Word Play Research Articles

Social interaction on the net

The phrase virtual community is often used to describe long term, computer-mediated conversations amongst large groups. This paper suggests that such conversations may be better viewed as instances of a participatory genre, rather than as community. A genre-oriented analysis is useful because it encourages a focus on the medium within which the discourse is embodied. As an example we analyze an on-line conversation from the perspective of genre: we identify its communicative purpose, regularities of form and substance (such as word play and affirmation), and the situation which gives rise to these regularities. We then examine ways in which the discourse medium supports these regularities and enables participants to establish and reinforce the conversation's underlying conventions. More generally, we believe that genre-oriented analyses such as this can play an important role in the design of participatory media.

Pasakos mirtis brolių Mekų kūryboje

Brother Mekas are representatives of modern Lithuanian literature who based their writings on new stylistic elements. They had chosen a popular field - tales. Jonas and Adolfas Mekas introduced modern modifications and structure changes into old tales. Their tales are not created for children as is usually done. Many of them have symbolic meaning, and some of them have no plot. The authors changed functions of personages. Their tales are built on fixed mood and based on word play. In this way brothers Mekas created poetic stories with tale elements, which are famous for their metaphoric meaning and the effect of absurd.

White K(night) to the Rescue: Sir Arthur Defends the Colors of the Getty

A NOTE FROM THE COMMENTARY EDITOR There may be some readers of Studies, like me, who are not well versed in some of the writing conventions jagodzinski is using in his response to Efland's commentary. Therefore, I have asked the senior editor to include the following quotations from a letter to him from jagodzinski, in which jagodzinski explains some of his language choices: There is a lot of word play and particular use of italics and bolded words for visual effects. Without them, the piece suffers a loss of metaphorical and metonymic play. Imaginary, Real, Thing, and Other are purposely spelled with capital letters in keeping with the Lancanian specialized vocabulary. The word objet a is also correctly spelled to retain the original French as part of this same specialized vocabulary. There is a sentence with the wording-under the guise of justicewhich has been intentionally put at the end of the sentence to give it a double meaning, i.e., as either the 'justice' of the pestilence or the `justice' of Sir Arthur [Efland]. Of course, interested readers also may choose to take jagodzinki's lead and find additional information by pursuing the references he lists at the conclusion of his remarks. Many feminists will, no doubt, shake their heads in disgust at the boy's game that is being staged here. Some of Robert Bly's wild men may even cheer at the tabloid heading from the dark recesses of their forest preserve. Whatever the response may be to the exchange presented here, I feel compelled to throw yet another rock, for I stand accused-demonized, in turn, for having (in Sir Arthur's mind) demonized the Getty. In Sir Arthur's [Efland's] Imaginary, I am cast as an irresponsible demon from hell with nothing better to do with my time except to be a devilish prankster, avoiding the real issue which is to fight for art education (as does the Getty). His accusation paradigmatically illustrates Lacan's register of the Real. The evocation of the unknown, the paranoia of that which threatens, is relegated to the darkness of the night-dismissed and abjected. For the article's intent he substitutes the signifier demonization rather than reading it as an exploration of the effects of desire that the discursive subject position of the ad invites (as further developed in note 2). But, as Lacan claimed: All perception is a form of (mis)perception. Even Efland's unconscious desire cannot remain hidden. His objet a is to get rid of the pestilence which stalks the sanctuary of art education under the guise of justice. I expected more from this Haudegen: an engagement with the central tenet of the article, for instance, as the last sentence of the article invites. Rather, the attack was aimed at the ad hominem jugular, at the same place of invitation where blood might easily flow and k(nightly) justice done to silence the avid. The article's last sentence intentionally set up a psychic force; its self-reflexive irony indicates that none of us can escape our own rhetorical constructions and desires, and, at the same time, it presents a serious accusation for deliberation. Efland chose the former and not the latter, indicating his true colors. I always thought David slew Goliath with a well-aimed rock in the forehead into the very place where he could not see. Translated into the psychobabble of Lacan, thrown at the psychic blind-center which was the Philistine's Thing, i.e., the empty foundation in the Real which held their prosaic cultural Imaginary together. The fight in my allegorical tale is over art education's Imaginary; its ideological stance toward neo-racism; it's about sleeping with the enemy rather than uncritically accepting its golden calf' (web site included). The point of Efland's commentary misses the mark. To say that the imagined fable is a question of privilege where the saying dif ferent strokes for different folks holds court, is being irresponsible. …

Towards a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio

Towards a Theory of the Fairy-Tale Film: The Case of Pinocchio Jack Zipes (bio) “Animation should be an art, that is how I conceived it . . . but as I see what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade . . . not an art, but a trade . . . bad luck.” (Winsor McKay, addressing young animators in 1927) Just as we know, almost intuitively, that a particular narrative is a fairy tale when we read it, it seems we know immediately that a particular film is a fairy tale when we see it. We recognize its generic qualities without necessarily interpreting it as part of a genre. It is almost as though it were natural that there be fairy-tale films since fairy tales are so much part of our cultural heritage as oral and literary tales. This “natural” process of recognition and consumption, however, makes it all the more important that we historicize the reception of the fairy-tale film to understand what has gone into its making. When did it come about? Why? What are the consequences? Of course, these questions cannot all be answered within a short essay, but by using Walt Disney’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s fairy-tale novel, Pinocchio, I want to suggest possible approaches toward developing a theory of the fairy-tale film as genre. Before I do this, however, I should like to present five brief theses about the development of the fairy tale as film. 1 ) As we know, storytelling is thousands of years old, and there are many types of tales. In the oral tradition, the “magic tale” generally centered on a miraculous transformation or occurrence that enabled the protagonist to triumph over evil forces or overcome obstacles to win a bride/groom, obtain wealth, or gain recognition within a tribe or community. [End Page 1] The oral tales were told and still are told, in many different settings—in all sorts of tribes and communities, in homes, at taverns, in the fields, at sea, in weaving circles, and so forth. No matter what the situation may have been, the teller was present among a group of people and told tales to share experience, to amuse, and to enlighten the listeners. Most importantly, the close personal setting of storytelling created a bond between teller and listeners and often reflected upon customs, norms, and values within the group. Since one had to be artful in the telling of tales, and since most people were not particularly “artful” or articulate in days of old, as Rudolph Schenda has maintained, 1 the taleteller was highly regarded within a community. Telling tales, using words and symbols, endowed the speaker with authority and power. A magic folk tale did not only concern the miraculous turn of events in the story, but also the magic play of words by the teller as performer. And each performance by the same teller was different, even of the same tale. The taleteller would also change in the telling of the story, and could shift his or her identity like the remarkable trickster of the folk-tale tradition. Telling a magic folk tale was and is not unlike performing a magic trick, and depending on the art of the storyteller, listeners could be placed under a spell, as if in awe. To be in awe is to be in a special place linked with the teller and other members of the group, transcending reality for a brief moment, to be transported to extraordinary regions of experience. 2 ) There is evidence of magic folk tales in all the sacred literature of the world. That is, the motifs of magic folk tales were incorporated into all the early texts such as the Bible, The Iliad, and The Odyssey that concern the origins of gods and/or initiation rituals. Another early classical example in the West is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, in which we find the complete magical tale of Cupid and Psyche. However, despite the existence of such magic folktales, one cannot speak about the literary fairy tale as genre until the invention of the printing press, the growth of literacy and vernacular languages, and the establishment of genres as institutions...

Dickens in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading : A Figure of Concealment

Nabokov Studies 3 (1996) SAVELY SENDEROVICH (Ithaca) Dickens in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading: A Figure of Concealment1 For Elena M. Schwarz In Chapter 13 of Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus C, a prisoner in the fortress, sentenced to death by decapitation and awaiting execution, has just finished a letter to his wife Martha (Marfin'ka), when his jailer Rodion enters his cell. Cincinnatus: "This letter. This letter. This letter I should ask you to . . . Here is the address ..." "'You'd do better to learn to knit like everybody else,' grumbled Rodion, 'so you could knit me a cache-knee. Writer indeed!'" (143) Should we understand the connection between writing and knitting here just as an opposition signifying the difference between the worlds of Cincinnatus and his jailer, that is, between the lofty and the quotidian? Or as a version of the ancient topos of writing as weaving? Why does Rodion choose this particular word "cache-knee"? We need to keep in mind that the book was written in Russian, and although Nabokov himself edited his son's translation into English, not every play of words can be effectively conveyed in another language, even if it is done by a great writer in both languages. Let us take a closer look at this word "cache-knee." Of course it is a distortion of French cachenez. Then what is the purpose of choosing this word instead of the English "scarf" or "muffler"? If it was coined in order to play against a concomitant folk re-etymologization, then what is the purpose of that? Why the distortion only in the second part of the word "cache-knee"? "Knee" from "knit" is a legitimate wordplay, but wouldn't it be more natural , if Rodion distorted the whole thing into, say, "catch-knee"? But no, Nabokov chooses to retain the first part of the word, more difficult for an unsophisticated anglophone, and to twist only the second part. 1. I wrote this paper as a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Oct.-Dec. 1995. My gratitude goes to the Lady Davis Trust for that wonderful and productive time. 14 Nabokov Studies In the original Russian the wordplay is simple and natural. "Scarf in Russian is sharf, diminutive of which is sharfik, and Rodion deforms this into farshik (283)—as one would expect given the folk tradition, with the effect of a funny re-etymologization, funny because it evokes a very remote meaning: farshik is a diminutive of farsh, "filling," ground meat intended for hamburgers or as filling for pies, or as in Yiddish gefiltefish. In comparison with the Russian original, the English translation is somewhat forced. Couldn't Nabokov do any better? Why did he do what he did? In investigating this, I must start from afar, for I would like to demonstrate that the detail in question is a key to a conceptual plane of high importance in Nabokov. By the way, on page one of Invitation to a Beheading , we read: "Rodion, the jailer, took a long time to unlock the door of Cincinnatus's cell—it was the wrong key—and there was the usual fuss" (12). It is Rodion, the jailer, who with his "cache-knee" remark is also offering us the correct key. However he carries a whole bunch of them, of which all but one are wrong; and it will take some time to sort them all out. There is one aspect of Nabokov which has hardly drawn any attention from critics. Many things—some very fine and some very crude—have been said about Nabokov the philosopher's reading the "book of life." I would argue, though, that Nabokov was concerned not only with reading the book of life, but also with what poets and aestheticians of the nineteenth century called expression, die Äußerung, bringing out the innermost of one's psyche, reaching the normally inaccessible recesses of the inner being in the process of poetic utterance uniquely suitable for this purpose.2 This innermost often was in Romantic texts designated as the ineffable, which of course is only a figure of speech—those uttering this word also tried to achieve...

"A Hero! Is Dot a Business?" Vaudeville Comedy and American Popular Entertainment

Except for silliness of their titles, Whirl-i-Gig, an 1899 Broadway musical show produced by comedy team of Weber & Fields, and Whoopee!, a 1930 Hollywood film comedy, would seem to have little in common. Separated by two decades of entertainment history and created by two distinct cultural media with their own peculiarities and conventions, Whoopee! and Whirl-i-Gig nevertheless were cut from same bolt of cloth. They exemplify what was arguably most salient aspect of American popular entertainment from late 1880s to mid-1930s-its hybrid nature. Whirl-i-Gig and Whoopee! both relied upon a mixture of aesthetic forms and practices, Both incorporated remnants of minstrel stage, both had elaborately staged chorus numbers, both were social comedies that simultaneously poked fun at WASP establishment and at ethnic outsiders. Finally, and most significantly, both featured romantic plots whose narrative conventions were disrupted by anarchical zaniness of what film scholar Henry Jenkins calls the vaudeville aesthetic: fast-paced word play, gags, and physical humor. The hybrid nature of American popular culture is often mentioned but rarely analyzed. A few film historians have examined interaction between vaudeville stage and silent screen, and historians of popular entertainment have acknowledged, but have not systematically explored, appropriation of vaudeville's values, forms, and themes by musical comedy, radio, and talking film.1 Although evolution of American popular entertainment

Mind and consciousness during sleep

The epistemological-methodological constraints for an approach to dream as an object of scientific-experimental investigation are pointed out, along with the suggestion of a new memory paradigm, that utilizes the linguistic convention (‘word play’) proposed by Wittgenstein. A model of dream generation is proposed, in which mnemonic materials activated from long-term memory stores enter the dream production system (bottom-up process); such materials are elaborated and interpreted by a top-down process. A circular feedback activity, operating between these two components, is able to activate additional mnemonic materials. Some experimental results, concerning the incidence of dream recall in different stages of sleep, show evidence of the continuity of dreaming activity throughout the period of sleep. The relationships between dream and consciousness/awareness are then considered. Experimental data suggest that consciousness, interpreted as awareness (phenomenal awareness; meta-awareness; self awareness), can be present along the whole sleep/dream process, even if many modifications of meta-awareness and of self-awareness are possible. Some hypotheses on the relationship between sleep and dreaming are formulated.

Bühnentexte als Übersetzungsproblem

Translations for the stage are problematic, because they have to satisfy the demands of theatrical performability and speakability. Mary Snell Hornby's (1984) approach to understanding texts for the theater in a holistic and hermeneutic framework and the consideration of speech criteria have been adopted here. The identified criteria for stage texts are "spoken stage language", multiperspectivity (word play, irony, metapher), rhythm, speakability and audience perception. Applying these aspects, a meaningful translation critique seems possible, because the characteristic features of the play and its demands of performability are considered. This paper discusses multiperspectivity (word play), rhythm, and holistic features in short segments of Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck. These segments are compared with three English translations of Woyzeck in terms of these criteria. The translations chosen are the most recent ones: David G. Richards (1977), John Mackendrick (1979) and Michael Ewans (1989). Even this small selection of texts and stage criteria suggests that a critique of a stage translation should go beyond comparing dictionary equivalents. The criteria of stage language and the holistic focus seem to be a meaningful tool to determine whether the translator has meet the demands for stage effectiveness of the author's original play.

What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming Women

A recent magazine article evokes the perennial mystery of human desire by asking why a movie star who “has it all” — “a perfect body, happy marriage, wealth,” and “success” — is “not yet satisfied.” Beginning with a play of words, “Why Demi Moore Wants More,” the article ends by finding the wordmore“elusive.” This elusivemoreis the subject of my essay, which links a desire formoreto determinism as a doctrine of causation common to literary naturalism, behavioral psychology, modern advertising, and consumerism. Once consumption figures in a discussion of literary naturalism, at issue in this essay, the lines of argument move centrifugally in various directions to include such seemingly far-flung and unrelated matters as the Vietnam War, kleptomania, the “packaging” of American politics, women's fashion, material culture studies, fitness diets, images of burning bodies, the commodification of books, Jane Fonda's self-transformations, and indecent proposals to Demi Moore. All these matters converge at a single point of origin where a woman character, an American literary heroine, stands and looks. The consequences of this simple, ordinary act — which leads the woman to consume and be consumed — seem to me laden with literary and cultural meanings I must necessarily condense. To do so, my first tactical move will be to leap over an entire century in order to compare Theodore Dreiser's famous novelSister Carrie, published in 1900, with a contemporary story that leaves one shaken by its brilliance and horror. I ask the reader to imagine the gap between the two texts as an ellipsis - adot, dot, dot- filled in by decades of turbulent historical change that have redefined what an American heroine wants but not why she wants more.

Bilingualism and Word Play in the Work of Russian Writers of the Third Wave of Emigration: The Heritage of Nabokov

L'influence du bilinguisme et du jeu de mots nabokoviens dans les oeuvres d'emigration de V. Aksenov, Z. Zinik et I. Brodskii

The Poetics of Qur՚ānic Punning

Puns stand as a bridge between rhyme and metaphor. Sound—that characteristic of rhyme—combines with the explosion of semantic implications associated with metaphor into the form of word play or punning. The quality of blending of sound together with meaning remains the best definition of what constitutes a pun. Certainly it is possible to create a classification system for puns which will lead to a workable description of the phenomenon. Interesting attempts along this line have been made working with Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and English material, for example. Such efforts tend to rely on the formal aspects of the words used in the puns in order to produce their classificatory systems. That is, they speak of puns using the ‘literal’ meaning of two words, puns relying on ‘metaphoric’ meanings, and so forth; or they speak of the formal relationship between the words in question in terms of the combinations and permutations of letters and sounds. The aim of this paper, however, is not to circumscribe the use of puns in the Qur՚ān, although certainly a number of formal ranges of punning employment will emerge in the course of the treatment. Rather, the goal is to see what puns convey to the reader of the Qur՚ān, to see how the sound of music combines with sound argument within the text of scripture. Leaving the definition of word play or pun open (indeed, even using those two words interchangeably) allows the broadest view of the phenomenon to be embraced.

Metaphor in Context: an examination of the significance of metaphor for reflection and communication

Summary This article shows how metaphor is basic to language structure. It is illustrated with practical examples of how metaphor is found within different social and cultural contexts, irrespective of historical time. Numerous examples are given of how metaphor works in efforts to communicate meaning. From an early age, young children are initiated into the use of metaphor. This appears to be understood intuitively, and examples of words games and riddles are given to show how children become familiar with the symbolic use of language. It is discussed how this early facility to engage in ‘word play’ forms a basis for future development of language skills, helping children move on from familiar contexts which are understood intuitively by transferring their skills in order to interpret metaphorical language empirically in unfamiliar contexts. Theories concerning ‘dead’ and ‘living’ metaphors are explored, and attention is drawn particularly to the need to teach children how to rediscover the original mean...

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The adaptive value of humor and laughter

Most explanations for humor neglect important types of humor, such as tickling and word play; or raise difficult evolutionary theoretical problems, such as group selection, dubious fitness benefits, and excessive complexity of design; or ignore the data on humor and laughter. The present theory was based on the following observations. Tickling entails a mock attack at vulnerable body spots, and may provide youngsters with practice in defending themselves. The child's laughter is pleasant and encourages the tickler to persist. Similarly, juvenile primates including children encourage roughhousing by laughter and other emotional expressions. We also laugh at humorous content that provides striking counter-examples (incongruities), as in word play, or that informs us about fitness-relevant topics such as sexual, aggressive, and social poise scenarios. The present theory is that the pleasure of humor motivates us to seek out poignant, fitness- enhancing input of this sort. Laughter evolved to allow us to continue to recieve amusement. Laughter is a pleasant social signal that prompts the humorist to persist in providing this edifying stimulation. In response to true wit, laughter conveys appreciation and gratitude—an intention to reciprocate for having received a stimulating idea. Thus, humor benefits both humorist and laughter. This theory and others are evaluated in the light of evolutionary principles and relevant data.

The Play of Words and Music in Moliere-Charpentier's 'Le Malade imaginaire'

Journal Article THE PLAY OF WORDS AND MUSIC IN MOLIÈRE-CHARPENTIER'S LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE Get access NICHOLAS CRONK NICHOLAS CRONK ST EDMUND HALLOXFORD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLVII, Issue 1, January 1993, Pages 6–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLVII.1.6 Published: 01 January 1993

At the Jeweler's

At the Jeweler's In the mountain village rain falls softly on clay and rock and grass on silver rail and roof. In this shop on the one main street the jeweler tells me funny stories to distract me, even though he stutters and does not often perform, He is assaulting with his file the gold wedding band that has grown into the flesh of my fingers for twenty-seven years. The circle is finally broken, I say aloud, "The divorce is at hand." The jeweler smiles at my word play and folds the ring into a plain brown envelope on which is written my own expendable name. —Alice Cabaniss Bass 61 ...

Updike's Scarlet Letter Trilogy: Recasting an American Myth

UPDIKE'S SCARLET LETTER TRILOGY: RECASTING AN AMERICAN MYTH James A. Schiff University of Cincinnati Though many readers are aware of how John Updike has chronicled America of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in his Rabbit tetralogy, few have paid close attention to his other multivolume work concerning America (and a canonical American text), namely The Scarlet Letter trilogy. In 1975 Updike published A Month of Sundays , a novel in diary form in which a spiritually tormented and adulterous minister from Massachusetts is ordered to an Arizona motel for ministers-gone-astray; there he is urged to wrestle with his perverse soul and rub out his "stain."1 Updike later referred to that novel as "Dimmesdale's version" of The Scarlet Letter.2 In 1986 Updike published Roger's Version, an unreliable first-person narrative in which a Harvard professor, a crusty old doctor of divinity named Roger, manipulates and feeds upon the life of a youthful, pious computer science graduate student named Dale. Most recently, in 1988, Updike published the epistolary S., in which an angry North Shore housewife , with a strong predilection for Vitamin A, rebels against her Puritan heritage and patriarchal society by traveling to a desert ashram in Arizona. In these three novels, each told from the perspective of one of Hawthorne's three protagonists, Updike has expanded, updated , satirized, and rewritten Hawthorne's text. That such a bold and intriguing project should go largely unrecognized by the critical community is surprising.3 Though these novels, with the notable exception of Roger's Version, are lighter fare and less substantial than the best of Updike (the Rabbit books, The Centaur, The Coup), the project is significant. Any reconsideration of a canonical text by a major literary figure should warrant attention , particularly in light of the contemporary interest in intertextuality . In addition, the project is significant in that it reveals a more experimental and postmodern Updike, one who shares Nabokov's sense of word play and games. Two questions persist in regard to Updike's project: Why should a prominent novelist explicitly rewrite a story which has already been told so successfully? And why Hawthorne? In answer to the former, Updike has long relied upon the successful work of previous writers.4 His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1958), was a futuristic retelling of the story of St. Stephen. Rabbit, Run (1960) sprang from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Arthurian grail legend, and Peter Rabbit. 18James A. Schiff The Centaur (1963) updated and interlaced a variety of Greek myths, so many in fact that Updike compiled a mythological index as an appendix. The mythic mode, in which a writer appropriates and retells an earlier story or tale which has achieved mythic dimensions, has long been salient in Updike's fiction, though critics have failed to recognize its importance except in The Centaur. And according to Updike, the mythic mode is attractive not only because it offers "a counterpoint of ideality to the drab real level" and provides "an excuse for a number of jokes," but because it demonstrates the "sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or longings in our minds."5 In answer to the latter question—why Hawthorne?—one discovers in Hawthorne many of the same themes and conflicts inherent in Updike's own writing: the conflict between matter and spirit; a fascination with community and communal experiments; the anxiety and fear of moral damnation; the relationship between sex and religion ; an interest in what Tony Tanner calls the "unstable triangularity of adultery" and its effect upon a community; and the use of ambivalent symbolism.6 The link between the two writers is strengthened by the fact that both have lived most of their lives on the same approximate patch of ground near Boston: Hawthorne in Salem and Concord, and Updike in Ipswich, Georgetown, and Beverly Farms. Hawthorne has become more than just a literary antecedent for Updike; he is a figure embedded in the history and myth of Updike's chosen community, a writer whose town Updike must pass every time he goes to and from Boston.7 Yet in appropriating Hawthorne's text, Updike...

Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed edited by Marcia Pointon (review)

106Victorian Review in Victorian England is a tremendously valuable contribution to the understanding of an important aspect of Victorian EngUsh society. There can be no argument with the author ' s concluding comment that "there is a need for greater interest to be taken in the legal system—the laws themselves, who operates them, and who benefits from their operation" (268). Notes 1.The English legal profession was then characterized by two major "branches* which operated in effect as distinct professions providing related legal services. The Bar ("barrister's branch") was the socially more exclusive of the two, enjoyed a monopoly of superior court practice, and was governed by four "Inns of Court" in London. The so-called "lower branch" of the legal profession consisted of attorneys (also called solicitors), was much less socially exclusive, much larger, and provided the vast bulk of legal services throughout the country. 2.I am grateful to Dr. Barry Wright for sensitizing me to this. Of course there are many stopping points short of simplistic conspiracy theories but, as Wright's extraordinary scholarship illustrates, elements of instrumentalism and deliberate elite manipulation of law routinely intrude in times of perceived crisis. WES PUE University ofManitoba Marcia Pointon, ed. Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed. Manchester UP, 1989. viii + $49.95 US (cloth); $18.95 US (paper). The word play in the title of Marcia Pointon's essay collection PreRaphaelites Re-viewed holds out an engaging offer. In this set of eight closely focused articles, written by British and American scholars in the fields of Uterature and art history, we are asked to take a new look at famiUar terrain, the art, the writings, and the ethos of the Pre-RaphaeUte movement. Few would argue with this proposition. Despite the vast extant Uterature on the movement—and few movements have been so meticulously documented—the discourse has tended to be redundant, telling and retelling the same story of youth, rebeUion, and romanticism, all in the cause of a purer British art. Although the story still pleases, as Reviews107 any undergraduate instructor will attest, it has ceased to inform and enlighten. A further problem with Pre-Raphaelite scholarship is its legacy of personalization and bias. From the beginning, the original seven Brothers wrote about and promoted one another, sought out "friendly" critics and endured, especially in the first years, some of the most vituperative criticism ever sent to press. The list of primary biographers—Wüliam Michael Rossetti, Ford Madox Hueffer, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Amy Woolner, Diana Holman Hunt, to name only a few----reads like a guest list for a family reunion. Each writer offers his or her own version of the same story, placing their father/uncle/grandfather at the center of the circle, then sets the familiar facts in motion around them. Even works conceived as a corrective—notably Jan Marsh's The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985)—must ultimately travel the same worn road; trying to balance the story unfortunately tells us the story again. Pointon ' s coUection appears at the end of a decade that saw a new analytical perspective on the Pre-Raphaelite movement The retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery (1984) and its comprehensive catalogue The Pre-Raphaelites played down the anecdotes and put forth the solid information on sources and provenance needed to work with the pictures at a deeper level of analytical engagement The essay coUection published in conjunction with the exhibition—Pre-Raphaelite Papers (ed. Leslie Parris, 1984)—advanced an approach of closer reading and broader contextual integration. These volumes broke ground for the innovative analyses that foUowed—by Deborah Cherry and Griselda PoUack, by Lynda Nead, and, most significantly by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. In common with the efforts of Pointon and her contributing authors, these scholars all seek to apply new, or at least alternative and less biased, modes of interpretation to the production of the PreRaphaelites , leading to deeper and wider understanding of the works in their broad Victorian context A part of a series published by Manchester University Press on "Cultural Politics," Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed adheres to the observation that "texts" are "as inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history...

Fiat vita, pereat veritas Nietzsche's Untimely Reflections on Hegel's Dialectic of History

You will indulge me if I begin with a commonplace. The term “history” is an ambiguous expression which can be taken either in the sense of res gestae or in the sense of rerum gestarum memoria. According to the former meaning, it refers to the phenomenon itself, the past course of human events, whereas, according to the latter meaning, it denotes the representation of this phenomenon.German allows Hegel to mark the difference in terms of the relation between Geschichte and Historie. He also speaks of “objective” and “subjective” history in this connection. Yet by suppressing the brute opacity of language in favour of its teleological function, he is able to turn a blind eye to history's semiotic double game, the free play between literal and figural meaning within the linguistic sign. Hegel thus propounds the view that identity and difference at the level of the signifier are ultimately recuperated as expressive moments or alienations of the signified, the pure idea of History on its circular journey to itself. Linguistic signs are capable of meaning, according to Hegel, precisely because of their dialectical structure. The proliferation of meaning in language through the play of words is not random and anarchic but guided systematically by the invisible hand of spirit.

A Game of Heuene: Word Play and the Meaning of Piers Plowman B by Mary Clemente Davlin

A Game of Heuene: Word Play and the Meaning of Piers Plowman B by Mary Clemente Davlin