Transitional Figure Research Articles

Heidegger and Galileo’s Slippery Slope

ABSTRACT: InDie Frage nach dem Ding, Martin Heidegger characterizes Galileo as an important transitional figure in the struggle to replace the Aristotelian conception of nature with that of Newton. However, Heidegger only attends to Galileo’s modernity and not to those Aristotelian elements still discernible in Galileo’s work. This article fleshes out both aspects in Galileo in light of Heidegger’s discussion. It concludes by arguing that the lacuna in Heidegger’s account of Galileo is the consequence of Heidegger’s own self-conscious modernity − a modernity that he slyly hints at in a remark he makes in FD concerning Galileo and Democritus.

Shakespeare and Childhood (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Childhood Jennifer A. Munroe (bio) Shakespeare and Childhood. Edited by Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Of the many oft-cited quotes from Shakespeare's plays, few, if any, are about children. Yet a new collection of essays reminds us that Shakespeare's plays portrayed issues relevant to childhood, and children were ready participants on the early modern stage. Rather than simply looking at the way the plays represent children from the perspective of adults, the essays in this collection seek to rediscover the children themselves, from Shakespeare's day to today. This collection will be a useful resource not just to Shakespearean scholars, but also to scholars of childhood and children's literature more broadly as it illuminates the "historical origins and contexts of Shakespearean childhoods and their continuing history of cultural reinvention" (6). Divided into two parts, the volume looks at children first in the context of Shakespeare's day and then from the eighteenth century onward. The first part addresses "the questions of what being a child might have meant, both to children, and to adult others, and of how these meanings were reflected, constructed and negotiated by children both as the subjects and the agents of fictional, theatrical and poetic representation" (6). The second part of the book "addresses the cultural history of the relationship between Shakespeare(s) and childhood(s) from a period spanning the eighteenth century to the present" (7). As the first part of the volume promises to remember that children were (and are) not simply smaller versions of adults, we find various approaches to recovering examples of actual children represented on the early modern stage. Catherine Belsey looks at how the young princes of Richard III, whose voices still echo in the pages of literature and history books as they do in the halls of the Tower of London, are shown to exercise some measure of agency and independence, despite their early death at the hands of their uncle. Two essays examine relationships between parents and children in Shakespeare: Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy's essay looks at father-child identification, especially that between fathers and daughters, while Patricia Phillippy concentrates on "child-loss" in the Sonnets, focusing on "competing claims to the possession and importance of sons and daughters" in Shakespeare's poems (97). Rounding out the first part of the volume, A. J. Piesse and Lucy Munro both seek to understand how children in Shakespeare's plays work through issues of developing masculine [End Page 86] identity. For Piesse, the child on Shakespeare's stage is a transitional figure, bearing the signs on his (and we might remember that there were no girls, just as there were no women, on the early modern stage) body of the man he would become; thus, the "Shakespearean child figure is a carrier of culture between the generations" (77). Munro's essay similarly considers how boy actors (and child characters in plays) in Coriolanus figured in liminal ways and illustrated how childhood and adulthood are both performative and how these children were "impersonating" a kind of "hypermasculinity" (92). The second part of the volume moves forward in time, with essays that consider Shakespeare's children (and the children who read the plays and saw them performed on the stage) from the eighteenth century and Victorian era to today's 'tween culture. As Suzanne Greenhalgh's introduction to the second part explains, Shakespeare's plays influenced shifting cultural definitions of "proper" childhood, as Shakespeare has been inherited from one generation to the next as the cultural epitome of "good" literature to which adults and children alike should aspire (120). The essays in the second part of the volume, therefore, "do not merely seek to document the relationship between Shakespeare and childhood but to acknowledge and explore the many ways in which Shakespeare has existed within changing cultures of childhood" (120–21). The essays in the second part of the volume address how children understood and used Shakespeare's plays, increasingly so after the early modern period came to a close. Naomi Miller, like Kate Chedgzoy, considers how children used Shakespeare's plays in subversive ways...

Understanding Human Technogenesis: Human Development in the Post-Genomic World

Different schools of thought within continental philosophy claim that humans are instricably bound up with technology. As Ansell-Pearson states when discussing Bergson, Nietzsche and the transhuman condition, “technology is constitutive prosthetic of the human animal”, or the ontogenesis of the human is dependent on the technics and artificial instrumentation that survive well beyond the individual and are part and parcel of human culture. The emergence of the human represents an extended process of bio-technogenesis or a ‘creative evolution’ of biological and technological forces, where natural selection has been guided by the natural history of technics and technical interventions. Thus, Bergson has argued that Homo sapiens can be seen as Homo faber because it is a by-product of tools and technology. Similarly, Nietzshe claimed that the human is a transitional figure, “something to be overcome”. Is technology simply an extended phenotype, the result of our hardwired genetic impulse to constantly remake our world? Or is technology interwoven in nature’s design through what the anthropologists call ‘material culture’? While the answers to these questions may not be easy to grasp, recent scientific discoveries have put humans within striking distance of being able to re-engineer human biological destiny.

Irregular immigration: economic convenience and other factors

This article illustrates the factors leading to the entry of irregular immigrants and their integration into the labour market, that is to say: the economic convenience for both businesses and families of employing unauthorised manpower; the support from compatriot networks and ethnic economies; the embedded liberalism within democratic states' legal systems; the cost and organisational difficulty of controls and expulsion; and the part played by solidarity providers in civil society, including trade unions. Repeated mass amnesties especially in southern Europe, periodically regularise the situation of these migrants and function as the principal tool of migration policy. To this extent, the irregular immigrant appears to be a transitional figure, awaiting recognition and destined to obtain authorisation sooner or later. Trade unions are one of the social groups pushing for the enactment of regularisation measures. In this way they are asserting their attachment to the ideals of justice and solidarity, while at the same time combating the unfair competition which the hidden economy poses to law-abiding companies and declared workers.

The Life and Career of Justice Robert H. Jackson

The Life and Career of Justice Robert H. Jackson CONSTANCE L. MARTIN* Introduction Robert H. Jackson was one ofthe most influential Justices ofthe Supreme Court in the twentieth century. His tenure on the Court ran from 1941 to his death in 1954, and during that time he participated in landmark cases involving the programs implemented by Roosevelt’s New Deal to rescue the country from Depression, having previously served the administration in other roles. He authored a memorable dissent in United States v. Korematsu, the notorious Japanese internment case.1 He is also remembered for the role he served as the chiefAmerican prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders after World War II. In some ways, Jackson’s fierce independence and the lessons he learned growing up in a small town were the ideal training for the demands and competitiveness of the nation’s highest Court. That Jackson’s words and beliefs still have relevance in the twenty-first century is evidenced by the fact that both recent Supreme Court appointees quoted him during the confirmation hearings.2 In this essay, I will examine how Jackson’s life experiences influenced his legal career and informed hisjurisprudence, and to what extent Jackson lived up to his own vision ofthe role of a Supreme Court Justice. The Influence of a Small Town Born near the end of the nineteenth cen­ tury, Jackson was raised in southwestern New York State in a small town called Frewsburg. It was primarily a farming region, although the family’s business activities in­ cluded horse-breeding, which contributed to Jackson’s lifelong love of horses and out­ door sports. Jackson’s descriptions of Frews­ burg and Jamestown, a city fifteen miles away where Jackson later studied, emphasized the THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON 43 communities’ core values of self-sufficiency and individualism. There was respect for those who worked hard, and distrust ofthose who did not. Jackson explained, “To an unfortunate in­ dividual there was utmost kindness, but if one was a pauper that was probably his own fault. He either drank, or gambled, or was lazy or something evil.”3 Jackson’s own family was thrifty, hard­ working, and even more independent than their neighbors: they were ‘“sturdy and un­ compromising Democrats’ in an area that was ‘overwhelmingly Republican.’”4 Although Jackson’s parents were not religious, they were nominal members of the local church and taught their son “to respect other people’s reli­ gion and never to start a religious argument.”5 He described his relatives as “practical people who were not carried away by either religious emotions or any other... [They were] too busy making a living, to work life’s annoyances up into a philosophy.”6 This individualism and re­ gional pride developed Jackson’s fundamental beliefin persistence and independent thought, and the conviction that hard work is ultimately rewarded. It is likely he was also influenced by the local justices of the peace, whom he saw dispensingjustice and whose “decisions repre­ sented the community’s collective idea of the decentthing.”7 A sense offairness would char­ acterize Jackson’s work in government, ad­ vancing and defending New Deal programs. Jackson’s Education Jackson is a transitional figure between two very different traditions oflegal education be­ cause he was the last Supreme Court Justice to have received the traditional law-office “ap­ prentice” training rather than a formal lawschool curriculum. Jackson’s determination to obtain more than the basic education avail­ able in Frewsburg sent him north to Jamestown for a post-graduate year of high school. He later spoke often and affectionately of the En­ glish teacher, Mary Willard, who befriended him there, encouraged him to read the classics and to debate and “to develop a notable ca­ pacity for writing and speaking clear, simple, direct English.”8 She was one ofthe most im­ portant influences of Jackson’s life, instilling in him not only a love of books but also legal ambitions.9 In 1911, while still attending school, Jackson began clerking part time in the Jamestown law offices of his cousin, Frank Mott, as had been the tradition for aspiring lawyers in...

The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents

The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents. By Colleen J. Shogan. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 230p. 22.95 paper.This work offers a relevant, theoretically rich discussion of rhetorical strategies pursued by presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. Colleen Shogan's accomplishment is striking not only because it is the rare presidential study that accounts for all the nation's chief executives but also because it exists at the intersection of two important, and in some respects competing, theories of presidential power, Stephen Skowronek's (1993) The Politics Presidents Make and Jeffrey Tulis's (1987) The Rhetorical Presidency. Like Skowronek, Shogan recovers the premodern presidencies, which are too often ignored, and links them to their successors by focusing on comparable political environments. This allows for fascinating and surprising conclusions across eras. Like Tulis, she focuses on rhetoric as a strategic tool that, on the one hand, can help presidents overcome constitutional limitations but, on the other hand, can raise public expectations beyond reasonable bounds. Also like Tulis, she finds Woodrow Wilson to be an important transitional figure, albeit in a more limited way. Far from introducing moralizing to presidential rhetoric, Shogan demonstrates that Wilson was the first to engage heavily in moralizing without reference to a specific policy goal, a tactic continued by Wilson's successors.

Durkheim and Dewey and the challenge of contemporary moral education

John Dewey and Emile Durkheim are philosophical giants in the field of moral education. This paper compares and contrasts their respective visions for moral education and contextualizes the comparison in the profound intellectual and social changes modernity was casting throughout the world. They were transitional figures that attempted to make education responsive to those novel conditions and forces. Toward this end, Dewey and Durkheim, though they differed in key areas, articulated the moral sources and authority on which their respective visions for education depended. In as much as the contemporary discourse on moral education lacks this articulation, there is much to be learned from examining their work. Though the current cultural context differs from that of Dewey and Durkheim, their approach to addressing these questions can inform our task in the present.

Inheriting the Renaissance: Three Writers of the Post-War South

Inheriting the Renaissance:Three Writers of the Post-War South Douglas Mitchell Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence. Edited by Jan Norby Gretlund. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2005. 207 pp. $34.95 cloth. Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City. By James Panabaker. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004. xviii + 238 pp. $32.00 cloth. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. By Georg Guillemin. College StationTexas A&M UP2004. 170 pp. $29.95 cloth. The generation of writers who came of age after World War II had the unenviable task of following the Southern Renaissance. As Flannery O'Connor famously said of Faulkner, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Three writers who had to come to terms with inheriting the Renaissance, both in their self-conception and the minds of their readers, are Shelby Foote, Madison Jones, and Cormac McCarthy. For Foote and McCarthy, it was moving beyond Faulkner, and for Jones the Agrarian vision of Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. This movement out from under the Renaissance, so to speak, is the subject of three recent books devoted to these writers. Jan Norby Gretlund's volume, the most traditional of the three, treats the most traditional writer. Madison Jones has been sadly neglected by critics, but he is a fine novelist and easily the major heir of the southern [End Page 158] Agrarians. Gretlund provides a solid introduction, laying out Jones' importance as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and contemporary southern literature, and he has included a valuable collection of commentary and criticism from a range of major critics and writers, among them Lewis Lawson, George Garrett, Hans Skei, and Richard Gray. Several themes run through all the essays, as they do in Jones' work, such as the destruction of the traditional order of the family farm, and the ineradicable presence of evil. Further, what the essays all make clear is that Jones, as a second generation Agrarian, possesses a fully developed sense that what destroys the traditional order is latent within that order itself. Each critic has his or her own way of getting at that problem, and the difficulty of any simple notion of return. The two strongest essays are those by Hans Skei on Season of the Strangler and Richard Gray on Herod's Wife. Both of these reveal Jones' technical mastery, with Skei taking on the question of unity of form within the short story sequence and Gray looking at the implications of a shifting narrative form. Both come to grips with one of the strongest traits of Jones' writing: a kind of potent indeterminacy when confronting the mystery of human evil. The most valuable portions of the book, however, are by Jones himself, including his acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award and an interview with Gretlund. On the whole, the collection is a start toward putting some solid criticism of Jones on library shelves to complement what is scattered in the journals. James Panabaker, in Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City, traces Foote's movement out of the shadow of Faulkner and southern modernism and into his own distinct aesthetic. Faulkner himself said of Foote at the University of Virginia that he "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Panabaker rightly focuses on Foote's attempt to order the chaos unleashed by modernist relativism through aesthetic form. Foote works, Panabaker writes, "by placing his own sense of modernist relativism within clearly demarcated, almost classical, narrative structures—an approach I call his aesthetic of limitations." Panabaker, in his two opening chapters, begins with Foote's heritage and the problem of Faulkner, then moves to his effort to reenvision the South in the mythic landscape of Jordan County. His middle chapter, on the aesthetics of limitation, deals with Foote's creation of an adequate form to treat the vagaries of memory. The final two chapters are largely devoted to Foote's magnum opus, his Civil War narrative. [End Page 159] For Panabaker, Foote's greater distance from the marked cultural shift...

Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. by Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher

134 cargues-Grant’s Tristram Shandy stimulates discussion, raises issues without forcing a narrow vision, and makes one turn to the book itself. Peter De Voogd Universiteit Utrecht Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher. New York: MLA, 2005. Pp. xxii ⫹ 243. $19.75. Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the best books to have appeared so far in the quartercentury -long series of ‘‘Approaches to Teaching World Literature’’ as pedagogical guides designed primarily for teachers of undergraduate students: ‘‘primarily ’’ because many of the approaches would work equally well with graduate students. Indeed, one of the most stimulating entries from the collection’s twenty-three contributors, Robert Markley ’s ‘‘Teaching the Crusoe Trilogy,’’ seems better suited for a graduate seminar than undergraduate courses in which few instructors would have the time to teach Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Serious Reflections, in addition to Robinson Crusoe. Given the range of suggestions , methods, and examples offered in this collection, one comes away from it convinced that Robinson Crusoe could easily be the focus of undergraduate and graduate seminars. In light of the vast amount of secondary material on Defoe, his oeuvre, and recent biographies of his life, Messrs. Novak and Fisher have concisely and fair-mindedly identified and described the ‘‘Materials,’’ including internet resources , available to teachers of Robinson Crusoe. Their ‘‘Approaches’’ are subdivided into often inevitably overlapping groups. The first, ‘‘Defoe and the History of English Narrative,’’ includes four essays that usefully contextualize Defoe’s most famous novel. Robert Maniquis’s ‘‘Teaching The Pilgrim ’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe; or, From Filthy Mire to the Glory of Things,’’ enables students to appreciate Defoe’s revolutionary treatment of ‘‘realistic ’’ detail. In ‘‘Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels: Some Pedagogical Frameworks,’’ Richard Braverman tells how he teaches the Travels with Crusoe to demonstrate competing early eighteenth-century assessments of exploration and colonialism. Roxanne Kent-Drury and Gordon Sayre introduce their students to parodic intertextuality through an investigation of the reception history of Crusoe (‘‘Robinson Crusoe’s Parodic Intertextuality’’). Invoking Max Weber and Ian Watt in ‘‘Weber, Watt, and Restraint: Robinson Crusoe and the Critical Tradition,’’ Manuel Schonhorn sees Defoe’s Crusoe as a transitional figure between earlier religious and modern economic conceptions of the hero. The next section, ‘‘Intellectual and Ideological Contexts,’’ comprises Geoffrey Sill’s comparative ‘‘Myths of Modern Individualism: Defoe, Franklin, and Whitman,’’ which argues for Defoe’s role in the development of the myth of the self-made man. The connections Mr. Sill draws among his three authors seem tenuous. Far more convincingly, Paula R. Backscheider compares and contrasts Crusoe in ‘‘Crusoe among the Travelers ’’ to contemporaneous travel narratives , including ones by women, to see Crusoe as a transitional figure between an older world of mysterious spiritual forces and a new world comprehensible through scientific investigation. George E. Haggerty’s excellent ‘‘Thank God It’s 135 Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe’’ exposes the often comic effects of Crusoe’s ultimately successful attempts to assert his ‘‘masculine mastery’’ of people and places. In ‘‘Robinson Crusoe and EarlyEighteenth -Century Racial Ideology,’’ Roxann Wheeler largely recapitulates part of her argument in The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000) to use the figures of Xury and Friday to show her students that modern-day notions of race are historically contingent. Mr. Markley’s approach reveals how thin the resolution of contradictions in the first volume of the Crusoe trilogy remains. Close reading is the subject of Timothy C. Blackburn’s perceptive ‘‘Robinson Crusoe as Literary Art,’’ which opens the section on ‘‘Formal and Thematic Approaches.’’ John Barberet takes a more comparativist approach in his insightful ‘‘Messages in Bottles: A Comparative Formal Approach to Castaway Narratives,’’ contrasting castaway and utopian fictions to argue convincingly that Crusoe is more the former than the latter. Widening his approach even further than Barberet, in ‘‘A Semester on Crusoe’s Island’’ Matthew Wickman has his students read Crusoe in conjunction with essays by the cultural theorists Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and François Lyotard to enable them to recognize the kinds of exchanges and...

Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life by Kingsley M. Bray, and: The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks

b o o k R e v ie w s 3 1 7 is not the high point: “I have been fortunate enough to be involved in many exciting adventures. But when I look back over my life, I have little doubt that the most worthwhile things I have done have not been standing on the sum­ mits of mountains or at the North and South poles, great experiences though they were. My most important projects have been the building and maintain­ ing of schools and medical clinics for my good friends in the Himalaya. ... These are things I will always remember” (247). To everyone who breaks open Himalaya: Personal Stories of Grandeur, Challenge, and Hope, this is a call to action for personal involvement in worthy causes that will lead to making the world a place of harmony and peace. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life. By Kingsley M. Bray. N orm an : U n iversity o f O klah om a Press, 2006. 510 pages, $34.95. The Unquiet Qrave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country. By Steve Hendricks. N ew York: T h u n ders M ou th Press, 2006. 490 pages, $27.95. Reviewed by Julie Foster Sacram ento, C alifornia Kingsley M. Bray has done it again. With the publication of Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, Bray has sharpened another portrait of a great Sioux warrior. Bray’s 2002 article on Spotted Tail and the Treaty of 1868 in Nebraska History garnered this comment on the Nebraska State Historical Society’s web site: “Kingsley Bray’s re-evaluation of the role of Spotted Tail provides a new view of these crucial transition years as he and his people were drawn inescapably into a new world of restricted land base and radical economic change.” That Bray utilized this same blueprint for his book— looking at Crazy Horse as a transitional figure during a time of change— in no way diminishes the value and readability of this thoroughly captivating biography. Senior bookseller at BM A Hammricks Medical Bookshop in Manchester, England, Bray has for the past twenty years researched Plains Indian (and especially Lakota) history and ethnology. He admits that the materials avail­ able to reconfigure Crazy Horse’s life are “sketchy and fragmentary” (xvii). This dearth of materials makes the density of his work all the more remarkable. Bray returned to “primary sources to construct a life of Crazy Horse grounded in the reality of the nineteenth-century Lakota world” (xvii). Those records include the Eli S. Ricker and Eleanor H. Hinman interviews, housed at the Nebraska State Historical Society, and interviews Bray conducted with modem Lakotas. Crazy Horse and his world come to life on the page. Readers are offered rich images of his family and spiritual life along with his role as a warrior chief. Bray pulls no punches with his interpretation. While acknowledging that Mari Sandoz’s book, Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942), is still 3 1 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 7 a literary classic, he argues that it “reducfes] the complex reality of the period to a dichotomy of good and evil and [does] no favors to contemporary Lakotas struggling with reservation inheritance” (xvii). He frankly discusses Crazy Horse’s two extramarital affairs and his seven-year marriage to Black Shawl, refuting Sandoz’s interpretation of these events. He delves deeply into Crazy Horse’s visions and spiritual life. Bray also plumbs his early life, examining the trauma inflicted by the death of his mother and loss of four stepsisters due to disease, events that formed his personality. Bray has done an admirable job of placing his subject within the broader historical context of the changing times into which Crazy Horse was bom. He writes that “he and his peers knew no other life than the post-Oregon Trail Lakota world, with its inheritance of disease, game attrition, and resource loss” (22). Bray weaves in important events, explaining how the discovery of gold on the South...

The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley by Ruth Herman

168 ventionally satirized, on occasion we glimpse a more independent female strength. For example, the discarded mistress Belira, whose plot to regain her lost lover fails, is at least allowed to express her hurt and resentment: ‘‘But thy heart, Traytor, thy perjur’d Heart; tell me, how shall I get it back?’’ The pieces written within a theatrical context are supplemented by the Letters Writen by Mrs Manley, an epistolary account of a stage coach journey to the country. With its loosely strung episodes and keenly observed fellow travellers, the letters anticipate the great picaresque novels of the next century, but they also bear witness to the distance writers like Smollett and Fielding would have to travel in terms of characterization and plot. Manley is a transitional figure, bridging the gap between two very distinct literary epochs. This volume offers an interesting overview of one of the mothers of the English novel. Ms. Hodgson-Wright’s concise Introduction gives some indispensable information about the author and the selected texts. The carefully reproduced facsimiles convey a sense of the materiality of late seventeenth-century printed texts. The only thing to be desired are explicatory notes that would assist the understanding of the nonspecialist readers addressed in the general editors’ Preface. Virginia Richter University of Berne RUTH HERMAN. The Business of a Woman : The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. Newark: Delaware, 2003. Pp. 332. $59.50. Instead of a study devoted to gender politics, Ms. Herman’s book is, more happily, devoted to the career of a successful political writer who was also a woman. Certainly, Manley’s gender played a role in her professional life. In fact, her gender was surely the reason Manley emerged on the literary scene as a writer of ‘‘scandal fiction rather than straight political propaganda until she had made her name.’’ Salacious narratives focused on the sexual peccadilloes of the powerful were accepted from women who, by the very act of writing, tacitly renounced much of their own claim to virtue. Political propaganda, however, was a new domain for all writers . It was an enterprise presided over by men—or, actually, by one man, Robert Harley, whom Ms. Herman describes accurately as ‘‘perhaps the first political leader in England to realize the power of the printed word and the importance of influencing and controlling public opinion through a regular and wellorganized political press.’’ Manley astutely saw the need to come to Harley’s attention and just as astutely traveled the roads available to her as a writer to do so. She wrote her way into his world. This effective study may lose readers by the predictability of the argument in the first four chapters. Ms. Herman begins by reviewing the facts (as we know them) of Manley’s life—notorious and sensational. While the scandals are expectedly rehearsed, Ms. Herman directs our attention to a fact of Manley’s early life that has been underemphasized in many (though by no means all) previous studies: from her beginnings in a ‘‘long established gentry family’’ with ‘‘Royalist loyalties,’’ Manley was always ‘‘a fully functioning member of a highly politicized section of society.’’ The ‘‘section’’ was, of course, the Tory party. Manley’s scandal fictions, which Ms. Herman discusses in chapters two, three, and four, were highly successful attacks on Whig political character, es- 169 pecially the Marlboroughs’. They were also Manley’s ticket to a position on ‘‘the Tory writing team.’’ What had been Manley’s aspiration all along is sealed, for all practical purposes, by her appointment to the editorship of the Examiner . As a member of the team, she wrote ‘‘several little pamphlets and papers ’’ that helped maintain Tory party minister Harley’s ascendancy over his most important rival, Bolingbroke. Ms. Herman’s research into the complexities of the Harley/Bolingbroke battle for Tory leadership is exhaustive and compelling. Situating Manley in a complex political setting, she demonstrates convincingly that Manley was a major player. In fact, the single most important corrective of Ms. Herman’s study illuminates the relationship between Swift and Manley. Ms. Herman makes it clear that Swift was a genuine friend to Manley . His remarks regarding her indebtedness to him were not...

Gravitating towards Stability: Guidobaldo's Aristotelian-Archimedean Synthesis

Until recently, Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607) was treated mainly as a transitional figure in the history of science. His contributions to the revival of the ancient science of mechanics were often praised, whilst his inability to see beyond the ancients was much deplored. Whereas Pierre Duhem’s derisory description of Guidobaldo’s œuvre as “sometimes in error, always mediocre” found its direct echo in the work of the French historians of science Pierre Costabel and Rene Dugas, Anglo-Saxon historians of science tended to be somewhat more positive in their judgement. Yet both Paul Lawrence Rose and Stillman Drake, to name but two of the most prominent, did not truly alter Duhem’s assessment. They admitted that Guidobaldo’s work contributed to the advance of modern science, since he was one of the most influential promoters of a mathematical approach to nature and most importantly an early supporter of Galileo, but they still stressed the many steps he was unable to take which “he would otherwise have been quite capable of making”. It is clear that these negative evaluations of Guidobaldo’s mechanical writings are based on a particular historiographical position that favours the vantage point of ‘classical’ mechanics as a norm by which to judge earlier approaches. Accordingly, it is not surprising that in more recent literature we find important amendments to this picture. By focusing more closely on Guidobaldo’s own interests and predicament, these writers have stressed the social position from which he was working, the philosophical and scientific agendas he was pursuing, and especially the interplay between these elements. As a result, we are beginning to have a more nuanced understanding of the reasons why Guidobaldo’s mechanics has some of the particular characteristics for which he was so severely criticized by earlier writers. Much of the (admittedly not very numerous) writings on Guidobaldo’s mechanics have been organized around the historiographical categories of scientific traditions or schools. Drake influentially but controversially distinguished two sixteenth-century Italian schools of mechanics: a Northern group, “conspicuously interested in practical aspects of mechanics”, and a Central Italian group that “concentrated its interest on works of classical antiquity and on the rigorous application of mathematics to mechanics”. While not questioning the difference in outlook between these groups of mathematicians, Mario Biagioli has tried to “uncover the more complex social dimensions of the interaction of these two ‘schools’ and of their quite different conceptual styles”. Enrico Gamba and Vico Montebelli take a step further in thoroughly investigating the characteristics and context of the Central Italian group, which was

Ephraim George Squier and the Development of American Anthropology (review)

Ephraim George Squier and Development of American Anthropology. By Terry A. Barnhart. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 425. Cloth, $59.95.)Ephraim Squier stands as one of most important figures in history of American archaeology and anthropology in era before both those fields, along with rest of American intellectual life, became professionalized. In history of anthropology, Squier has been seen as precursor rather than predecessor, footnote rather than founder. When he died in 1888 federal government's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) had been up and running for nearly ten years. Squier had nothing to do with its founding or with its early work. By time John Wesley Powell took helm of BAE, Squier's important work was well behind him, and he had gone through nasty divorce and stint in an insane asylum.The purpose of Terry Barnhart's biography to recover Squier's career as serious student of Native America and to elevate his accomplishments beyond their usual assignment. Barnhart believes that Squier a transitional figure in history of American anthropology in many ways, and that he is indeed worthy intellectual ancestor (5).To make this case, Barnhart spends most of this book with Squier's own writings, published and unpublished. It an impressive-indeed, daunting-accumulation. Squier published widely during 184Os, 185Os, and 186Os, corresponding with most of major American researchers of Native Americans. Barnhart has assembled bibliography of Squier's anthropological writings that runs to nearly six pages.Squier received national attention in 1848 with publication of Ancient Monuments of Mississippi Valley, first volume in Simthsoman's Contributions to Knowledge. That book resulted from three-year collaboration with Edwin Davis exploring, surveying, and excavating Indian mounds that so fascinated Americans through Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.Ancient Monuments remains Squier's best-known book, but no sooner had it come out than Squier moved his investigations from Ohio to New York. There he worked to some extent with Lewis Henry Morgan, and result was his Aboriginal Monuments of State of New York, published in 1851. By time this book came out, Squier had accepted diplomatic posting to Nicaragua and wrote Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments and Proposed Inter-Oceanic Canal, which first appeared in 1852 and was revised and excerpted several times. In midst of all this, Squier found time to collect his ideas about the origin and development of religious ideas and symbols (187) and publish them as The Serpent Symbol and Reciprocal Principles of Nature in 1851. By 1853 he was back in Central America; this trip yielded three more publications, in 1853, 1860, and 1861. Between 1863 and 1865, Squier served as U.S. claims commissioner in Peru. In 1877, as last major publication of his remarkable career, he issued Peru: Incidents of travel and Exploration in Land of Incas.Even this cursory listing of Squier's major works makes clear that he was thinking about Native America in hemispheric rather than strictly nationalistic terms. He wanted always to synthesize, compare, and draw connections between mounds of Ohio, earthworks of New York, constructions of Central America, and civilizations of Peru. …

Tonio Kröger: Anthropology and Creativity

The advanced scientific insights available to the young Thomas Mann in trying to come to terms with homosexuality included work such as that of Driesmans on racial mixing and creativity and of Hirschfeld on gender. With this help — whether or not he espoused Driesmans' racial theories — he could be enabled to overcome earlier images of the homosexual as inferior, feminine and capable only of passive kinds of artistic achievement. Thus in Tonio Kröger he can present a protagonist whose homo- or bisexuality is not an indelible stigma or a bar to literary creativity. The suffering and passivity previously characteristic of the sexually abnormal man are transferred to be characteristic of the creative writer; celibacy and distance from life are the condition of creativity, not the disadvantages of the man at odds with his sexuality. From this distance, Tonio can proclaim his love of life: a life which, seen in the persons of the blond and blue-eyed citizens of the north, unites elements of the ecstatic vision of the Nietzschean Übermensch and of the ordinary burgher ethos. The creativity which Tonio engages in is that of a lyric poet, but at the end his new-found distanced commitment to Leben seems to issue in a decision to become a prose writer, analysing and observing character much as Mann himself did. Remaining apart from life as Thomas Mann did not, he is a transitional figure in Mann's oeuvre.

Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady

Although overshadowed by her higher-profile successors, Lou Henry Hoover was in many ways the nation's first truly modern First Lady. She was the first to speak on the radio and give regular interviews. She was the first to be a public political persona in her own right. And, although the White House press corps saw in her old-fashioned wifehood, she very much foreshadowed the new of the era. Nancy Beck Young presents the first thoroughly documented study of Lou Henry Hoover's White House years, 1929-1933, showing that, far from a passive prelude to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a true innovator. Young draws on the extensive collection of Lou Hoover's personal papers to show that she was not only an important First Lady but also a key transitional figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century views on womanhood. Lou Hoover was a multifaceted woman: a college graduate, a lover of the outdoors, a supporter of Girl Scouting, and a person engaged in social activism who endorsed political involvement for women and created a program to fight the Depression. Young traces Hoover's many philanthropic efforts both before and during the Hoover presidency - contrasting them with those of her husband - and places her public activities in the larger context of contemporary women's activism. And she shows that, unlike her predecessors, Hoover did more than entertain: she revolutionized the office of First Lady. Yet as Young reveals, Hoover was constrained as First Lady by her inability to achieve the same results that she had previously accomplished in her very public career for the volunteer community. As diligently as she worked to combat the hardship of the Depression for average Americans by mobilizing private relief efforts, her efforts ultimately had little effect. Although her celebrity has paled in the shadow of her husband's negative association with the Great Depression, Lou Hoover's story reveals a dynamic woman who used her activism to refashion the office of First Lady into a modern institution reflecting changes in the ways American women lived their lives. Young's study of Hoover's White House years shows that her legacy of innovation made a lasting mark on the office and those who followed.

Writing Qiu Jin's Life: Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning

Writing Qiu Jin's Life:Wu Zhiying and Her Family Learning* Hu Ying, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature Preamble: The Burial of Qiu Jin (and of Wu Zhiying) In February of 1908, two women took the initiative to give a proper burial to their friend Qiu Jin (1875?-1907), beheaded six months earlier for attempted insurrection against the Qing empire.1 The ensuing memorial service, which drew a crowd of several hundred, became a forum for public protest and was duly registered as such by the government. Within the year, Qiu Jin's tomb by the West Lake was razed and the two chief mourners, Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, found themselves on the government's wanted list. After the success of the Republican Revolution four years later, Qiu Jin quickly became a celebrated revolutionary martyr. Today, her story still appears in patriotic educational texts for young readers, her image often visible on stage and in films.2 So much symbolic significance is invested in the singular figure of Qiu Jin that in historical accounts of Chinese women's progress, she often functions as a "transitional figure" par excellence: a history of women of traditional China typically ends with her while a study of modern women begins with her. It is as if alongside her the last of "talented women" (cainü) was buried and through her the New Woman (xin nüxing) was heralded in. [End Page 119] The present study shifts the focus away from Qiu Jin and onto one of the two chief mourners in her shadow, Wu Zhiying (1867-1934). Wu wrote five biographical essays on Qiu Jin against the rapidly changing cultural and political backdrop of the last four years of the Qing and the first year of the Republic. Proclaiming herself the rightful heir to her "family learning"—the Tongcheng tradition—Wu re-interprets the classics such as the Shiji and the Yijing to legitimate Qiu Jin's participation in the public arena. Highly self-conscious of her own historical intervention, Wu Zhiying yet chose a path considerably different from the one taken by her friend Qiu Jin. Precisely because of this difference, her case offers an alternative construction of meaning from the more familiar one associated with Qiu Jin and the rise of the New Woman. While one might say that the name of Wu Zhiying was kept in history because of her connection with Qiu Jin, it was rather a mixed blessing. This connection tends to obscure significant aspects of her life unrelated to Qiu Jin, such as her 1906 championing of the "women citizens' donation" for the Boxer's Indemnity debt (nüzi guomin juan), her donation to the women's army during the 1911 Revolution, and her 1912 letter to Yuan Shikai reprimanding his imperial ambition. In addition, the comparison with Qiu Jin was not always favorable to her: in fact, the higher Qiu Jin's stock grew, the lower Wu's sank. As Qiu Jin was increasingly represented as an extraordinary revolutionary hero in later history, Wu Zhiying became the negative foil, or in Guo Moruo's caustic words, "the pecking swallow" who could not possibly comprehend "the great aspirations of the magnificent roc."3 This negative picture may be traced to a particular self image that Wu Zhiying publicized in the aftermath of Qiu Jin's execution, a self image that may be said to give rise to others' unwitting or willful misrepresentations later. In a memoir of Qiu Jin written days after the execution and published barely three months later, Wu recounts a dialogue after Qiu Jin's return from Japan in 1906: From time to time, I [Wu] would caution her, saying: 'Your words are too shocking. Please be more circumspect. . . . Should a border official mistake you for a woman revolutionary, what then?' She [Qiu] laughed, 'There is a difference between revolutionary and revolution. Of course you of all people know that I'm not the sort of New Youth revolutionary.'4 [End Page 120] Later citation of this conversation typically changed Qiu Jin's answer into "How do you know I am not a revolutionary?" thus portraying Qiu Jin to be a self-declared anti-Manchu...

Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism

McLeod Bethune was a significant figure in American political history. She devoted her life to advancing equal social, economic, and political rights for blacks. She distinguished herself by creating lasting institutions that trained black women for visible and expanding public leadership roles. Few have been as effective in the development of women s leadership for group advancement. Despite her accomplishments, the means, techniques, and actions Bethune employed in fighting for equality have been widely misinterpreted. Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women s Political seeks to remedy the misconceptions surrounding this important political figure. Joyce A. Hanson shows that the choices Bethune made often appear contradictory, unless one understands that she was a transitional figure with one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth. Bethune, who lived from 1875 to 1955, struggled to reconcile her nineteenth-century notions of women s moral superiority with the changing political realities of the twentieth century. She used two conceptually distinct levels of activism one nonconfrontational and designed to slowly undermine systemic racism, the other openly confrontational and designed to challenge the most overt discrimination in her efforts to achieve equality. Hanson uses a wide range of never- or little-used primary sources and adds a significant dimension to the historical discussion of black women s organizations by such scholars as Elsa Barkley Brown, Sharon Harley, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. The book extends the current debate about black women s political activism in recent work by Stephanie Shaw, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.Examining the historical evolution of African American women s activism in the critical period between 1920 and 1950, a time previously characterized as doldrums for both feminist and civil rights activity, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women s Political Activism is important for understanding the centrality of black women to the political fight for social, economic, and racial justice.

Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (review)

Reviewed by: Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival James Pethica Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. x + 277. $95.00 (cloth). In his final years, W. B. Yeats defiantly described himself as one of the "last romantics." He claimed that "alone in modern times" he and his fellow Abbey Theatre playwrights J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory had drawn "all that we said or sang" from "contact with the soil" and from their "[d]ream of the noble and the beggar-man."1 While the impact of class, religious affiliation, gender, and proficiency in the Irish language have all been considered as significant factors shaping the ways Irish Revival writers recruited folklore and the figure of the peasant to promote their competing conceptions of "authentic" Irishness, Sinéad Garrigan Mattar's book is the first extended study to attend to the impact of late nineteenth-century developments in comparative anthropology as an influence on major figures of the movement. Focusing on the work of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory to 1909, Mattar argues that their folklore gatherings and representations of Irish peasant culture have consistently been misread as predominantly informed by unreconstructed early-nineteenth century Romantic notions of the primitive. The image of the "noble savage" was indeed alluring to all three writers, and each conceived of an Edenic golden age and its surviving traces in rural Ireland as to some extent a potential antidote to what Yeats termed the "filthy modern tide" of contemporary life.2 But as Mattar emphasizes, Yeats and Synge were by 1900 well read in recent developments in anthropology. They were thus obliged to reassess both their own idealizing impulses, and the core assumptions of Romantic Celticism generally, in the light of scholarship that insisted on rigorous documentation of source materials, comprehensive historical knowledge, and, most of all, an objective and stringently comparative view of individual cultural practices. The work of Lang, Frazer and others prevented them from slipping into an easy reduplication of the idealized views of nationhood and the discourse of crude racial typographies that had marked most prior approaches to Irish folklore. It was thus a key influence on their evolving conceptions of Irish nationality. Their broader efforts to come to terms with comparative science, Mattar suggests, also place them as important transitional figures anticipating the modernist primitivism of Joyce, T. S. Eliot and others. In her reading, Yeats and Synge are positioned as what she wryly terms the "missing link" (1), functioning as "last romantics" obliged by their encounters with comparative anthropology to evolve into the "first modernists" (247). Mattar begins by tracing the rise of Celticism as a discipline, highlighting the emerging strains in the nineteenth century between the scholarly (or "critical") approach to Irish folklore and legend, and the Romantic (and typically patriotic) mode prevalent amongst Irish writers and artists. Already marked in Matthew Arnold's influential but conflicted 1860s lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature, these strains intensified into open hostility once the Revue celtique began to excoriate the merely "poetic" school of Celticism after 1886. At the very moment the [End Page 832] Irish Revival was stirring into self-consciousness, Mattar argues, time was running out for the "romantically primitivist vision of Ireland" (20). Yeats is the subject of two of the book's four chapters with a single-author focus. In "Yeats, Celticism, Comparative Science" Mattar shows that Yeats was "acutely aware of the division between 'scientific' and 'literary' versions of folklore" early in his career (44). He zealously claimed in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) that the Celts of the western seaboard had remained untouched by modernity, and retained visionary forms of knowledge lost to people of the cities. At the same time,though, he was striving to assimilate the work of Alfred Nutt, John Rhys, de Jubainville and others suspicious of, or hostile to, "poetic" racial primitivism. He consequently took care to claim that his gatherings contained nothing that he had merely imagined, even while simultaneously emphasizing that he viewed folklore's primary importance as being a source of imaginative inspiration. From around 1896, however, under the influence of Andrew...

Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War John McIntyre Sarah Cole. Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. vii + 297 pp. Sarah Cole's trenchant reading of modernism's investment in male friendship productively reorients discussions begun by Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) and Joanna Bourke (Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War). While earlier discussions such as these have argued for the centrality of male bonds to the literary and historical imagination of wartime Britain, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War reveals that the "organization of male intimacy" played a constitutive role in the formation of modernism itself. Cutting across an impressive range of fictional material and cultural contexts, Cole shows how writers as diverse as Forster, Sassoon, and Lawrence responded to the reconfiguration of male friendships—and the institutions that had fostered them—in the years of modernism's emergence. Throughout her study, Cole emphasizes the ubiquity of the bereft individual who reels from the loss of friendship and its cultural support systems. Indeed, in one of the most compelling features of her argument, Cole returns us to modernism's familiar associations with notions of fragmentation, loss, and alienation, seeing them as the "excavated" remains of "lost male comradeship" (122). For Cole, male friendship in the modernist era is beleaguered because of its detachment from the various institutions in which it had been codified and safeguarded. Nineteenth-century educational networks—with their frequent appeals to Hellenic homosocial bonds, the increasingly fraught project of empire-building, and long-standing [End Page 773] militaristic codes of masculinity and comradeship, all falter under the combined pressure of internal contradictions and the shifting of male alliances that no longer conform to institutional imperatives. While some might see this waning of organizational power as a vindication of modernism's sometimes neglected liberatory politics, Cole argues for the disorienting effects of foundational shifts that leave in their wake a series of disempowered and disconnected individuals. The irony, readily evident in the cultural contexts explored by Cole, is that the only thing that institutions and uncoupled male pairings have in common in this period of crisis is their shared failures to live up to Forster's famous dictum to "only connect." As its title indicates, Cole's study coalesces around an examination of the fate of culturally sanctioned male formations during the First World War. Unable to withstand the debilitating violence of the war, what are now hopelessly shattered male friendships live on only in the form of the grief-stricken soldier who returns home only to have his voice appropriated by a modernism eager to legitimate its claims for a hollowed out and alienated image of modernity. But unlike many before her, Cole does not return us to a "rupture model" of understanding the war's place within the modern imagination. Rather, the depletion of homosocial bonds was ushered in slowly, beginning in at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and continuing to unfold long after the war, as Cole's concluding chapter on D. H. Lawrence's fiction makes clear. The war itself simply intensified the fractures of an already incommensurable relationship between male intimates and the institutions in which they might take cover. Such a nuanced approach forms part of a larger and much-welcomed effort to revise our understanding of modernism's emergence from its literary and cultural antecedents, here understood through the slow and painful decline of various Victorian bastions of male intimacy. Cole's analysis thus attends not only to more familiar transitional figures like Forster and Oscar Wilde, but also to the more marginal voices of Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds. So linked, such figures become important precursors, even protomodernists, for their uneasy sense of the incapacity of institutional structures to house homosocial bonds in an era of increasingly divided and fraught male loyalties. By the same token, Cole's analysis of Romance, an underappreciated collaborative novel written by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in 1903 stands as one of the volume's finest achievements. The volume will be of special value to those interested in reevaluations of modernism...

Lord Berners and His Books: A New Survey

Few printed copies, and only one manuscript, of the work of John Bourchier, Lord Berners, now survive. In “Lord Berners and His Books: A New Survey,” Joyce Boro considers new evidence about his career, from the romances Huon and Arthur to Froissart’s Chronycles to the Castell of Love and The Golden Boke. Berners was one of the first to translate Spanish texts into English—in some cases, he apparently worked simultaneously from Spanish and French sources to create an entirely new English version—and he was also among the last to compose prose romances before the English Reformation. Boro fills out the sporadic record of this transitional figure with recent discoveries— including a manuscript fragment of the Chronycles, Continental printed editions that served as source texts, and evidence for the dispersal of Berners’ library.        This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 07:30:18 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms