Thematic Unity Research Articles

Book Review: The Thematic Unity of the Book of the Twelve, written by Jason T. LeCureux

Book Review: The Thematic Unity of the Book of the Twelve, written by Jason T. LeCureux

“Strangers in Our Own Land”: John Kneubuhl, Modern Drama, and Hawai‘i Five-O

Widely acclaimed a foundational Oceanic playwright, Samoan American dramatist John Kneubuhl also wrote dozens of television scripts for programs such as The Fugitive and The Wild Wild West . As with his stage-dramas, many of these teleplays represent a masterful orchestration of diverse cultural traditions—an aesthetic nowhere more clear than in “Strangers in Our Own Land” (1968). In this early episode of Hawaii Five-O , Kneubuhl looks to his past as a playwright-cum-screenwriter and anticipates his future as Oceania’s foremost postcolonial dramatist. I argue that “Strangers in Our Own Land” reads as an adaptation of The Adding Machine (1923), the famous expression-ist play written by Elmer Rice, with whom Kneubuhl studied at Yale in the 1940s. Alluding to The Adding Machine , Kneubuhl offers a version of the play in which the anomic Mr. Zero becomes Benny Kalua (Simon Oakland), a native Hawaiian nightclub owner driven to murder by his participation in Honolulu’s exploitative tourist industry. “Strangers in Our Own Land” also evokes Kneubuhl’s earlier stage and screen works as well as intertexts such as John Dominis Holt’s “On Being Hawaiian” (1964). This small-screen drama should therefore be understood as a pivotal text that exemplifies the formal and thematic unity of Kneubuhl’s literary oeuvre.

Some Suggestions to Integrate the Self-Disorder Hypothesis of Schizophrenia

Some Suggestions to Integrate the Self-Disorder Hypothesis of Schizophrenia Giovanni Stanghellini (bio) Keywords hermeneutic, person, phenomenology, self-disorder, schizophrenia A significant cluster of complaints of persons affected by schizophrenia, for example, their feeling ephemeral, lacking core identity, being affected by a diminished sense of existing as a self-present subject, point to the disruptions of structural aspects of the core self. These and similar disturbances aggregate significantly and selectively in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, occur and are detectable in adolescents at risk of future schizophrenic disorder, and have a tendency to persist. All this led to the proposal that the generative disorder in schizophrenia is a disorder of the self (Parnas and Sass 2011). The phenomenological notion of the self serves to investigate the fact that we live our conscious life in the first-person perspective. This basic form of self-experience is implicitly, pre-reflexively, immediately, non-conceptually, non-observationally manifest. Such a core sense of self refers to a crucial sense of self-sameness, of existing as a unified, unique, and embodied subject of experience that is at one with oneself at any given moment. When this basic sense of self is disturbed, the person is inclined to experience both a kind of exaggerated self-consciousness (hyper-reflexivity; Sass 1992) and a concomitant fading in the tacit, pre-verbal feeling of existing as a living and unified subject of awareness (diminished self-affection). These changes in the basic structures of subjectivity are accompanied by an alteration of the very structure of the field of awareness, that leads to an emergent, particular way of experiencing which is infused by a change in the focus with which objects and meanings emerge from the background context, as well as to an altered emotional and conceptual ‘grip‘ on the world, a mutual amplification of the growing dissolution of the sense of existing as a subject with a disturbing and alienating self-scrutiny, and an increasing morbid objectification of one’s own psychic processes, including thinking, perceiving, and acting. The ongoing empirical validation of the self-disorder hypothesis of schizophrenia represents an important advance in the recent history of schizophrenia research. Yet, there are several features that still need to be investigated. This paper is a sympathetic attempt to focus on those aspects of the psychopathology of schizophrenia that have remained under-described in this perspective. A tentative list includes the pheno-phenotype, emotions, person’s position-taking, and personal history. [End Page 213] Pheno-phenotype The principal instrument that has been developed to investigate changes or abnormalities of phenomenal experience in the context of the self-disorder hypothesis of schizophrenia is called examination of anomalous self-experiences (EASE). This is a symptom checklist for semi-structured exploration of experiential anomalies that may be considered as disorders of basic self-awareness. The EASE does not cover all potential anomalies of experience, but mainly focuses on the disorders of the self. An example is that perceptual disorders are not explored, as well as other crucial domains of the life-world of persons with schizophrenia (e.g., emotionality). Thus, a more comprehensive instrument to assess the schizophrenic phenol-phenotype (Stanghellini and Rossi 2014) is needed. This interview should explore systematically all the fundamental dimensions of the life-world, including lived time, space, otherness, embodiment, materiality, and so on, as well as self-hood, rather than mainly focusing on disorders of minimal self-awareness. Emotions The primacy of disordered mood in the conceptualization of schizophrenia is a Leimotiv in clinical phenomenology (Stanghellini and Rosfort 2013). Anomalous emotions have been considered the core of the life-world, the ‘spatializingtemporalizing’ generative nucleus from which the transformation of the life-world originates, not just one of its features. In classic phenomenological literature, the schizophrenic mood has been variously characterized as perplexity (Ratlosigkeit), stage-fright (Trema), and delusional mood (Wahnstimmung), as well as loss of vital contact with reality (perte du contact vital), loss of natural self-evidence (Selbstverstaendlichkeit), ontological anxiety, and crisis of the vital drive (Lebensdrang). An outstanding example is Conrad’s (1958) ‘das Trema,’ a paradoxical mixture of anguish, hope, despair, and suspicion whereby reality becomes suspended between meaninglessness and the imminent revelation...

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.

Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice

Shirley Verrett once asked an interviewer: When you hear my sound, would you think it's a black The interviewer replied without hesitation: No. Verrett responds, That's it. And people told me this a long time ago. So, it mixes me up a little bit. (Schmidt--Garre 2000) Vocal timbre is commonly believed to be an unmanipulable attribute, akin to a sonic fingerprint. (1) Because the arises from inside the body, quotidian discourse tends to refer to someone's vocal sounds as inborn, natural, and true expressions of the person. What, then, are we to make of the common notion that a person's race is audible in her voice? While it has been conclusively demonstrated that many of the physiognomic aspects historically employed as evidence of a person's race--including skin color, hair texture, and dialect or accent (2)--actually evidence nothing more than the construction of race according to the ideological values of beholders, vocal timbre continues to elude such deconstruction. (3) Recent critical thought on the intermingling of the physical senses, including the so-called sensory turn in anthropology, new materialist philosophies, and recent advances in science, technology, sound studies, and media studies, underscores the need for scholarship that recognizes the and vocal categories as culturally conditioned material entities. (4) Trends such as the metaphorical notion of having voice (5) have to some degree obscured the material and multisensory aspects of voice. Conceived within the specific context of musicology and the general context of the humanities, this article seeks to demonstrate how the re-framing of implied by sensory and material inquiries redraws the topology of voice. I believe that this exercise may offer a deepened understanding of racial dynamics as they play out in our interactions with voice. Firstly, I oppose the common metaphor that equates with unified subjectivity--an association that assum[es] myths of constancy, coherence, and universality (6Ira Sadoff, quoted in Wheeler, 2008:37)--and instead examine the in its concrete specificity, as an unfolding event articulated through a particular sensing and sensed body. Secondly, I take issue with musical research that has traditionally construed as sound (or even conflated it with notations in a score), and instead suggest that because is always already materially grounded across all points of contact, we might understand it as corporeally enacted throughout all acts of voicing, transduction, and reception. (7) In short, I wish to offer vocal research that centers on the material, sonorous, and sensory as it is produced and imagined. Encouraged by the critical discourse enabled by the aforementioned sensory turn in anthropology, history, and philosophy, I submit four contentions about the ways in which vocal timbre is racially framed, and offer two interventions in the form of analytical models. The first two contentions address distinct, but nonetheless intermingling and reinforcing, perceptions of vocal timbre as an indicator of race, bearing in mind the fact that vocal sounds are never experienced in a purely sonorous realm, divorced from contextual information. Rather, non-sonic aspects, including preconceptions of race, tend to influence how sound is perceived. My third and fourth contentions deal with the definition and subsequent analysis of voice. Both claims account for the fact that each vocal sound uttered is materially produced and through that process imprinted onto the vocalizer's body and therefore, in time, becomes part of the vocalizer's vocal sound; and both recognize the complexity that this adds to any attempt at thinking through and race. I hence propose, drawing on concepts from dance and choreography, a theoretical and analytical framework that can address as the product of both societal shaping and individual articulation and materiality. …

Sources of Unity and Disunity in Sociology

In this essay I will present some ideas on the themes of unity and disunity in our field. It will be a sociological analysis of our own house, a kind of sociology of knowledge about sociology. I will not only consider internal features of the discipline but also will move out of doors and consider our institutional embeddedness in the academy, as well as in larger societal, political, and cultural environments. It is rare that sociologists use their own tools to analyze themselves, but it important and profitable to do so. I use the terms “unity” and “disunity” in the title. Neither term is very clear in its meaning. My subject is sufficiently complex, however, that a single term with a single referent will not do. By “unity” I mean commitment to a common culture and mission, a sense of solidarity, lack of conflict, and a generally positive attitude toward others in one’s social category (in this case, other sociologists). By “disunity” I mean the opposite of each of the factors making for unity.

Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays By Charles Parsons

Given its author’s thoroughly deserved reputation for meticulous scholarship and extensive knowledge of the philosophy of mathematics and its history, coupled with the fact that he has himself been a major contributor to it in his own right, this collection of a dozen of his essays, spanning the last 25 years, must be one which anyone with a serious interest in the subject will wish to consult. Although each of them, save the opening essay, has been previously published, their collection into a single volume has some of the usual advantages – convenience of access, a degree of thematic unity and additional notes and references to relevant work, both by others and by Parsons himself, which has appeared since their original publication. The present volume is a sequel to From Kant to Husserl (2012). Both volumes are selections of essays which, as Parsons admits, ‘leave out much of the relevant history considered as a whole’ – neither makes any claim to presenting a comprehensive survey. Omissions the author himself notes are various figures such as Zermelo, Skolem and Herbrand, whose contribution was mainly mathematical rather than philosophical, and, perhaps more surprisingly, Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap and the Vienna Circle. Among those on which he does not comment in these essays, one might mention figures such as Dummett, Benacerraf, Field and others, who in one way or another have exerted a significant influence on work in the philosophy of mathematics in the latter part of the last century and beginnings of this one, and movements or directions associated with them (renewed interest in intuitionism inspired by Dummett’s work, Field’s unorthodox nominalism, structuralism in its various forms, and neo-logicism – and, of course, Parsons himself has made important contributions in some of these areas).1

The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” by David Watt Elon Lang The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series” By David Watt. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2013. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo14387537.html In The Making of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” David Watt takes on one of Middle English literary scholarship’s persistent interpretive challenges: to characterize the thematic and formal unity in the sequence of disparate poems and other texts by the early fifteenth-century London poet Thomas Hoccleve that modern scholars simply dub the Series. Characterizing this compilation has been complicated by Hoccleve’s bibliographic record, which includes four surviving holograph manuscripts, one of which preserves a copy of the whole Series in Hoccleve’s own hand. Scholars have long been interested in the Series because of its pseudo-autobiographical narrative frame, in which a first person narrator named Thomas discusses the process of composing and assembling the book as it is being written—transforming it into something quite different from what he originally intended. This narrator also describes the process of recovering from a mental illness and reforming his moral reputation in his community, prompting numerous critics to analyze the Series in terms of Hoccleve’s psychology and rhetorical strategies. Watt, however, encourages us to view the narrative of Thomas’s ad hoc process of composition and compilation as a crucial part of the narrative of his illness and recovery. Watt argues that Thomas’s story about how his book changes over time as he imagines the needs of his readers serves as Hoccleve’s model for spiritual reform. Part of Watt’s argument is traditionally historicist, in which he reads the narratives of personal reform and textual assembly in the Series against the backdrop of the ecumenical Council of Konstanz (1414–1418) and its goal to reform the Church in the wake of the Great Schism. Hoccleve would have had this Council on his mind while writing parts of the Series due to his clerical work in England’s Office of the Privy Seal—through which the English government communicated with its ambassadors at the Council. While the conciliar context alone is an innovation in Hoccleve criticism, Watt grounds this reading in a detailed study of manuscript evidence to illustrate how Hoccleve conceptualized [End Page 134] the purpose of his texts and their functions for his readers. As such, Watt provides the most convincing account yet published on the formal and thematic unity of the Series. Watt finds this unity in the way the text dramatizes its “making”—its piecemeal assembly as both a composition and material book over time—as a model for personal moral reform. This model shows reform to be fraught with the same challenges as textual production: an individual’s own problems, external interventions by other people, and problems with unforeseen worldly circumstances. The strength of Watt’s argument is in how it rests on the premise that “the Series’ coherence as a unit of analysis depends on both literary and bibliographic principles” (14). With this multi-modal approach, Watt organizes his book into chapters that focus on each of the four surviving manuscripts that Hoccleve made himself, with a fifth chapter on one of the most significant scribal copies of the Series. In his first chapter, Watt considers how the various dedicatees of short occasional verses in Huntington Library MS HM 111 (which does not contain any part of the Series) compare with the audiences Hoccleve seems to envision for different parts of the Series. Watt’s comparisons reveal what he calls a “stratified” audience that includes members of the reading public, Hoccleve’s bureaucratic colleagues, and his noble patrons—each of whom were invited “to judge his texts by imagining how well they would have served the needs of other readers” (40). Although Watt does not consider this a call for empathy, he does suggest that an audience’s perception of other readers might lay the foundations for personal moral reform by considering other individuals as models. In the second chapter, Watt explains how fifteenth-century English readers voraciously sought redemption from sin in vernacular religious texts. As a representative example, Watt...

Death does not become her: An examination of the public construction of female American soldiers as liminal figures

AbstractSince the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, over 150 female American military personnel have been killed, over 70 following hostile fire. Given Western society’s long-standing practice of reserving the conduct of collective violence to men, these very public deaths are difficult to encompass within the normative and ideological structures of the contemporary American political system. This study examines the ways in which the public duty to commemorate the heroism of soldiers – and the private desire to accurately remember daughters and wives – poses a significant challenge to coherent discursive representation. In doing so, the study employs hermeneutical interpretation to analyse public representations of female soldiers and their relation to death in US popular culture. These representations are examined via Judith Butler’s concept of grievability – the possibility of receiving recognition as a worthy life within the existing social imaginary. It is argued that female soldiers are grievable as both ‘good soldiers’ and ‘good women’, but not as ‘good female soldiers’. The unified subject position of ‘good female soldier’ is liminal, and thus rendered socially and politically unintelligible. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of this liminality for collective mourning and the possibility of closure after trauma.

Sólo cuento VI

and belonging remain central to his existence . What is unanticipated, however, is the consistency with which Doron Rabinovici proves able to counter gaiety with solemnity, calamity with cheerfulness, and displacement with inclusion. The uncanny ability to tap into the glimmering portal of his Israeli-Austrian experiences through creative expression was first kindled in 1994 with his publication of Papirnik and rose in 2004 when banter’s wit harnessed his writing powers, licensing him the power needed to blithely beckon memories of the Holocaust in Ohnehin (Anyway). The skill with which he uses humor to recount recent challenges brought on by an enduring Jewish encounter with unsettlement likewise ascends to heights anew in his latest novel, Elsewhere (Andernorts, 2010), a narrative that enshrouds the writer’s own ventures through a subtle intersection of character and motive. Autobiographical strands of possessing an identity as one who may willfully shed their own emerge from the very beginning when, during the course of a flight, Ethan Rosen repeatedly masks his origin, mother tongue, and true self to suit the immediate situation. Within the first chapter alone, Ethan dons several veils of selfhood in ways that only truly displaced transnationals can do. Grasping at his authentic Israeli roots leaves him irritated at the habits of what he agitatedly thinks of as core to the Jewish disposition for dissettlement, “a law of their nature, an instinct of eternal restlessness.” This revelation’s uncomfortable truth further spurs him toward an outright denial of self when later asked whether he could speak Hebrew. Unwilling “to revisit the question of origin and identity, to justify where he had chosen to live yet again,” he blatantly asserts an inability to speak his heritage language, saying instead that “he had gone to Israel on vacation, scuba diving in Eilat.” When Ethan’s counterpart, Rudi Klausinger , later appears in the narrative, an additional filament of belonging and kinship flickers. In their initial altercations, they strategically confront each other in a continual game of odds in efforts to outdo the other and to gain professional and personal recognition. Parallel yet contrasting images of the other, they vie for the public’s trust and engagement through a series of publicly issued statements. Later, when Ethan detects Rudi’s latent presence by his dying father’s bedside, an already delicate situation becomes even more tenuous. Do Rudi and Ethan share the same biological father? Can they be brothers? Although a haphazard set of genetic testing succeeds in negating these queries, what remains is an underlying sense that the elastic identities of Jew and Gentile alike flexibly conform to the confines of one’s earned and lived experience. The story concludes as it began, with a travel account reminiscent of the exodus each individual can only withstand if embarked upon with a sense of humor. Andrea Bryant University of Oklahoma Sólo cuento VI. Mayra Santos-Febres, ed. Mexico City. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 2014. isbn 9786070252914 Since 2009, the National Autonomous University in Mexico has been publishing the series Sólo cuento, a yearly anthology of the best Hispanic short stories. In the sixth volume (2014), twenty-seven stories offer a glimpse at the state of the genre in the Hispanic world. The anthology is not organized in a traditional way: there is no authorial, generational , or thematic unity. Well-known authors (Eltit, Boullosa, Valenzuela, among others) are grouped together with younger ones who have been well received by critics Margaret Mazzantini Morning Sea Ann Gagliardi, tr. Oneworld This intense work of fiction focuses on the human spirit in times of ultimate uncertainty while navigating the rough waters of exile, political turmoil, and two families who are struggling to find what is “home.”By using the sea as a tool to distance people yet bring them together, Mazzantini reveals how the Italian and Libyan states in chaos influence family life and survival. Jonas Lüscher Barbarian Spring Peter Lewis, tr. Haus / University of Chicago Press This satiric novella by a rising Swiss talent vividly narrates the experiences of Preising, a filthy rich industrialist unwittingly controlled by his assistant. While attending a British wedding party in the desert, the pound collapses and festivity...

Studies in Kūṭiyāṭṭam : The Living Sanskrit Theatre of Kerala

From the vast literature of classical and medieval Sanskrit drama, only one tradition of live performance has survived—the intricate, elaborate, and refined art form known as Kūṭiyāṭṭam, still performed by a handful of families in central and southern Kerala on the south-west coast of India. To be precise : performances of Kūṭiyāṭṭam now tend to be truncated, reduced to two or three hours in a single night, as opposed to the full-length performances that would normally range from twelve hours to over 150 hours spread out over many days or nights. Since the older economic basis of the tradition in temple endowments has been lost, this art now competes in the open market with all other, modern forms, including contemporary cinema. Nonetheless, in recent years, under the aegis of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, full-length Kuṭiyāṭṭam productions by the Nepathya team of Mūḻikkuḷam have been re-introduced, and major parts of the classical repertoire are now once again amenable to viewing and study. An analytical study of the tradition must address a series of primary questions : Why have the performances, always limited to a single act of one of the classical texts, taken the strange shape we find today, with its central structural feature of imaginative retrospection (nirvahaṇam) ? What is the nature of the expressivity embodied in these complex performances ? Are there thematic unities at work ? How are we to understand the radical personalization of the character as presented to us over many hours on stage ? Can we define the peculiar, contrasting temporalities at work in these performances ? How is the Sanskrit text related to the immense expansion and exegesis that the actors generate ? What is the effect —cognitive, affective, aesthetic, sensual— upon the spectator of a performance that runs for 130 hours ? What is the aim of the actor as ritualist ?

Проект Мандельштама «Семь стихотворений» (1930–1931): цикл или подборка?

The article examines Mandelstam’s unrealized project «Seven Poems» (1930 – 1931). A hypothesis of a cyclic nature of this group of poems, of their imagery and thematic integrity and correlation with other Mandelstam’s cycles is formulated.

Roll a Hard Six: Losing Your Noodle in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing

Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing is a convoluted representation of the mentallyunstable mind existing as a series of six characters that are at once separate and conjoined: the horrors and traumatic events of the narrative past dismantle the unified subject into a series of schizophrenic sub-personalities, parts of the destabilized Author’s psyche, existing as separate fragments that eventually collide. Further, the imaginary room emerges as the Fifth Person, promising, but failing, to be a central stabilizer of the other fractured selves. Finally, the design of the text echoes the patterns of the traumatized mind, illustrating the inability of a narrative to construct a stable, unified subject and demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional narrative forms. The text, with its obliterations, cropped phrases, and pictorial manifestations, becomes the Sixth Person. However, in the end, the text shows that the past cannot be erased, explained, or reversed; neither can the experimental nature of the novel reach beyond the traumatized, schizoid subject to represent the horrors of the past that caused the Author’s psychotic breach. Federman has rolled a hard six that will repeatedly fragment and unite, just as the traumatic past continues to repeat itself as one that defies representation.

“Let Me Bite You Again”

This essay examines restrictions on and opportunities for agency in Fledgling, Octavia Butler's 2005 science fiction vampire novel. Reading agency through three relational modes—belonging, trauma, and consensual nonconsent—it argues that Fledgling helps us critically consider agency in a queer, posthumanist context. Butler's vampires become figures through which the text highlights conflicting desires (for independence and dependence, autonomy and belonging) that flow through the seemingly unified modern subject. This novel reinforces feminist and queer critiques of humanist notions of agency while allowing that some version of agency does survive for the postmodern subject within embodied and relational experiences of subjectivity.

Konsep Kesatuan Tema al-Qur’an Menurut Sayyid Qutb

This article is to prove that the more comprehensive the interpretation of the Qur’an is the more objective his/her interpretation is. This article demonstrates that Sayyid Qutb is one of the mufassirs who interprets the Qur’an comprehensively. The concept offered by Qutb is the thematic unity of the Qur’an. Qutb’s interpretation is based on the thematic unity in the Qur’an as a whole and in its each Sura. This article agrees with Muhammad ‘Abd Allah Diraz, A.H. Mathias Zahniser who argue for the harmony, coherence and thematic unity of the Qur’an. However, it argues against ‘Izzuddin ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, Subhi al-Salih, and Salwa M.S. El-Awa who doubt and deny the harmony, coherence and thematic unity of the Qur’an.

What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?

What Makes History of Capitalism Newsworthy? Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of NineteenthCentury America. Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Komblith. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 358. Cloth, $97.00; paper $32.00.)Capitalism may be in crisis as an economic system, but it is thriving as a subject within historical profession. The of now organizes a book series at Columbia University Press, a seminar program at Newberry Library, a MOOC at Cornell University, a graduate field at University of Georgia, and a tenure line at Brown University. Undergraduate courses on American capitalism are filling lecture halls at Princeton, Florida, and Loyola University Chicago, while New School for Social Research has launched its Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. The topic has provided thematic unity to recent annual meetings of Social Science History Association and Organization of American Historians. American Historical Association's state-of-the-field volume American History Now, of capitalism stands alongside established subfields like women's and cultural history. A front-page article last year in New York Times carried headline, In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar.1 is news? one could hear many early republic historians ask with incredulity. The study of capitalism has long been a central concern of our field. Forty years ago, labor history began recovering experiences of first generation of American wage laborers in communities like Paterson, Rockdale, and Lowell. Very soon, artisans of every trade had a historian to recount their declining economic power in face of capitalism's rise. Graduate students in 1980s cut their teeth on farmers' account books and rural mentalites, and few qualifying exam lists lacked a section on the transition to debate. The generation coming of age in 1990s had the market revolution looming over its head, and in wake of a Journal of Early Republic special issue on capitalism in 1996, social historians continued to argue with Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby over compatibility of capitalism and democracy. Over last decade, SHEAR conferences have featured sessions on capitalism as a force of liberation or destruction, as a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon, and as ideology or a structure. As often as not, experienced commentators have alerted younger presenters to classic works of Samuel Rezneck, Oscar and Mary Handlin, or George Rogers Taylor, extending field's historiographical genealogy ever deeper into past. If academic generations define themselves against their immediate predecessors, how many revisionist historians have humbly discovered that their scholarly grandparents had in fact been exploring same questions half a lifetime earlier? This new of capitalism might be a testament to good branding (appropriately) rather than original insight, less a field than a fad.Scholars identifying themselves with new of capitalismand I count myself in these ranks-make no pretense of having discovered a field. Many historians working under this rubric are quick to credit their undergraduate teachers and graduate advisors: Elizabeth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, and Eric Foner at Columbia, or JeanChristophe Agnew and Michael Denning at Yale, to name only two clusters of influential faculty who have been talking about capitalism for decades. For those interested in parlor games, younger historians of capitalism can reach Agnew or Blackmar in about half steps required to get to Kevin Bacon. Columbiaand Yale-trained students have been at forefront of institutionalizing of capitalism elsewhere; none with more success than Sven Beckert, whose Program on Study of Capitalism at Harvard has placed recent graduates into faculty positions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, UC-Berkeley, Cornell University, and University of Pennsylvania. …

“A Very Remarkable Piece of Iron”: Towards a Theory of Material Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects”

Abstract This article examines the supposed lack of “humanity” in Woolf’s short stories and novels by identifying its source in the sphere of “solid objects” and in the way these “objects” destabilize the coherence of what the western philosophical tradition typically refers to as “subject” (in the Cartesian sense). Referring to Moore’s direct realism as well as James’s and Mach’s radical empiricism, the discussion focuses on specific states of heightened perceptive intensity in which the perceiving subject stumbles on the verge of collapse and “mixes” itself with what it perceives. By considering these limit cases, this paper tries to demonstrate the way in which Woolf’s fiction might in fact be understood as illustrative of the process of de-humanizing de-centralization and dispersion of the already fluid consciousness and its blending with the impersonal material objects, resulting in a complete loss of one idea of “the human” (an idea based on the intellectual autonomy and sovereignty of a unified subject) and pointing towards a post-human and post-modern condition in which human becomes defined by the ever-widening circle of its own outside

Envisaging agency as discourse hybridity: a Butlerian analysis of secondary classroom discourses

Conceptualised from a range of sociological perspectives, and theorised extensively over the last 50 years, human agency is an integral element to lifelong learning. Poststructural theory with its decentred discursive construction of the learner offers a vibrant conception of classroom dynamics. This paper envisions how learner agency can be performative in the discursive space of a secondary classroom. The research disrupts the notion of a unified subject, a key tenet of sovereign theory that is evident in conceptions of the ‘self-regulated’, ‘self-motivated’, ‘self-efficacious’ student. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Bronwyn Davies, the classroom relations in this study are read as both dynamic and interdiscursive. Agency plays out through learners' discourse moves as they act upon and blend discourses to learn in a New Zealand Year 9 science classroom.

The Citizen’s Progress: Irony, Agency, and the Evolution of the Bildungsroman in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez

From the moment of its belated publication, (1) the formal unorthodoxies of Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez have captured the attention of its readers and critics. In his introduction to the first published edition of the novel, Rolando Hinojosa apologetically remarks: [ijt's first draft, and it should be seen as an historical work, not as an artifact (5). Hinojosa's separation of the historical and the literary, the factual and the artifactual, suggests model of literary production and critical reception in which the novel's purported shortcomings with respect to what he seems to consider the temporally autonomous rules of aesthetic result in an imperfect structuring of historical content. No doubt this impulse to separate history and aesthetics stems from Paredes's own determination to publish the unrevised, in the he had left it more than half century before. (2) But if we take seriously the notion that, in so doing, Paredes was presenting, as he describes it in the novel's acknowledgments, an archeological piece (3), different sense of the relation between literary and the operations of ideology emerges. Thus understood, we do better to view George Washington Gomez less as draft than as record of the aesthetic possibilities available at particular historical moment for negotiating that moment's ideological conflicts. Indeed, we might better say, at two particular historical moments. For if the formal structure of the book Paredes composed in the late thirties/early forties responds to one set of historical needs, his decision in 1990 to publish it as it was indicates an evolved interest, from the vantage of the cultural historian, in the issues. The novel's aesthetic possibilities, framed with respect to their moment of production, provide, in Michael McKeon's formulation about genre, following Claudio Guillen, a problem-solving model on the level of form (McKeon 1). As such they limn the conditions of possibility for agency and subjectivity at the moment of the novel's composition. (3) Their deployment fifty years later marks Paredes's interest in the broader, ongoing dynamics of the Mexican-American subject. Subsequent critics have been somewhat more integrated in approaching the problem of and content while nevertheless keeping the issue of their relation at the center of concern. The majority of these have closed the gap by asserting that, far from being somehow inadequate to its representational content, the novel's is manifestation of the ideological operations it represents. For Hector Perez, for example, the inflects the of the Bildungsroman with naturalism that is ultimately antithetical to the genre--with the result of ultimately circumscribing the protagonist's agency. Similarly, Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo sees the protagonist's subject formation as irreconcilably riven by the conceptual reductions that occur when complicated Mexican racial economy is translated into the relatively less complicated, though no less discriminatory, US one. Likewise, for Christopher Schedler, [t]he ever present gap in narrative meaning and sense of absence within the apparently unified subject points to the impossibility of closure for George G. Gomez's identity or for Americo Paredes' novel (Schedler 172). And Leif Sorenson's excellent reading of the stakes out yet another version of this homology between failed and ideological unrest: Each option, I contend, misses the mark, effacing Paredes's critique of both forms [corrido and Bildungsroman] and the subjectivities they produce. In my view, Paredes's rejection of both forms represents the conditions of cultural emergence with uncompromising rigor. He concludes that [w]e must face the disturbing realization that by the end of the novel, Chicano/a literary emergence seems impossible (Sorensen 114, 135). Various as their particular foci and concerns are, the majority of readings of the share couple of clear, though not always explicitly asserted, suppositions. …

The Heavenly Pattern of the Church

The ecclesiology of Richard Baxter (1615–91) has long been a matter of dispute. In particular, his role in the Restoration debates over the settlement of the Church of England from 1660–2 and as a leader of the Nonconformist party thereafter has been a source of considerable confusion. In this article it is argued that from at least the 1650s onwards Baxter was motivated by an ‘Association ecclesiology’ – a desire to comprehend as many confessions as possible around the fundamentals of the Gospel – which displays marked affinities to Archbishop James Ussher’s system of reduced episcopacy. In this the twin themes of unity and discipline become rooted within a distinctive Trinitarian and covenantal framework, which unfolds in his mature ecclesiology into a moving vision of the universal Church reunited in bonds of love towards God and one another.