Theoretical Sophistication Research Articles

The Victorian Illustrated Book, and: Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (review)

Reviewed by: The Victorian Illustrated Book, and: Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England Daniel Novak (bio) The Victorian Illustrated Book, edited by Richard Maxwell; pp. xxx + 440. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002, $45.00, £34.50. Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England, by Gerard Curtis; pp. xii + 305. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, £52.50, $94.00. In the opening of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1865), Alice offers a precocious and trenchant piece of literary criticism—an observation that anticipates the present state of interdisciplinary studies and the assumptions that underwrite the two books addressed in this review. Having glanced "once or twice" at the book her sister silently reads beside her, she expresses her informed opinion by asking, "what is the use of a book...without pictures or conversation?" Of course, Alice's demand for a union of text and image is immediately granted as she enters a textual world in which animated fictions and conversational pictures are the epistemological norm. That Alice's interdisciplinary expectations are no "dream" is borne out by the fact that her dream takes physical form in the book her reader holds, and that her fantastic vision of literary visuality had been a norm of Victorian publishing for forty years. But if Alice's rhetorical question helps to anticipate the ways in which literary criticism has turned its attention to the rhetoric of images in Victorian culture and the rhetorical "use" of images in texts, two recent interdisciplinary studies, Richard Maxwell's edited collection The Victorian Illustrated Book and Gerard Curtis's Visual Words pose a version of Alice's question at once more basic and more sophisticated: What do we mean when we call an object a book and when we call an object an image? What does it mean to think of the book as an object with an artistic life of its own, and what would it mean for an image to "illustrate" a text? In different ways, both volumes usefully defamiliarize the seemingly well-defined and agreed-upon parameters of Victorian visual studies. In doing so, both texts expand what will count as legitimate objects for interdisciplinary work in the future. The essays that Maxwell brings together in The Victorian Illustrated Book perhaps do this more explicitly and immediately—literally on page one, with Maxwell's opening essay on Walter Scott. Using the sixteenth-century connotation of illustration (using one text to explain another), before it became synonymous with the visual interpretation of a [End Page 357] literary text, Maxwell cleverly argues for an expanded notion of Scott's internal "illustrations" of his own text through his apparatus of explanatory notes, pointing out that visual illustrators of Scott respond more to these notes than to the text (4-5). That is, narrowly speaking, illustration is pressed into the service of novelistic antiquarianism rather than historical narrative. Robert Patten's essay on David Copperfield (1849-50) also instructively brings us back to the dictionary for our theory of illustration, differentiating illustrare from mimesis: the former may mean to "enlighten," "elucidate," or "make famous" (91). The essay is, at heart, a defense of H. K. Browne's illustrations from a century of abuse. However, Patten's effort to make us see that Browne successfully pictures the "unspeakable" (102) multiple narrative and readerly points of view that cohere around David demands a kind of blind faith. But, he does argue persuasively that the illustrations, both individually and collectively, embody and perform Charles Dickens's narrative logic—an argument that provides a welcome relief from the ritual discussions of images attempting but failing to escape their static temporality and leap into narrative. Other essays in the collection expand our sense of illustration by looking at objects in illustrated books that we might otherwise ignore. Simon Joyce's essay on maps in Victorian fiction is useful both for its theoretical sophistication and its simple common sense. Asking a question these novels have been begging since their publication (what are these maps doing here?), he moves beyond the sense of realism that novelists attempt to provide and readers—such as Thomas Hardy's fanatical...

Preface

Preface Cannon Schmitt, Richard Grusin, Donna Landry, and Dana Seitler Criticism: the negative connotations of the word are not far to seek, whether in the direction of the musty irrelevance of an over-fastidious and hermetic scholarship or the brutal attacks of the sort encouraged in the "criticism sessions" of Mao's Cultural Revolution. But in the academy—and perhaps still more so beyond it—the necessity of criticism presses on us with fresh urgency. Its traditional strengths, well represented in the pages of this journal over the years, include a devotion to particulars and a rigor of analysis that seem especially valuable not only in light of the current theoretical and methodological eclecticism of literary, cultural, and visual studies but also in the context of a political climate in which critical voices are too little in evidence, Orwellian language use too much the norm and too rarely called to account. In this, the journal's new incarnation, we aim to make Criticism a venue for adding capaciousness to the word and the practice. Such capaciousness demands, at least, searching attention to criticism's enabling assumptions, varied procedures, divergent aims, frequent failings, and occasional impossibilities. Among the many changes we have instituted to prepare the way for these new engagements, two merit special mention: First, Criticism features a new, external Editorial Board comprising scholars and critics whose own work exemplifies theoretical and methodological sophistication within and across disciplinary boundaries: Srinivas Aravamudan, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Cartwright, David L. Eng, Rita Felski, N. Katherine Hayles, Jonathan Lamb, Mary Poovey, Erica Rand, Valerie Smith, Peter Stallybrass, and Paul Strohm. We are grateful to all of them for their generosity and expertise. Second, to initiate and mark the journal's new direction, we have arranged for three special issues to be published in this volume. The first, "Materia Media," consists of essays on media, mediation, and materiality by members of the Department of English here at Wayne State; it also includes two review essays—one on Romanticism, another on the turn to religion in Early Modern Studies—as well as an extended review of and meditation on Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual (2002). In the second, guest editors Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens gather work exploring the possibilities and limits of [End Page 197] public sphere discourse in the early modern period, asking, as their title has it: "When Is a Public Sphere?" Finally, guest editors Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb put together a collection of essays addressing the epistemological and ontological stakes of reenactments, experiments in living history, and a wide range of related phenomena that they place under the heading "Extreme and Sentimental History." Each of these special issues promises intellectual excitement of the sort we hope to make a hallmark of the journal. "The history of thought is the history of its models." Thus Fredric Jameson in The Prison-House of Language (1972), addressing the rise and fall of such once-privileged epistemic metaphors as the organism, evolution, and linguistics. Not hubristic enough (fortunately!) to imagine the role of Criticism so world-historically, we do aspire to provide a site where thought and models for thought in the humanities can be explored, subjected to critique, given social and political purchase, reworked, disentangled, fused—in short, renewed. Copyright © 2004 Wayne State University Press

Remembering the Alamo, Post-9/11

IN RECENT YEARS SCHOLARS IN VARIOUS FIELDS have shown increasing interest in historical memory. Informed by anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, linguistics, and cultural studies, recent studies of historical memory have achieved considerable theoretical and analytical sophistication.1 At the same time, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Nora, scholars in the humanities have also shown increasing interest in space and place as analytical concepts. Although scholarship on the American Southwest has always at some level been engaged with both history and place, Richard Flores's groundbreaking new study Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol is among the first in this field to incorporate recent theory from these two areas of research within a historical model.2 Yet to categorize Flores's wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the Alamo myth as Mexican American, southwestern, or Marxist may be misleading. This book examines both the workings of Ameri-

Martin S. Jaffee. Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi, 239 pp.

In recent decades, an array of scholars has investigated the oral and written (re)creation and transmission of early Jewish and Rabbinic tradition. Martin S. Jaffee stands at the forefront of this field of research, devoting much of his recent scholarly effort to the topic. In a series of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes over the past ten years, Jaffee has offered diverse insights from a variety of research forays into the literary traits of early Judaism. Torah in the Mouth is Jaffee's initial monograph on the subject, in which he builds extensively and impressively on his prior work, augmenting it in breadth, depth, and theoretical sophistication.

A Global Feminist Travels:Assia Djebar and Fantasia

Scholars and critics have hailed Assia Fantasia, An Algerian Calvacade (1985) as a successful bridge between Western feminism and the experiences and philosophies of women living beyond the United States and Europe. Soheila Ghaussy's enthusiastic response to the text celebrates blend of Western and French feminisms and her careful attention to the politics and lives of Arab women: Djebar's ecriture feminine re(dis)covers woman; it voices the protest of Arab women, it escapes the confines of the harem, it gives body to the oral accounts of women, it inscribes woman's unspoken name (1994, 461). By means of a complex blending of genres and voices, novel successfully represents what was formerly silenced and absent from representation, the participation of Algerian women in resistance struggles against the French colonization of Algeria, and politicizes the everyday experiences of Algerian women in their global and historical contexts. Ghaussy and other critics such as Mildred Mortimer (1997), Anne Donadey (1993, 1996, 2000), and Mary Jean Green (1993), among others, analyze the complexity and theoretical sophistication of Fantasia that they argue results in its successful representation of Algerian women. Fantasia's ambitious project borrows strategies from a variety of genres to create a multifaceted, multilayered, multivocal text. The genre that most critics have overlooked but that nonetheless shapes the political and textual achievement of Fantasia is travel writing. Quoting nineteenth-century French travel accounts, invoking and reworking travel genre tropes, including Orientalist representations of harems and veiled women, and representing Algeria as a contact zone (Pratt

History Theory Design: a pedagogy of persuasion

Architecture students tell stories about their work. These stories are meant to convey information regarding their convictions about design, the motivating concept for a specific design, and the intended meaning of the design. Such stories are calculated to have something to do with the work presented. Often, though, what is said is put forward and accepted as valid simply because it is said. Scrutiny of the relationship between such accounts and the visual or physical evidence frequently reveals a wide gap between intention and result. Credulity of such incongruity encourages a loose way of thinking that fosters a separation of thought (theory) from doing (practice). Concurrently, architecture students at the earliest stages of their education seem to require skill development above all else. But overemphasis on technique undervalues developing conceptual depth. If students are not introduced to design as an ill-defined problem, akin to formulating effective and persuasive arguments, their propensity is to produce work that tends to be ineffectively developed or represented while lacking theoretical sophistication.

Post-structuralism and policy research in education

This paper critically examines some of the challenges to policy research in education posed by post-modernist and post-structuralist thinking. It starts by characterizing those modernist and structuralist assumptions which have been subject to attack, but suggests that they are still very much in the ascendancy in the official discourse of educational research (as expressed, for example, by the National Educational Research Forum). Thereafter, key features of the assault represented by the work of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard are outlined and an account of their destabilizing effect on intellectual work, for individuals and institutions, is offered. Several possible responses are considered. It is argued that policy research poses particular problems because, notwithstanding the messiness of the policy process, there must always come a point of closure on options: decisions cannot be delayed until the epistemological status of educational research is resolved. Researchers must find ways of negotiating the shifting configurations in the relationship between research, policy and practice. This will require both theoretical sophistication and robust engagement with issues that matter to practitioners.

The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic

Martens, Lorna. The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. 273 pp. $19.95 paperback. The question mark is crucial to the title of Lorna Martens' study of feminist writing in the former GDR. Without the interrogative, Irmtraud Morgner, whose work is prominently featured in this analysis, attributes this phrase to her intrepid protagonist in the 1974 novel named for Beatriz and Laura, who pens the story. There, Beatriz applies the sobriquet to the GDR, tongue-in-cheek, but half seriously (26). In her analysis, Martens explores the reasons for the discrepancy between the promises the GDR made and the ways in which they were, were not, or could not be, kept. Her book aims to acquaint the English-speaking women's studies audience with GDR feminist ideas (1-2). In the process, she succeeds in illuminating aspects of the unique history of GDR feminism for German Studies scholars as well. Martens traces with historical accuracy and theoretical sophistication the influence of Marxist and socialist thinking on the writers of the GDR from that country's inaugural, constitutional commitment to equality between the sexes, through its precipitous demise and the aftermath. She varies the historical narrative with prudent reminders: state socialism needed workers in light of a labor shortage; state-sponsored day-care did not always conform to actual working shifts; and equality dictated from above does not always trickle down into reality. As thematized in the feminist writing from the GDR, still were primarily responsible for children, did the housework, and waited in line. In Women, Feminism, and Writing in the German Democratic Republic, Martens establishes the (to many) unfamiliar framework of GDR history and its answers to the women question. She discusses influences on West German and American feminism(s), and points to similarities and differences with reference to the GDR. Crucial to socialist theory is the emancipation of based on equal access to work outside the home. In classical Marxist theory, the liberation of would logically follow from the triumph of the proletariat. The GDR state legislated into work, accommodated the need to do housework, and stood firmly on the side of women. But, as Martens writes, My thesis is that GDR writers above all focused on the question of 'feminizing' society by changing not laws but, rather, the conventions that shaped male and female psychology. …

Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (review)

Opening Up is a marvelous book. Readers who are familiar with changes in Chinese youth culture since the early 1990s will not find much in the book that is very surprising. But Farrer offers a systematic and comprehensive account of the changing culture of sex in a Chinese city and does so with theoretical sophistication and personal sensitivity. He also casts the study in a conceptual framework of modernity that endows it with significance beyond what he has to report with respect to Shanghai and the People's Republic of China.

A história do pensamento político: dos Grands Doctrinnaires à história social das idéias

Análise do desenvolvimento da história das idéias políticas no século XX. Os aspectos centrais acentuados referem-se à conquista de reconhecimento institucional da história intelectual e à sua abertura progressiva aos contatos transdisciplinares, elementos que ajudaram-na a renovar-se, acarretando na sofisticação teórica que se observa atualmente neste campo de estudos.

Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860. By Martin Bruegel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 305. $21.95, paper.

The transformation of the northern countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century is one of the central themes of American rural history, and it has formed the basis of many excellent studies by economic and social historians. Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing , is the latest addition to this literature, and it is a valuable one. Bruegel extends our perspective beyond New England to New York's Hudson River Valley, and he demonstrates a theoretical sophistication and an eye for the telling details that give a familiar story fresh nuance and texture as well as a scope and sweep that transcend the local.

Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan. By Robert P. Weller. [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. xvi+172 pp. $28.00. ISBN 0-8133-3931-6.

Robert Weller has given us a virtuoso display of theoretical sophistication combined with rich primary data in a densely packed yet consistently stimulating volume. Recognizing the controversy over the applicability of the concept of “civil society” to areas outside the West, he elaborates the idea of an “alternate civility,” by which he means forms of association between the family and the state deeply rooted in society at the grassroots level (therefore not broad-based enough to qualify as “civil”) that, in his view, have provided the basis for Taiwan's democratic transition, and may provide the seeds for a similar political transformation in mainland China. He calls this the “informal social sector” and contrasts it with a sector comprising formal organizations, which are more likely to be co-opted by the state.

TOWARD A NEW POLITICAL METHODOLOGY: Microfoundations and ART

▪ Abstract The past two decades have brought revolutionary change to the field of political methodology. Steady gains in theoretical sophistication have combined with explosive increases in computing power to produce a profusion of new estimators for applied political researchers. Attendance at the annual Summer Meeting of the Methodology Section has multiplied many times, and section membership is among the largest in APSA. All these are signs of success. Yet there are warning signs, too. This paper attempts to critically summarize current developments in the young field of political methodology. It focuses on recent generalizations of dichotomous-dependent-variable estimators such as logit and probit, arguing that even our best new work needs a firmer connection to credible models of human behavior and deeper foundations in reliable empirical generalizations.

Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order. By Amitav Acharya. New York: Routledge, 2001. 234p. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Amitav Acharya has produced an innovative and stimulating evaluation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a crucial juncture in that organization's development. Acharya does not shrink from the challenge of measuring ASEAN's rhetoric of regional cooperation against its actual accomplishments, and the theoretical and empirical sophistication that Acharya displays makes this book sure to be a key work on the security and political aspects of ASEAN for academics and policymakers.

A Bayesian approach to estimate evoked potentials

Several approaches, based on different assumptions and with various degree of theoretical sophistication and implementation complexity, have been developed for improving the measurement of evoked potentials (EP) performed by conventional averaging (CA). In many of these methods, one of the major challenges is the exploitation of a priori knowledge. In this paper, we present a new method where the 2nd-order statistical information on the background EEG and on the unknown EP, necessary for the optimal filtering of each sweep in a Bayesian estimation framework, is, respectively, estimated from pre-stimulus data and obtained through a multiple integration of a white noise process model. The latter model is flexible (i.e. it can be employed for a large class of EP) and simple enough to be easily identifiable from the post-stimulus data thanks to a smoothing criterion. The mean EP is determined as the weighted average of the filtered sweeps, where each weight is inversely proportional to the expected value of the norm of the correspondent filter error, a quantity determinable thanks to the employment of the Bayesian approach. The performance of the new approach is shown on both simulated and real auditory EP. A signal-to-noise ratio enhancement is obtained that can allow the (possibly automatic) identification of peak latencies and amplitudes with less sweeps than those required by CA. For cochlear EP, the method also allows the audiology investigator to gather new and clinically important information. The possibility of handling single-sweep analysis with further development of the method is also addressed.

Diversity and Its Discontents: Cultural Conflict and Common Ground in Contemporary American Society

Never before has the legitimacy of a dominant American been so hotly contested as over the past two decades. Familiar terms such as multiculturalism, moral majority, and family values all suggest a society fragmented by the issue of cultural diversity. So does any social solidarity exist among Americans? In Diversity and Its Discontents, a group of leading sociologists, political theorists, and social historians seek to answer this question empirically by exploring ideological differences, theoretical disputes, social processes, and institutional change. Together they present a broad yet penetrating look at American life in which cultural conflict has always played a part. Many of the findings reveal that this conflict is no more or less rampant now than in the past, and that the terms of social solidarity in the United States have changed as the society itself has changed. The volume begins with reflections on the sources of the current culture and goes on to show a number of parallel situations throughout American history--some more profound than today's conflicts. The contributors identify political vicissitudes and social changes in the late twentieth century that have formed the backdrop to the wars, including changes in immigration, marriage, family structure, urban and residential life, and expression of sexuality. Points of agreement are revealed between the left and the right in their diagnoses of American and society, but the essays also show how the claims of both sides have been overdrawn and polarized. The volume concludes that above all, the antagonists of the wars have failed to appreciate the powerful cohesive forces in Americans' outlooks and institutions, forces that have, in fact, institutionalized many of the radical changes proposed in the 1960s. Diversity and Its Discontents brings sound empirical evidence, theoretical sophistication, and tempered judgment to a cultural episode in American history that has for too long been clouded by ideological rhetoric. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Seyla Benhabib, Jean L. Cohen, Reynolds Farley, Claude S. Fischer, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., John Higham, David A. Hollinger, Steven Seidman, Marta Tienda, David Tyack, R. Stephen Warner, Robert Wuthnow, and Viviana A. Zelizer.

Irish Classics (review)

Critics and journalists frequently employ the term "public intellectual" when describing Declan Kiberd, a Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin. Kiberd can lay claim to the title of public intellectual because of his accessible prose and his cogent commentary on trends in Irish culture. Kiberd's last book, Inventing Ireland (Harvard University Press, 1995), a study of twentieth-century Irish writing, has been the single most influential text in the growing discourse of Irish postcolonial studies. Many critics worked to situate Ireland in a postcolonial context before Kiberd, and some, like David Lloyd, did so with more theoretical sophistication. But Kiberd's use of the work of Fanon and Said, especially, to frame a narrative about Irish writers' response to British colonialism made a postcolonial approach to Ireland seem inevitable, and quickly paradigmatic. Kiberd's critics, like Denis Donoghue, criticize him for the very thing that gives him the title of public intellectual—i.e., the fact that his arguments are convincing to a large number of readers, both in and out of the academy. Donoghue and others argue that Kiberd simplifies Irish colonial experience, and in doing so becomes politically correct.

Sobre a interpretação antropológica: Sahlins, Obeyesekere e a racionalidade havaiana

This essay is an attempt to understand the anthropological presuppositions of interpretation of Hawaiian thought in the 18th century considering the reciprocal elucidation of Marshall Sahlins's and Gananath Obeyesekere's arguments about this way of thinking. It is not possible to reproduce the authors' arguments in all their ethnographical profusion and theoretical sophistication therefore it was our option to emphasize the identification of Captain Cook as the Hawaiian god Lono in order to make explicit Sahlins's and Obeyesekere's concerns regarding the validity of such a practice as a rational behavior.

Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction

Downing, Eric. Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 338 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Reviewing books, sometimes considered the drudge work of the profession, can on occasion be a genuine pleasure. Only on rare occasions have I read and enjoyed a book as much as Eric Downing's Double Exposures; most impressive are his lucidity, his sensitivity to textual detail, his theoretical sophistication, and the cogency of his argumentation. What is most significant about this work is its theoretical framework, which draws on previous work (including my own), yet goes beyond it in intriguing and productive ways. Downing claims that realism is not only invested with the compulsion to repeat a previously encountered reality, but also with a resistance to that very repetition. Thus in theories of realism, but especially in the texts of realism one finds in conflict both a movement toward repetition, which is manifested on levels from the linguistic to the thematic, and a self-- conscious, self-deconstructive proclivity that undoes or at least threatens to undo, everything that repetition has propagated. According to Downing, for example, the norms of realism, firmly associated with middle-class life, are simultaneously affirmed and questioned by the fictions of the mid-nineteenth century. While most commentators have taken realism to be something simple or mono-directional, Downing regards realism as a prototypical discourse that works incessantly against itself. Double Exposures consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six interpretive chapters. The authors and works Downing treats are familiar from the realist canon, although a few works are less frequently cited in the literature. Chapters two and three deal with the writings of Adalbert Softer: first the celebrated preface to his Bunte Steine, in which he outlines something of his own model for realist writing, and then a brilliant interpretation of chiastic mimesis in Der Hochwald. I oversimplify greatly in reducing the intricate and patient exegeses to sentences or phrases, but with regard to the Preface Downing wants to demonstrate that the suppression of imagination and desire, hallmarks of Stifter's efforts throughout his career is itself accomplished only by exercising imagination and desire. In his analysis of the novella Downing shows how the text is an instantiation of this dual and contradictory movement, focusing in particular on vision and the image of the telescope. The following chapter, on Gottfried Keller's Sieben Legenden, revisits the question of repetition, this time as an inner literary matter; here Downing is particularly interested in the statue and its implication for a realist program, as well as the sensuality of the body and its demise. In chapter five Downing turns to Theodor Storm's novella Viola Tricolor, in which repetition is an obvious theme; in this analysis he is interested not only in the literary resonance of the second wife, the Ligeia impulse, but more centrally in the complex interplay of desire and repetition that structures the work and comments ambivalently on its connection to a realist aesthetics. Although the work on Stifter, Keller, and Storm is extremely persuasive, I found the final two interpretations, which examine Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Die Hochzeit des Monchs and Wilhelm Raabe's Stopfkuchen, to be the most compelling and challenging. …

Functional neuroimaging of cognition: state-of-the-art.

This paper presents a brief overview of functional neuroimaging studies of cognitive processes. A "publication profile" is identified for PET and fMRI studies of cognitive functions. It is shown that the number of publications has increased exponentially over the last ten years, and that a set of ten journals accounts for the vast majority of publications. It is argued that the field has moved from a state of explorative character to a state of high theoretical sophistication. With special reference to the contributions in this issue of Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, methodological, topical, regional, and clinical implications of cognitive neuroscientific studies are discussed.