Thematic Coherence Research Articles

Impaired coherence of life narratives of patients with schizophrenia.

Self-narratives of patients have received increasing interest in schizophrenia since they offer unique material to study patients’ subjective experience related to their illness, in particular the alteration of self that accompanies schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated the life narratives and the ability to integrate and bind memories of personal events into a coherent narrative in 27 patients with schizophrenia and 26 controls. Four aspects of life narratives were analyzed: coherence with cultural concept of biography, temporal coherence, causal-motivational coherence and thematic coherence. Results showed that in patients cultural biographical knowledge is preserved, whereas temporal coherence is partially impaired. Furthermore, causal-motivational and thematic coherence are significantly impaired: patients have difficulties explaining how events have modeled their identity, and integrating different events along thematic lines. Impairment of global causal-motivational and thematic coherence was significantly correlated with patients’ executive dysfunction, suggesting that cognitive impairment observed in patients could affect their ability to construct a coherent narrative of their life by binding important events to their self. This study provides new understanding of the cognitive deficits underlying self-disorders in patients with schizophrenia. Our findings suggest the potential usefulness of developing new therapeutic interventions to improve autobiographical reasoning skills.

Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China ed. by Alan K. L. Chan, Yuet-Keung Lo, and: Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China ed. by Alan K. L. Chan, Yuet-Keung Lo (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ALAN K. L. CHAN and YUET-KEUNG LO, eds., Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010. vi, 288 pp. US$80 (hb). ISBN 978-1-4384-3217-5 ALAN K. L. CHAN and YUET-KEUNG LO, eds., Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010. v, 375 pp. US$80 (hb). ISBN 978-1-4384-3187-1 With the publication of these two volumes, Chan and Lo have deeply enriched our understanding of early medieval China (220–589 CE). This is the first attempt to assemble an English language conference volume that focuses on both the intellectual and religious history of early medieval China—an incredibly significant era in which Confucianism lost its ideological monopoly, Daoism emerged as an organized religion, and Buddhism became a permanent fixture on China’s cultural landscape. Besides redirecting our focus to this neglected but momentous period, these volumes include a number of outstanding contributions that recast how we should envision early medieval assumptions and values. The good news is both volumes contain insightful articles on Chinese religion. Negatives include the existence of two volumes rather than one, a weak thematic coherence, and their neglect of Confucianism. On the whole, however, these volumes will considerably benefit specialists in pre-modern Chinese culture. These volumes emerge from two conferences, one in Singapore and the other in Shanghai, sponsored by the National University of Singapore. The Philosophy and Religion volume has eleven chapters: five of which concern Xuanxue 玄學, two on Daoism, two on Buddhism, one on reclusion, and the final essay addresses fate. The Interpretation and Literature volume contains nine chapters. The first four treat literary culture. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss literary aspects of Daoism and Buddhism. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss motifs in popular narratives. Since over half of the essays in Interpretation and Literature are about religion, one wonders why two volumes are necessary. The editors explain that, The project was conceived as a multidisciplinary venture. Scholarship does not grow well in insularity; our plan was to bring together in a single book fresh studies on early medieval Chinese philosophy, religion, literature and interpretation, not only to deepen our understanding of these topics but also to open up a view of the interconnections of the early medieval Chinese intellectual enterprise. However, a single volume proved unworkable, given the constraints that publishers face. Still, some of the essays may fit just as nicely in this or in the companion volume. (Interpretation and Literature, pp. 1–2). # Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 2015 DOI: 10.1179/0737769X15Z.00000000021 Journal of Chinese Religions, 43. 1, 89–118, May 2015 Thus, the decision to make two volumes was based on the overabundance of essays, resulting in a somewhat arbitrary thematic division. The quoted text above also indicates that these volumes should be judged based on their success in deepening our understanding of the connections between early medieval philosophy, religion, and literature. A striking contribution made by the Philosophy and Religion volume is that it recasts how we view the philosophical ruminations of the Xuanxue (Learning of the Mysterious Dao 道) movement. Four out of the five essays on this philosophy demonstrate that, rather than being theorists who were solely concerned with metaphysical questions, He Yan 何晏, Wang Bi 王弼, and Xi Kang 嵇康 were also intensely concerned with political and ethical issues. In fact, their discussions of ontology informed their vision of how political order should be instituted. In the volume’s opening essay, “Sage Nature and the Logic of Namelessness,” Alan Chan demonstrates that He Yan perceived wu 無 (nothing, non-being) as a nameless, complete, and harmonious energy source that produces all phenomena in a balanced and ordered manner. The sage embodies wu; thus, he is also harmonious, unbiased, and complete. If he becomes ruler, then all things will be well-ordered because he will choose the right people to administrate. For He Yan, sages are born, not made. In the absence of a sage, the best one can do is to select excellent men as officials. In a much more opaque essay, “Tracing the Dao: Wang Bi’s Theory of Names,” Jude Soo-Meng Chua notes...

Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society ed. by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland (review)

Reviewed by: Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society ed. by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland Charis Messis Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society. Edited by Bronwen Neil and Lynda Garland. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xiv, 218. $119.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-4779-5.) Just because a book has “gender” in the title does not mean that it actually does deal with it. Other than a specific topic, “gender” is a theoretical methodology, a way of looking at things and posing questions. Simply writing about women, men, or eunuchs does not necessarily entail that one is doing “gender studies.” Those topics can equally be approached through traditional scholarly methods that may be brought to bear on any aspect of Byzantine history. If gender scholarship is limited to the repetition of certain commonplace formulas or to banal observations about sexual inequality and does not truly bring “the lens of gender to the study of history,” the results may be interesting, to be sure, but do not deepen our understanding of gender in a society. Two basic observations may be made regarding the book under review. First, in spite of the quality of most of the contributions, the volume takes an approach that, with few exceptions, is far from belonging to gender history and that ultimately leads to the conclusion that there was no gendered discourse in Byzantium, not because it truly did not exist but because the contributors are not looking for it where it did. Second, this type of collection of papers is shaped primarily by the [End Page 148] choice of contributors and their prior interests, and not by an editorial logic that would prioritize theoretical relevance and thematic coherence. Two contributions (Paul Brown and Bronwyn Neil) deal with Western views of Byzantine men and women. The first relates to the military presence of Byzantium in Italy (eighth to eleventh centuries) and the second relates to the image of the empress Eirene (797–802) in various literary texts, primarily Western. In both cases the authors conclude that gender plays a secondary role in the political and cultural confrontation between the Byzantines and the Latins and that the main issue at hand was, in the first case, a denunciation of the “treachery and cunning” of the Byzantines and, in the second case, Eirene’s Iconophile policies (whether viewed positively or negatively). The chapter by Diana Gilliland Wright takes the inverse approach by looking at Byzantine views of Western women, namely Sophia of Montferrat and Cleofe Malatesta who came to Byzantium to marry the sons of Manuel II Palaiologos and tries to understand why they were treated so differently. A series of chapters on aspects of the lives of women in Byzantium constitutes the core of the book. Lynda Garland presents family strategies of investment in monasticism, by examining, through the Typika, the transformation of monasteries into alternative family households, especially on the initiative of aristocratic women. Amelia R. Brown presents the “highlights” of the education of women throughout the whole of Byzantine history. Sarah Gador-Whyte studies the masculine and feminine qualities that hymnographers attribute to the Virgin during the sixth and seventh centuries. Liz James presents the genealogical tree of many women of the family of Constantine the Great, their role in the creation and cultivation of political alliances, and the way in which their representation changed with every fluctuation in political circumstances. For his part, Shaun Tougher discusses men and eunuchs in Byzantium and underlines the importance of beards in defining manhood after the seventh century. Tougher regards the general preference for beards as “a sign of the increasing Hellenisation and Christianisation of the empire and also a sign of a desire to enhance masculinity, perhaps in response to a sense of political and military crisis” (p. 161). The volume closes with the contribution of Damian Casey that is also the most interesting when it comes to the actual issue of gender. In this very stimulating paper, Casey examines various Christian readings of gender, the body, and sexuality, underlining the ambivalence of those terms and the complex relationship that they had with spiritual authority. In conclusion, with the exception of some contributions that pose the issue...

“Owning” the personal past: Adolescents’ and adults’ autobiographical narratives and ratings of memories of recent and distant events

Adults and adolescents are characterised as having different perspectives on their personal or autobiographical memories. Adults are recognised as having vivid recollections of past events and as appreciating the meaning and significance of their autobiographical memories. In development, these qualities are noted as absent as late as adolescence. To evaluate the assumption of developmental differences, we directly compared autobiographical memories of adults and adolescents drawn from each of several periods in the past, using measures of narrative quality (coded independently) and participants’ own subjective ratings of their memories. Adults’ narratives of events from the previous year and for the “most significant” event of their lives were coded as more thematically coherent relative to those of adolescents’; the groups did not differ on thematic coherence of narratives of early-life events (ages 1–5 and 6–10 years). The ratings that adults and adolescents provided of their autobiographical memories were similar overall; differences were more apparent for early-life events than for more recent events and indicated stronger mnemonic experiences among adolescents than adults. The pattern of findings suggests that whereas adults have more sophisticated narrative tools for describing the significance of events and their relation to the corpus of autobiographical memories, adolescents as well as adults have vivid recollective experiences as well as personal and subjective perspective on the events of their lives and their memories thereof.

Characterizing lifespan development of three aspects of coherence in life narratives: a cohort-sequential study.

The ability to narrate stories and a synchronic self-concept develop in the pre- and primary school years. Life story theory proposes that both developments extend to an even later developmental stage, that is, to adolescents' acquisition of a coherent life story. Cross-sectional evidence supports the emergence of a life story in adolescence, but is mixed in terms of later life span development. The present study examines longitudinally the development of global coherence in life narratives across almost the entire life span. Starting in 2003, a total of 172 participants narrated their lives over the course of 8 years (aged 16, 20, 24, 28, 44, and 69 when last tested) resulting in up to 4 life narratives per person. Three aspects of global life narrative coherence--temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence--were measured with global ratings and predicted by their respective textual indicators. Children lacked most aspects of global coherence. Almost all indicators of temporal and causal-motivational coherence increased substantially across adolescence up to early adulthood, as did thematic coherence, which continued to develop throughout middle adulthood.

Scelus Femineum: Adultery and Revenge in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica Book 2 (98–241) and Seneca's Agamemnon

This article makes the case for the importance of Seneca's Agamemnon as a model, in terms of both language and content, for the account of the Lemnian massacre in the second Book of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, an episode which has been much discussed or disputed because of its extensive and digressive character. It will thus become evident that the semantics of adultery and crime, combined with those of vengeance elaborated on in the Agamemnon, have exercised a significant influence on Valerius’ detailed sketching of the slaughter conducted by the Lemnian women as well as on the thematic coherence of the second Book as a whole.

Arthur of the North: Histories, Emotions, and Imaginations: Introduction

Arthur of the North: Histories, Emotions, and ImaginationsIntroduction Bjørn Bandlien, Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, and Sif Rikhardsdottir The articles in this special issue are based on papers presented at the First International Conference of the Nordic Branch of the International Arthurian Society, which took place at the University of Oslo in May 2013. The aim of the conference was to mark the establishment and thus inaugurate the newly formed branch. Its primary goals were (1) to map the state of the field of Arthurian studies in the North, and thus lay the groundwork for future activities and collaboration among the members of the network, and (2) to introduce the Nordic branch to the International Arthurian Society as a whole by inviting to the conference prominent scholars representing other linguistic and cultural communities of the society, such as Latin, French, German, English, Dutch, and Welsh. The objective of the conference was therefore to promote international collaboration and comparative research, and to foreground the nature and potential of the studies of the transmission of Arthurian literature in medieval Scandinavia. The main goals of this special issue are closely related to the main objectives of the conference, that is, to present current innovative scholarly work on the Nordic Arthurian material and thereby emphasize the relevance of this material for Arthurian studies in general. The conference, as well as this publication, may certainly be seen as a part of a recent trend that promotes the value of cross-cultural research of Arthurian material and that seeks to highlight the significance of [End Page 1] Nordic Arthurian literary material for gaining a better understanding of the development of indigenous literary traditions.1 The papers presented at the conference covered a wide variety of topics, including literary transmission, cultural adaptations and social contexts, feelings and cognition, senses and the psyche, and identity and the self. The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion with invited scholars representing the various literary traditions. The roundtable discussions addressed the relevance of cross-cultural research for Arthurian studies. To paraphrase some of the scholars’ ideas: Frank Brandsma emphasized the nature of texts as agents of cultural transmission, and the dynamics and continuity of this transmission process across the artificial borders created by modern languages and cultural and historical contexts. Keith Busby focused on the role of manuscripts when studying the transmission process, and touched upon some of the problematic issues related to varying editorial practices. Cora Dietl argued that by focusing on the process of translatio, our research contributes to an increased sense of European political, cultural, and didactic history. Siân Echard emphasized the dual nature of all individual literary traditions, including Latin: that is, their centrality in certain contexts and simultaneous invisibility and peripherality with regard to others. It is therefore crucial to combine detailed knowledge of the specific with comparative and collaborative endeavors in order to reach a better understanding of how the various traditions feed into each other. While the conference papers reflected a wide array of topics, revealing a vibrant research community in Nordic Arthurian studies, the present issue focuses on three thematic strands that seemed to stand out as overarching themes. The editors furthermore consider these themes to represent fertile, new, and innovative approaches to Nordic Arthurian literature, which moreover have significant theoretical or critical relevance beyond the borders of Nordic studies. Unfortunately, many very promising papers and topics therefore had to be excluded to maintain thematic coherence of the special issue. The thematic strands are conveyed in the title of this special issue, and of this introduction, and focus on the making and transmission of histories, emotions, and imaginations. The concept of history here conveys the yet unexplored [End Page 2] territory of the reception history of medieval Nordic Arthurian literature, the representation of history in the extant stories, and finally the history of the manuscript variants and textual representation. Emotion and imagination are interlinked in their foci on the internal senses and cognition, while the approaches adopted here by the authors are very varied and range from linguistic analysis of emotive representation to landscape studies from a cognitive (or emotive) perspective. In the first article, Marianne Kalinke, in her plenary address, directs...

Los tientos 68, 65 y 67 de <em>Obras de música:</em> Estudio analítico de tres obras maestras de Cabezón

El presente estudio se centra en tres tientos que sin duda pueden contarse entre las obras maestras de Cabezón: los números 68, 65 y 67 de Obras de música. Este orden en particular nos permite viajar analíticamente desde un tiento largo y brillante con gran unidad modal, hasta un tiento corto e introspectivo que sin embargo incluye tres secciones, cada una de las cuales está en un modo distinto, pasando por un tiento de longitud mediana que demuestra ambigüedad estructural entre dos modos. El mundo tonal de Cabezón (y también de su tiempo) se encuentra representado en estos tres tientos en toda su riqueza y variedad. Abordamos tres aspectos de cada uno de estos tientos: organización formal, coherencia temática y relationes motívicas entre diversos sujetos, y organización modal. Lejos de ser aspectos aislados dentro del proceso musical, veremos que estos tres elementos están íntimamente relacionados en estas obras de Cabezón, y juntos constituyen y determinan las estructuras compositivas que precisamente definen estos tientos como obras maestras.

Preschoolers’ narrative representations and childhood adaptation in an ethnoracially diverse sample

This investigation evaluated relations between preschoolers’ representational content and coherence in the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB) at age four as related to child adjustment at age six. A community sample of 250 preschoolers (50% female; Mage= 49.05 months, SD = 2.9; 46% Hispanic, 18% Black, 11.2% White, 0.4% Asian, and 24.4% multiracial) completed assessments of relational representations using the MSSB at age four and of child adjustment at age six, including a measure of child-reported depressive symptomatology and observer ratings of child aggression during a Bobo doll task and inhibitory control during a delay of gratification task. Regression analyses demonstrated prospective relations between negative mother representation and less inhibitory control, negative child representation and higher aggression, and narrative coherence and more inhibitory control. Interactive analyses revealed relations between negative mother representation and difficulties in inhibitory control among White children and weaker relations among Black children. Prospective relations between narrative coherence and increased inhibitory control were less pronounced for Hispanic children. Findings indicate that preschoolers’ narratives can reveal the thematic content and structural coherence of their internalized beliefs and expectations of self and (m)other. Associations between representations and children’s adaptation have clear implications for representational processes and interventions in development.

Contextualizing the self: the emergence of a biographical understanding in adolescence.

In adolescence, remembering the personal past and understanding what kind of person one is intertwine to form a story of one's life as the most extant, informative, and flexible form of self-representation. In adolescence, the striving for self-coherence translates into a quest for global coherence of the life story. We suggest that contextualizing is a fifth means for creating global coherence in life narratives besides the cultural concept of biography, temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence. We present three kinds of contextualizing in life narratives, the temporal macrostructure, sociohistorical contextualizing of one's life, and hierarchical and linear segmenting of the text and life. These three forms of contextualizing in life narratives by their authors are complemented by three forms of contextual influences on life narratives analyzed by researchers, namely the historical, personal, and communicative situation in which they are recounted. Contextualizing is exemplified by the life narrative of a young migrant.

“The Time When … The Place Where”: Chronotopes and Chronologies in Love’s Labour’s Lost

William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost notoriously confronts readers and playgoers with a number of puzzles linked to its representation of time and space, resulting in thematic and generic controversies, such as its refusal to end in marriage, “like an old play” (5.2.856). Careful study of unfolding narrative events reveals three overlapping temporal frameworks that render the comedy’s unfolding plot at times cyclical and slow, at times measured and moderate, at times linear and fast. These frameworks are accompanied by such spatial juxtapositions as private study vs. public ceremony, bucolic nature vs. courtly artifice, and monastic asceticism vs. worldly pleasures. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, which posits the indissoluble connection of time and space in literature, this article will identify three temporo-spatial frames that we have termed the chronotope of the retreat , the chronotope of the embassy , and the chronotope of the comic idyll . Each proves a locus or matrix where narrative events, cultural associations, and generic expectations intermingle to create a complex experience for playgoers and readers. Familiarity with these three models renders the play’s purportedly shocking conclusion rather more topically apt, generically logical, and chronotopically inevitable. The resulting temporo-spatial medley generates hitherto unrecognized comic subgenres, thematic coherence, and structural cohesiveness in a play often dismissed as haphazardly plotted or formally inconsistent.

Deux plumes, un texte: hybridité ou cohérence? Aster. Mémoire de la danse

A brief short story in Arabic, «Astīr: Ḏkirat al-raqs» (Memory of the dance), is characterized by its hybridity and by an innovative textual history. It is the result of a collaborative, evolving writing process (écriture), both African and Arab, at one time Sudanese and Palestinian, male and female, narrative and lyrical. Published online in 2002, by the Sudanese novelist Khālid ʿUways under the title Astīr qissa qasīra lam taktamil (Aster: an unfinished short story), it was completed a year later by the Palestinian poet Dunyā l-Amal Ismāʿīl, who, while retaining a thematic and stylistic coherence, establishes her own imprint, adding (for instance) Dhākirat al-raqs as a subtitle.

Narratives and traits in personality development among New Zealand Māori, Chinese, and European adolescents

Narrative and trait levels of personality were assessed in a sample of 268 adolescents from age 12 to 21 from New Zealand Māori, Chinese, and European cultures. Adolescents narrated three critical events and completed a Big Five personality inventory. Each narrative was coded for causal and thematic coherence. NZ Chinese adolescents reported lower levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and higher levels of neuroticism, than NZ Māori or European adolescents. Cultural differences were also evident in narrative coherence. Adolescents in all three groups demonstrated age-related increases in thematic coherence, but only NZ European adolescents demonstrated the expected age-related increases in causal coherence. Narrative identity and traits were distinct aspects of personality for younger adolescents, but were linked for middle and older adolescents. These findings support the importance of both narrative identity and traits in understanding personality development in adolescents across cultures.

Justification from Fictional Narratives

Abstract Philosophers generally accept that sound arguments or strong empirical evidence for a proposition can provide some justification for believing it. Can make-believe stories do the same? In this paper, I examine an argument that denies that they can, and I assess one popular response to this argument, which seeks to assimilate fictional narratives such as novels and plays to thought experiments. I argue that this analogy helps explain how fictional narratives can justify propositions at what I call the "micro" level but not at the "macro" level, where other factors such as thematic coherence and the intellectual character of the author typically come into play.

On the Trans-Siberian with Sylvester Stallone: National Identity and Brand Identity in Post-socialist Russia

In our short paper we look at how certain brands in post-socialist Russia appeal to consumers’ patriotism in order to build brand identity. In order to ensure thematic coherence, we restrict our discussion to the alcohol sector. In the first part, we analyse the packaging of certain vodka and brandy brands. Our focus then shifts to beer and specifically the Facebook page of AB-InBev’s ‘Siberian Crown’ brand (entitled ‘The Map of Russian Pride’). Our paper is conceptual, and we use a visual studies methodology following Schroeder (2002) and Manning (2010). As we demonstrate, a number of brands in today’s Russia generate certain types of myths, both about Russia and Russianness and – by extension – about themselves as brands. They do so by recreating the past, or rather, by carefully selecting from that past those elements which contribute to the grand narrative that is both the brand, and the nation. Our paper’s contributions lie in a number of areas. First of all, it adds to the literature on social media networks, and especially to discussions of the role those networks play in branding. Second, it explores the relationship between building brand legitimacy and (re)constructing national identity. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it extends the pioneering work on ‘iconic’ branding by Holt (2006) into a non-Western context. Given our findings, more work clearly needs to be done on the difference that social networks make to brands, on the role they play both in legitimizing the brand and in promoting myths of national identity – not just in Russia but in a wide variety of markets.

A longitudinal study of global coherence in life narratives from age 8 to 70

When telling the own life story the individual is challenged to construct a coherent narrative, which is a cognitive and narrative performance. Not only the listener, but also the narrator wants to bring the multiple single events of his life into a coherent organization in order to demonstrate the own biographical development and to justify how one has become the person the one is at present. In a longitudinal study a total of 531 life narratives were collected in three waves. Since 2003 the participants of six age groups (presently 16, 20, 24, 28, 44 and 70 years old, 145 participants) told us their life stories every four years. We studied the development of global coherence of life narratives over almost the entire lifespan (8-70 years) by coding linguistic indicators at the level of propositions, by rating the global impression of listeners, by analyzing in terms of how well-formed the beginnings and endings of the life stories are and whether they follow a linear temporal order. The findings of the third wave replicate prior cross-sectional findings on development of global coherence in life narratives across adolescence and confirm them longitudinally. Temporal coherence is developed by midadolescence. By the age of 12, the majority of life narratives began with birth, ended in the present and followed mainly a linear temporal order. Regarding the overarching linear temporal macrostructure, it turned out that from age 20 on, the use of well-formed beginnings and endings and the maintenance of a comprehensible linear temporal order were well established. Causal-motivational coherence is developed by young adulthood and thematic coherence only in mid-adulthood.

Effective and Robust Query-Based Stemming

Stemming is a widely used technique in information retrieval systems to address the vocabulary mismatch problem arising out of morphological phenomena. The major shortcoming of the commonly used stemmers is that they accept the morphological variants of the query words without considering their thematic coherence with the given query, which leads to poor performance. Moreover, for many queries, such approaches also produce retrieval performance that is poorer than no stemming, thereby degrading the robustness. The main goal of this article is to present corpus-based fully automatic stemming algorithms which address these issues. A set of experiments on six TREC collections and three other non-English collections containing news and web documents shows that the proposed query-based stemming algorithms consistently and significantly outperform four state of the art strong stemmers of completely varying principles. Our experiments also confirm that the robustness of the proposed query-based stemming algorithms are remarkably better than the existing strong baselines.

Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block (review)

Reviewed by: Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block Karen Coats Block, Francesca Lia . Love in the Time of Global Warming. Holt, 2013. [240p]. ISBN 978-0-8050-9627-9 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10. After a massive earthquake and tsunami devastate Los Angeles and possibly the entire U.S., Penelope is alone in her seaside home when looters come, one of them a mysterious man named Merk, who insists that she take his van and go find her parents with a map he has provided. The map launches Pen on a journey that loosely follows the exploits of Odysseus, re-imagined, in Block's familiar dreamlike fashion, in the ruined locales of her beloved city. Pen encounters the brutal, genetically engineered giants who are responsible for the earthquake and whose creation is linked to her father, a former scientist who incurred the wrath of his partner, Kronen, when he protested his experiments. She also attracts a crew of survivors: Hex, a beautiful transman living among the lotus eaters; Ez, a boy enslaved by a Circe-like character named Beatrix; and Ash, a strikingly handsome boy with an alluring voice. Over the course of their journey, Pen and Hex and then Ez and Ash fall in love and face the terrors of their new world together, but Pen's goal of finding her family never wavers. Block's self-conscious efforts to fuse multiple mythologies and genres has the logical weakness common to dreams: the plot is disjointed and often unsatisfying, with convenient appearances of Merk whenever Pen comes to a dead end, and magic elements appearing randomly to explain the otherwise inexplicable, not to mention the completely unrealistic and wish-fulfilling conclusion. Like a dream, however, what holds the novel together is a consistent emotional tone, here one of exhausted determination in the face of loss and mourning, rendered aesthetically beautiful, though gory, by Block's prose. The result is more collage than story, offering only tenuous narrative or thematic coherence, but diverse readers will certainly latch on to different, undeniably sparkly bits. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Stomaching the Salon: The Sense of Taste in Le Tintamarr e’s “Boulangerie du Louvre” and Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846

Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 appears to be devoted to the textual transposition of visual experience. Yet the text features a coherent body of tropes pertaining to the sense of taste—the physiological sense of flavor perception—and the gastronomic field more generally. These, I argue, are central to Baudelaire’s attempt to engage with a non-elite and non-specialist audience. The gustatory tropes bespeak the influence of journalism on the Salon de 1846 , and in particular a contemporaneous strand of “gastronomic” art criticism: the 1840s “Boulangerie du Louvre” series from the “petit journal” Le Tintamarre , known and contributed to by Baudelaire. Through a comparative textual analysis of the two critical works, I show how Baudelaire adopts and adapts these culinary tropes. While Le Tintamarre uses the sense of taste to satirize the Salon, Baudelaire employs it to conceptualize and heighten the sensorial and corporeal pleasures of art for a bourgeois readership.

Topic and discourse structure in West Greenlandic agreement constructions by Anna Berge (review)

Reviewed by: Topic and discourse structure in West Greenlandic agreement constructions by Anna Berge Louis-Jacques Dorais Topic and discourse structure in West Greenlandic agreement constructions. By Anna Berge. (Studies in the native languages of the Americas.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington), 2011. Pp. xviii, 446. ISBN 9780803216457. $75 (Hb). This book is a reworked version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation completed in 1997. It won the Mary R. Haas Award presented by the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), but unfortunately, it had been held up in review for an unusually long period of time. Its publication is, thus, especially welcome. [End Page 173] Anna Berge's objective is to provide readers with an analysis of West Greenlandic agreement constructions based on the structure of discourse rather than on a traditional syntactic approach, by stressing the primacy of topic over the roles of subject and object. Her motivation for so doing stems from two factors: (i) the inadequacy of a purely syntactic analysis for describing ergative languages such as West Greenlandic (the Inuit dialect spoken on the western coast of Greenland), and (ii) the fact that studying syntax through decontextualized sentences entails various problems, including a high number of exceptions that the theory cannot explain without having recourse to nonsyntactic elements (e.g. information flow, 'psychological subject'). The study uses spoken West Greenlandic texts as raw materials—totaling more than 600 clauses—that B collected in the field by interviewing two local consultants in their native language, and by asking two more to talk freely about their personal recollections. All of the data appear in the appendix at the end of the book, with their morphological analyses and English translations. Data analysis is generally correct, except for a small number of errors that do not impair the validity of the study. The book is divided into five chapters. It opens with an introduction discussing West Greenlandic grammar, its role (and that of other Inuit dialects) in syntactic theory, approaches to the study of discourse, and their application to discourse structure in West Greenlandic. This is followed by three core chapters that deal respectively with topic and theme as discourse roles, ergativity as a reflection of topic status, and a discussion of the relevance of switch-reference vs. thematic coherence and topic continuity. Each of these core chapters starts by positioning the chapter's matter within general linguistic theory, before describing in detail what West Greenlandic data analysis has to tell us about the topic under examination. The book ends with a conclusion summarizing its findings and hinting at some more general extrapolations that stem from West Greenlandic discourse analysis. The author's core argument is that in West Greenlandic, the chief factor governing agreement marking is not strictly syntactic, because studies of the language, whether dealing with ergativity, transitivity, or the difference between the ergative and antipassive verbal voices, must always involve nonsyntactic elements in their explanation. This suggests that discourse is particularly important in grammatical analysis. If discourse can predictably affect syntactic constructions, it must possess predictable structural components—as syntax and semantics do—that are necessary to an adequate description of linguistic structure. Several theories have been used in studying West Greenlandic, but without a comprehensive description of what is needed to speak the language, and this at all levels of linguistic complexity (including semantics, discourse, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics), a linguist's analysis risks being tributary to the theory to which he or she adheres. According to B, in order to be satisfactory, the study of discourse must consider central issues such as its effect on syntax, the patterns of information flow, and the thematic development of a text, as well as the sociocultural context within which a text is produced. The central premise of her study is that certain constructions that mark textual cohesion in West Greenlandic can best be understood by assuming that discourse roles such as topic—rather than syntactic roles such as subject or object—are the most relevant structural items. This means that discourse must be viewed as a structure, rather than...