Title Of Part Research Articles

Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer

Reviewed by: Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer Eric Plaks (bio) turn it up! music in poetry from jazz to hip-hop Stephen Cramer, ed. Sundog Poetry Center and Green Writers Press https://www.sundogpoetry.org/shop/p/turn-it-up-music-in-poetry-from-jazz-to-hip-hop-edited-by-stephen-cramer 400 pages; Print, $19.95 As I suspect is true of many readers of this anthology, compiled and edited by poet and University of Vermont professor Stephen Cramer, I approach Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop with more recognition of the names and sounds in the music world than in the world of poetry. Since I am a jazz performer and music enthusiast, there are very few musicians referenced in the anthology that I had to google, but almost every poet was a new discovery to me, with the exception of some extremely well-known figures (James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg). As such, I found reading Cramer’s three-part alphabetic-by-last-name anthology of gorgeous words by a vast array of mostly American poets on the topic of music to be an incredibly valuable and pleasurable experience. The title of part 1, “A Shower of Golden Eighth Notes: Poems about Jazz,” comes from a line in Lynda Hull’s poem “Lost Fugue for Chet,” one of four poems by Hull included in the anthology. Like so many of the poets and their musician subjects in this anthology, Hull lived a fascinating and tragically short life, dying in a car crash in 1994. In a sense she lived the crazy life of the stereotypical jazzer, running away from home and college after having been accepted to Princeton at age sixteen and moving from Chinatown to Chinatown in her teen years (it’s a long story worth checking out on its own). Like her subject, Baker, Hull had personal experience with heroin, and the “shower of golden eighth notes” is Hull’s unforgettable word picture of the fatal fall of Baker’s body from an Amsterdam balcony in 1988. While the alphabetical presentation of the poets would seem to be a natural randomizer in terms of thematic organization, themes do emerge. A world of jazz is being sketched out by thirty-five poets in alphabetical order, [End Page 150] each one a giant in his or her own right despite having only one to five poems included in this anthology. It is not the factual world of jazz history, but rather the impressions made on the poets, who are a very diverse bunch although still a bit more recent and a bit whiter on average than the jazz musicians themselves. There is to me a bit of the widespread romanticization of the trappings of jazz—the smoke, the scene, the heroin, Chet Baker and Chet Baker again—but poet after poet more than solves the conundrum of writing about music that Cramer references in his introduction, when he quotes an unknown author (Steve Martin? Frank Zappa? Thelonious Monk?) of the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” These poets make music when they write about music and, as in jazz, it’s all about the phrasing, and the phrasing is gorgeous. As I learned more about the poets, more direct connections to jazz emerged—for example, Jayne Cortez, the author of two extremely hip poems in the collection—“Rose Solitude” (dedicated to Duke Ellington and getting at his African roots) and “Tapping” (read this poem aloud and you will feel that it is tap-dancing about poetry and not the other way around)—is the mother of Denardo Coleman from her relationship with Ornette. Part 1 has poems about jazz legends such as Bird, Miles, Mingus, Chet (too many), Lena Horne, Trane (many, and many about his heroin and his rotting teeth), Monk (lots), Sonny Rollins, Billie, Dinah, Ella, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, J. J. Johnson, McCoy Tyner, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, and Sonny Criss—but also poems about lesser-known figures such as Indianapolis drummer Stan Gage (“Sonnets for Stan Gage...

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

What Is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions by John M. Rist

Reviewed by: What Is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions by John M. Rist Eileen C. Sweeney John M. Rist. What Is a Person? Realities, Constructs, Illusions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 288. Cloth, $34.99. John Rist's What Is a Person? is a scholarly, rich, and trenchant study of the history of the concept of personhood in Western thought. However, its sharp critique of modern and postmodern accounts of personhood, though thought-provoking, also uses jarringly polemical language, which further undermines the book's flawed overall argument. The first section, "Constructing the Mainline Tradition," carefully mines ancient and medieval sources, tracing with nuance and complexity the different threads in the notion of person. The threads are religious, philosophical, legal, and literary, and the philosophical sources are multiple. Rist does not privilege Boethius's definition in Contra Eutychem et Nestorium of person as "individual substance of a rational nature" (3) so influential in Christian theology, but explores different approaches from the Stoics and Neoplatonists, as well as from Plato and Aristotle. For example, from Cicero by way of Panaetius we get the four layers of personhood: personhood (1) in virtue of a common nature, (2) as a unique individual, (3) as the subject of historical circumstances we do not choose, and (4) as the professions we do choose (27–28). In the Stoic tradition, the individual person is grasped as "uniquely distinct" with the soul as the "source" of its "essential diachronic unity" (33). Augustine, though not at first, ultimately asserts that the human person is not the soul alone but the "miraculous combination" of body and soul (49), both "objective reality" and "subjective historical structure" (55). Rist argues that these multiple sources get lost in the emphasis on Boethius's definition, especially as these sources are pulled into the Aristotelian framework in the Middle Ages, and that, moreover, as Aristotelianism came under attack, the notion of personhood constructed too exclusively in its terms was further weakened. Rist also points out two important "gaps" in Aquinas: first, the claim that individuals cannot be known but only sensed qua individual, and second, that individuation is through matter (67–68). The latter leaves Aquinas struggling to maintain the individuality of the person, not just the body, and the former fails to recognize, as Augustine did, that we do know individual persons, for example, through biography and history (67–68). What is compelling about this story is the careful elucidation of multiple strands grounded in very different kinds of philosophical principles. However, this makes the conceit of the book even more surprising and untenable, namely that there is a mainline tradition, all the pieces of which are absolutely necessary and must be combined with the view that the dignity of persons is conferred by the creator God. The mainline tradition is a fiction; even according to Rist himself, it never coalesced. And what did not coalesce it makes no sense to hypostasize as the object of relentless (and mostly construed as malevolent) attacks from Scotus to the present day. Before he begins his journey through modernity and the nineteenth century toward "the final solution" (from the title of part 4: "Persons Restored or Final Solution," 200), Rist claims that thinkers after Aquinas "have much to contribute" to the mainline tradition. However, he continues, they do not add to or support the "worth" of the person but "merely" add "new information" (69, emphases in the original) because—though Rist never really argues for this claim—it is impossible to establish the worth of persons unless one holds that it is divinely given. Further, Rist's analysis of the modern "contributions" of "new information" (69), even when incisive, is always the story of the undermining of personhood, whether intentionally or in the attempt to save or refound it. Part 2, discussing Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Richardson, Hume, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant, is entitled "No God, No Soul: What Person?"—and the answer is clearly "none." Part 3 delves into the "swamp" (Rist's term) of the nineteenth century to find five attempts to "save" the person but which, he says, point "variously to homogenization, debasement and ultimately nihilistic despair as the destiny of the...

Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts, 1600–1900

Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts, 1600–1900

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken Miryam Sas Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken, translated by Francesca Simkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. vi + 248. $60.00 cloth, $59.99 e-book. During the early 1990s, when I used to attend “the seminar,” as it was fondly called, run by Professor Edwin McClellan at Yale on the topic of modern Japanese literature, every once in a while Professor McClellan would sum up at the end of a complex three-hour conversation by saying something along these lines: “So you see, Author X [say, Mori Ōgai] was a genius.” This way of seeing the works never particularly bothered me: mired in deconstruction as I was, I effected an internal translation that made perfect sense to me, framing exactly what I thought he meant in my own critical terminology of the day: “This text by Mori Ōgai is an amazing work.” Lucken, in Imitation and Creativity, is concerned with the myth of genius and original creativity, as well as their history and vicissitudes in Japanese arts. He is equally concerned with creativity’s contrast—imitation—and the denigration of imitation, which is summed up in the original French title of one of the book’s chapters: “Japon singe” (lit. Japan the monkey, translated into English as “copycat Japan”). Lucken ultimately traces a “double dialectic,” or a “two-stage dialectic” (p. 199), process of creativity along various axes, leading to a “third and final phase” (p. 200), a sort of synthesis as it were, that does not stay stably on one or the other pole of this creativity-imitation binary. The [End Page 268] term “plastic” and the related quality of “plasticity”—whose uses and history, from Eisenstein writing about Disney to early anime theory, interest me deeply—come to represent Lucken’s reluctance to polarize the two terms. One of the key contributions of Lucken’s book and of some of his recent scholarly activity consists in his efforts to open a conversation between francophone and nonfrancophone scholars of Japanese studies in America, Europe, and Asia. Based at Inalco (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) in Paris, Lucken co-edited the volume Japan’s Postwar.1 Imitation and Creativity, translated smoothly by Francesca Simkin, continues his labor of bringing works of Japanese studies from French to English and thus providing the potential for a broader series of international dialogues. Since one would like to visit Paris as often as possible, even if only in imagination, these volumes offer the gift of a virtual tour around one corner of Inalco. Reading Imitation and Creativity raised for me questions about methodological differences between American and French studies of Japan—the implicit expectations we hold, without perhaps realizing it, and the subtle differences in emphasis, style, and approach these fields practice on different sides of the Atlantic. The French-language, Inalco publication of Imitation and Creativity is available from within an institutional library for PDF download under a different title, with some additional illustrations and hypertext footnotes: Les fleurs artificielles: Création, imitation et logique de domination (Artificial flowers: Creation, imitation and the logic of domination).2 The French title resonates somewhere between Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of evil) and Les paradis artificiels (Artificial paradises), hence implying a more complex relation to problems of artifice and origin than the English title. Not to criticize the change, but just to ask: Are we in Japanese studies in America expected to be more direct, less elliptical or literary? The title of part 1 is similarly transformed from “Le Paradigme Mimetique” (The mimetic paradigm), in my French version, to “A Historical Construction.”3 The history of the valuation and [End Page 269] devaluation of the varying definitions of the mimetic—from the concept of Schein (appearance) through Brecht to recent feminist performance studies—makes the topic truly complex and multivalent and well worthy of inquiry. Are American readers of Japan studies expected to require an emphasis on the historical rather than the theoretical vicissitudes of mimesis? It seems so, and...

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola (review)

The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola. By Brian Alegant. (East - man Studies Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010. [326p. ISBN 9781580463256. $75.] Music examples, work list, bibliography, index. With this book, Brian Alegant envisions the addition of a new dimension to scholarly literature on the music of Luigi Dallapiccola. The author seeks to find analytical and theoretical framework for the serial music of this composer with emphasis on the middle- and late-period works, an aspect he claims to be missing present secondary literature. On the first page, Alegant sets the tone for his study with the assertion that the approach not ask why Dallapiccola composed with twelve tones, but, rather, how he did (p. 1). In keeping with this statement, the emphasis throughout the book is definitely upon serial procedure with only limited reference to the musical qualities of the works themselves. The statement is conflict with Schoenberg's often cited response to Rudolf Kolisch who had worked out the Schoenberg's Third String Quartet. can't utter too many warnings against overrating these analyses, since after all they only lead to what I have always been dead against: seeing how it is done; whereas I have always helped people to see: what it is! (Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965], 164-65). Alegant divides his study into two parts. In part 1, he proposes an evolutionary view of twelve-tone technique; part 2, he provides detailed analyses of two of the later twelve-tone works in their entirety, so as to model their large-scale strategy (p. 2). Alegant takes his title for part 1, Dallapiccola's Serial Odyssey, 1942-1972, from Ethan Haimo (Schoenberg's Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-tone Method, 1914-1928 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]). The author claims that allegorical journey may be understood as a slow shift . . . from a 'Webernian' conception to a 'Schoen - bergian' one (p. 3). The fundamental characteristics of the two Viennese composers, as Alegant understands them, are presented chart format as a series of seven contrasting pairs of traits (fig. 1.1, p. 10). Throughout the book, the author relies upon these traits as templates for understanding development over a thirty-year period (p. 10). The chart becomes the basis for Alegant's subdivision of entire twelve-tone oeuvre into four phases. However, this chart of contrasting pairs is both incomplete with regard to musical features and inaccurate with regard to some of the serial features of these two composers. The single exclusively musical pair on the list, sparser orchestration for Webern as opposed to denser orchestration for Schoenberg, is too general to be incisive. It ignores matters of orchestral doubling, use of instruments, and texture, all of which differentiate Webern from Schoenberg. In addition, the chart makes no reference to tempo, dynamics, phrase structure, or expressive indications the score. The remaining six contrasting pairs concern serial characteristics. Alegant's use of the terms and aggregate betray a lack of precision. As an example, Alegant contrasts the of Webern's rows with the unordered of Schoenberg's rows. Neither here, nor elsewhere the book, does the author observe the disjunct linear contours common to most of Webern's row presentations and the much more conjunct melodic contours of Schoenberg's row presentations. The term re-ordered is important for an understanding of Schoen - berg's melodic lines, for most certainly they have their own order even when the original order has been reconfigured. Alegant's refererence to these rows as removes the distinction between melodic lines and verticalized segments, the latter referred to by the author as cross partitions. …

Using Benchmarking, Needs Assessment, Quality Improvement, Outcome Measurement, and Library Standards: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians With CD-ROM. A Medical Library Association Guide

Using Benchmarking, Needs Assessment, Quality Improvement, Outcome Measurement, and Library Standards: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians With CD-ROM. A Medical Library Association Guide

<i>English in the world: Global rules, global roles</i> (review)

Reviewed by: English in the world: Global rules, global roles Madia Thomson Rani RubdyMario Saraceni (eds.) 2006. English in the world: Global rules, global roles. London/New York: Continuum. Pp. vi + 218. US $70.00 (softcover). From its origins amongst the people of the British Isles to its rise as a language of international trade, English has shown a remarkable adaptability. Its current form—its usages and vocabulary—reflect the diversity of cultures and peoples who either colonized or were colonized by these ubiquitous Britons. There seems, therefore, little need to question its place as an international language. Yet, it is this very question that guides much of the discussion in Rani Rubdy and Mario Saraceni’s edited volume, English in the world: Global rules, global roles. The book consists of a series of articles collected from some of the leading thinkers in the field of English as a Second Language. Their interests as writers and the purpose of the book are quite clear: to understand English as a global phenomenon and consider what it means for language teaching. The book has two sections appropriately titled “Conceptualizing English as an international language” (Part I) and “Pedagogical implications of English as an international language (Part II). Part I examines theories of global English, referred to alternately as English as an International Language (EIL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), or simply World English. One sees a priori no apparent complication of ideas and it is only after reading an introduction that actually inverts the order of the section themes that one begins to see what the difficulties are and where they might lie. The underlying assumption of many of the authors—that English as it is already known and [End Page 119] taught is somehow inappropriate to its role as an international language—is not the least of these difficulties. The remainder of this review discusses this conceptual complication, and then focuses on the chapters that seem to offer a better sense of what the editors might have had in mind when planning the book. The book begins with a brief discussion of an interview with World English specialist Tom McArthur. After explaining how he came to his field—while living and teaching in India—Tom McArthur comments that non-native English speakers’ unwillingness “to break the rules” prevents them from being creative with the language (p. 22). Using a rather bad example, he goes on to say that creativity and the fear of it is one of the more pressing issues for the field. The idea itself is sound; fear of making mistakes is a common problem. It does, however, raise the question of what rules are to be considered here? McArthur does not offer any real answers to this question. Subsequent discussion about standardizing English as an international language, that is, finding rules that serve as a guide to all speakers of English who might want to speak to one another, do little to resolve the problem. In fact, the issue itself remains fuzzy for the rest of Part I, with various contributors saying what they want to do without always writing about what they actually do. One exception to this position is Luke Prodromou’s article “Defining the ‘Successful Bilingual Speaker’ of English.” Prodromou begins by situating his discussion of ELF in the context of bilingualism; in doing so, he gives the reader a particular context in which to consider his proposals (pp. 53–54). Not only does he suggest ways of evaluating the successful bilingual, but also does he mention his concern, as do other authors in Part I, about the use of native-speaker speech as a model for non-native speakers of English. He then leaves the realm of the general to present an example of a real project designed to address the problem of ELF standardization, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and the work of one of its vocal proponents, Barbara Seidlhofer (p. 55). In this way, the concepts suggested in the title of Part I are examined in the context of a real world project that they generated. Not only do we know that there is a problem with establishing...

Friendship, Marriage, andBetween Women

Friendship, Marriage, and Between Women Richard Dellamora (bio) In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus has impressively combined portions of two, or even three, books. Of these, the one that I find especially enjoyable is Part Two, "Mobile Objects: Female Desire," in which she offers a witty parody, full of reversals and inversions, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1985 book, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. At its time of publication, Sedgwick's book posed some major challenges to practitioners of feminist literary studies. With a few notable exceptions, feminist literary scholars of the preceding decade had focused on establishing a female literary canon. Sedgwick's book was dramatically different, focusing as it did exclusively on works from the classic male literary canon. In addition, Sedgwick showed little interest in relations between women. Instead, she anatomized male homosocial desire—the rivalrous, potentially deadly attraction/repulsion acted out in the representation of desire triangulated between two men and a woman. Women's agency was so diminished in this Sedgwickian model that in the key chapter of the book, a brilliant reading of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Sedgwick argued that Lizzie Hexam, the "courageous" (178) working-class female heroine, was reduced to the status of a "slave" by her marriage at the end of the novel (179).1 [End Page 67] Revisiting Between Men two decades later, in Part One of her book, Marcus reclaims female-female desire for gender and sexuality studies of the Victorian novel by arguing that the marriage plot of Victorian fiction has as much—or more—to do with fostering lifelong friendships between women as it has to do with successful courtship. In Part Two, Marcus focuses on material culture: first, in the exchange of female same-sex attraction and pleasure in the commodified world of female fashion; and second, in the sadomasochistic female same-sex fantasies that inhabit the world of doll literature. Marcus's gleeful pursuit of perversity in both of these contexts carries through to the main literary analysis that appears in this section, her counter-reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61) as a narrative of desire triangulated not according to Sedgwick's model but between two women and a man. Marcus persuasively argues that Pip, the young male protagonist, learns opposite-sex desire by imitating Miss Havisham's desire for Estella. While Marcus's reversals of Sedgwick are queer in their affirmation of sadomasochistic female same-sex desire, they also return feminist sex/gender studies to where it was before Sedgwick's advent: namely, to a focus on female gender and on desiring relations between women. In its interest in gender-crossing, transgender, and transsexuality, queer theory by Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others has crucially revised this approach to gender studies. But while Marcus's Pip is a gender-crosser, "Mobile Objects" in the title of Part Two refers mainly to how female same-sex pleasure and desire circulate through a world of commodities designed for female consumption. In Part One, Marcus sets the stage for this analysis by linking the study of female friendship (approached via many examples of female life-writing composed between 1830 and 1880) with what she describes as the plot of "female amity" in Victorian novels. In Part Three, she focuses on what she refers to as "female marriage" in the fiction of Anthony Trollope and in mid-Victorian anthropological and legal debates about the character of marriage as an institution. Despite this emphasis on female friendship and marriage, Marcus argues that her approach debunks classic 1970s studies of female intimacy by writers who tended to see close ties between women as subversive of male privilege. Marcus asserts instead that female marriages were accepted within middle- and upper-class society. This assessment is not in itself novel. Sally Cline, for example, says with regard to Radclyffe Hall's early infatuation with the singer Agnes Nicholls: [End Page 68] Certain restrictions . . . were placed on these friendships. Should two women . . . wish to pursue their attachment by forming an established ménage, they had to remember three caveats: first, that if an eligible male appeared he must not...

Coming to Rest (review)

Kathryn Stripling Byer. Coming to Rest. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. 63 pages. Hardback $45.00. Trade paperback $16.95. Thisnew collectionbyNorthCarolina'sPoetLaureateoffersreaders a splendid variety of subject matter, tone and poetic forms. The book's thirty-six poems (along with an untitled "song" that concludes the second of its three parts) address such topics as family relationships and home, memory, mortality, "the old hymn of April" as Byer writes in "I Listen" (12), and the power of "language [to] raise the world up / from the grave of our common amnesia" (56). In "Nets," she notes how "Line / for the caveman worked / magic" in its depiction ofbison and mammoth; the same can be said for many of Byer's own lines. The title of Part 1, "Again," announces the volume's emphasis on memory and on the motif of return, both literal and figurative. The epigraphtothis sectioncomes fromSeamusHeaney's "The Birthplace," lines that give Byer's book its title and a good share of its thematic focus: We come back emptied, to nourish and resist the words of coming to rest: birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash, flagstone, hearth. (1) "Home" is a key term in this collection, occurring in at least twenty different poems, including the opening poem, "Coastal Plain," which speaks of "Home that calls / / and calls / and calls" (4) and which uses couplets of identical rhyme as if to mirror, stanza by stanza, the movement of return. In the five-part title poem, Byer displays her skill with both traditional forms and free verse by including a villanelle, a sonnet and a ghazal. The final seven of the twelve poems in Part 1 deal with experiences involving the poet's daughter Corinna, to whom Coming to Rest is dedicated, experiences that range from infancy to Cory's twenty-first birthday. The final poem in Part 1, "Chicago Bound," with its portrait of an airplane flight to that city, where Cory awaits her parents' visit to celebrate her birthday, provides a skillful transition to Part 2, which utilizes the journey motif in fifteen poems describing a trip to the westernUnited States and the poet's subsequent return home. 87 Entitled "Singing to Salt Woman," Part 2 is unified not only by the motif of the journey but also by water imagery. Here the term "home" recurs often, but Byer also inquires, "what's native now?" (28), a question she responds to in "Zuni," the central poem in Part 2, in which she remarks: Maybe native means nothing if not our own way of recovering, back to the first wind that quickened it, what we call home----- (33) The legend of Salt Woman cited in "Zuni" takes readers back to what the poem's closing lines call "a creation story / whose ripples keep cnreading / beyond comprehension" (33). Byer again invokes the mytnu^w. a,„118? 0f tne human imagi«**™, in "Edge of Plains," a poemthat contrasts tue1,^^nnnnS' visionof a "heavenly ?ß?-ow with the Anasazi's embrace of "earthly / repose" (35). Just as the trajectory of the airplane in "Chicago Bound" is earthward ("if it's down / there on earth where you are, / it's Sweet Home," says the poet to Corinna), so the trajectory of Byer's poetic vision in Part 2 comes to rest on the images of a linen tablecloth settling over a table and of Alice Mathews, Byer's former colleague at Western Carolina University to whom the poems in Part 2 are dedicated, delighting in the sight and smell and taste of raspberries. Part 3, "Closer," contains just ten poems, yet all but the last run longerthan any ofthepoems inPart2. This section's title invites readers to ask, "Closer to what?" Among many possible answers, two seem prominent: closer to death, to the sense of mortality that haunts many of these poems, and closer to home, whether home denotes a particular place or the recovery of one's past or ultimate union with the life force manifest on "the dawn of the first morning" (35). The epigraph to Part 3 refers to "the call / and response of memory" (41), and this section's opening poem, "The Still Here and Now," recollects the poet's first day as...

Transcendental Exhaustion

ABBREVIATIONS BzP Beitrage zur Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe 65. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989. EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. Gesamtausgabe 40. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. IM An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale Press, 1959. MFL Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans. Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1984. Nii Nietzsche. Volume II: Eternal Recurrence of Same. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Niv Nietzsche. Volume IV: Nihilism. Trans. Frank Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. OTB On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. SA The Self-Assertion of German University and The Rectorate 1933-34: Facts and Thoughts. Trans. Karsten Harries. Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985): 467-81. SB Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat and Das Rektorat 1933/34-Tatsachen und Gedanken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. WCT What is Called Thinking? Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. WHD Was Heist Denken? Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997. ZSD Zur Sache des Denkens. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Varlag, 1969. (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) If we take philosophy, in most general sense, to be presentation of underlying conditions without which some given determinacy would be impossible, then it would seem to go without saying that Heidegger's and Time, whatever else it might be, is an instance of philosophy. As Heidegger indicates in introduction: question of aims ... at ascertaining a priori conditions not only for possibility of sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of but also for possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified of [Sinn von Sein], and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (11) It seems that sense of Being, as underlying condition for possibility of both ontic sciences and regional ontologies underlying them, is a condition which Heidegger seeks to [kldren] for us. And rest of text appears to confirm this: not only are there several points in and Time where Heidegger refers to his own project as (e.g., 24, 199200,208); more significantly, very task of fundamental ontology, as specified in title of Part One, is the explication of time as horizon of question of Being (41). And yet, one might well wonder why, if Heidegger is engaged in such a project, he fails to take up term transcendental in a sustained manner in and Time, particularly given his suspicion of all such terms as they have been handed down to us by history of ontology.1 At no point in text does he clarify his precise use of transcendental (how his usage differs from, say, Kant's). And his reticence seems still more perplexing when we consider relation between and Time and his subsequent work. Though he would always hold and Time to be a crucial point of departure for his whole path of thinking,2 fact remains that he nevertheless abandoned this text less than half finished. And his occasional elliptical references to this momentous interruption in his thinking are of little help in deciphering precisely what in and Time needed to be abandoned.3 This ambiguity has led several commentators, in their attempts to articulate inadequacy of and Time, to underscore an apparent shift in Heidegger's relation to philosophy that purportedly takes place between this text and his subsequent work: To summarize this interpretation, very briefly: 1. …

Oceania: An Introduction to the Cultures and Identities of Pacific Islanders

Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart, Laurence M. Carucci, Lin Poyer, Richard Feinberg and Cluny Macpherson, Oceania: An Introduction to the Cultures and Identities of Islanders, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002, 249 pages.The material is presented in three independent parts: South-West Pacific by Strathern and Stewart (67 pp. of text), Pacific by Feinberg and Macpherson (53 pp.), and West Central Pacific by Carucci and Poyer (52 pp.).In their very brief Introduction to the volume, Strathern and Stewart reject the anthropological areal terms-Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia-in favour of compass directions, except where they use the older terms in quotations marks, to signify their dissatisfaction with them. Feinberg and Macpherson are of different opinion, as indicated by the quotation marks they place on the phrase the Eastern Pacific in the title of part 2. Strathern and Stewart say that the sections (parts) into which the book is divided ... correspond to geographical, historical, and cultural within the as whole, but we do not stress these broad divisions as such. Yet, having named the parts of the book for those divisions does indeed give stress or emphasis to them.Stewart and Strathern provide the volume's aim: ... to provide an overview of ethnography, history, and changes in broad range of societies across the region (p. 3). They say that their intended audience is undergraduate college students; however, that the average college/university student already finds Mela/Micro/Polynesia sufficiently hard to keep straight, I would rather that Strathern and Stewart had either used the traditional terms, or had taken the more sophisticated approach of avoiding this classificatory problem altogether. They state that contemporary processes, common ethnographic themes and dynamic differences in Oceania as whole are their primary interest (p. 4). Actually organizing the book around these concepts, rather than according to geographic areas (whatever one might call them), would have provided unique treatment of Oceanic ethnography.Additionally, in their Introduction, Stewart and Strathern note that they ...have written this book in the conviction that this world...is world knowing, as much today as it was perceived to be by its earlier explorers, whether captains of ships or writers of books (p. 3). While I agree with this, I also wonder why they feel they need to make this statement. The underlying issue is not how worth knowing cultures are, but the noxious habit of Westerners' judging other cultures as more or less interesting and therefore in direct correlation with how exotic they appear to be. I wonder which audience Stewart and Strathern are trying to convince of the value of cultures: students, their own colleagues, or the general public?Part 1 of the book focusses on the South-West Pacific. The first section is overly detailed. For an undergraduate textbook, providing accurate content is essential, of course, but so is building sense of place and context, visual clues and cues to aid students' memory and understanding, and that sense of being there. What few pictures there are-nine-only appear at the end of the text of this section, preceding the References, very much like footnotes. None is in colour. Five are from Mt. Hagen, and not one is from outside Papua New Guinea.The pictures seem like archival footage, frequently focussing on ritual moments-the National Geographic type of native (Lutz and Collins, Ch.5), strangely dressed, frightening or scowling, and more often than not, nameless: a female mourner, a male dancer, a newly married bride, a younger man.Part 1 also contains 16 Case Studies: two on Fiji; one each on New Caledonia andVanuatu; three on the Solomons; and nine focussed on Papua New Guinea. …

The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy.

The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy.

The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy.

The Arctic: Environment, People, Policy.

Late-marxist, post-poststructuralist critical nebulosity

Late-Marxist, Post-Poststructuralist Critical Nebulosity Wendell V. Harris Illustration, by J. Hillis Miller; 168 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, $35.00. The title of J. Hillis Miller’s Illustration is apt in a way other than the author anticipated: it is a composite illustration of most of what makes so much of contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism unsatisfying if not nugatory. Initial evidence of the lack of cogent conceptualization is the disparateness of the two long essays jammed between the covers of the book. Part One is entitled “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction” and Part Two “Word and Image.” Miller explains the relationship by saying what while the first section of the book “will attempt to understand” the shift in literary studies toward theory and especially cultural studies, the second section “will explore the relations of picture to word as one practical and theoretical issue important to cultural studies” (p. 9). But that connection is (fleetingly) asserted in the midst of an argument so fragmented and confused that whole sections must here be passed over without comment. What is most striking about Part One is the thought-disabling imprecision of many of the key terms and the not unrelated way in which the argument follows well-travelled modes of Marxist and poststructuralist thought. The title of Part One, “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” is of course intended to [End Page 127] link Miller’s first essay to what is probably the best-known of Walter Benjamin’s essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Both seek not only to link changing technological possibilities to the direction of cultural change, but to suggest that such changes should be harnessed to the work of political revolution. Miller might have been warned by the deficiencies of Benjamin’s over-rated essay. Benjamin begins his essay by applauding Marx for so cogently showing “what could be expected of capitalism in the future”: the prophecy Benjamin derives from Marx is “that one could expect [capitalism] not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself” (p. 217). 1 There is still plenty of exploitation to be found in the world, not excluding the most economically (capitalistically) developed countries, but it requires real intellectual contortions to argue that the growth and exploitation of a proletariat has increased where capitalism has most developed; the assertion that the world is moving toward the abolition of capitalism hardly requires comment. Benjamin’s closing argument, the point toward which his entire essay is presumably driving, substitutes a clever slogan for thought. “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life” (p. 241). But, writes Benjamin in his closing sentence, “Communism responds by politicizing art” (p. 242). Miller attempts to explain the distinction: “To aestheticize politics is to treat the state as though it were a work of art” while the “politicizing of art . . . means affirming the political value and force of art” (p. 10). Well, it is of course possible to assume such a meaning for Benjamin’s words, especially since it is hard to know exactly what they mean, but why make so much of an essay which begins by endorsing a prophecy that has become increasingly dubious, ends in an ambiguous formulation, and in between mixes obvious and trivial observations with a highly questionable argument about the disappearance of the “aura” of a work as a result of mechanical reproduction? As for the latter, the cheap reproduction of, for example, certain of Van Gogh’s paintings can be argued to “debase” them, but if they mean little to those who encounter them only on cheap posters or computer screens, they can scarcely mean less than they did to those unaware of their existence before the age of mechanical reproduction. And after all, if the original paintings have not retained their “aura,” museums could simply fill their rooms with reproductions. The reason Miller links his essay to that of Benjamin is presumably to demonstrate his allegiance to the form of Marxist thought so frequently...

How to communicate better, part 1

Originally, the title for Part 1 (and next week's 'Part 2') was to be 'How To Improve Your Communication with Patients', because both pieces are concerned with communicating with patients. But, they are also intended to put forward some ideas to help you develop communication skills.

Apollo Underground: His Master's Still, Small Voice

narrative of Notes from the Underground, Part II is a crescendo in three movements. first describes the young hero's bizarre schemes for wreaking vengeance on an imagined bully; the second, his efforts to insinuate himself into a band of ex-schoolmates; the third, his tortured relationships with a young prostitute named Liza. Although these adventures differ greatly in substance and tone (the first is essentially comic; the second, harshly satirical; and the third and longest borders on tragedy), each is an attempt on the part of a lacerated and self-hating outsider to attain some kind of relationship with-hence respect from-his fellow men. But as these schemes collapse under the weight of their own foolishness, perversity, or perversion,' the gulf separating him from society widens, not narrows. And with the final seemingly gratuitous spurning of Liza (he offers to pay in cash for what had been given in love) he exiles himself altogether from the company of men and falls into that terrestial Hell, the Underground. Or so the hiatus between the temporally inverted parts of the work asks us to assume.2 For it is in The Underground (the title of Part I) that we find the middle-aged misanthrope railing, explaining, preaching. This tripartite march to self-damnation constitutes the narrative bones of A Propos of Falling Snow. But it is symptomatic of

Cod-liver Oil and Chemistry

THIS book is divided into two parts-the title of part i. is “Cod-liver Oil”; the title of part ii. is “The Law of Atomic Linking, diagrammatically illustrated,” and the heading of the first chapter of the second part is “Chemistry.” There is a separate preface to each part, and, though bound together in one volume, each forms an independent treatise, and is separately paged. One hundred and eleven pages are devoted to “cod-liver oil,” and rather more than five hundred to “chemistry.” Cod-liver Oil and Chemistry. By F. Peckel Moller (London: Peter Moller, 43 Snow Hill, E.C., and at Christiania, Norway, 1895.)