Transcendental Values Research Articles

Liberating Lawyers: Divergent Parallels in "Intruder in the Dust" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Professor Atkinson hopes William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust will replace Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird as our favorite story of lawyerly virtue. In both stories, a white male lawyer and his protege try to free a black man falsely accused of a capital crime. But below these superficial similarities, Professor Atkinson finds fundamental differences. To Kill a Mockingbird, with its father-knows-best attorney, Atticus Finch, celebrates lawyerly paternalism; Intruder in the Dust, through its aristocratic black hero, Lucas Beauchamp, and his lay allies, challenges the rule of lawyers, if not law itself. The first urges us to serve others in a way that confirms our superiority in a system we have made in our own image; the second engages us in a dialogue with those who may be able to help us make our common world better than we alone could ever have imagined. Beyond this comparison, Professor Atkinson invites us to wonder why we prefer the more comforting tale to the more challenging. In his view, the fault lies largely with contemporary legal education. Even as that education recommends our using the law to liberate others, it fails to free us from our own prejudices and preconceptions. Current calls for more skills training and doctrinal scholarship both reflect and exacerbate this failure. Although Professor Atkinson doubts that literature can lead us to eternal, transcendent values, he believes that it can open us to new possibilities of personal virtue and social justice. Like the Socratic dialogues, Intruder in the Dust makes us examine our lives in dialogue with others. That, Professor Atkinson concludes, is both its principal lesson for us lawyers and its best claim for elevation in our canon.

Welcoming in the New Millennium: The Possibilities of Brecht's The Days of the Commune for Northern Ireland

I want to begin by addressing the contention that either Brecht is not a convinced Marxist or somehow his plays and poetry can be detached from his politics. This assertion not only resorts to a traditional critical approach, namely that art has access to transcendent values and universal meanings that can remove it from its historical and material roots, but also suggests that critics likewise can be above material concerns in an unassailable "neutral" intellectual territory. In reality, critics are products of their own period and communicate as much about themselves as they do about their subject matter.

L’art de l’échec dans The Recognitions et JR de William Gaddis

The art of failure in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and JR. William Gaddis’s novels are all centered to a greater or lesser degree around plots involving the issue of artistic creation, but the first two, The Recognitions and JR, certainly provide a more thorough examination of the situation of the artist. Starting with an analysis and description of the relationship between the notion of originality and the work of art as it appears in The Recognitions through the figure of the painter and forger Wyatt Gwyon, this paper tries to explore the ways in which the reader is gradually led to recognize failure as the dominant and even constitutive feature in artistic creation. Since art no longer offers an ultimate refuge for transcendent values that could replace the absence of other, more religious, transcendent references, JR stages the passage from the art of failure to the failure of art even more systematically as the overpowering presence of money and the financial jargon seem to rule out the necessity of and need for artistic creation.

Ecometrics' stakeholder subjectivity: Values, issues, and effects

AbstractStakeholder groups, defined according to their transcendent values, have different concepts of sustainability. Their prioritizations of individual, family, collective, and local and global environmental issues also differs. Given this, the metrics required for a given sustainable development path are subjective. Therefore, the questions of who should define ecometrics, their transparency, number, state of aggregation, standardization, and benchmarking are questions that require an enfranchised multi‐stakeholder debate. At present, corporations have been asked to bear the burden of environmental reporting and eco‐indicators have been established to account for material intensity, energy consumption and waste or toxic releases, among other factors. However, the links among these local‐, product‐, or service‐based microecometrics and global states such as temperatures or atmospheric concentrations have yet to be established. The relationship of macroecometrics to individual definitions of sustainable development also has not been addressed. This article summarizes four plenary lectures given at ECOMETRICS '98 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The workshop involved forty participants from industry, academic and government organizations representing seven countries and three continents.

The Private Life of the Victorian Novel

REVIEW ARTICLE THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Deirdre D'Albertis. Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text. New York: St. Martin's P, 1997. ? + 230. ($39.95 US (cloth). Patricia McKee. Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878). Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ix + 245. $49.95 US (cloth); $19.95 US (paper). Catherine Waters. Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 246. $54.95 US (cloth). Each of these books examines the nineteenth-century detachment of private from public existences. Though in the late twentieth century we take the idea of a private life as a given, its separation from public life is not simply apparent. These categories were constructed during the century through re-definitions of knowledge, family life, and ideology. Novels have a place in this construction. Catherine Waters investigates one powerful aspect tool of private life, the idea of family. Waters's study focuses on the family as an "imaginary construct," (16) a part of a middle-class ideology. Middleclass readers and writers assume that the family is a transcendent value, a desirable object that united ages, classes, regions, and genders. Nineteenth-century discourse depicted domestic life as a universal ideal. Following Jacques Donzelot, Waters notices a shift in definition of the family as the family came to be regarded as a nuclear unit through which the state could operate: "a transition of a government of families to government through the family" (26). The nuclear family replaced feudal notions of the family as a bloodline or mercantilist notions of the family as a corporation. Waters shows that Dickens at once participates in familial ideology early in his carer and then begins to question its transcendence later on. 70Victorian Review In a fascinating chapter on Dickens and Christmas, Waters reveals the extent of Dickens's domestic ideology. Waters notes that in the early nineteenth century the holiday was depicted as an old-fashioned feast-day that few celebrated anymore. Christmas had been a village festival, a time for the landowner to treat his servants and tenants. In Pickwick, Dickens represents a traditional, pre-Victorian Christmas celebration. But by mid-century, the holiday was reconceived as a family party; new customs (like the tree) were adopted, and the village events were reinvented in smaller, indoor venues. Scrooge can be seen not only as a convert to Christmas, but to the idea of the family. Dickens's Christmas books not only show a change in the representation or Christmas but in the amount of ideological weight the season was meant to bear. Moreover the Christmas books help create and maintain that ideology. Dickens's many fractured families help establish the ideal family by counter-example. In Oliver Twist, Mrs. Mann, Fagin and the workhouse authorities all access the rhetoric of family life. Dickens provides examples of numerous failing, rather than parodie, families as well. Waters notes that in Dickens, families that do not adapt themselves to the domestic ideology inevitably decline and can only be re-established by a woman who reconfigures the family to fit it. Dickens's portrayal of the Dombeys in Dombey and Son is a diagnosis. Dombey runs his family like and as a firm; he fails to follow middle-class ideology and separate the family from his business practices. When Dombey's firm-as-family fails, a woman is called upon to establish true domestic virtues. Florence creates a family that is almost transcendent - though, as Waters notices, threatening characters like Carker and Alice have been removed from the narrative. Waters notes that that bureaucracy in Little Dorrit exists through a series of families; these families show an older idea of the family not as a nuclear unit, but a public conglomeration of blood relatives. The Barnacles and their bureaucratic tribe support the anonymous functions of governing like the Circumlocution Office. Their presence threatens the idea of the individual self. Mr. Dorrit too, with his misplaced idea of paternalism — while playing at being the Father of the Marshalsea he forgets to be father of his own family — satirizes ineffectual, pre-industriai familial organization. Like so many of Dickens's...

Russian Religious Rejections of Money and Homo Economicus: The Self-Identifications of the "Pioneers of a Money Economy" in Post-Soviet Russia

Russian Orthodoxy, Christian Socialism, and Russian Communism are consistent in their denunciation of Homo Economicus — the Western ideal type celebrating individual proprieties and instrumental rationality. Russian religious and cultural rejections of Homo Economicus and Western-style contract are counterpoised by the constructions of Homo Orthodox and Russian covenant, that exalt communitarianism and transcendental value convictions. The recent market-style reforms in Russia brought the rising tide of Western influences. Focusing on new Russian bankers who are representative of the spirit of an emerging marketplace, this paper explores their self-identifications as Homo Orthodox or Homo Economicus, and their endorsements of covenant or contract. Based on the interviews with sixty-one Russian bankers, it is concluded that the perceptions of the “pioneers of a money economy” deviate from traditional Russian cultural-religious ideals questioning the endurance of these ideals in the new market situation.

'The Light of God's Law': Violence and Metaphysics in the '50s Widescreen Biblical Epic

AbstractThe essay offers a reading of two episodes from widescreen biblical epics of the 1950s: Henry Koster's CinemaScope The Robe (Twentieth Century Fox, 1952), the story of the Roman centurion who played dice for Jesus' robe at the foot of the cross, and Cecil B. De Mille's VistaVision The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1957). Widescreen technology was developed in response to a catastrophic postwar slump in cinema attendance. In this respect, it was extremely successful: by 1960, De Mille's film was top of Variety magazine's all-time grossing list. More important, however, is the fact that it transformed the very nature of the cinema image. This article reassesses the historical and theoretical significance of the '50s biblical epic, and argues not only that the metaphysics of presence it inscribed within the Hollywood frame has not been adequately theorised, but also that its transcendental values anticipate the challenge to poststructuralist thinking that has been gathering momentum in Jacques Derrida's readings of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

History's Divining Rod

History’s Divining Rod Robert L. Dorman (bio) Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf. All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. x + 136 pp. Notes and index. $13.95 (paper). If history is like a “complex system of underground rivers and springs, creating its own subterranean pressures” and “latent meanings” in particular places, as Edward Ayers and Peter Onuf write in their introduction to All Over the Map (p. 5), then the concept of region is history’s divining rod. No one is quite sure how it does what it does, yet it leads them to discoveries. Or does it? The four authors whose essays are collected in this volume are by turns intrigued, seduced, and confounded by the region category, just as American cultural observers have been for generations, all attempting to make sense of our amorphous “nation of regions” (p. 10). Ayers, Onuf, and their coauthors, Stephen Nissenbaum and Patricia Limerick, are well aware of this indeterminate character of regions—in some cases, perhaps too aware. At the outset, Ayers and Onuf are careful to warn that regions have never been “bounded and complete entities” but have been continually redrawn and redefined throughout American history (p. 4). The cultural and political construction of regions is one of three unifying themes of the book, explored especially in the opening essay by Onuf, who offers an excellent synthesis covering the revolutionary era to the Civil War. He argues that antebellum sectionalism was not an outgrowth of “fundamentally different social systems” in the North, South, or West, but instead was “integral” to republican ideology and the conception of the federal system itself (p. 12). Having fought a nationalist revolution against distant centralized power and “metropolitan authority,” the founding fathers were careful to ratify the “empowerment of an expanding periphery” as a counterweight to the “strengthened center” guaranteed by the federal constitution (pp. 13–14). Their hope, writes Onuf, was to preclude both the rise of a “new imperial center” and the fragmentation of “unrestrained regional rivalries” by binding the union into harmonious economic and political interdependence (pp. 16, 19). Antebellum politicians on the national stage (particularly westerners like Henry Clay) later sought to mute sectional differences in order to extend their [End Page 369] influence and broaden coalitions. In due course, according to Onuf, “the absence of internal and external threats to the union by the mid-1820s” made the disunionist scenarios feared by the founders seem “irrelevant” (p. 34). Unfortunately, during the ensuing debate over slavery each side recklessly “essentialized” sectional distinctions that were never as “real” or “fundamental” as believed (pp. 11–12, 37). Americans in the North and South came to equate union and national political control by one section with the specter of imperial tyranny over their particular region, the seat of “deeper loyalties and more transcendent values” (p. 35). Consequently the great divide between North and South overwhelmed the “multiplicity of provisional . . . sections and sectional alliances” that the decentralized federal system engendered. The “sphere of the nonnegotiable” thus became larger and larger, Onuf concludes, and the war came (p. 37). Stephen Nissenbaum expands on this depiction of the “necessarily provisional and indeterminate” construction of regions with his delightful account of the invention of pastoral New England during the nineteenth century (p. 36). He begins by noting recent scholarship that disputes the stereotype of the tightly “nucleated” colonial New England village, where even the hymn-singing was more raw and rural than we have assumed (pp. 42–44). Commercialization and industrialization gave the New England village its classic Our Town shape, he contends, and antebellum “culture wars” supplied the region with its enduring mythology (pp. 39, 52). In the Federal period, the town common proved to be an efficient central location to conduct business, and only after the Civil War was it landscaped and beautified in communities like Litchfield, Connecticut, where residents wanted a “traditional” refuge from ugly industrial centers. Nissenbaum reminds us that the decline of New England economically and politically after 1800 (relative to other regions) had sparked the first efforts at inventing this tradition by individuals such as Timothy Dwight, who suggested...

Positively Fabulous: Why It Is Good To Be a Legal Positivist

‘Legal Positivism’ is a much abused term. It is often pejoratively invoked by those occupying both the natural law and critical legal studies ramparts. The former see it as a school of thought which ignores the role in law of those standards and values which have not been deliberately laid down or unintentionally evolved. Positivism, for them, fails because it is prepared to describe a legal world where moral values play no necessary part and where transcendent values may not exist at all. The latter group of critics, not too dissimilarly, see legal positivism’s doctrines as over-reliant on rules and too inclined to accept that a legal system somehow can generate a logically mandated code of answers.In order to defend positivism it is advisable to start with an enunciation of its core precepts. With all that has been written attacking and supporting positivism though, this can be a contentious matter. So instead I shall defend one particular version of positivism, that of H.L.A. Hart. As Hart’s The Concept of Law, first published in 1961, is at worst one of the handful of great legal philosophy texts written in English this century and at best “the classic work of philosophical jurisprudence”, this preference for concentrating on the tangible and identifiable precepts of Hart over the woolly, elusive and frequently caricatured precepts of something disparagingly termed positivism has much to recommend it.

Futurism today

Futurism Today Laura Harwood Wittman The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Cinzia Sartini Blum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 212. $45.00 (cloth); $17.00 (paper). L’Utopia futurista: Contributo alla storia delle avanguardie. (Futurist Utopia: A Contribution to the History of the Avant-Gardes.)Gianni Eugenio Viola. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1994. Pp. 179. Lire 25.000 (paper). Both of these new books attempt to renew studies of futurism and its founder F. T. Marinetti, attempting to overcome the dualism that has plagued critical assessments of Marinetti’s place in the history of the avant-garde: the tendency of critics either to praise Marinetti’s revolutionary aesthetics and downplay his historical involvement with fascism; or else to condemn his contribution to fascist discourse and discount his creative achievement (Blum, 2–3). Blum and Viola propose new ways to negotiate the tension between a historical approach, one that must confront the ethical issues and very concrete political implications of Marinetti’s rhetoric, and a more theoretical or aesthetic approach, one that acknowledges the force of artistic claims to autonomy from political, moral, or historical content, yet does not take these simply at face value. Yet they pursue this goal in different ways: Viola presents archival materials in an effort to offer a more nuanced historical analysis, while Cinzia Blum uses feminist and psychoanalytical theory to reveal new aspects of Marinetti’s poetic imagination and ideology. Blum’s is the first book-length study of Marinetti’s poetics to be published in English, and the most thorough in any language. It uncovers new thematic continuities and private obsessions that structure his poetic imagination from his early decadent phase, through the so-called [End Page 197] “heroic” years of futurism (1909–1918), all the way to his later works, which exalt fascist nationalism and rediscover religion as a response to personal and national tragedy. These continuities are gathered together in what Blum calls the “futurist fiction of power,” a term that encompasses both the historical substance of Marinetti’s texts (decadent but also proto-fascist), as well as the psychological and ethical impetus that gives that substance its deeper structure and generates Marinetti’s apparently contradictory rhetorical strategies (ix). Blum situates the origin of Marinettian futurism in “the cultural crisis of modernism” a crisis “of metaphysics and language: a collapse of transcendental values . . . a breakdown of the framing assumptions of Western civilization so far as they rest on the traditional conception of individuality, on the anthropocentric notion of the rational control and supremacy of man over reality” (3–4). Although Marinetti’s earliest works were written in the context of French decadent literature, “Marinetti’s prefuturist poetic persona is unlike the effeminate, passive, impotent dandy in that he experiences a violent expenditure, rather than deliquescence, of vital forces” (10), that is, he counters the crisis with “violent gestures of self-assertion” (11). Thus the “futurist fiction of power” is both an attack on the modern loss of absolute values and boundaries, a loss that threatens Marinetti’s optimistic, aggressive image of individuality (17), and a “collection of strategies for empowerment” that attempts to “reclaim” “the old, collapsed fiction of man’s mastery of the universe and of language” (19). For Blum, the oppositional nature of Marinetti’s imaginative universe and his aggressive response to the modernist crisis mean that “the polarized, asymmetrical configuration of masculine totality and feminine lack provides a bedrock and a blueprint for the futurist destruction and reconstruction of the universe.” As a result the “methodological lens of gender” can reveal the “unarticulated emotional underside, the ‘other’ within the self” (viii). Her approach enables Blum to show that the same oppositional structure reappears under diverse guises in many texts that have previously been seen as radically different from one another: this is especially revealing when texts that are overtly political in content are shown to be similar in structure to other texts that are putatively less ideological, more purely aesthetic. The reappearance, for instance, of certain rhetorical constructions suggests that Marinetti, in his creative works, was more consistent than is usually thought in following the prescriptions he sets out in the manifestos...

Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (review)

216 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press By Michael Ugarte In the preface to his Madrid 1900: The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture, Michael Ugarte makes it clear he has written a book of literary criticism he wants readers to find intellectually engaging as well as pleasing. Ugarte has made a theoretically provocative, gracefully argued contribution to the study of urban Spanish literature from around the last decade of the nineteenth century to the first three decades or so of the twentieth. His treatment of Madrid literature (chiefly prose, with the exception of Valle-Inclán's esperpentos) introduces a fresh, fruitful way for Hispanists to approach Spanish literarure written at the dawn of Spain's modernity. It is also accessible to those in other fields conducting comparative studies. Across rhe disciplines, many intellectuals whose theories of culture have been closely tied to the historical have underestimated the importance of space, place and geography in artistic representation of all kinds. Ugarte, inspired in part by Walter Benjamins reading of nineteenth-century Paris, seeks to "lay bare the concrereness of culture, its materiality both in relation ro the commodity system and to the social practices of which it is both the producr and the producer " (15). The relarionship between Spanish urban history and rhe history of the Spanish nation-state is always a given in Ugarte's study. He draws (not uncritically) on other socially minded scholars such as RaymondWilliams, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, and fellow Hispanist Edward Baker in his interrogation of the role of history, gender, politics and economic relations in Spanish literary production at the turn of the century. His position is that history is an undeniable and concrete teality but at the same time he is sensitive to, as he states in his introduction, "the multifaceted, subjective, and quirky constructions of history conveyed through language. Indeed quirkiness (or marginality, and that which does not fit into the accepted categories) is precisely what leads me to read women's assimilations and representations of cities in conjunction or againsr those of the more-established male writers. In short, what follows is a doubleedged (and I hope problematic) attempt to offer a panoramic view of Madrid representation around 1900 and to create a tension in that very panoramic view by considering the glimpses, the writing rhar does not mesh easily with previously defined categories" (6-7). For Ugarte, therefore, the production of meaning is a social act within specific times and spaces whose understanding is impossible without historical considerations. Ugarte carefully selects authors who recreate city space as a replica not only of a locale but of an entire aesthetic project. The first chapter, "Reading Madrid's History," is a brief introduction to urban Madrid as represented by authors such as Larra, Mesonero Romanos, Galdós and Pardo Bazán. The second , "Urban Sociology and Narrative" provides close readings of parts of Baroja's Book Reviews 217 La lucha por la vida trilogy and El árbol de la ciencia, focusing on the authot's socioscientific worldview and his seemingly uncritical belief in reality and empirically verifiable truth. A woman reads and recreates Madrid in Chapter 3. Carmen de Burgos, writing at atound the same time as Virginia Woolf, is not entitely unlike her female characters whom at some point take charge of their urban environment. In Chapter 4 "the Bohemian frivolity of life in the street was both Ramon's trademark and his aspiration," (105) says Ugarte of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose works of supposed nonfiction (the greguerÃ-as) simultaneously contain a clash berween the mundane object of description and its seemingly transcendent value. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on "Madrid as esperpento," or the relarionship between an essentially urban Bohemia and modernism in selected works of Ramón MarÃ-a delValle-Inclán. "Madrid's Grand Country Bumpkin : AzorÃ-n" is the last chapter which deals wirh José MartÃ-nez Ruiz's recapturing of the Madrid of his more politically radical youth with specific attention to the dichotomy between country and city. This last chapter skillfully...

Cervantes's Confidence Games and the Refashioning of Totality

Georg Lukacs's correlation of the origins of the novel with the disappearance of transcendental values established a line of theoretical reflection on the importance of this genre for the understanding of Modernity. His treatment of Don Quijoteas the textual watershed in the configuration of the genre is laden with implications for the speculative or even normative significance of this work. Lukacs was not, of course, the first to accord Cervantes's masterpiece a historic-philosophical role or to consider its formative influence on the development of the novel, but he was the first to situate this work at the axis of a reflection on the historical necessity and the philosophic presuppositions of the genre. The Romantic forefathers of modern aesthetics (Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel) had already called attention to the concentration of new literary conditions in Cervantes's text, while two years before the publication of Lukacs's Theory of the Novel (1916), the Spanish philosopherJose Ortega y Gasset titled his first book Meditations on Quixote (Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914). Still earlier, the late Romantic essayist and religious thinker Miguel de Unamuno had made Cervantes's hero the object of a meditation in the manner of spiritual exercises. Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) is an Imitatio of sorts, a subjective rewriting of Cervantes's novel filled with ad hoc harangues and a high-pitched lyricism typical of Unamuno's style. A rigorous and informative analysis of the philosophical relations between Lukacs and these Spanish authors, both with respect to their engagement of Hegelianism and their responses to the philosophical possibilities of Cervantes's work, is available (Cascardi 1987). My pur-

Beyond Drudgery, Power, and Equity: Toward an Expanded Discourse on the Moral Dimensions of Housework in Families

Current research and theorizing on housework in families has emphasized technical, economic, and political dimensions. Little theorizing on is subject has recognized the moral dimensions of housework stemming from its familial/relational context. Following an overview of historical and current orientations to the study of housework, we critically examine the prevailing assumptions that underlie this research, with special attention to those that limit or exclude the possibility of moral discourse. We point to ways in which the current literature might lend itself to an expanded moral discourse, and consider the potential benefits of such discourse. Finally we suggest reconceptualizing housework as family work with its basis in moral obligation. In the past 2 decades the study of household labor or housework, formerly notable by its absence from family research, has emerged as a mature specialty in the social science literature. Presumably its emergence is associated with the continuing increase in women's paid employment, political appeals for gender equality, and the rise of women's studies devoted to illuminating women's subordination and domination (e.g., Smith, 1987). However, while much of the motivation to study housework may have been timely, postmodern, and even revolutionary, the writing itself has represented paradigmatic continuity rather than innovation, in that it has generally applied prevailing methods and dominant theoretical orientations to work in the home, as work in family settings were no different from work in other contexts. Often building on the assumption that housework and child care are drudgery, to be avoided possible, this body of literature has framed the study of family work in issues of efficiency and productivity, power and equity. When the discourse has included a moral element, typically it has been an appeal to fairness and gender equity, or an affirmation of the often-implicit norm that everyone should do their share of undesirable work. Rarely has a recognition that families provide a special context for work, and generate unique products. led to moral discourse on the meaning and social importance of family work. Instead, the family has been just one more context where modern technologies, theories, and research modes have been applied with little regard to the social impacts of that application or to the lack of fit between scientific paradigms and the special milieu of normative nurturance and commitment represented in much family work (Beutler, Burr, Bahr, & Herrin, 1989). In this article, we are proposing a moral discourse that recognizes that housework in families or family work is action undertaken in regard to other human beings...[and where] matters of what is fair, right, just and virtuous are always present (Fenstermarker, 1990, p. 133). While the existing literature on this subject sometimes includes considerations of fairness and justice, issues of the virtue, goodness, or transcendent value of the human interaction associated with family work have usually been neglected. Yet family work is the essential labor of life, the activity of nurturing and caring for that makes social life possible. Our moral lives are based in particular loyalties and relations, stated Hauerwas (1981), and if we are to learn to care for others, we must first learn to care for those we find ourselves joined to by accident of birth (p. 165). Since relationships, whatever else they may be, are moral in character and consequence (Clark, 1990, p. 265), words that carry the burdens of morality, namely trust, care, obligation and responsibility, must have a place in the discourse (Thomas, 1990, p. 267). It is our intent to call attention to their rarity in the current dialogue, and to create a space for an expanded discussion on the positive aspects of family work. We emphasize at the outset that our interest is in the ways family professionals have studied family work, the research questions that have been asked, and the paradigms that have been applied. …

Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations between Religion, Church, and Society by Adriaan H. Bredero

636BOOK REVIEWS Medieval Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages: The Relations between Religion, Church, and Society. By Adriaan H. Bredero. Translated by Reinder Bruinsma. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1994. Pp. xiii, 402. »2999) Adriaan Bredero, professor emeritus of medieval history at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, has, over a distinguished career, published many scholarly articles and two important monographs, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle (Amsterdam, 1985) andBernardas van Clairvaux (1091—1153): tussen Cultus en Historie (Kampen, 1993). The present collection of essays, assembled mostly from lectures, reviews, and previously printed pieces, first appeared in Dutch in 1986, and then in a second edition of 1987. This translation is based on the latter, but the author has made further revisions and added a chapter on the early Franciscan Order, which had been separately published in Dutch in 1988. Despite its composite character, the volume embodies an overall plan and purpose. Convinced that a proper historical understanding of anything requires a grounding in its social context—a point he reiterates repeatedly— Bredero expresses concern that contemporary conceptions of the Catholic Church are too often unaware of how Christianity has been shaped by forces peculiar to past times (p. 277); in particular, he worries that the idealization of the "Christian Middle Ages" can blind believers to necessary distinctions between the transcendental values of the tradition and those elements which were temporally conditioned and might therefore be changed, or—to put it another way—to "how medieval the Christianity of our times still is" (p. Lx). To combat this ahistorical tendency, Bredero intends to show in this collection that the medieval Church was not a static or unchanging entity, but one which possessed "the ability ... to experience at crucial moments an aggiomamento, an adaptation that prevented its degradation from an institution of salvation into a relic of the past" (p. 8). Such an awareness, he implies, will facilitate the aggiomamento called for in our own day by the Second Vatican Council, helping to ensure both the preservation and the purification of the tradition. Bredero begins with a supple, frequently insightful overview of the development of European Christianity from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century, and then proceeds to investigate individual elements in that process: the topics treated include the significance of Jerusalem in religious thought and practice, the nature of thepaxDei movement and its impact on medieval society, changing conceptions of sanctity, the slender boundary between reformist impulses and heresy, and the character of medieval anti-Semitism. His arguments evince wide learning and an impressive ability to draw perceptive, often imaginative conclusions from the evidence. Nonetheless, it should come as no surprise that the studies which leave the greatest impression are those BOOK reviews637 on subjects in which he has special expertise: a chapter on Cistercians and Cluniacs is notably strong, and the periodic references to Bernard ofClairvaux are unfailingly enlightening. Likewise, the final chapter—a substantial survey of religious life in the Low Countries from 1050 to 1384—is particularly impressive. But despite its many strengths, the book is somewhat problematical as the general work it apparently aspires to be. Bredero has rearranged and supplemented the original material with obvious care, but ultimately the volume does not .entirely escape a patchwork quality; this is most apparent at the very close, when a book review suddenly appears as an appendix, with little obvious relation to what has preceded. The annotation, moreover, is relatively scanty (and at times eccentric): the inclusion of many important secondary sources in an unannotated bibliography does not excuse the failure to cite them in the text where reference would have been natural (e.g., Le Goffs Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages at p. 78, or McKitterick's The Carolingians and the Written Word at p. 357). Even more troubling are instances oftextual imprecision which significanüy impede understanding. One can forgive the occasional misspelling ('?ß? Enghen" for "Van Engen" at p. 321, n. 2) as merely a technical oversight, just as one might explain away the unfortunate transposition of the Council of Soissons from 1121 to 1211 (p. 232). But the average reader may become justifiably irritated...

Hellenism and homosexuality in Victorian Oxford

Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. xvi + 173. $25.95 cloth. During Oscar Wilde's prosecution for acts of gross indecency with another male, the evidence brought against him included several of his own letters, among them a sensuously figured encomium to Lord Alfred Douglas and his rose-leaf lips: I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days (Letters 326). In that florid conjunction of red lips and Greek days, we tend to see but another late-Victorian instance of a desire seeking expression under the aegis of Ancient Greece, with all its cultural prestige. But as the interpretation of desire itself becomes ever more complex in our time, is well to note that Wilde would later recall with dismay the judicial and popular interpretations of that letter, protesting that every construction but the one is put on it (Letters 441). It is at least as problematic today as ever before, what a right construction might after all be in such a case. Linda Dowling provides some compelling suggestions with her Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, an engaging and elegantly presented discussion of the rise of Oxonian discourse. As the first scholarly book to focus entirely on the Victorian intrication of things Greek with things homosexual, Dowling's study advances a welcome convergence of contemporary historical and New Historical procedures. Following studies by Richard Jenkyns and Frank Turner in the early 1980s, a growing body of historical scholarship has clarified the privileged role that Ancient Greece played in the imaginations of many Victorians. And in a largely independent critical vein over the last decade or so, appropriations of Michel Foucault's ideas into English-language scholarship have profoundly enriched and complicated our awareness of the construction of male subjectivity in the late Victorian era. Dowling draws from both these critical directions in tracing the development of Oxford Greek studies into what she calls a homosexual code. Dowling begins by arguing that crises in English political and religious consciousness made Greece appear appealing on grounds quite other than an incipiently sympathy. When comes to diagnosing the anxieties of the Victorians, cultural flux is of course the usual suspect, and Dowling ably details the manifold political and religious transformations that were to prepare the way for Victorians to find in Ancient Greece a saving alternative. At a time when a worrisomely scientistic and materialistic culture was rendering theological orthodoxies increasingly untenable, the Greek philosophers (Plato, at least) seemed to provide an alternative ground for transcendental value. And in an England made anxious by French Jacobinism and creeping political fragmentation, the sane vitalism of Greece seemed to offer a salutary vehicle for negotiation between the Scylla of anarchic radicalism and the Charybdis of entropic political stagnation. Tenets of this sort are in fact common to most recent studies of Greece and the Victorians, so Dowling's distinctive achievement here emerges in the particular range and quality of reference she vitalizes relative to these topics, and in the suggestive force with which she charts the translation of this Greek investment into a specifically homosocial/homosexual apologetic. Like Alan Sinfield in his recent The Wilde Century, Dowling takes up the concept of and charts the term's use in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republican discourse that would continue to show its influence into the Victorian period. In this classical republicanism, effeminacy signified, not a failure of male heterosexual inclination, but rather a failure of martial propensity and valor, a failure of the civic virtus. In such a civic discourse, claims Dowling, male posed a threat to the precarious sense of security available to a polis worried about military invasion. …

Social Constructions and Cultural Contradictions: A Look at a Christian Perspective on Economics

Economics and the New RightThe economic perspective that I label Christian is predicated on two things. One is the inerrant Bible and the other is the neoclassical economic paradigm. The former is cited to support the latter, in particular the economic theory's assumptions and implications concerning a capitalistic free-market economy, individual freedom and limited government. The particular position I will address is promulgated by the Contemporary Economics and Business Association (CEBA), head-quartered at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The CEBA may be seen as a branch of the political movement often known as the New Right. The following passage provides a succinct introduction to this position.The most potent justifications for the orientation to economic growth and material success within American culture have been those that imbue this orientation with broader religious meaning....American conservative ideology captures the libertarian emphasis on material progress and individual success, but envelopes these within an appeal to divine providence, transcendent values, and collective social bonds. In this way, contemporary American conservatism affirms both God and capitalism. (Himmelstein 22-23, emphasis added)The CEBA in fact seems to find God in capitalism and its supporting market theory, the neoclassical paradigm.The neoclassical economic paradigm presents an ideal image of market behavior where each economic actor has equal power and perfect knowledge, resulting in individual behavior that is rational and optimizing; actors in an economic market are always maximizing their utility or profit while minimizing their cost. Further, economic actors are assumed voluntarily and independently to enter the market about which they have full knowledge, each individual market transaction being viewed independently from any other. These assumptions combine to result not only in the maximization of individual satisfaction, whether profit or utility, but also in the best, most efficient solution to the economic problem (i.e., scarce resources combined with unlimited wants) for society--the great good for the greatest number. This is an economically optimal, allocatively efficient solution in which no one can be made any better off without anyone else being made worse off. In the competitive market economy of neoclassical economics, prices efficiently ration goods and services, and distributive justice is thereby achieved in the private sector with the resulting distribution of economic resources.One function the neoclassical economic paradigm performs for economists is that of a bridge between God and capitalism. Interestingly however, when economists cite Scripture to legitimize the tenets of neoclassical economics, they never mention the story of Judas. Judas is an example of an economic man enjoying independent freedom of choice, of self-interested behavior that these proponents of economics at least theoretically laud. The story goes: Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests, and said to them, 'What will you give me, and I will deliver to you?' And they covenanted with for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him (Matthew 26:14-16).The neoclassical economic paradigm celebrates this ever-optimizing individual whose behavior, by definition, insures the just distribution of economic resources. According to its assumptions, economic actors should follow their Internal subjective motivations concerning their own actions. Actions follow logically, rationally and consistently from values. But tautological problems plague the neoclassical paradigm because it cannot differentiate among behaviors. Behavior is accepted as evidence of values and results in utility maximization. So, since all behavior is maximizing, whatever the individual economic actor does will promote the most efficient solution to the economic problem. …

A survey of exact solutions of inviscid field equations in the theory of shear flow instabilty

This paper presents a survey of undisturbed flows that take one or another of the field equations of inviscid shear flow instability theory (e.g. theRayleigh equation,Taylor-Goldstein-Haurwitz equation or theKuo equation) to a differential equation satisfied by aknown transcendental function forarbitrary complex values of the parameters. Some mean velocity profiles having this feature are well known. Thus, piecewise linear mean velocity profiles take theRayleigh equations to a constant-coefficient differential equation and the exponential mean velocity profile takes theRayleigh equation to theGauss hypergeometric equation. Less well known is the fact that a variety of mean velocity profiles take theRayleigh equation to a differential equation due toKarlHeun. These profiles include: (i) the sinusoidal profile; (ii) the hyperbolic tangent profile (an example pointed out byMiles (1963)); (iii) the profile in the form of the square of a hyperbolic secant (theBickley jet); and, (iv) a skewed velocity profile in which each component has the form of a quadratic function of the variable exp(−z/l) (in whichz is the cross-stream coordinate andl is a length scale). In all of these cases, one or another author has previously identified aregular neutral mode solution of theRayleigh equation and has expressed that solution in the form of elementary functions. Such regular neutral modes apparently represent cases in which the solution ofHeun's equation (which is normally an infinite series) truncates to a single term. The survey concludes by noting that the parabolic mean velocity profile takes theRayleigh equation to thedifferential equation of the spheroidal wave function.

There's no such thing as free speech: and it's a good thing, too

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms and correct, are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as reactionary and fascist are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential a culture, or a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, Terms that come us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order level an accusation, but remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does. Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not try insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested. In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos, an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

The Ghost-Seer (review)

Goethe Yearbook 279 occupation is overwhelming in Schiller's prose dramas. (Koopmann's assumption that Schiller, qua "Aufklärer," would have simply regarded Christianity as a barbaric superstition, seems particularly questionable.) What happens to God after 1791? The question seems to me well worth asking, and might help to explain the peculiar fervor of Schiller's belief in art. Finally, it would be a step in the right direction if scholars would refrain from special pleading and would acknowledge the incoherence of Schiller's philosophical works. This incoherence derives from his vacillation between immanent and transcendental values and is best encapsulated in his antithesis of the beautiful and the sublime. Too often, one reads commentaries that expound the progressive, "diesseitig" side of his thought and try to explain away the other, if they do not suppress it altogether. Reed emerges well from a comparison with Ueding here; he not only devotes space to the sublime, he also acknowledges the ambivalence at the heart of Schiller's "Antrittsvorlesung" (1789) as to whether a rational plan is inherent in history or whether it has merely been read in by us. Such ambivalences permeate Schiller's thinking, not only on history, and should be confronted as a premise of analysis rather than conceded shamefacedly at the end. Even if the reputation of his philosophical works suffered from a general admission of their incoherence, such an admission might nonetheless prove worthwhile for the light it sheds on the sources of Schiller's poetic creativity. Though I have been critical here of the anachronistic tendencies in these three books, it is probably impossible to escape such tendencies altogether . If so, the insecure situation created by the revolutions of 1989 to 1991 may offer us a new vantage point for understanding Schiller, especially in the last fifteen years of his life. As we confront a new century full of dilemmas—ethnic, ecological, cultural—that (pace Reed) may not respond to the familiar liberal methods, perhaps we will discover a new Schiller, a troubled explorer in another age of threatened certainties, who will seem more in tune with our own concerns than the self-assured ideologue of freedom whom we have encountered so often in the scholarship of the past two decades. Queen's University David Pugh Schiller, Friedrich, The Ghost-Seer. Trans. Henry G. Bohn. Intro. Jeffrey L. Sammons. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992. "Der Leser des Geistersehers muß gleichsam einen stillschweigenden Vertrag mit dem Verfasser machen, wodurch der letztere sich anheischig macht, seine Imagination wunderbar in Bewegung zu setzen, der Leser aber wechselseitig verspricht, es in der Délicatesse und Wahrheit nicht so genau zu nehmen." These words of Schiller's, taken from a letter of 1789, along with other derogatory references (not to mention his negative assessment of the novel as a genre in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung), de- 280 Book Reviews terred generations of scholars from devoting serious attention to the novel fragment, which was left unfinished when Schiller embarked on his career as a historian. And yet the work was immensely popular in its own time, giving rise to a host of imitations in Germany and abroad, including several by reputable authors. For scholars who share Schiller's distaste for popular literature, the work contains valuable pages of psychological analysis, as well as the long "philosophisches Gespräch," which Schiller excluded from later editions and which foreshadows his withdrawal from literature during his philosophical period. Clearly, the work contains material that cannot be ignored by scholars investigating Schiller's intellectual development. The welcome appearance of the present businesslike translation (first published 1849), which comes equipped with a characteristically learned and precise introduction by Jeffrey Sammons, provides an occasion to glance at the reappraisal of the work that has now been in progress for some years. In their books of 1959, both Benno von Wiese and Gerhard Storz devoted some thoughtful pages to the fragment and spoke up strongly for its merits. Their contributions are important on at least two counts. First, the open-minded reader of the Geisterseher will agree with them that Schiller was far more gifted in this genre than, to be consistent with his theories, he ought to...

Transcendency of local conjugacies in complex dynamics and transcendency of their values

Letp andq be polynomials of the same degree. A classical result of Bottcher says that there exists a functionf conformal in a neighborhood of infinity such thatf(p(z))=q(f(z)). We show thatf is transcendental and takes transcendental values at algebraic points unlessp andq are linearly conjugate to monomials or Chebychev polynomials. As an application, we show that the conformal map from the exterior of the Mandelbrot set onto the exterior of the unit disk takes transcendental values at algebraic points. A second application is the solution of a transcendency problem posed by Golomb.