Undiscovered Country Research Articles

Indeterminacy and the Role of the Archive: The Eight Extensions of Piaget’s Sociological Studies

What a text means in translation is accepted, canonically, to be indeterminate. Authors can provide additional constraints to interpretation by taking care to explain some of the original context. But this requires making judgments about what counts, and readers can’t generally do that of sources except in retrospect. So the solution to the problem is taken to be “to become bilingual,” and basically do the translation work oneself. This means immersing in that foreign culture for long enough that its ways of being, and ways of meaning, become one’s own. When the subject of one’s interest is the undiscovered country, however, this goal remains forever inaccessible. That’s just not somewhere you can go and report back from. The true meanings of deceased authors are therefore forever inscrutable. Except, of course, in cases where historical traces can stand in their stead. Interactions with archival sources are thus offered as a new solution to the problems of indeterminacy and inscrutability: archives provide anchors to stabilize the received meaning of historical texts by offering evidence of what those involved in their production intended them to mean. Here, that is demonstrated with reference to (1) the difficulty of translating Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) collection of essays entitled Sociological Studies and (2) the broader misunderstanding of Piaget’s sociality in relation to the popularity of its critique by Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). We then find, in the process, new ways to consider a consistently thorny question: what is the means by which one attains truth? Here, we therefore articulate and illustrate the “Interpretation Game” by providing access to a curated selection of archival texts drawn from several collections never before considered in relation to the question of the meaning of “Piaget” as a holophrastic utterance. The result is then also a new look at Cold War-era developmental psychology, social psychology, educational theory, and genetic epistemology (the study of the construction of knowledge).

Transkulturowe znaczenie ksiąg ubioru na przykładzie hiszpańskiego Boxer Codex w nowożytnej Europie

The transcultural significance and the significance for costuming of a book on dress: The Boxer Codex in early-modern Europe The Boxer Codex is a Spanish manuscript dated approximately to 1590. It was written in the Philippines in Manila, having been commissioned by the contemporary governor of Manila, Gomez Pérez Desmariñas. The document is called after the name of the last private owner of the codex, Charles R. Boxer, a historian and specialist on the history of colonialism in Asia. It contains illustrations showing figures in costumes representing peoples living in areas colonized by the Spaniards in Asia (The Philippines) and neighbouring lands, such as China, Japan, the Spice Islands (the Moluccas), Brunei, Java, Siam (Thailand), Northern and Central Vietnam, and others. Alongside the illustrations are texts describing the geography and customs of the minorities who live there; these, research shows, may be copies from the work of Martin de Rada, Miguel Rojo de Brito, and other anonymous authors. This article examines the manuscript from the perspective of costume studies. Because of the very extensive material in the manuscript, the author has selected several illustrations connected with Chinese dress in order to show its richness and the first European view of Chinese culture on the threshold of modern times. The author juxtaposes these with the already well-known accounts of the Polish sinologist Michał Boym (1612-1659). Boym’s accounts of Chinese dress (and not just of that) form a supplement to the illustrations from The Boxer Codex. This manuscript is also one of the first documents relating to the so-called volumes of costumes, which were put together both in Europe and in the Far East, and which made it possible to learn about still undiscovered countries and their inhabitants.

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo (review)

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo (review)

The undiscovered country: ten grand challenges in rotifer biology

The undiscovered country: ten grand challenges in rotifer biology

Pupil Memoirs as Hagiography in the Gurdjieff Work

G. I. Gurdjieff (c. 1866–1949) emerged as a spiritual teacher in St Petersburg and Moscow in 1912. In his early phase of teaching, he emphasized a complex cosmology that was recorded by P. D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous (1949), and after leaving Russia during the Revolution he introduced the Movements or Sacred Dances in Tiflis in 1919. At the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basses-Loges at Fontainebleau-Avon south of Paris Gurdjieff initiated a communal life in which pupils pursued a program of spiritual activities devised to lead them from false personality to true self, from a multitude of “I”s to a “real I.” After Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, various of his pupils published memoirs of their time with the Master; notable examples include Margaret Anderson’s The Unknowable Gurdjieff (1962) and Kathryn Hulme’s Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure (1966). This article argues that the pupil memoirs function in the Work as hagiography, cementing the holiness and authority of Gurdjieff in a similar way to the lives of the saints in medieval Europe; additionally, they operate as a substitute for the personal encounter with Gurdjieff in life, constructing his charisma and extraordinary powers for later generations of pupils.

A Discipline of Submission: Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur

A Discipline of Submission:Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur Robert Vaughan There is nothing uniquely postmodern about wrestling with language's limitations, whether it is the poet or the critic doing the wrestling. Jacques Derrida admitted that "Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much," but such reservations long predated the theorists who came to prominence in the latter years of the twentieth century ("Force and Signification" 9). Samuel Taylor Coleridge had expressed similar doubts as the eighteenth came to a close. Though he may be remembered best for his belief in the secondary imagination's "esemplastic power" to render the divine intelligible for human consumption, he also conceded that words were only "shapings of the unregenerate mind; / Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break" ("Aeolian Harp" 27–28). He considered language "the sacred Fire in the Temple of Humanity" (Collected Letters III 522), but he knew that he could "not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within" ("Dejection" 115). What divides the romantic and the postmodern view is not so much a loss of faith in language's efficacy as it is a loss of faith in the nature of the reality language seeks to grasp. Is the poet a "carver," as Donald Davie posited, one who perceives "the form he wants . . . already present in the marble. . . . a reality which is . . . fully and undeniably out there" (111, 112)? Or has the "out there" really always been an "in there," as Jonathan Culler has said, "implicit knowledge that i myself have not brought to consciousness" (91)? whether "reality" is a realm of light glimmering down from the mouth of Plato's cave or only a solipsistic reflection of every writer's (and reader's) interior undiscovered country, what is certain is that it can only be charted linguistically, an expedition T. S. Eliot warned would be undertaken "[w]ith shabby [End Page 335] equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling" ("East Coker" 128). And if the poet acknowledges the limits of language, what is left for the critic? For more than half a century, literary theory's current has mostly flowed in an inescapable direction. The "imprecision of feeling" lamented by Eliot leaves us all in the same "general mess," demonstrating only that the bubbles' glitter does not find its source in any "sacred fire." Any "scriptor," said Barthes, simply accesses an "immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (147). If the poet strains to see something "beyond the picture" of his own reflection, as he does in Frost's "For Once, Then, Something," it is now the critic's task to demonstrate that what he thought he had glimpsed was not "[s]omething more of the depths," but only his own face "in the summer heaven godlike" (208). As Richard Rorty put it, The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. . . . The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. (5, 6) The "demythologizing" of language and its power was birthed in the Enlightenment, and the romantics who followed that era memorably railed against many of its advances. "Once we lived in what we saw," wrote Emerson in "Experience"; "now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. . . . Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast" (487). "Disenchantment" is the term the sociologist Max Weber would eventually use to describe the shift: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the...

Autopsy: The Undiscovered Country in Which We Already Reside

Autopsy: The Undiscovered Country in Which We Already Reside

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

The later stages of viral infection: An undiscovered country of host dependency factors.

The later stages of viral infection: An undiscovered country of host dependency factors.

Dreaming through the Ages: Towards a Global History of Utopian and Dystopian Thought

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

The Undiscovered Countries: Shakespeare and the Afterlife

The multiple uses of religion in Shakespeare’s plays seem to counter each other at every turn. In one respect, though, I have found a surprising consistency. Moments when Shakespeare’s drama imagines the afterlife are moments that lend significant insights into the play’s action or characterization, even though the image of one undiscovered country may differ drastically from another. Across the canon, the afterlife may appear as a place of religious judgment, as in Othello, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice; as a classical Elysium or Hades where the spirit or shadow removes elsewhere (Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus); as Abraham’s Bosom—a place of rest between death and the Last Judgment (Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet); or an unidentifiable life to come (Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear).

“There’s so much more to be seen …”: An Omnibus Review of Chelene Knight's Dear Current Occupant and Al Rempel's Undiscovered Country

“There’s so much more to be seen …”: An Omnibus Review of Chelene Knight's Dear Current Occupant and Al Rempel's Undiscovered Country

Schnitzler in Britain: Authorship, Translation and Finding a Place at the National Theatre

For over sixty years Das weite Land [The Vast Domain, 1911] remained largely unknown in Britain. It was only with the production of Tom Stoppard's English 'version' (Undiscovered Country, 1979) at the National Theatre that Schnitzler and this particular play were brought to the full attention of British audiences. Examination of the papers of Heinrich Schnitzler (in Vienna) and Tom Stoppard (in Texas) makes it possible to situate the production within a wider context of placing Schnitzler in Britain, while also illuminating Stoppard's process of adaptation. The material shows that what we see performed on stage is merely one iteration in a continuum of creative transfer back and forth between numerous individuals and texts.

Dynamic Assessment and Second Language Development: Realizing the “Undiscovered Country” in the Twenty-First Century

Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky and Israeli psychologist and educator Reuven Feuerstein, although working in different times and cultural contexts, arrived at a commensurable and indeed complementary set of theoretical proposals that hold considerable potential for reenvisioning educational activity. One area, in particular, where their theories converge concerns the diagnosis of learner abilities and use of this information to inform targeted interventions to guide psychological development. Specifically, Vygotsky’s (1987) formulation of the Zone of Proximal Development as cooperative activity undertaken with learners to reveal and promote abilities that have not yet formed but are still emerging provides a conceptual framework that aligns with Feuerstein’s elaboration of procedures for identifying learner needs and abilities by engaging with them around specially designed tasks and materials, an approach he referred to as Mediated Learning Experience. Together, these proposals provide the basis for Dynamic Assessment (DA). DA has been widely pursued in the areas of special and cognitive education, where it has been shown to provide insights into the full range of learner abilities and has proven directly relevant to interventions to help all learners develop. This article traces the influence of Vygotsky’s and Feuerstein’s ideas on the field of second language (L2) education. While the field has a long tradition of drawing upon Vygotskian theory to interpret processes of L2 development in instructional contexts, only more recently have researchers begun to invoke it as a basis for organizing educational practices. This has coincided with efforts to understand the relevance of Feuerstein’s research to the domain of children and adult learners of languages beyond their first. Beginning with Poehner’s (2008) examination of DA with learners of L2 French, a sub-field within the area of L2 assessment has emerged that has included applications of DA principles in group formats and computerized procedures and with learners of a wide range of languages and in a variety of cultural contexts. With the continuing trend to elevate certain languages to a “global” status and the growing populations of displaced and immigrant learners, the need for educational approaches that look beyond manifest functioning in order to construct a future with learners has perhaps never been greater.

The Undiscovered Country: An Analysis of the Nature of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:35–58

In 1 Corinthians 15:35–58, Paul combats disagreement in the Corinthian church over the nature of the resurrection. Paul’s argument for the physicality of the resurrection, and his location of the individual’s resurrection within a larger transformation and restoration of all creation, changes how the contemporary church understands and teaches Christian hope, sanctification, and mission.

Traveling “the undiscovered country”

Traveling “the undiscovered country”

Inter-parliamentary relations in the United Kingdom: devolution’s undiscovered country?

SUMMARY Since 1997, the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution has undergone an immense process of change and has resulted in the establishment of separate legislatures and governments for the peoples of Scotland, Wales and, when Stormont is operational, Northern Ireland. These changes have spawned a whole series of relationships between the institutions of the devolved UK, at executive, legislature and civil service levels. However, while intergovernmental relations has been the subject of repeated debate, there has been little attempt to document and examine the way in which the UK’s four legislatures interact with one another, post-devolution. To the extent that these interactions, otherwise known as inter-parliamentary relations (IPR), have been the subject of scrutiny, it has been largely to bemoan their modest state and/or to suggest that stronger, albeit occasionally rather unelaborated, mechanisms be established. This article seeks to correct this deficit and provide a first step towards a clearer understanding of IPR in the UK, post-devolution. The article breaks the different levels of IPR down into three main strands: (1) parliament-parliament, (2) committee-committee and (3) official-official, and suggests that the main interactions that take place at each of these levels. Following this audit, the article concludes by highlighting the role that shared policy competence (a field that is set to grow with the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union) has played in driving IPR in the UK, post-devolution, and suggests some steps that may be taken to enhance IPR in the future.

The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio by Melek Ortabasi

Reviewed by: The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio by Melek Ortabasi Seiji M. Lippit The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio by Melek Ortabasi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. xiii + 329. $49.95. “Yanagita Kunio [柳田国男],” Melek Ortabasi writes at the beginning of The Undiscovered Country, “was a public intellectual who played a pivotal role in shaping modern Japan’s cultural identity” (p. 1). The characterization is appropriately broad; although Yanagita may be best known as the founder of the discourse of minzokugaku 民俗学 (translated typically as folklore studies or native ethnology), which aspired to the status of an academic discipline, his influence spread far beyond this particular area of study. The impact of his work was felt in the fields of history, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies, among others, but also reached far into many forms of popular culture and into popular consciousness at large. Yanagita’s work has, furthermore, found itself attached to a diverse range of ideological positions. His writings on rural village life and the concept of the jōmin 常民 (common folk) are often described as a nativist search for an authentic Japan, and he himself called his work a type of shin-kokugaku 新国学, or neonational studies. At various times, critics have ascribed to it collusion not only with ethnic nationalism but also with discourses undergirding Japan’s empire in Asia. At the same time, he has also been a powerful beacon for progressive intellectuals, especially at moments when Marxism suffered from state suppression or from the disillusionment of intellectuals, as historian Hashikawa Bunsō 橋川文三 and others have pointed out.1 For such thinkers and writers, Yanagita’s folk studies appeared as an indigenous discourse offering the means to conceive alternative social formations to modernity. In the introduction to this informative and wide-ranging book, Ortabasi perceptively points out that Yanagita can be considered an example of what Michel Foucault identifies as a distinctive type of author that emerged during the nineteenth century, whom he calls [End Page 252] “founders of discursivity.” Foucault writes in “What is an Author” that “they are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.”2 For Foucault, the writings of such an author (Freud and Marx are privileged examples) can be situated somewhere between the performative texts of a novelist (who is author only of his or her own texts) and the referential texts of the founder of a science, which may give rise to subsequent works but claim no special authority over them apart from their empirical truth claims: in this situation, the founding act, Foucault says, “is on an equal footing with its future transformations.”3 There are, in fact, intriguing parallels here to Marx and Freud. Both of those authors, like Yanagita, were founders of discourses whose reach went well beyond their disciplinary homes—indeed, one might say their impact was felt more strongly outside those disciplinary boundaries. As Foucault notes, this dispersion inevitably leads to calls for a return to origins, as seen in the calls for a “return to Freud” or a “return to Marx” that shaped postwar French intellectual discourse: In this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a “return to the origin.” This return, which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement that would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself. Reexamination of Galileo’s text may well change our understanding of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism.4 Ortabasi’s attempt here can generally be seen along such lines; while not phrasing her project precisely as a “return to Yanagita,” she does proclaim the necessity of reading the texts themselves, noting that...

Better than to Arrive: The Last Voyage of Walter Scott, Romantic

ABSTRACTBy 1831, early death in adverse circumstances had become a popular marker for Romanticism and a driving force in “necromantic” literary tourism. Walter Scott, however, daily was exceeding the span allotted to many a contemporary writer and challenging both discourses. Now, verging toward death, he set out on a journey around the Mediterranean in search of health. At 61, and reduced to ordinariness by the sufferings of age, the author focused inward, studying the mysteries of his failing mind. Scott thus mapped an undiscovered country, demonstrating what it could mean if Romanticism’s practitioners could ever venture through maturity and beyond.

Structural correlates of the creatine transporter function regulation: the undiscovered country.

Creatine (Cr) and phosphocreatine constitute an energy shuttle that links ATP production in mitochondria to subcellular locations of ATP consumption. Cells in tissues that are reliant on this energy shuttle, such as myocytes and neurons, appear to have very limited ability to synthesize creatine. Therefore, these cells depend on Cr uptake across the cell membrane by a specialized creatine transporter (CrT solute carrier SLC6A8) in order to maintain intracellular creatine levels. Cr supplementation has been shown to have a beneficial effect in numerous in vitro and in vivo models, particularly in cases of oxidative stress, and is also widely used by athletes as a performance enhancement nutraceutical. Intracellular creatine content is maintained within narrow limits. However, the physiological and cellular mechanisms that mediate Cr transport during health and disease (such as cardiac failure) are not understood. In this narrative mini-review, we summarize the last three decades of research on CrT structure, function and regulation.