Unsuspecting Reader Research Articles

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Furious Feedback and the Revolutionary Ode to Noise

Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli

Reviewed by: Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli Bradley J. Nelson (bio) E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377. E. Michael Gerli begins his latest book with a prologue entitled “Cervantes and I,” in which he describes his personal and professional relationship with Cervantes as a journey that has led him to the realization that the best teacher and most reliable authority for the Cervantine oeuvre are the works and author, themselves. Rejecting “the existence of a science of literature and philology,” Gerli follows Américo Castro’s discovery that “Don Quijote’s radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world” (9). The rest of the book develops the textual bases for his claim, beginning with a theoretically-informed deep reading of the eruption of competing narrative voices in part one of Don Quixote, when the narrator interrupts the battle between Don Quixote and the Vizcaino with the subtly uproarious history of the lost Arabic manuscript, its translation, and the myriad problems and perspectives of interpretation that it drops into unsuspecting readers’ hands. Gerli links Castro’s recognition of the “problematical nature of the representation of truth” in Cervantes with Foucault’s concept of linguistic heterotopias (19–20), offering a productive and agile analytical framework for the complex linguistic games that Cervantes plays with his readers. The latter’s self-conscious presentation of the missing manuscript provides Gerli with prima facie evidence of the intentional and systematic production of textual and narrative lacunae and mis-direction that generations of philologists have peddled as signs of Cervantes’s supposed carelessness or lack of formal aesthetic training: justification, in other words, for their continued attempts to correct the text in ways that suit their own vision of an ex post facto editio printemps. Gerli’s ironically serious discussion of philology is reminiscent of Julio Baena’s sustained critique of what he calls the science’s “rigor mortis,” on the [End Page 223] one hand, and Tom Lathrop’s spirited defense of Cervantes’s artistic control over his intentionally error-filled texts, on the other. More importantly, it allows the critic to dive into the rhetorical gamesmanship of Cervantes while, at the same time, enriching his analyses with important contributions to our understanding of the literary and historical contexts with which Cervantes dialogues. Gerli’s readings demonstrate how Cervantes’s works not only communicate and model a productively ironic approach to history and truth, they also show how the metaphysical positing of a stable truth and reality beyond language, what David Castillo and William Egginton call the “major Baroque strategy,” both perpetuates and disguises systemic violence along caste, gender, ethnic, and cultural frontiers. In chapter 2 Gerli juxtaposes his analysis of “El curioso impertinente” with Francis Bacon’s “rehabilitation of curiosity” and the rise of scientific empiricism, showing, in effect, how the metaphysics of honor attempt to appropriate the early modern drive toward scientific certainty. In this perspectival analysis of the tragedies that ensue from Anselmo’s drive towards absolute knowledge, “Cervantes signals the need for an ethical basis to all belief [...] and [...] that the search for truth [...] requires moral agency,” situating judgment in relation to values as opposed to knowledge. Chapter 3 continues in this vein through an insightful analysis of Cañizares’s analogously impertinent desire to preserve his young wife’s chastity—albeit through enclosure as opposed to temptation—in the entremés El viejo celoso. Gerli reminds us that the interludes should not be detached from their performative placement as entr’actes in the comedia nueva, which foregrounds their critical relationship with the socio-economic apparatuses surrounding early modern theatrical institutions. The author reads Cervantes’s purpose in these pieces as the production of “critical insight regarding the representation of the long-established conflict between honor, morality, and individual desire that lies at the heart of the Spanish drama at the start of the seventeenth century,” specifically the ways in which the comedia nueva obfuscates...

E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377.

E. Michael Gerli begins his latest book with a prologue entitled “Cervantes and I,” in which he describes his personal and professional relationship with Cervantes as a journey that has led him to the realization that the best teacher and most reliable authority for the Cervantine oeuvre are the works and author, themselves. Rejecting “the existence of a science of literature and philology,” Gerli follows Américo Castro’s discovery that “Don Quijote’s radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world” (9). The rest of the book develops the textual bases for his claim, beginning with a theoretically-informed deep reading of the eruption of competing narrative voices in part one of Don Quixote, when the narrator interrupts the battle between Don Quixote and the Vizcaino with the subtly uproarious history of the lost Arabic manuscript, its translation, and the myriad problems and perspectives of interpretation that it drops into unsuspecting readers’ hands. Gerli links Castro’s recognition of the “problematical nature of the representation of truth” in Cervantes with Foucault’s concept of linguistic heterotopias (19—20), offering a productive and agile analytical framework for the complex linguistic games that Cervantes plays with his readers. The latter’s self-conscious presentation of the missing manuscript provides Gerli with prima facie evidence of the intentional and systematic production of textual and narrative lacunae and misdirection that generations of philologists have peddled as signs of Cervantes’s supposed carelessness or lack of formal aesthetic training: justification, in other words, for their continued attempts to correct the text in ways that suit their own vision of an ex post facto editio printemps.

Piers Plowman: The A Version. William Langland. Translated by Michael Calabrese. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Pp. xlvii+160.

<i>Piers Plowman: The A Version</i>. William Langland. Translated by Michael Calabrese. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Pp. xlvii+160.

The English Translation of Qadyanism a case study of Sher Ali's Translation

The research examines the influence of the theological ideology on The Holy Qur’an, 1997 by Shar Ali; moreover, it demonstrates the relationship between ideology and translation. conveyed and supported their beliefs through translations. The Qadyani translators of the Qur’an convey and support their beliefs through translations. They dedicate themselves to produce English translations which were circulated at a very wide scale with a missionary spirit in the English-speaking world with a view to win over unsuspecting readers to Qadyanism. The comparative method is used to explore the different aspects of ideology on the translation and exposes many results as shown in the current study. Sher Ali’s translation is prejudiced and influenced by the Qadiani beliefs. He misrepresents and mistranslates many verses that shall be scrutinized in the research. He depends on unauthentic beliefs which distorted the core of Islam and distorts the attributes of Allah. The translator denies the finality of the prophethood and denies the miracles of the prophets. The translation of several verses which refers to the theological ideology of Qadyanism movement. In translating verses on miracles, prophethood, and Jesus, for instance, these translations show their distinctiveness and how this sect distorted the Qur’anic text to present its beliefs and thoughts.

The English Translation of Qadyanism and Ideology: A Comparative Study of Shar Ali's Translation

The research examines the influence of the theological ideology on The Holy Qur’an, 1997 by Shar Ali; moreover, it demonstrates the relationship between ideology and translation. conveyed and supported their beliefs through translations. The Qadyani translators of the Qur’an convey and support their beliefs through translations. They dedicate themselves to produce English translations which were circulated at a very wide scale with a missionary spirit in the English-speaking world with a view to win over unsuspecting readers to Qadyanism. The comparative method is used to explore the different aspects of ideology on the translation and exposes many results as shown in the current study. Sher Ali’s translation is prejudiced and influenced by the Qadiani beliefs. He misrepresents and mistranslates many verses that shall be scrutinized in the research. He depends on unauthentic beliefs which distorted the core of Islam and distorts the attributes of Allah. The translator denies the finality of the prophethood and denies the miracles of the prophets. The translation of several verses which refers to the theological ideology of Qadyanism movement. In translating verses on miracles, prophethood, and Jesus, for instance, these translations show their distinctiveness and how this sect distorted the Qur’anic text to present its beliefs and thoughts.

The Pernicious Effects of Compression Plagiarism on Scholarly Argumentation

Despite an increased recognition that plagiarism in published research can take many forms, current typologies of plagiarism are far from complete. One under-recognized variety of plagiarism—designated here as compression plagiarism—consists of the distillation of a lengthy scholarly text into a short one, followed by the publication of the short one under a new name with inadequate credit to the original author. In typical cases, compression plagiarism is invisible to unsuspecting readers and immune to anti-plagiarism software. The persistence of uncorrected instances of plagiarism in all its forms—including compression plagiarism—in the body of published research literature has deleterious consequences for the reliability of scholarly communication. Not the least of these problems is that original authors are denied credit for their discoveries. When unsuspecting researchers read articles that are the products of plagiarism, they unwittingly engage the arguments of hidden original authors through the proxy of plagiarists. Furthermore, when these researchers later publish responses to the plagiarizing articles, not knowing they are engaging products of plagiarism, they create additional inefficiencies and redundancies in the body of published research. This article analyzes a suspected instance of compression plagiarism that appeared within the pages of this journal and considers the particular ways in which plagiarism of this variety weakens the quality of scholarly argumentation, with special attention paid to the field of philosophy.

A Tale of Three Hoaxes: When Literature Offends the Law

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant[,] [s]uccess in Circuit lies,” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems. Although this advice may be apt in certain circumstances, recent litigation has shown that authors of memoirs or other nonfiction would be better off avoiding it. Over the course of several centuries, the publication of “true” stories peppered with embellishments and falsities has come to form the troublesome tradition of the great literary hoax. Many esteemed authors have participated in this surreptitious and vexatious realm of writing. In fact, “[s]ome of the most respected names in literature have indulged in the sport: Defoe, Shelly [sic], Sir James Barrie,” Edgar Allen Poe and many others. In the last century, so many authors masterminded hoaxes that it would be difficult to quantify how many there have been. Perhaps unsuspecting readers are being subjected to an undetected one at this very moment? Literary hoaxes have taken many different appearances, and their ability to continue to evade early detection by publishing houses, readers and reviewers adds to their mischievousness and the intrigue surrounding them. Typically, hoax literature provides a compelling narrative that lures readers into valuing the words being read because they are supposed to be true. Consequently, once the hoax is revealed for what it is, readers often experience strong feelings of disappointment, anger and embarrassment for having been tricked; some are even amused for having been played the fool. Countless times, the book industry has been brought under fire for not catching a hoax before a book is released for public consumption and allowed to ravage unsuspecting readers. Despite cries for reform, few changes have been made and publishing companies have increasingly been hailed into court for resolution of disputes arising from these literary capers. In fact, over the last century, hoaxes have spawned congressional hearings, lawsuits and even criminal prosecution, yet they show no sign of slowing and, if anything, have only grown

Missing by Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy Missing New Delhi. Aleph. 2018. 261 pages. Missing, Sumana Roy’s first novel after her highly acclaimed first work of nonfiction, is a modern retelling of the oldest Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Will the present-day Sita, Kobita in the novel, meet the same fate? We will never know, as she remains missing through the entire novel. What we do know from the other characters’ reminiscences about her is that she is the one who is in charge. Her husband, Nayan, who is blind, depends on her for everything in the day-today business. Kobita is a social worker, too, and her concern for a young girl molested in the heart of Guwahati makes her pack her bags and go to a strife-torn and floodravaged Assam in search of the girl. Soon, it is Kobita herself who goes missing, as her phone calls to Nayan stop coming. While the Ramayana was about bringing back Sita from the clutches of Ravana and the war that ensued, Missing portrays the internal war that goes on in Nayan, as he tries to come to terms with the feeling of missing his wife. The seven days narrated in the novel are filled with moments of despair, hope, anxiety, anger, and anticipation for Nayan. It doesn’t help that their son is far away in a foreign country and he is surrounded by people who have their own issues to deal with. The novel is peppered with clips from the daily newspaper, for which Nayan employs a young girl, and soon it becomes difficult to distinguish between news and fiction. In the age of “breaking news,” news has become stranger than fiction. Missing is not a racy mystery novel, as some may assume from its title. One needs to read it slowly. Missing’s poetic tenor grows on you. Sumana Roy’s Missing reads like the name of its protagonist, Kobita, the Bengali word for a poem. The missing is not only physical but metaphorical, too. Sumit Ray Darjeeling, India Roberto Ransom Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists Trans. Daniel Shapiro. Chicago. Swan Isle Press. 2018. 177 pages. Roberto Ransom’s openings are not just that. The first story in Missing Persons is about a pet lizard grown big enough to devour its adoptive family. Ransom’s ingenuity lies in drawing out this topic’s surprising means of presenting caregiving and loss. The first story’s unexpected developments parallel its relation to the other stories. Who could foresee a series of nuanced and unsettling tales about memory, art, betrayal, and divinity from a volume that begins with a housebound Godzilla? Perhaps someone who pays close attention to first sentences, or who reads things at least twice, because— and it took me a while to notice—Ransom employs anaphora especially well. “Lizard à la Heart” begins, “The bathroom hasn’t been open for days. Under the door, as always, it smells like a swamp.” Though syntactically nothing is missing, the words “for days” and “always” map out mysterious antecedents and seductive postcedents for the unsuspecting reader. What happened? What’s next? This is an appetizer for the initial sentences of later stories, all in David Shapiro’s superb translation from Ransom’s original Desaparecidos , animales y artistas (1999). The beautiful elaboration of the capricious time of artistic labor that characterizes “Three Figures and a Dog” begins, “He liked to be in the chapel at dawn and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow.” “Something similar” and “that” are more syntactic anaphora than those that open “Lizard” because they leave their possible referents reliant upon World Literature in Review 78 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 ...

Archi: Complexities of Agreement in Cross-Theoretical Perspective by Dunstan (eds) Bond, Oliver; Corbett, Greville G.; Chumakina, Marina and Brown (review)

Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 4, 2017 Reviews Bond, Oliver; Corbett, Greville G.; Chumakina, Marina and Brown, Dunstan (eds). Archi: Complexities of Agreement in Cross-Theoretical Perspective. Oxford Studies of Endangered Languages. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xxii + 280 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. £65.00. Archi is a Lezgic Northeast Caucasian language spoken in one village, Archib (with six adjacent settlements), in the central highlands of Daghestan. Archi separated from the main body of Proto-Lezgic a very long time ago, perhaps because a family or clan fled a blood feud to what was then territory that was uninhabited owing to its isolation and limited resources. As a result of its history, Archi has evolved into a unique combination of archaic and specific features, and it is now one of the most ecologically fragile languages in Daghestan. The current volume is an important contribution to Caucasology, typology and formal linguistics as well as to the study of endangered languages. Archi, unlike the rest of Lezgic but like some other Northeast Caucasian languages, displays what the authors call ‘extreme agreement’, i.e. gender marking on a variety of parts of speech (including adverbials and adpositions) via prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Also, like the rest of Daghestanian, Archi is semantically ergative, although agreement patterns are split and bi-absolutive constructions are possible. As gender marks and controls person agreement, this adds an additional complexity to the analysis of verb phrases. Moreover, agreement sometimes occurs on an item outside the clause where the gender-controller occurs. Archi thus represents significant challenges to any scholarly approach to language, and the editors and authors are to be congratulated for producing such a broadly useful and interesting volume. The premise of the volume is to use Archi data to test three different theories of grammar by focusing on one particularly complex phenomenon: agreement. The title of the book, especially as it appears on the cover and title page, is justified: ARCHI: Complexities of Agreement in Cross-Theoretical Perspective. The unsuspecting reader might pick up the book thinking to find in it a grammatical description of Archi, and in this such a reader will not be disappointed. The ‘Introduction’ (chapter 1: Bond, Corbett, Chumakina, pp. 1–16) explains the rationale of the book, defines basic concepts and terminologies, and outlines the structure of the chapters. Chapter two (Chumakina, Bond, Corbett, pp. 17–42) outlines ‘The Essentials of Archi Grammar’ in theory-neutral terms that can be used by any linguist or student of the Caucasus. Owing to the nature of the book, this is an outline, not a reference grammar. For greater detail, the outline has good references SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 734 to relevant works cited in the References (pp. 261–72), which contains more than 200 entries. The book also has indices of Authors (pp. 273–75), languages (p. 276), and Subjects (pp. 277–80). Thus armed with the essentials of Archi grammar, the reader can proceed with profit to the next two chapters: 3. ‘Agreement domains and targets’ (Bond and Chumakina, 43–76), and 4. ‘Competing controllers and agreement potential’ (Chumakina and Bond, pp. 77–117). In chapter three, the authors describe the basic morphology and mechanics of agreement, and in chapter four they describe agreement in phrases and clauses. Particular attention is paid to bi-absolutive constructions, i.e. where two participants are both in the absolutive case instead of one being in the ergative (or some other) case. The accounts are lucid and theory-neutral. As with chapter two, they can be used with profit by any student of language. The next three chapters examine the facts adduced in chapters 2–5 through the lenses of three competing formalist syntactic theories: chapter five, entitled ‘HPSG and the nature of agreement in Archi’ (Robert D. Borsley, pp. 118– 47), chapter six, entitled ‘Agreement in Archi: An LFG perspective’ (Louisa Sadler, pp. 150–83), and chapter seven, ‘Agreement in Archi from a minimalist perspective’ (Maria Polinsky 184–232). In each of these chapters, the authors begin by laying out clearly the premises of the theoretical frameworks in which they are working. Having assured that the reader understands...

Business and Economic Forecasting: Analyzing and Interpreting Econometric Results

This is the book review of Silvia et al. (2014). Despite being extremely intuitive and erring on the side of being unassuming, 'Business and Economic Forecasting: Analyzing and Interpreting Econometric Results' serves as an excellent and thorough textbook not only for advanced students, but also for analysts who may not have had prior experience with more recent or formal econometric techniques. Although intended for company analysts, this book proves useful for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in working with time series. Even without any interest in time series, this will be useful in reinforcing econometric concepts. In particular, this text focuses on contemporary forecasting issues after a major structural break like a recession has occurred. SAS is used as a tool for analysis. The book spans 368 pages of. As a cautionary note to an unsuspecting reader, the book contains a few graphs which would benefit from a bit of editing and possibly color--black and dark gray are virtually indistinguishable on certain graphs.

Telling the Story in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz ed. by Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, and Laurie Postlewate

Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, and Laurie Postlewate, eds. Telling the Story in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor ofEvelyn Birge Vitz. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. 282. ISBN: 978-1-84384-391-7. $99.This volume finds itself in the ambiguous position of being both a tribute to Evelyn Birge Vitz and a scholarly enterprise in its own right, capitalizing on Vitz's research, but-fortunately-building its specific momentum and opening intriguing new perspectives. It so happens that Vitz's studies have encompassed a large range of texts, and have put into (good) use many theoretical approaches that had not often been harnessed together to produce such original results. When the editors, in the Introduction, suggest that Vitz has done Cultural Studies before the concept was invented, they ipso facto acknowledge the diversity of the contributions gathered in honour of Vitz, the more so since they also underline the importance, both to Vitz and to the numerous scholars she influenced, of Paul Zumthor's scholarship on the mouvance of medieval texts and on the sometimes delicate balance between orality, or aurality, and literature. Indeed, the Introduction does struggle a bit to find lignes directrices within the volume, which may be described as a versatile collection of diverse essays rather than as a coherent ensemble of related articles.The first part, 'Speaking of Stories, ' may be the least convincing. Both Linda Marie Zaerr, in 'Of Aunters They Began to Tell: Informal Story in Medieval England and Modern America,' and Simonetta Cochis, in 'Plusurs en ai oiz conter: Performance and the Dramatic Poetics of Voice in the Lais of Marie de France,' put a modern practice of private storytelling (Zaerr) or professional performance (Cochis) in relation with their medieval equivalents. While arguing for the possibility of aristocrats doubling as performers according to literary testimonies might be intriguing, comparing this hypothetical appropriation of stories within stories to the contemporary ways of adapting fairy-tales to one's daughter's feminist expectations does not produce very useful insights on the medieval materials under consideration. Nor does the analysis of several recent performances of lais by Marie de France demonstrate much about Marie's writing and intentions, but rather it reflects the somewhat biased take of the performer on the writer, an interpretation that has not so much to do with Marie or the status of women or realities of medieval culture, as with what Cochis thinks they are or should be.On the other hand, Marilyn Lawrence, in 'The Storyteller's Verbal jonglerie in Renart presents a perspective cavaliere on the famous Branch of the Roman de Renart, 'Renart teinturier et jongleur,' that suggests that the goupils brilliancy in showcasing his own career when playing the part of a Breton juggler is more than matched by his talent in orchestrating the discourse of his entourage when he is supposedly dead and finally regaining his mastery on the text as well as his identity: Renart, whether dead or alive, whether object or subject of discourse, is the ultimate master of the performing game. One might argue that Nancy Freeman Regalado, in 'Who Tells the Stories of Poetry? Villon and his Readers,' pursues a similar line of inquiry that exposes the resemblance between the goupil and the bon follastre, with the difference that the first one operates within the textual space, while the latter acts upon the unsuspecting reader. Regalado's very clever analysis shows how the hints contained in the Testament, while not building a narrative per se, invite the reader to construct his/her own narrative about the persona(s) of Villon. The demonstration, however, is slightly marred by Regalado's reliance on a translation that is not entirely accurate, or rather, that 'rearranges' the text in order to fit what the translator thinks of Villon.The second part, 'Inscribing Studies,' introduces another player in the game: the manuscript in its materiality, whether at the level of textual variants or with regard to illustrations. …

Examining the Discourse of Perfume Advertisements: An Analysis of the Verbal and the Visual

In the world that promotes consumerism, companies are in a competition to produce a variety of commodities and to convert people into consumers of their products whether they need them or not. The abundance of consumer products is promoted through advertisements. These advertisements persuade the common people to become consumers for which they use a variety of strategies, the most common being the use of problem-solution format in language and an effective use of the verbal and the non-verbal. This paper focuses on investigating the verbal and the non-verbal aspects of the text to examine how ideological constructs function in the discourse of advertisingthrough the use of hegemony. A perfume advertisement has been selected for a detailed analysis of the verbal and the visual elements to illustrate how advertisers commonly attempt to transmit some underlying, yet unasserted, meanings to unsuspecting readers who may understand the intentions of the advertisers i.e. to promote consumption but may not understand that the aim is achieved by generally promoting cultural stereotypes which work towards the disadvantage of one social group vis-à-vis the other especially the one that the advertisement is addressed to. The tool for the analysis of the advertisement is Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that uses the analysis of the verbal and the visual to reveal ideological underpinnings. CDA also has pedagogical implications for instance the language used for describing products, if analysed critically by language learners, helps them to unfold the hidden meanings as is illustrated through the analysis. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/nelta.v19i1-2.12085 Journal of NELTA, Vol 19 No. 1-2, December 2014: 117-131

ARTHUR F. KINNEY (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare

IF I search Amazon.com for the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘handbook’ on 1 December 2013 I get 512 results. Of course a number of these are the recycling of very old material with the intention of making money off the unsuspecting reader, but several are very good indeed, and so the book under review here has some stiff competition. It is certainly one of the larger entries in the field with 845 pages of text of various kinds produced by 42 scholarly experts in various fields. And the idea of a companion or handbook to Shakespeare comprised of such essays is a venerable tradition dating back at least to the Companion to Shakespeare Studies first published by Cambridge University Press in 1934 and edited by Harley Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison. The Handbook is divided into five ‘parts’, the first called ‘Texts’, the second ‘Conditions’, third ‘Works’, fourth ‘Performances’, and the fifth the curiously titled ‘Speculations’. Each one of these parts contain a series of essays generally linked to the title of the part, but there appears to have been no editorial control or programme to cover all the expected areas of a subject; rather, there is an assemblage of a series of essays touching, sometimes from afar, the subject as it could be most generally conceived. For instance, ‘Texts’, no matter what one might have expected to find here, begins with Hugh Craig’s essay called ‘Authorship’ (15–30) which discusses what authorship means and skirts the whole silly question of who wrote the plays; and this is followed by MacDonald P. Jackson’s ‘Collaboration’ (31–52) which concerns itself largely with the matter of the collaborative authorship for Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen, as well as the findings of Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney in their Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge, 2009); and then there is Ann Thompson’s ‘Quarto and Folio’ (71–84) which covers very lightly the handling of Shakespeare’s texts since the 1980s. I will not extend this list but would observe that anyone coming to this handbook looking for a systematic survey and explanation of Shakespeare’s texts and how they have been handled from the 1590s to the present will be either disappointed or confused.

Jostling with Borders: Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

Anita Rau Badami masters the art of ambivalence in her writing. Through a performance of uncanny in-betweenness indebted to Bhabha’s “politics of polarity,” the narrative spins its way from comedy into mongrel degeneration. The unsuspecting reader slowly comes face-to-face with a lot more than s/he bargained for: a carnival of horrors composed of South Asian communalism and global terrorism, all of which turn up on his front doorstep demanding recognition.

The True Meaning of Force—A Reply to Mary Ellen O’Connell

In her comment on my piece in the latest issue of the American Journal of International Law (The Meaning of “Force” and the Boundaries of the Jus ad Bellum: Are “Minimal” Uses of Force Excluded from UN Charter Article 2(4)? ), Mary Ellen O’Connell expresses strong objections to the piece’s central thesis, notably that small-scale or “targeted” forcible acts are not as such excluded from the scope of the prohibition on the use of force in UN Charter Article 2(4). What is more, she sees the central thesis and narrative of the piece as a mere veil, behind which hides the true aim of the article, notably to set forth an extensive reading of the right of self-defense—which was allegedly also the point of my book on armed attack of 2010. In other words, an argument pleading for a broad interpretation of the prohibition on the use of force is in reality used as a Trojan horse, to lure the unsuspecting reader into accepting a broader right of states to use force, doing considerable damage to the Charter regime on the use of force.

Rabid: a cultural history of the world's most diabolical virus

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies - a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans - kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes. A searing narrative. (The New York Times). In this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system...A smart, unsettling, and strangely stirring piece of work. (San Francisco Chronicle). Fascinating...Wasik and Murphy chronicle more than two millennia of myths and discoveries about rabies and the animals that transmit it, including dogs, bats and raccoons. (The Wall Street Journal).

A Tale of Three Hoaxes: When Literature Offends the Law

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant[,] [s]uccess in Circuit lies,” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems.1 Although this advice may be apt in certain circumstances, recent litigation has shown that authors of memoirs or other nonfiction would be better off avoiding it. Over the course of several centuries, the publication of “true” stories peppered with embellishments and falsities has come to form the troublesome tradition of the great literary hoax. Many esteemed authors have participated in this surreptitious and vexatious realm of writing. In fact, “[s]ome of the most respected names in literature have indulged in the sport: Defoe, Shelly [sic], Sir James Barrie,” Edgar Allen Poe and many others.2 In the last century, so many authors masterminded hoaxes that it would be difficult to quantify how many there have been. Perhaps unsuspecting readers are being subjected to an undetected one at this very moment? Literary hoaxes have taken many different appearances, and their ability to continue to evade early detection by publishing houses, readers and reviewers adds to their mischievousness and the intrigue surrounding them. Typically, hoax literature provides a compelling narrative that lures readers into valuing the words being read because they are supposed to be true. Consequently, once the hoax is revealed for what it is, readers often experience strong feelings of disappointment, anger and embarrassment for having been tricked; some are even amused for having been played the fool. Countless times, the book industry has been brought under fire for not catching a hoax before a book is released for public consumption and allowed to ravage unsuspecting readers. Despite cries for reform, few changes have been made and publishing companies have increasingly been hailed into court for resolution of disputes arising from these literary capers. In fact, over the last century, hoaxes have spawned congressional hearings, lawsuits and even criminal prosecution, yet they show no sign of slowing and, if anything, have only grown more prevalent. This article examines the tradition of the literary hoax, and then focuses on three unique examples that resulted in court intervention. Part I provides a brief history of literary hoaxes and samples the many guises they have taken over the years. Parts II, III and IV provide detailed accounts of the hoaxes perpetrated by Arthur Train, Clifford Irving and James Frey, respectively, and explore how Train got away with his mischief, Irving ended up behind bars, and Frey and his publisher became entangled in a class action lawsuit and a multimillion dollar judgment. Part V attempts to reconcile the differing outcomes for Train, Irving and Frey. As there is a dearth of case law clarifying what acts might result in civil liability, an examination of past hoaxes and their resulting litigation lends some lucidity as to what acts might result in imprisonment, monetary damages and public acquittal for one’s literary sins.

Ulysses : Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes

Ulysses: Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes Fritz Senn (bio) One salient feature of Ulysses are its abrupt metamorphoses; they impede effortless leisurely absorption. The novel (if that is what it is) lives up to its otherwise misleading title: it springs novelties upon its unsuspecting readers and keeps changing its unstated often erratic rules of the game. A chapter may end with the familiar sounds of a cuckoo clock, the next one sets off with a cryptic threefold repetition of ‘Deshil Holles Eamus’ (U 13.1304, U 14.01). One analogy with the Odyssey remains valid: the episodic adventures are diverse and make renewed demands on one’s adaptability — a book of many turns: ‘Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique’.1 Often, at least from the midpoint, a simple glance at the layout of the page identifies an eccentric episode. All these known facts are far more striking than the underlying continuities, the latent interconnections between capriciously conflicting episodes. The following observations (an elaboration of an earlier sketch) are extracted from a larger project to work out the implicit narrative nuts and bolts that hold the epic together.2 The emphasis, naturally, is not the obvious sequence of characters, topics, or plot development, but on technical and structural devices. Often a connection is a simple reversal into its opposite, as in the transition from the rude male deprecating noises of ‘Cyclops’ to the female syrupy sentimentality of ‘Nausicaa’. Three successive episodes are here under inspection, pars pro toto: ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Sirens’, and ‘Cyclops’. For the present purposes the unintegrated Homeric tags serve to give individual names to seemingly autonomous episodes. [End Page 1] From ‘Wandering Rocks’ to ‘Sirens’ ‘Sirens’ immediately grows out of ‘Wandering Rocks’ in explicit repetition. A motif is struck twice in ‘Wandering Rocks’, first as an interpolation, ‘Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel’ (U 10.962), and then, with changes, in the Coda: ‘Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired’ (U 10.1197–9). It is resumed in the opening of ‘Sirens’: ‘Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing’ (U 11.01). Before, the two barmaids are seen and in turn are watching; in the acoustic dominance of ‘Sirens’ the metallic sounds are now heard. When the episode begins properly (after the ‘Overture’, or tuning up) another, more extended variant, sets the chapter off: ‘Bronze by gold, miss Douce’s head by miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel’ (U 11.65–6). Four occurrences, with later reverberations, serve as conspicuous joints and collectively parade a principle of repetition with variation, which would be one possible thumbnail description of traditional music. ‘Wandering Rocks’ was put together from nineteen parts, with more than thirty displaced passages, interpolated from one location into another, to indicate events going on elsewhere at the same time. A sense of simultaneous elsewhereness emerges, something that sequential language cannot act out but has to dissolve into a series. The ‘nebeneinander’ of events can only be treated as a successive ‘nacheinander’ (U 3.13–7). Readers are now alerted to unmarked translocations. While we are detained within the Ormond bar, parallel tracks are kept of other characters, mainly Bloom. A dismissive comment on men calls up a short paragraph ‘A man’ (U 11.85), and a different site is interposed, all in the manner of ‘Wandering Rocks’, with an exact location: ‘Bloowho went by by Moulang’s pipes bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul’ (U 11.86–8). ‘Bloom’ (U 11.102), or a question as to his whereabouts, ‘But Bloom?’ (U 11.133), indicates that other characters, remote from the main scene, are within the narrative range. ‘Sirens’ abounds in one or two word paragraphs that punctuate the episode...

The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890 (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890 Mark Lincicome (bio) The History of Modern Japanese Education: Constructing the National School System, 1872–1890. By Benjamin Duke. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 2009. xiv, 416 pages. $65.00. Publication of the book here under review—the fifth in the long career of Emeritus Professor Benjamin Duke—presents an occasion to reflect upon the development of English-language scholarship on Japanese education over the last 50 years. In 1959, when Duke joined the faculty of International Christian University (ICU) as professor of comparative and international education, there were not enough publications on the subject in English to identify Japanese education as a distinct field of study. That began to change in 1965 with the appearance of widely read works by R. P. Dore on Tokugawa education and Herbert Passin on the modernization of education in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan.1 Duke and Donald Thurston, in turn, broke new ground eight years later with the publication of their respective monographs on the left-wing teachers' movement, centered on the Japan Teachers Union.2 Between 1973 and his retirement from ICU in 1996, Duke went on to publish three more books related to Japanese education. All three were published within a notable five-year period between 1986 and 1991, best remembered as the historic watershed when "Japan, Inc." gave way to Japan's "lost decade" as the country's "economic bubble" finally burst. Like his monograph on the left-wing teachers' movement, what these three works lacked in theoretical and methodological sophistication they seemed to make up for in their choice of timely topics. His second monograph, The Japanese [End Page 455] School: Lessons for Industrial America (Praeger Publishers, 1986) appeared on the heels of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform—prepared by President Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education—and rode the wave of American angst over the economic threat posed by Japan, Inc. This was followed by a collection of biographical essays written by Japanese historians of education, which Duke compiled, edited, and published under the title Ten Great Educators of Modern Japan (University of Tokyo Press, 1989). The major contribution of this volume was that it introduced to an English-language audience some less prominent educational reformers and innovators active in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan—including Sawayanagi Masatarō, Shimonaka Yasaburō, Nanbara Shigeru, and Munakata Seiya—and the distinguished contemporary Japanese historians who wrote about them, such as Mizuuchi Hiroshi, Nakano Akira, and Terasaki Masao. Duke's final book during this period picked up on a theme similar to The Japanese School. The major difference is that instead of examining the role of Japanese education in producing a literate, loyal, hardworking labor force rivaling that of the United States, his Education and Leadership for the Twenty-first Century: Japan, America, and Britain (Praeger Publishers, 1991) examined how the Japanese school was shaping the attitudes of the country's future leaders. Regrettably, the book here under review marks a disappointing coda to Duke's prolific scholarship on Japanese education. Woe to the unsuspecting reader who reaches for Duke's The History of Modern Japanese Education solely on the basis of Thomas R. H. Havens's hyperbolic praise gracing the book jacket, which erroneously proclaims it "the first analysis in any western language of the creation of the Japanese national school system based primarily on Japanese-language documents," "a major step forward in the scholarship on this important subject," and "fresh and thorough." Anyone familiar with previous historical treatments of Japanese education during the late nineteenth century will quickly discover that this is a work of limited vision and originality, written by a seasoned scholar who has failed to stay abreast of the field he helped to establish. Indeed, the problems that plague Duke's narrative are presaged in his decision to dedicate the book "To the Japanese samurai who led their nation into the modern era," a line that smacks of the heroic narrative that dominated an earlier generation of English-language surveys covering Japan's transformation from insular, feudal backwater to modern nation...