Trinity University Research Articles

A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape

passion strives to persevere. Perhaps the fiery and sporadic nature of his mother’s condition is what makes this work most harrowing, as Lalla Fatma’s moments of liveliness bring forth a momentary hope within the shadow of inevitability. Due to this, the work can at times seem emotionally taxing. However, this is yet another necessary facet of Jelloun’s realism. Despite its morbid subject matter, About My Mother pulses with life, invigorating the reader with every sentence. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Matt Donovan. A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape. San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University Press. 2016. 253 pages. There is a huge arc that links the first incomparable essay (on the atom-bomb crater at Trinity, New Mexico) to the final expansive one about the Pantheon in Rome, and this arc culminates in a massively bracing negative capability. Matt Donovan’s expansive erudition over fourteen meditations on ruin and redemption is never deadening: everything from painting, architecture, engineering, sculpture , photography, film, literature, music, geography, history, and mythology seems to be embraced in large loops. An ancient mosaic in Pompeii stirs him to remember Keats; Tuscany evokes Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Rothko, Masaccio, and, more intriguingly, a haiku by Issa; and in the final essay, Donovan gathers together Caravaggio , Dante, George Herbert, Marguerite Yourcenar, Brueghel, Walter Benjamin, the Psalms, Pope Alexander VII, Mussolini, and Elizabeth Bishop. Not every essay is a masterpiece or even substantial enough, but even the slightest ones (such as one on Japanese cherry blossoms and a banal haiku) emphasize his humanist perspective. In “Garden of the Fugitive,” Donovan confesses to feeling nothing about the body casts of the perished in Pompeii because poignancy is ruptured through replication and there is little of the human to be found in the human-shaped hollows. At his best, Donovan writes almost poetically as he combines personal experience with dream symbolism, history with metaphysical inquiry. That kid in an Ohio night who aimed a flashlight straight at a star-clustered sky, and who mused on his “clipped beams soaring off into blackness , cruising the cosmos, bound to strike something decades on” has become a Lannan Fellow acutely concerned about “the conspicuous absence” of what is human in World Literature in Review 92 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 history. As he parses through ruin, “looking for things rich and strange,” he admits that he rarely knows what he is looking for. Even when he discovers certain verities, he interrogates himself, wondering how much certainty he wants in what he seeks. Keith Garebian Mississauga, Canada Cynthia Ozick. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. 211 pages. This slender but dazzling collection of thirteen essays, some previously published but refurbished, is primarily concerned with fiction and criticism, both of which Cynthia Ozick practices with ease. It is clear that she is not a reviewer but a critic. Reviewers are allocated a certain amount of space, while critics can—or should—be given free rein, addressing not just the work but its relationship to the world in which it gestated and into which it arrived. Naturally, such critics are rare. Most can synopsize and summarize, but not all can judge, the root meaning of “critic ”—one who can adjudicate, producing something akin to literature. Ozick asks as much of critics as Alexander Pope did in “An Essay on Criticism,” who demanded “a knowledge both of books and humankind.” Ozick is very much the kind of critic Pope envisioned. The epigraph is taken from Pope’s essay, and the title was suggested by Pope’s challenge to critics, urging them to attack the excesses of the age: “These monsters, Critics! with your darts engage, / Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!” Two such critics who can satisfy Ozick’s criteria are the polymath Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, who based his criticism on moral as well as aesthetic grounds. To Ozick, the ability to wield language creatively, even in letter writing, is paramount . She praises Saul Bellow’s letters both for their expression and insights. The prose may not be as inventive as that of the novels, but the letters are a worthy ancilla. Ozick has never considered the Holocaust...

Technologies of Reading and Writing: Transformation and Subjectivation in Digital Times

Technologies of Reading and Writing: Transformation and Subjectivation in Digital Times

Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster. By Randy Fritz. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2015. 244 pp. Cloth $24.95, ebook $24.95.

<i> Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster.</i> By Randy Fritz. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2015. 244 pp. Cloth $24.95, ebook $24.95.

La gaieté par Justine Lévy

Reviews 269 portés par un racisme à fleur de peau sur le Genève d’aujourd’hui soumis à une atmosphère délétère des milieux onusiens et internationaux. Il s’agit tout simplement d’un récit plat, embrouillé, qui ne happe à aucun moment la curiosité du lecteur. University of Maryland Joseph Brami Lévy, Justine. La gaieté. Paris: Stock, 2015. ISBN 978-2-234-07026-4. Pp. 215. 18 a. Louise has been struggling with depression. This narrative appears to be her cure, but her remembered past pulls her away from the present into a self-created myth about motherhood. Her backstory includes drug use, her father’s dependable consolation, and her marriage to Pablo. When Pablo was ready for a family, she acquiesced and became pregnant ten years ago. Pregnancy became the line of demarcation for her: she decided then not to be sad any longer. She would consciously try to be joyful for her progeny’s sake because, she asserts, her future children do not deserve her sadness. So Louise’s voice begins here to explain her suspiciously joyful odyssey. During her pregnancy with her first child Angèle, Louise’s mother Alice dies.Alice was a woman who stopped trying to be a mother when Louise was eleven. A heroine and opium abuser, Alice thus contributed to Louise’s depressive jags. Louise now believes that her mother’s ghost sometimes returns, inhabits Louise’s body, and changes Louise’s behavior such that her daughter Angèle does not recognize her own mother during fits of rage. Pregnancy does occasionally help Louise to manage her depression and to quit smoking. With her focus on searching for a joyful life, she ignores herself by displacing her sadness in altruism that, by its nature, excludes her. She claims having tried to isolate her sadness in its own room. But, despite herself, her maternity causes her to reflect on her own childhood and how she thinks she has been an inadequate daughter (see Lévy’s 2009 novel, Mauvaise fille) by not having helped Alice get through her various addictions. Divorced from Louise’s father, Alice descended into selfdestructive behavior. Meanwhile, Louise’s successive stepmothers, the new wives of her divorced father, do their best to destabilize any maternal reassurance Louise expects from her father’s side about the joys of motherhood. Despite her conscious strategies to protect her children, she lapses into depressive behavior and realizes that she comes dangerously close to continuing the cycle of irresponsible maternity passed on to her from Alice. Although Louise deliberately focuses on keeping sadness away from her children, there are moments when she simply cannot control her own maternal rage. Louise’s writing style reflects her struggles. Her writing lapses into long paragraphs in an oral, out-of-breath flow of words that incorporate dialogues with others and blend into her interior monologue about how she becomes another by descending into “un creux à l’intérieur” (27). This interior abyss engulfs her and takes over her writing such that the reader is mesmerized by accompanying her descent. Phrases coined by others become gerunds to display her own reflective re-formulation of words, especially recollected advice given by her mother. Overall, this work strikes book reviewers as a roman à clef for Justine Lévy’s life, but this attribution does not fill in the blanks about the sources for the social conditioning of Louise’s ironic self-delusion to be happy about maternity. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Monénembo, Tierno. Les coqs cubains chantent à minuit. Paris: Seuil, 2015. ISBN 9782 -02-108895-3. Pp. 188. 17 a. Ce roman se situe dans le Cuba contemporain, mais à travers ses personnages, nous découvrons en microcosme la triste évolution vers la tyrannie et la corruption d’une révolution entreprise dans la bonhomie et dans l’espoir. Le personnage central n’est jamais directement présent. Il est né d’une mère cubaine et d’un père guinéen, musicien de passage à Cuba à l’époque des rapprochements simultanés de ce pays avec l’Union soviétique et la Guinée (1965–1978).Lorsque la jeune Cubaine tombe enceinte...

A revised correlation between molecular weight between crosslinks and equilibrium degree of swelling of hydrogel networks

Event Abstract Back to Event A revised correlation between molecular weight between crosslinks and equilibrium degree of swelling of hydrogel networks Dany J. Munoz-Pinto1 and Mariah S. Hahn2 1 Trinity University, Engineering Science, United States 2 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Biomedical Engineering, United States Introduction: Among hydrogels properties, characterization of their capacity to transport solutes of different sizes is of great relevance for the biomedical community. Their diffusional capacity has been commonly estimated using the average molecular weight between crosslinks (Mc) which is calculated using equilibrium degree of swelling data[1]. However, the current correlation lacks of sensitivity and fails to accurately reflect the diffusional properties of more highly crosslink hydrogel networks[2]. To address this limitation, the present work first evaluated the robustness of the standard swelling correlation using poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) as a material model. The strength of the correlation was assessed by contrasting swelling and mechanical behavior as functions of hydrogel crosslink density (ρx).Second, an independent assessment of hydrogel mesh size (ξ) by molecular size exclusion (MSE) was utilized to calculate ρx. The resulting set of data followed more general trends for swelling and modulus. Finally, using the MSE data, an improved correlation between Mc and degree of swelling was generated. Material and Methods: Hydrogel Preparation. Hydrogels were prepared by the photopolymerization of aqueous solutions of 3.4, 6.0, 10.0 and 20.0 kDa PEGDA. For each PEGDA MW, six distinct polymer concentrations ranging from 8 to 30 wt% were characterized. Swelling Measures. The volumetric swelling ratios at the swollen and relaxed states (Q and Q’) were calculated from the hydrogel initial, swollen and dry weights. Mc and ρx for each hydrogel formulation were then determined using swelling data correlations[1]. Mesh Size Evaluation. Mesh size was independently estimated by molecular size exclusion experiments[3],[4]. The measured ξ was then used to back calculate Mc and ρx. Tensile Modulus (E) Evaluation. The modulus of each formulation was determined from the slope of the linear portion of the stress-strain curve using a ring test method and an Instron 3342 mechanical tester[5]. New Swelling Correlation Model. To generate a new model to correlate Mc and swelling data, the value 1/Mc from the MSE data and the effective number of chain per unit volume (Vc) from swelling data were fit to the linear model: 1/Mc=a+bVc'. Where Vc'=f(Q,Q')*Vc. Results and Discussion: As expected, Q and E of PEGDA hydrogels as functions of ρx exhibited a tradeoff behavior for both sets of data (Fig. 1A and 1B).However only the ρx estimates based on MSE-based mesh size measures (Fig. 1B) resulted in a general ρx-Q trend, which was independent of PEGDA MW. Furthermore, the data from MSE model was used to derive an improved correlation between Mc and degree of swelling of hydrogel networks (Fig. 1C). Conclusions: The current data shows that the values of 1/Mc can potentially be calculated from swelling data using a modified version of the current correlation. Although in this work we used PEGDA as a model, this correlation can potentially be extended to other polymer networks.

What to Take

What to Take Barbara Ras (bio) From the drummer, take the cymbals, the crash, and hi-hatand walk like you’re shining. From the composer take “waterunder snow is weary,” sung by young voices in the timbreof wind blowing through the antlers of reindeer. From the organ-maker take the names of the stops, night horn,vox celeste, and chimney flute, instrumental sustainsthat theoretically go on forever. Eternity eludes the NRAand ants, who cannot hear, but I swear that following Rachmaninoff ’s Second Piano Concerto notefor note while rain sledgehammered the road the firsttime I drove to Swannanoa, got me there safely.From a gypsy, take any castanets offered, and play them first thing to get you out of bed, despitethe news of nine dead in Charleston who invited Dylann Roofinto their prayer service at the Emanuel A.M.E. Churchwhere he repeatedly shot the gun, whose one note is death. Take a chance. Take guns away and ask peopleto hum more, to whistle, if, unlike me, they know how,to talk often, like baby turtles, who startvocalizing inside their eggs. Every river’s original name was water weeping, waterlaughing. Take the call of a cricket or a ricochet of crickets,each with its own thumbprint. Take the cry of a bushbaby at nightthat narrows to next to nothing the distance between it and us, both our wailings scored by loneliness, bothshocking the night air, calling for kin, calling for help to perpetuatethe species. Take a lesson from the bushbaby with its esotericallylarge eyes that see what we don’t see, its paws and mouth that eat whatever they kill. [End Page 598] Barbara Ras barbara ras’s first collection of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, was chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award. In 1999, Ras was named Georgia Poet of the Year. Her books include One Hidden Stuff andThe Last Skin. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. She has been on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Ras currently lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press. Copyright © 2016 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest. By Char Miller. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013. 250 pp. Notes. Paper $17.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest. By Char Miller. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013. 250 pp. Notes. Paper $17.95.Jared OrsiJared OrsiColorado State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 20, Number 3July 2015 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 7Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emv073 Views: 7Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 01, 2015 © 2015 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Lives of the laureates: twenty-three nobel economists

Lives of the Laureates offers readers an informal history of modern economic thought as told through autobiographical essays by twenty-three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The essays not only provide unique insights into major economic ideas of our time but also shed light on the processes of intellectual discovery and creativity. This fifth edition adds five recent Nobel laureates to its list of contributors: Vernon L. Smith (2002), Clive W. J. Granger (2003), Edward C. Prescott (2004), Thomas C. Schelling (2005) and Edmund S. Phelps (2006). Also included is the editors' revised afterword, Lessons from the Laureates. Lives of the Laureates grows out of a continuing lecture series at Trinity University in San Antonio, which invites Nobelists from American universities to describe their evolution as economists in personal as well as technical terms. Each laureate achieves the goal of clarity without sacrificing inherently difficult content: Kenneth Arrow makes grasping the essentials of his impossibility theorem painless; Lawrence Klein clearly presents what goes into econometric model building; George Stigler masterfully describes his information theory; and so on. These lectures demonstrate the richness and diversity of contemporary economic thought. The reader will find that paths cross in unexpected ways -- that disparate thinkers were often influenced by the same teachers--and that luck as well as hard work plays a role in the process of scientific discovery.

Listening to Memory

Book Review| February 01 2015 Listening to Memory 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared by Kim Stafford. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2012. 202 pages, paper, $16.95. Fred Arroyo Fred Arroyo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2015) 17 (1): 213–218. https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.17.1.0213 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Fred Arroyo; Listening to Memory. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 February 2015; 17 (1): 213–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.17.1.0213 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau par Guilhem Farrugia

Reviews 267 expressions in argot. She especially loved reading and appreciated literary language. She assumed the role of a writer when her father died in 1967 with the mission of her writing to explore the social issues in how to “écrire littérairement dans la langue de tous” (34). The disparities among the values of different social classes have thus been imbedded in her writings and led her to explore the degree to which she has or has not betrayed her origins. Retour à Yvetot includes the revision of a lecture Ernaux gave at Yvetot in 2012, pictures of Ernaux at various stages in her life, an interview given to the Ernaux scholar Marguerite Cornier, and an essay by Gortier explaining the role of Yvetot throughout Ernaux’s opus. This pamphlet has much to recommend its reading by those familiar with the écrivaine and especially by those not yet acquainted with her work. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Farrugia, Guilhem. Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 9782 -8124-0500-6. Pp. 361. 39 a. “Peut-on, après Robert Mauzi, écrire sur le bonheur selon Rousseau?,”asks Michel Delon in his preface to a book dealing with a topic that has been discussed at length, not only by Mauzi and the Rousseau scholars with whom the author engages, but also in recent intellectual histories, notably Darrin M. McMahon’s History of Happiness (2006), with which he does not. This is largely an immanent, phenomenological study of happiness in Rousseau’s texts, in the tradition of Poulet and Starobinski. Delon answers his question by pointing to the connections Farrugia draws between happiness and the status of fiction, and there are indeed interesting discussions here of how Rousseau constructs in his reveries as well as in his works imaginary spaces either of happy solitude or affective communication among intimates, spaces that serve as “la matrice de la félicité”(20).While not empirically grounded, these imaginary constructs are“véraces,”in the sense that they foster genuine and positive human experience. The first part of the book explores the key forms of happiness Rousseau likes to imagine, and how Rousseau turns the fictions he elaborates about them into “fictions vécues,” modeled by the characters in his books but designed to be lived by his readers and by himself as reader of his own work. The second part focuses on the “oscillation” between restriction and expansion, between the notion that happiness finds its ideal location within the individual, solitary self and the idea that its proper context is the sociability of little communities of friends or lovers (about citizens the author has little to say). This oscillation gives Rousseau’s thinking its dynamism and his various fictions their contrasting but equally enabling character. Much of this analysis will be familiar to eighteenth-century specialists, but it is designed to support a thesis the author believes to be original: “Assignant à la fiction une réalité existentielle, une solidité affective et infléchissant ce terme du sens de mensonge vers celui de véracité, Rousseau est l’auteur d’une théorie moderne de la fiction” (339). Farrugia is certainly on to something here, but there is a disconnect between his phenomenological approach and his historical thesis. Modern compared to whom or to what? In the absence of any comparison with other writers or thought-systems, it is hard to know what to make of this claim. Did no one before Rousseau ever give fiction existential reality? Another difficulty is that the book never deals with the mistrust of fictions that also pervades Rousseau’s works. How does one distinguish veracious fictions from mendacious ones? And is it really true that only veracious fictions help one be happy? To borrow terms from Starobinski, there is a lot here about la transparence but not enough about l’obstacle. University of California, Los Angeles Patrick Coleman Feilla, Cecilia. The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-16058-0. Pp. 258. $99.95. This insightful, articulate study illustrates the impact that theatrical esthetics had upon the French Revolution’s overarching goal of transforming society. Drawing upon statistical...

Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places / Human Nature &amp; Jewish Thought / Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought / Balancing on a Planet: The Future of Food and Agriculture / The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible / Capitalism: A Ghost Story/Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with

Other| August 01 2015 Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places Human Nature & Jewish Thought Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought Balancing on a Planet: The Future of Food and Agriculture the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible Capitalism: A Ghost Story/Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence Gary, Snyder, in conversation with Julia, Martin, Trinity University Press, 2014Edited by Dorff, Elliot N.; Laurie, Zoloth, Jewish Publication Society, 2015David, Fideler, Inner Traditions Publishing, 2014 Tikkun (2015) 30 (3): 2. https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-3147562 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places Human Nature & Jewish Thought Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought Balancing on a Planet: The Future of Food and Agriculture the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible Capitalism: A Ghost Story/Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. Tikkun 1 August 2015; 30 (3): 2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08879982-3147562 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTikkun Search Advanced Search Nobody Home presents three interviews conducted by South African scholar and writer Julia Martin with the poet Gary Snyder that take place from the late 1980s to 2010, along with a selection of letters between them covering the same period. Martin was a young academic in apartheid South Africa when she first reached out to Snyder, motivated by her critical work on his poetry and thinking. Martin’s study and practice of Buddhism and her intuitive grasp of Snyder’s importance as a forefather of a growing international movement of spiritual environmentalism provoked Snyder to respond with sympathy and encouragement. They had an instant rapport in letters, which led to the interviews. This is a great period for Snyder, as his thinking about the non-dualism of self/no-self and its relation to the world and all phenomena is culminating in his concentration on finishing Mountains and Rivers Without End, one of the... Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Tikkun Recommends You do not currently have access to this content.

Developing Scientific Literacy in Introductory Laboratory Courses: A Model for Course Design and Assessment

ABSTRACTAlthough science educators at all levels have focused on teaching students scientific literacy for nearly five decades, studies indicate that the average student remains far from scientifically literate. To address this issue at the local level, faculty at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, significantly revised the curriculum of an existing introductory physical geology laboratory course. The course, which satisfies general education requirements at Trinity, was revised to provide students learning opportunities in a scientific process context as part of a new science literacy initiative. This effort was spurred by general dissatisfaction with the existing curricular structure of the course as well as a new interdisciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded initiative to support the integration of research-grade instrumentation in curricula and undergraduate research across campus. The physical geology laboratory course revision was based on research that demonstrated the efficacy of learning through active participation, interpretation, iteration, and reflection, especially when knowledge and skills are gained within an explicit scientific process context. In addition to significantly revising laboratory activities, we added new activities within the course framework that involved the use of two new, NSF-funded instruments, including a handheld X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (XRF) and an inductively coupled plasma–optical emissions spectrometer (ICP-OES), which we used to improve student understanding of qualitative and quantitative elemental analyses. Finally, we introduced the use of a new course reader that provided both background materials for each activity as well as a new focus on providing a scientific process context for students. To assess student learning, we used in-class observations, student–instructor discussions, pre- and postlearning questionnaires, prelaboratory quizzes, course activities completed during class time, modified postactivity reflection questions, practical examinations, and a final examination. We also included faculty, staff, and administrator perspectives to qualitatively assess the impact of course changes upon student learning. Our results imply that students achieved the primary learning goals we developed for this scientific literacy initiative, including: (1) improved understanding of the scientific process and the nature of science; (2) improved understanding of qualitative and quantitative elemental research methods; and (3) improved understanding of the applicability of scientific research to real-world problems. Importantly, our findings suggest that the integration of research-grade instrumentation into introductory coursework, in a scientific process context, is an effective way to promote scientific literacy as well as to provide opportunities for students to understand and apply the knowledge and skills necessary to perform scientific research. We believe that this example of a significant course redesign provides a model that can be transferred to other geosciences departments as well as to other scientific disciplines.

Ladivine by Marie NDiaye

Reviews 263 reminds him that minutia tend to distract the viewer from the whole of the mosaic. Her counsel leads the reader to see Oleg’s task as that of a wise editor paring down the plethora of details about Catherine and focusing on his story. To complicate matters, the Politburo recently noticed and applauded Oleg’s first film. Oleg is no longer a poor, struggling artist. His current fame leads his former professor to remind Erdmann not to forget history in Catherine’s scenario.For Oleg,the word“history”meant Catherine’s story as that of a German princess becoming a Russian empress, but there is certainly a larger ideological frame to consider especially now that the Politburo is looking over his shoulder. Censorship reigns as the government’s film committee, which still sees Eisenstein’s experimental formalism as problematic,modifies and/or deletes Erdmann’s “realistic”details. The committee also decides that Erdmann will be demoted to artistic assistant to the film’s director, a well-known specialist of the camera. Kozine is the director who brings the camera’s eye to Oleg’s scenario. The filming itself adds yet another dimension, the theatricality of the actors. The czarina saw herself as an enlightened monarch on a world stage on which she invited Diderot to visit in 1774, discussed republican ideals with him, and proposed to publish the Encyclopédie in Russia. The actresses who play Catherine make Oleg aware of her stage presence. She was called Catherine le Grand. Kozine and Erdmann struggle with evoking the hidden masculinity of the czarina. Yet Catherine slips away from their determination to capture her in a movie in 1989, which is also the year when the Berlin Wall falls and Leningrad becomes St. Petersburg again. The republic of Russia appears and promises explosive freedom. Oleg even writes a televised version of Catherine’s erotic, almost pornographic, episodes, which are financially profitable but disappointing for him. His common German ancestry with Catherine keeps him doing research on her, especially about her travels outside Russia. She may have planned on going into northern Italy to Ravenna with Lanskoï, her twenty-something lover when she was fifty. Oleg would like to provide a glimpse of such a Catherine yet unseen in scholarship and movies about her. So he wants to reveal her dreams for that other life she yearned after but could not have. Intently he retraces this journey and finally finds himself through Catherine’s dilemma. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne NDiaye, Marie. Ladivine. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-012669-9. Pp. 416. 21,50 a. Ladivine tells the troubled story of three generations of women—Ladivine Sylla, her daughter Malinka (Clarisse), and her granddaughter Ladivine—who all suffer to varying degrees from the consequences of inauthentic living. Reflecting on the latter two generations, Clarisse’s husband observes:“Ils avaient vécu tous les trois ensemble une existence déformée par quelque chose d’indicible et de considérable, qui avait flotté au-dessus d’eux sans jamais se dévoiler ni disparaître et qui avait fait de leur vie une vie factice” (345). Clarisse, in an effort to distance herself from her origins— specifically her mother to whom she refers as “la servante” and for whom she feels “une honte et une peur atroces” (30)—runs away, changing her name from Malinka to Clarisse, a “perfect” (59) forename that reveals nothing of her true identity. She marries Richard Rivière,takes his name,and,in an effort to be accepted unconditionally, subjugates herself, never stating an opinion. However, after 25 years, Richard can no longer tolerate this “femme impersonnelle, irréprochable et candide” (363) and divorces her. While she does regularly visit her mother, who eventually found her, she refuses to reveal anything about her personal life until she meets Freddy Moliger, an alcoholic loner. Clarisse’s daughter, Ladivine, is also strangely influenced by her origins, although she does not initially realize it. Most of the novel’s second half recounts a vacation she takes with her husband and two children to an unnamed tropical country, which, it is implied, may be her grandmother’s home...

Les désorientés by Amin Maalouf

Reviews 211 Maalouf, Amin. Les désorientés. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 978-2-246-77271-2. Pp. 520. 22 a. War can alienate the best of well-intentioned friends, especially when one leaves their feuding country and the other remains. Herein, the Lebanese civil war in the early 1970s caused Adam to emigrate from his native land to Paris where he became a distinguished professor. He left twenty years ago.Adam is a scholar currently writing a biography of Attila the Hun. At forty-seven years old he is ‘disoriented’ by having left his homeland, understood to be part of the Orient. This tale is told with Adam’s memoirs linked by a narrator’s comments providing context for Adam’s writings. Unexpectedly , Mourad, an estranged friend from Adam’s university days, requests Adam’s presence at his deathbed in Adam’s native city. Adam decides to return and settle accounts with Mourad who dies before he can reach him. Mourad’s wife Tania would like to host a reunion of the friends forty days after Mourad’s death.Adam stays in his native country to contact the friends, advise them of Mourad’s passing, and invite them to the memorial service. Letters from Adam’s friends document their takes on his friendship with Mourad who was a generous host to the group of ten university friends. They called themselves“le Cercle des Byzantins”(367). The war separated the Byzantines in various ways that keep the story’s peripety engaging with an elegant style that searches for Adam’s origins“dans l’ordre des choses”(67). He maintains that his was“un choix existentiel”(69) to leave his homeland despite Mourad’s objections that Adam thus abandoned his country and his friends to settle in Paris. Their common friend Albert morally supported Adam’s departure, then attempted suicide, and eventually expatriated to the United States. There is also Sémiramis, a woman friend from the same group whose friendship is rekindled during Adam’s return. Her fiancé Bilal was killed in action when he joined an armed faction in the civil war.While most of the Byzantines left the country during the heady days of civil war, Mourad stayed and eventually was a government Minister during the war. He also became wealthy by taking advantage of the insurgents’ interests. After Mourad’s funeral, the other Byzantines now agree to return to Mourad’s terrace where they were so welcome during their university years. Returning to their Levantine homeland proves to be as difficult a voyage for many of the emigrated Byzantines as was their original odyssey in leaving. Adam is not the lone sufferer. Combining various religions and nationalities , the friends were also torn both by leaving and returning from their twenty-year absences. Adam finally discovers that there is much irony in his name for, like many of his friends,he began again somewhere else without ever acknowledging that his roots are part of that identity he sought elsewhere. This story is an intriguing narrative about being a stranger and the limitations that condition imposes on friends as they age and change into what they were not according to the original terms of their friendship. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne ...

Au revoir là-haut par Pierre Lemaitre

Reviews 271 massacrer par son propre frère, les conflits œdipiens ont toujours la cote auprès de l’académie” (40). Completely powerless to tell his family and doctor that it is his brother who raped him, he becomes increasingly frustrated as his girlfriend first reads a children’s story to him and then the headlines from the daily newspaper where he learns that he is described as the victim of a heinous and gratuitous crime. Once again, the reader’s unease becomes one with the victim’s pain. These short stories are not for the faint of heart. Yet, one would be hard pressed to find another author who is able to enter so adeptly into the mindset of the victims of perverse crimes. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Lemaitre, Pierre. Au revoir là-haut. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013. ISBN 978-2-22624967 -8. Pp. 567. 22,50 a. After four years of war, the promise of armistice is in the air. But for the soldiers of the Great War, their officers continue to push them against the enemy in trench warfare. As a professional warrior, Lieutenant Pradelle loves warfare and leads his infantry into yet more confrontations with the Boches while he reigns over his men with cruel insouciance. Meanwhile Albert Maillard is a grunt in the trenches who would rather wait for the armistice as he reflects upon being reunited with his beloved Cécile. Suddenly he is buried alive by a mortar barrage and saved by his enlisted peer Édouard Péricourt who was severely wounded simultaneously. The mud and grisly details of infantry warfare mark the contrast of tactical warfare by grunts to the strategic ideals of officers like Pradelle.Albert’s debt to Édouard continues into civilian life where Édouard’s disfigurement and addiction to morphine combine to affect Albert’s postwar survival as a poilu in Paris whose politics and daily life contradict each other regarding attitudes toward veterans. Name-changing is an available way for the veterans to survive as the anonymous soldier’s remains were buried on the battlefield and his papers accessible for substitution. The mis-identification of bodies is rampant and provides almost comic situations and opportunities of economic advancement for those in the funereal and commemorative markets. Thus Pradelle becomes a successful bourgeois adopting his aristocratic birth name of D’AulnayPradelle after his commercial management of the re-internment of those who died on the battlefield and were initially buried nearby. His greed knows no bounds as he profits from downsizing caskets so all the veteran bodies fit no matter their size. A government inquiry produces interesting results worthy of reading as the reader constantly waits for justice for the returning veterans caught in unexpected civilian ambushes. Édouard’s fate, for example, is continually ramped up as his addiction to morphine evolves into a heroin habit. And the stakes of his friendship with Albert become increasingly complex once the former’s identity is changed. The author’s style indirect libre is a masterful use of irony and skepticism toward the social classes and working conditions in the aftermath of the Great War. He introduces populist formulas into thoughtful reactions to the poilu’s reintroduction into Parisian civilian life. The Belle Époque had fostered the gender domination of men over women. As marriageable French men became rare after the War, Lemaitre’s women learn to play the mating game in order to obtain results from the men who think they have the upper hand.At play in the narrative is the cultural phenomenon of leaving for the French Colonies during this period. Such an odyssey was both desirable for those making a quick profit unscrupulously and also horrific for vulnerable public servants (fonctionnaires) threatened just prior to their retirements with alternatives to dutiful careers. All of these issues make this novel a page-turner and thus seem lighter than its hefty size. Once again we have a worthy recipient of the Prix Goncourt. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Lucbert,Sandra. Mobiles.Paris: Flammarion,2013.ISBN 978-2-0813-1048-3.Pp.277. 18 a. Ce premier roman décrit la société contemporaine sans complaisance mais...

‘The problem of Trinity College Dublin’: a historical perspective on rationalisation in higher education in Ireland

This paper offers a historical perspective on government policies for the rationalisation of higher education (HE) in Ireland through a critical re-appraisal of the initiative for ‘merger’ of Trinity College and University College Dublin. The initiative launched by Donogh O'Malley in 1967 was the first significant attempt by an Irish government to transform the institutional architecture of HE. This study sheds new light on the rationale for merger. A key motivation for the merger was to overcome ‘the problem of Trinity College Dublin’: policy-makers sought to integrate Trinity College, long regarded as a Protestant ‘enclave’ in a predominantly Catholic society, within the Irish HE system. O'Malley's initiative sought to bring Trinity College Dublin (TCD) firmly under the control of the state and transcend traditional religious divisions, by circumventing the ‘ban’ on the attendance of Catholics at TCD imposed by the Catholic bishops. This paper also explores the emergence of proactive, interventionist approaches by Irish ministers and officials to policy formulation and implementation in HE.

New Members of the Editorial Board and International Advisory Board of Angewandte Chemie

New Members of the Editorial Board and International Advisory Board of <i>Angewandte Chemie</i>

In the Country of Empty Crosses: The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico by Arturo Madrid (review)

Reviewed by: In the Country of Empty Crosses: The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico by Arturo Madrid Kathleen Holscher In the Country of Empty Crosses: The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. By Arturo Madrid. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2012. 240pp. $24.95. In the Country of Empty Crosses is a lovingly compiled, elegantly narrated collection of family stories. Beginning with his great-grandfather’s birth, and passing through the lives of maternal and paternal relatives into his own childhood, Arturo Madrid offers an intimate portrait of the shared experiences of a nuevomexicano family. [End Page 72] Accompanied by Miguel Gandert’s evocative, black-and-white photography, Madrid’s storytelling gently and powerfully reveals the layered intersections of kinship and landscape, and the emotional palate created from presence and absence, that have characterized northern New Mexican communities for over a century. For religion scholars, Madrid’s stories are also finely textured evidence of what he describes as a “historical movement” – the departure, beginning in the late 1800s, of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans from the Catholic Church to become protestantes (53). Madrid’s narrative moves fluidly across time. In one episode, readers meet the author in the near-present, searching a ruined cemetery for familiar gravestones. In other vignettes, a young Arturo accompanies his grandfather as the man peddles crops and tends the acequia that irrigates their farm. The author shows care in preserving his ancestors’ stories, but In the Country of Empty Crosses is also about Madrid himself, his early formation, and (so he acknowledges) his adult regrets. Because Madrid slips often into the voice of a boy raised among Protestants, trained to keep “a respectful distance” from the Catholic doings of his neighbors, his book isn’t the place to find accurate descriptions of New Mexican Catholicism (179). The author imagines his Protestant kin as modern and historical, while relegating Catholic ancestors to folklore and prehistory. He recalls his Catholic great-grandmother and her companion, for example, through the eyes of a twelve year old – as “the wizened women that populated the fables and tales of my storybooks” (130). Madrid’s stories do offer remarkable insights into the generations of Spanish-speaking Protestants who made their way in Catholic New Mexico. Protestantes “found themselves between two worlds,” one Anglo Protestant and one Hispano Catholic, “one that was hostile to them because they were apostates and another that kept them at arm’s length because they were manifestly the ‘other’” (71). Glimpses of daily life speak to the complexity of this position – made up, as it [End Page 73] was, of experiences of alienation from, but also sympathy with, both worlds. Madrid remembers, for example, the icy greeting his mother gave the Presbyterian pastor’s wife one morning as she dutifully delivered crates of produce to share with her. Interactions with the Hispano Catholic culture and community were just as complicated. When Madrid’s grandmother became a Protestant, she relinquished the treasured santos carved by family members. Her protestante children, however, attended schools taught by Catholic sisters and took part in the burial processions of Catholic acquaintances. Madrid’s account of the burial of a pair of Catholic schoolmates is poignant. “The bell tolled as the caskets were rolled out of the Santo Niño church and placed in the hearses,” he writes. “My father and I joined the long line of vehicles to the camposanto [. . . and] listened as Father Austin intoned the final prayers” (179). As the book’s title suggests, gravesites loom large in Madrid’s memory and storytelling. For the author, the Protestant and Catholic cemeteries of his childhood are telling symbols of the communities that maintained them – each cautiously distinct from the other, but always adjacent and, over the course of generations, thoroughly entwined. Kathleen Holscher University of New Mexico Copyright © 2013 American Catholic Historical Society

Digital video as a pedagogical resource in doctoral education

In recent years, multimedia technologies have become increasingly common in teaching practice. Digital video has provided a welcome alternative to traditional instructional techniques. Though it has been used to facilitate research collaboration [Armstrong, V., & Curran, S. (2006). “Developing a Collaborative Model of Research Using Digital Video.” Computers & Education 46 (3): 336–347], it remains an under-utilized resource for presentation and research dissemination in doctoral education. The Innovation Academy at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin has established innovation and entrepreneurship alongside research and education as an integral element of the PhD programme. Since 2010, the Innovation Academy has facilitated the use of digital video within an interactive multidisciplinary learning environment. While enrolled on a Graduate Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, over 100 doctoral students have planned, shot, edited and presented a short video, ‘pitching’ their PhD research. This paper details the rationale and process of capturing complex research findings using this medium. We explore the challenges of using video to organize empirical data, visually represent theoretical concepts and evaluate its effectiveness in communicating PhD research to non-expert groups, the wider academic community and potential industry partners. Based on our findings, we reflect on how digital video may be used as a valuable tool for learning in action.

When Data Curation Isn't: A Redefinition for Liberal Arts Universities

ABSTRACT. Data curation is one way that libraries are extending traditional services to meet the changing needs of patrons. Requirements from research funders have placed increased pressure on grant recipients to create Data Management Plans and to securely store raw data. Research universities have stepped up to provide comprehensive data support services. Despite discrepancies in funding and staff, smaller institutions can similarly provide robust services by focusing on their strengths, such as interdepartmental collaboration, flexibility, and rapid turnaround time. This article details how librarians at Trinity University adapted the larger practice of curation to meet local data management needs.