in a transnational economy, and of the ways in which commercial media interests serve as both hegemonic and disruptive forces within the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Textual Iconicity and the Primitivist Cosmos: Chronotopes of Desire in Travel Writing about Korowai of West Papua

The figure of the primitive circulates globally as a projected other of self‐conceivedly modern people, who through it wrestle with their own historical conditions. But what makes representations of the primitive persuasive? This article examines genre, register, and voice features of a highly repetitive sample of travel narratives about Korowai and Kombai people of New Guinea published in high‐circulation magazines and newspapers. I suggest that the genre's effectiveness turns on cultivation of iconicity among three event‐worlds: a chronotope of narrated travel, a chronotope of author‐reader relations, and a mythic chronotope of the civilized and the primitive. In a “hall of mirrors” effect, dense networks of intratextual iconicity make broad primitivist stereotypy, narrow travel events, and the textual event of travel writing performance support each other's believability, vividness, and claims to attention. [chronotopes, travel writing, iconicity, repetition, temporality, narrative, myth]

Translational (De)construction in Contemporary Chinese Poetics

In his essay ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, Derrida presents us with an epistemological puzzle: the dilemma of considering in tandem the event and the machine. Derrida’s question is: how can we reconcile a thinking of the event and that of the machine at the same time, in other words, both what happens/arrives and what is a calculable, machinelike repetition? What if Derrida’s ‘machine’ takes the form of a computer program that performs translation tasks? How could we then contemplate the relationship between this translation machine, or machine translator, and creative writing as a textual event? To consider these questions, the article presents the case of a linguistic experiment that involves a textual event and a machine translator. The textual event in question is the bilingual poetry collection Fenhongse zaoyin/Pink Noise, ‘written’ by contemporary Taiwanese author Hsia Yü (b. 1956). Specifically, the article taps into ideas from deconstruction to illustrate the discursive operations between creative writing (as an event) and (machine) translating in this bilingual collection, with a view to understanding how the machine as translator participates in the negotiation and dissemination of meaning in bilingual writing.

Historiography and the Material Imagination in the Novels of Sarah Waters

Historiography and the Material Imagination in the Novels of Sarah Waters Katharina Boehm The works of British author Sarah Waters have significantly shaped the "extremely active sphere of argument about history and the rediscovery of its elided potentialities" (Middleton and Woods 1) in contemporary literature. Garnering both critical and commercial success, Waters has published five novels to date—three set in the nineteenth century, two set in the 1940s—all of which have won or been nominated for major British book prizes. Scholarly attention has so far concentrated on Waters's neo-Victorian works. The experimental narrative structure and rich intertextual references of these novels define for many critics (e.g., Kohlke 155; Llewellyn 196-97; Kaplan 111-15) some of the characteristic traits of postmodern historiographic metafiction. 1 Building on poststructuralist theorizations of history's textual and discursive nature, Linda Hutcheon has defined historiographic metafiction as a genre that draws attention to the narrativity of the past by exposing "both history and fiction [as] discourses, human constructs, signifying systems" (93). Although critics have begun to investigate the limitations of Hutcheon's influential concept, historiographic metafiction continues to supply a powerful rubric for the interpretation of the contemporary historical novel. As a consequence, research in this field is still dominated by debates that hinge on history's textuality and on the multiform intertextual devices that the historical novel concocts in order to explore this epistemological quandary (see Arias and Pulham, Heilmann and Llewellyn, Mitchell, and Wallace Wolfreys). In this essay, I suggest that approaches that regard the past as a purely textual event run the risk of ignoring the historical novel's rich potential to explore questions concerning the materiality of history. I read three novels [End Page 237] by Waters—Affinity (1999), The Night Watch (2006), and The Little Stranger (2009)—in order to trace an important shift in her literary engagement with the past, arguing that her two latest novels move away from a mode of historiographic metafiction that is centered on history's textuality and towards an approach that concentrates on the affective and disruptive ways in which tactile encounters with architectural places and material objects shape our investments in the past. 2 The essay demonstrates that debates about history and historiography in the contemporary novel can be enriched by being opened both to recent theoretical developments in the fields of object studies and material culture, and to Michel de Certeau's theorization of the nexus between historiography, haunting, and materiality. In a second step, the essay addresses narratorial questions about the possibilities and limits of realism in historical writing that are raised by Waters's representations of the object world. The Prison-House of Historiographic Metafiction The contemporary historical novel has inherited from poststructuralist debates a keen concern with the relationship between historical and literary discourses. In the late 1960s, Hayden White, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others started to give attention to a question that Barthes outlined as follows: is there in fact...any linguistic feature by which we may distinguish on the one hand the mode appropriate to the relation of historical events—a matter traditionally subject, in our culture, to the prescriptions of historical 'science', and by the principle of 'rational' exposition—and on the other hand the mode appropriate to the epic, novel or drama? (145) Barthes, like other poststructuralists, has answered this question in the negative. The influential assumption that these critics share is that history is a discursive construct, characterized by narrativity and fictionality. "History invoked as ultimate reality," Jonathan Culler argues, "manifests itself in narrative constructs, stories designed to yield meaning through narrative ordering" (129). According to White, historiography is centrally shaped by "emplotment"—narrative and linguistic strategies "by which a sequence of events [is] fashioned into a story" (Metahistory 7). These strategies can be analyzed by subjecting historical texts to a formal analysis that operates in ways similar to literary analysis. White distinguishes between "four principal modes of poetic discourse" in historical texts: "the tropes of Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony" (Metahistory 426). The New Historicist focus on "the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (Montrose 20) continued this line of inquiry...

A Conversation with Jerome McGann

The following dialogue evolved in February 2007 from a series of email exchanges with Professor McGann. I was curious about the importance of Manfred in McGann's work and what his most recent thoughts were about Byron's devilishly enigmatic play. I had earlier queried McGann about the significance of Manfred and together we published our dialogue as the epilogue to Byron and Romanticism,1 but I wanted to push McGann to see exactly what he had in mind for staging Byron's notoriously unstageable play. Byron, we recall, said he had 'a horror of the stage'.2 As my conversation with McGann continued, I began to see how and why he wants to bring Manfred, and its author, out of the closet-drama and on to the stage. JS In the time I've known you (roughly twenty years) you seem to have kept going back to Manfred, for one reason or another. What is so alluring about this work? What unfinished business do you have with it, and how is your current project in Stratford (Canada) related to the magnetic pull of Manfred? JM You've lighted on a question you may come to regret - because I have a lot to say here. Yes, Manfred is for me the central Byronic text - as it was, I might point out, for the entire nineteenth century, even in England, which took such a fright from Byron and ran away from him until very recently. Swinburne, who had very harsh (and, I might add, just) things to say about Byron's verse skills - always excepting Don Juan - once wrote that Byron's forte lay in his 'sincerity and strength'.3 This seems to me right, at least in my understanding of Swinburne's comment. I translate him to mean that Byron's writing is like Yeats's Cuchulain fighting the sea. Until he takes up with Don Juan, his work is an assault on the impossible. He makes a drama of wanting to know things that cannot be known and saying things that cannot be said. Even knowing the impossibilities, or discovering them, he presses on. The first two cantos of Childe Harold lay down the pattern. They are an extraordinary, even a preposterous, failure - starting with the prosodic choice of the Spenserian stanza, a choice made in sheer technical ignorance of its resources. Carrying on with it forces him to fight with it, maim it - 'spoil' it, as Paul West long ago taught us to see.4 And out of the event comes Byron's first great success, his first great failure. (I might add, out of it comes as well a renewal of the verse form's technical possibilities.) 'Bloody but unbowed', we might say. But that idea scarcely gets at the situation and the textual event. Through his work, Byron's famous defiance emerges as at once sincere and hypocritical, his strength something that will persist to fall short. The consequence is a philosophic mind that settles for nothing except what is always 'beyond the fitting medium of desire' (CHP, III, 42). Manfred comes on this scene to square Byron's account with this poetry of failure. Without Manfred, Don Juan could not have been written. Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece of the poetry of the impossible because with it he makes impossibility look so easy, so natural. 'In play, there are two pleasures for your choosing / The one is winning, and the other losing' (Don Juan, XIV, 12) - Don Juan is an extended gloss on Manfred's last prophetic words: 'Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die' (III, iv, 151). I began studying Byron in 1963. By 1967 I had come to a very vague sense of what was entailed in Byron's sincerity and strength. Only with many more years of work did I find ways to talk about it that seemed, at least, not perfectly incompetent. 1967 was crucial because that year I and some friends at the University of Chicago founded an experimental theatre company - Cain's Company. Our purpose was to stage works that were regarded as unplayable (in a theatrical sense). We were much influenced by Living Theatre, by Artaud, by Stanislavsky, by Stein, by Brecht. The company was named after our first production, Byron's Cain. …

Neologizing inFinnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau

This essay discusses the portmanteau as a privileged rhetorical figure in Finnegans Wake. It illustrates the manner in which Joyce's use of the portmanteau enables him to establish a nonmathematical and nondialectical relation between the work's minimal structural element and the structure as a whole. The essay draws on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “the virtual” and on Jacques Derrida's notion of “invention” in order to theorize this relation. After reviewing previous discussions of Joyce's technique of word combination, it proceeds to consider the Wakean portmanteau as a textual event, an utterly new object that irrupts within the fabric of language to suspend conventional protocols of interpretation. Within this theoretical framework, the text's minimal structural element is charged with a radically inventive potential. The claim of this essay is that such potential pertains to a movement of thought that unfolds in excess of received hermeneutic paradigms.

The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse by Rebecca Messbarger (review)

1070 Reviews Given the predominant classicizing culture promoted by Leonelio and Guarino, vernacular lyric in Ferrara?to borrow the title of Chapter 2?was slow to establish itself and even slower to react to the experiments of Petrarch's rime. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, the firstindications?analysed in Chapter 5?are to be found in Latin lyrics from the mid-century, in particular those of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (a tentative defender of 'modern' writers in the Politia), and subsequently those of Boiardo. Boiardo's emergence as the outstanding exponent of Petrarchan lyric in the fifteenthcentury is thus set in the context of his association both with the Latin lyric tradition and with individuals prominent in Ferrarese culture at the time of the Council, including his chief (but not native Ferrarese) predecessor in the canzoniere form, Giusto de' Conti. The wealth of information contained in each of Pantani's chapters, on topics ranging from book ownership (Chapter 1) to Humanist debates (Chapter 3) and the contribution of minor poets in the early part of the century (Chapter 2), is immensely valuable, though it threatens at times to overwhelm the reader, and Pantani's style in Italian?elaborate, Latinate, and academic?does not lend itself to quick and easy absorption of the argument. Nevertheless, the patient reader who perseveres will be rewarded with a stimulating and satisfying conclusion in which Pantani rightly em? phasizes just how rapidly the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta entered Ferrarese poetic consciousness once the vernacular was set free from the classicizing constraints of the cultural politics of Leonelio and Guarino, and how widely it was absorbed and reused, not only in the love lyric, but also in religious poetry. This wide-ranging survey should prove of much use to scholars working on many aspects of literature in fifteenth-centuryItaly. ROYAL HOLLOWAY,UNIVERSITY OF LONDON JANEE. EVERSON The Century of Women: Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse. By Rebecca Messbarger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xi + 209pp. ?28. ISBN 0-8020-3652-x. Rebecca Messbarger's volume seeks to throw light on the intricacies of the woman question in eighteenth-century Italy 'through an analysis of the prolific public dis? course about women produced by male and female authorities of the Settecento' (p. 3). To this end she focuseson five'paradigmatic eighteenth-century textual events' (p. 19): the debate on women's education held at the Accademiadei Ricovrati in Padua in 1723, Antonio Conti's 'scientific' misogynist tract (1721), Diamante Medaglia Faini's oration on women's education to the Accademia degli Unanimi (1763), Carlo Sebastiano Franci's article in defence ofwomen published in that most eminent of Ita? lian Enlightenment journals, //caffe,in the 1760s, and Gioseffa Cornoldi Caminer's journal La donna galante ed erudita (1786-88). Women's education was a frequent object of debate, and Chapters 1 and 3 focus precisely on this, giving close analytical readings of the contributions made by men at the 1723 Padua dispute, the changes involved in the transition to the printed version of 1729, the additions at this stage of two pieces written by women, in particular Aretafila Savini de' Rossi's Apologia infavor e degli studii delle donne, and also the ora? tion delivered some fortyyears later by Medaglia Faini, Quali studi convengano alle donne. The author points out not only the differingpositions among male contributors as to whether or not women should receive an education, and if so, what kind, but also the fundamental ambiguity of their positions, the perpetual oscillation between the conviction that women are quite simply incapable of certain types of study and the afflrmation that women risk losing their 'femininity' as a result of educational MLRy 99.4, 2004 1071 excesses. Women's debating techniques are also seen as fundamentally ambivalent inasmuch as they appropriate the modes of male discourse. In the debate on women in the Settecento, startling results sometimes ensue from the enlightened emphasis on a 'scientific' approach. The theories regarding the biological constitution of women put forward in 1721 by Antonio Conti, one of the most renowned exponents of enlightened philosophy, form the topic of Chapter 2. Conti maintained that women's muscles are weaker than...

Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries by Loss Pequeño Glazier, and: 21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics by Marjorie Perloff (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 183 For others it may not. The New York school had forAmerican poetry a significance analogous to that of the Metaphysicals or the Romantics. Silly, sad, and solemn by turns, part of its pleasure lies in the facility with which it moves between the ridiculous and the sublime. It is also direct and honest; an uninitiated reader will find itimmediately engaging. Like any poetry itwill respond to theoretical analysis, but the tighter the theoretical framework, the more its spirit is threatened. Avant-garde poets eschew tradition; that is why they are avant-garde. Yet much ofthis poetry fails within American traditions descending from Poe and Whitman, and was written within the context of a background including Stevens and Williams, and even Eliot and Pound, whom Watkin mentions scarcely at all. Moreover, these poets are defined by their wit. Like the Metaphysicals it is through their wit that they most effectivelyengage the world that they inhabit. But Watkin's prose lacks the easy informality which gives rise to it. His fierce discursive rigour marches sternly towards an impenetrability that is hardly helpful in understanding poetry which is itself not easy. For example: 'The avant-garde must now be located not in a metanarrative nor archaeological superposition , but directly within the contemporary event of the textual encounter itself. The avant-garde is a textual event.' Or, as Frank O'Hara says, 'Happening is just like a little play. [. . .] "I'm going to do this delightful thing, I think, and I hope you'll come and thinkit's delightful"' (Standing Still and Walkingin New York, pp. 16-17). Initiated readers will not need reminding that the New York poets knew their Whitman and Williams, nor that they were quick-witted almost to a fault. For them Watkin's book usefully adds to the sum of knowledge. But it is a book that the publishers have allowed to betray its academic origins. To attract readers who are not examiners a little saving vulgarity is wanted. Watkin had to get his book out, and his publishers have virtuously helped him to do so. But they have failed in their responsibility to readers. Few but librarians and specialists will find the money for this well-argued and thoughtful book, which might easily have been, were times not, alas, as they are, much more widely useful. Clare College, Cambridge R. D. Gooder Digital Poetics: The Making ofE-Poetries. By Loss Pequeno Glazier. (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. 2002. xii + 2i3pp. $54.95 (pbk $24.95). ISBN 0-8173-1074-6 (pbk 0-8173I075 -4). 2ist-Century Modernism: The New' Poetics. By Marjorie Perloff. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2001. ix + 222pp. ?45 (pbk ?12.99). ISBN o-63i-2i969-2(pbko-63i-2i97o-6). These two books, while they do not engage with each other's material, nevertheless re? late, in that both deal with modern poetry,and in one case with the same poet, Charles Bernstein, whose writing reconstitutes words in what Bernstein calls 'dyraphism'?'a dysfunctional fusion of embryonic poets', a 'mis-seaming'. Marjorie Perloff expands this as 'the collaging of items that are not only disparate but have differentsyntactic orders, shifting voices, source and multiple allusions', combined with punning and word-play (Perloff, p. 172; see also Glazier, p. 36). And with that, we are offinto the territory that Glazier explores. He takes in such experiments as Concrete Poetry in the 1950s and explores the poetry that is written digitally. The model is poetry as the play of words, of language whose aleatory appearance cuts out the pretension of the humanist scholar. Glazier's book works at two levels. First, it is informative about the Web (which began in 1969, for military and research purposes in the USA) and its acceleration after 1991, and it reads partially as a series of fact-sheets, complete with 184 Reviews glossary, forthose who already know quite a bit about the Internet's ways and means. (The glossary is occasionally helpful, but it also assumes a fair degree of knowledge already.) In functioning as information, Glazier's book is useful for those who need what he...