York Review Research Articles

God, Science, and Imagination

God, Science, and Imagination Wendell Berry (bio) Among the oddest bedevillers of our time are the eminent scientists who use their heaped up credentials, achievements, and awards as pedestals from which to foretell the future and pronounce upon the ultimate questions of life and religion. One of the most recent of these is Steven Weinberg’s essay “Without God” in the New York Review of Books for September 25, 2008. The oddity of these ventures, of which Professor Weinberg’s is fairly typical, is in their ready—and, it seems to me, their thoughtless—abandonment of scientific rigor and methodology. For example, despite his protest that he does not want “to try to talk anyone out of their religion,” Prof. Weinberg sets forth an elaborate argument for the nonexistence of God, an argument obviously meant to be persuasive but based entirely on opinion. As a fundamentalist of science, like the fundamentalists of religion, he is clearly evangelizing, hoping to convert or at least to disturb those who disagree with him. And, like the religious fundamentalists, he uses a language that presents belief as knowledge. But more troubling than the authority he grants to his own opinions is his claim to know what cannot be known. “As religious belief weakens,” he writes, “more and more of us know that after death there is nothing.” The only fact available here is that Prof. Weinberg and more and more of us do not, and will never, know any such thing. There is no proof of this “nothing,” and there is no scientific or other procedure by which to attempt such a proof. Prof. Weinberg is a physicist, and he says that he is “professionally concerned with finding out what is true.” But as a mere person, evidently, he is concerned, like too many others, merely with investing his opinions with power. This is the concern of fundamentalists of all kinds: religious, atheistical, scientific, technological, economic, and political. They all seek power—they seek victory, in fact—by abandoning the proprieties that permit us to seek and to honor what is true while acknowledging the limits of our ability to know. Not far into his essay Prof. Weinberg says, with proper humility: “Of course, not everything has been explained, nor will it ever be.” But, two paragraphs later, speaking of “religious conservatives,” he abandons the careful and exacting speech of humility, and prognosticates with the absolute confidence and gleeful vengefulness of a religious conservative: “I can imagine how disturbed they will feel in the future, when at last scientists learn [End Page 75] how to understand human behavior in terms of the chemistry and physics of the brain, and nothing is left that needs to be explained by our having an immaterial soul.” This is something else that he does not know. Nor does he hesitate over the apparent difficulty of a material proof of the nonexistence of something immaterial. The argument about the existence of God necessarily must be conducted in the absence of evidence that would stand as proof either in a laboratory or a court of law. There is no objective or empirical or experimental evidence on either side. The argument, as such, is by definition hopeless—a piece of foolishness and a waste of time. Even so it has long existed and no doubt it will long continue, but only for the paltry reason that it cannot be won. Chaucer defined the problem about six hundred years ago in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and I doubt that it can be more clearly defined: A thousand tymes have I herd men telle That ther ys joy in hevene and peyne in helle, And I acorde wel that it ys so; But, natheles, yet wot I wel also That ther nis noon dwellyng in this contree, That eyther hath in hevene or helle ybe, Ne may of hit noon other weyes witen, But as he hath herd seyd, or founde it writen; For by assay ther may no man it preve. People of religion, and not just fundamentalists, can speak with tiresome confidence of knowing what in fact they don’t know but believe. None of us is...

<i>Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century John R. Pfeiffer P. W. Singer . Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Penguin, 2009. vi + 499 pp. Cloth, $17.00, ISBN: 9781594201981. Paperback, ISBN: 9780143116844. In one Clausewitzian sense war is a technique and policy of governance, and it follows that discussion of war can address utopian theorizing. There is an occasional fume of Clausewitz (invoked four or five times) in P. W. Singer's Wired for War, but Singer puts something in this book for everybody. The effects are of timeliness, disunity, shallowness, and disarming gravitas. The book describes a representative inventory of the new technologies for war and the dilemmas that use of such technology will precipitate. It is also part recruiting poster, part a manipulation of the popular perception of how tax dollars are being spent to enable the continued prosecution of war, and part elegy. Its cover proclaims " New York Times bestseller" (although my back-check couldn't verify this), and it is reviewed in about sixty forums. Wired is timely. Singer's agenda is associated with the Army-sponsored report in late 2009 on neuroscience research on pharmaceutical "fatigue countermeasures" to speed up the physiological repair accomplished in normal human sleep spans, to shorten the spans, "for a payoff in battle [that] would be enormous" (William Saletan, "You: The Updated Owner's Manual," New York Times Book Review, 2 August 2009, 23). It is also related to Mary Favret's War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, 2009). Wired is also, by the way, far better than Charles E. Gannon's Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Settings in American and British Speculative Fiction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; reviewed in Utopian Studies 17, no. 3 [June 2006]: 551-53), which Singer does not mention. Serendipitously, Daniel Mendelsohn's analysis of James Cameron's 2010 film Avatar (New York Review, 25 March 2010, 10-12) helps us [End Page 375] understand Wired. Mendelsohn believes that Avatar 's alien "Na'vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of [Cameron's] career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. . . . [The Na'vi are] both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized" (12). In short, the Na'vi are what cyborgs would be if they were organic. Wired is shallow. It covers a lot: "It will cover everything from [part 1—nine chapters] the resulting shifts in how wars are fought [by digitalized mechanisms] and who [still humans] is fighting them to [part 2—thirteen chapters] important questions that our new machine creations are starting to raise in politics, law, and ethics. War just won't be the same" (41). Part 1, "The Change We Are Creating," has chapter titles such as "Introduction: Scenes from a Robot War," "Robotics for Dummies," "To Infinity and Beyond: The Power of Exponential Trends," "Coming Soon to a Battlefield Near You: The Next Wave of Warbots," and "What Inspires Them: Science Fiction's Impact on Science Reality." Part 2, "What Change Is Creating for Us," has chapters titled "'Advanced' Warfare: How We Might Fight with Robots," "Open-Source Warfare: College Kids, Terrorists, and Other New Uses of Robots at War," "The Psychology of Warbots," "Changing the Experience of War and the Warrior," "Digitizing the Laws of War and Other Issues of (Un)Human Rights," "A Robot Revolt? Talking About Robot Ethics," and " Conclusion: The Duality of Robots and Humans." Wired could be an outline for a scholarly conference. There are a number of reservations we can have about the book. Its premise is not seriously original. It is a survey of current and theoretical digital technology designed for military actions by the United States and a summary of the highly predictable social, political, and legal problems that will result from this in the next half century. It repeats the facile claim that science fiction is an important predictor of and source of inspiration for future technological developments. Science fiction does not do this...

Remembering Sung I

As far as I know,the first gathering for the purpose of advancing Song studies on either shore of the Atlantic took place in the spring of 1961 at the annual Association for Asian Studies meeting in the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. The atmosphere was quite informal, so I do not believe anyone took minutes. Despite the efforts of the AAS Secretariat, I have been unable to obtain documentation,for their copies of the AAS Newsletter do not go back that far. At the time I do not think we proclaimed this occasion as Sung I. Quite likely it acquired that designation only after plans were afoot for Sung II,which—after several delays—finally took place in Germany in 1971. Alas, all but one of the six people I recall as fellow participants are now deceased and the only co-survivor, Jonathan Mirsky,has no recollection of the event! Can my memory be so faulty? Well, regardless, for better or worse, my account has to rely solely on my sagging memory with all its quirks, flying solo as it were with minimal instrumentation hoping not to crash . • • Jonathan Mirsky,who was to become the well known expert on contem porary China and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books,was at the time working on the Tang. He was there (if indeed he was) because in 1961 there were neither enough Song or conquest dynasties scholars to lend credibility to our championship of Song studies nor was the number sufficient to convince the profession of the probability of our ever reaching critical mass. To be sure, the profession itself was so much smaller at the time. As I recall all too well,in i960, there were two openings in Chinese history in the whole country (at the University of Iowa and at Swarthmore College). Thus, half a dozen was hardly an impressive number but it did amount at that time to not quite 1 percent of the 640 attendees at the 1961 meeting.1 Our number was small but the world was young and full of promise. We had a sense that just as the Song marked a new stage of Chinese history we

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

Cars, Climates and Subjectivity: Car Sharing and Resisting Hegemonic Automobile Culture?

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature

Linguistics can provide a technical vocabulary for talking about language, and an understanding of how everyday language is structured and functions. Literary texts are made from language, and although the relation between language in literature and language in general is not fully understood, linguistics can help theorize literary language, and suggest ways of thinking about literary form, and the relation between form and meaning in literature.

The Rise of the Theory Journal

The Rise of the Theory Journal Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) I. A New Kind of Journal The brief period between 1969 and 1979 saw the founding of a wave of new literary journals in the United States. They included New Literary History (1969), diacritics (1971), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1972), Feminist Studies (1972), New German Critique (1973), Critical Inquiry (1974), Semiotexte (1974), Enclitic (1977), Glyph (1977), Structuralist Review (1978), Discourse (1979), and Social Text (1979). They were joined by several established journals that retooled themselves along similar lines, such as Georgia Review, MLN, and Yale French Studies, as well as new entries in neighboring fields, such as the philosophy-based Telos (1968), social-science-based Signs (1975), film-based Camera Obscura (1976), and art-based October (1976). They constituted a new kind of journal, the theory journal. The standard journals at the time were largely oriented around literary periods or fields and had a more empirical focus toward close readings or scholarly reconstructions; these new journals turned toward the larger concepts that framed the study of literature, such as language, gender, interpretation, or society. Though they varied in particular approach or political leaning—New Literary History was nondenominational, whereas diacritics, for instance, tacked toward poststructuralism and Signs and Social Text had explicit political missions—they shared a stress on theoretical and methodological issues, as indicated by many of their titles. Part of their theoretical mission was bringing news from the Continent to a U.S. audience. They also freely drew upon other disciplines, such as sociology or anthropology, whereas most previous journals were more narrowly wedded to literature. They often took an overarching perspective, questioning the role of criticism itself and the aims and boundaries of literary and other studies. And they were adversarial, especially in their first decade, self-consciously announcing, as in the title New Literary History, a new way of doing criticism. [End Page 683] One way to glean a sense of the change they represented emerges from a 1978–79 survey, the results of which appeared in College English in 1980.1 According to its rankings, the majority of the leading journals were traditional scholarly ones, such as British Journal of Aesthetics, ELH, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of the History of Ideas, Medium Aevum, Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, Review of English Studies, Speculum, and Studies in Philology. They comprised the large majority of "Group A (Distinguished)," which only included a select sixteen; the bulk of journals fell into B-, C-, and D-lists. The A-list also included more general, organizational standards, such as American Literature, American Quarterly, PMLA, and, reaching beyond the academic fold, the New York Review of Books. Even by 1979, the only theory journal that made the cut was New Literary History (Critical Inquiry, diacritics, and Signs were among over fifty on the B-list, although the surveyor did note that it was early in their histories). Within a generation, many of the theory journals had taken over the A-list, displacing the fleet of philological journals especially.2 The theory journal became the dominant model in literary studies, spurring a few additional entries, such as Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (1982), Representations (1983), and Cultural Critique (1985), and influencing already existing journals, like ELH, which assimilated some of the tenor as well as expectations of the theory journal. Yet, other than occasional mention in histories and Jonathan Culler's "New Literary History and European Theory," there has been little account of the theory journal, of either its history or role.3 For instance, the two standard reference works inventorying the rise of theory, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism and the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, amidst myriad entries on theorists, schools, and terms, have no entries for NLH, Critical Inquiry, diacritics, or any other journal, nor for their editors. This lack of attention is not entirely surprising, since journals are usually seen as a kind of cargo truck, at most tangentially related to their intellectual freight. Spatially, they seem to be containers, like a box or the frame on a painting. Temporally, they are seen as secondary to the thought of theory, gathering...

The Iraq War and Global Governance

David Malone, International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in UN Security Council 1980-2005, Oxford University Press, 2006. Ramesh Thakur and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu (eds.), Iraq Crisis and World Order: Structural, Institutional, and Normative Challenges, United Nations University Press, 2006. Ramesh Thakur and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu (eds.), Arms Control After Iraq: Normative and Operational Challenges, United Nations University Press, 2006. Richard Ashby Wilson (ed.), Human Rights in on Terror, Cambridge University Press, 2005. More books on Iraq? Is there really more we need to know about miscalculations, incompetence, deceptions, and abuses of executive power that have characterized this war of choice? We do want to know about how almost unimaginably costly experience is going to turn out in end for Iraqis who are still unreconciled to each other, but those books have yet to be written. answer is yes, there is a perspective on how this war has affected global governance that needs study and reflection. That essential perspective is presented by four books reviewed here: International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in UN Security Council 1980-2005 by David Malone; Iraq Crisis and World Order and Arms Control After Iraq, both publications of United Nations University; and Human Rights in War on Terror, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson. outstanding books on how Bush administration got into Iraq War and mishandled occupation are mostly driven by central and compelling US political narrative. There has also been a recent surge of books about implications for US predominance in world as a result of Iraqi debacle (see What Happened to American Empire? by Alan Ryan in New York Review of Books, 23 October 2008, on recent books by Eric Hobsbawm, Amy Chua, Parag Khanna, Fareed Zakaria, and Robert Kagan). In addition, a few outstanding works look back at causal factors that drove events surrounding September 11, such as Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. Others explain chronic failures of intelligence and intelligence agencies, including those leading up to this war of miscalculation, such as mammoth Legacy of Ashes: A History of CIA by Tim Weiner. Then, there is shockingly thorough reporting by Jane Mayer who, in The Dark Side--The Inside Story of How War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, sets down facts of ethical compromise and corruption on part of Bush-Cheney chain of command, and deepens work provided by some of contributors to Wilsom collection under review. A Democratic Congress may seek legal accountability for abusive treatment of prisoners, though new US administration might decide in a spirit of reconciliation to turn page and move on. On this, though personal instinct of Barack Obama is to reconcile, much may depend on inside disclosures yet to come about role of the enablers, as Guantanamo human rights defender Major David Frakt has termed those who gave torture a green light from top of US administration (see Anthony Lewis, Official American Sadism, reviewed in New York Review of Books, 25 September 2008). Missing from Iraq library is authoritative book on British official deception and collusion in decision to invade Iraq (though not abusive treatment of prisoners), in part because Official Secrets Act has kept memoirs of former civil servants from readers' eyes. It may take inspired fiction to explain dynamics of personal ambition and school-prefect mentality of duty that kept London's lid on when Blair rode his moral horse to Washington and Crawford to align UK with US power come hell or high water, and to do at home whatever it took to pull it off; Robert Harris had a first go in his novel Ghost. …

Soul and Other Stories

Book Review| August 01 2009 Soul and Other Stories Andrey Platonov, Soul and Other Stories, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 335 pp. Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2009) 15 (3): 506. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2009-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Caryl Emerson; Soul and Other Stories. Common Knowledge 1 August 2009; 15 (3): 506. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2009-031 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Toward a Third Generation of International Institutions: Obama's UN Policy

By nominating his confidante, Susan E. Rice, as ambassador to the United Nations and restoring the post's cabinet status, President Barack Obama enunciated his “belief that the UN is an indispensab...

Material Gains: Assessing Susan McClary

Really? I asked the editors. You really want me to review Susan McClary right after she reviewed me in these very pages? You’re willing to risk the sort of spectacle in which, say, Joseph Kerman and Charles Rosen hand the palm back and forth in The New York Review of Each Other's Books? Don’t you know that is how one loses one's clout? Oh yes, we’ll risk it, they replied, and I am glad. What Susan handed me was not exactly a palm, although there were fronds amid the brambles. And as the editors evidently expected, what I am about to hand back will not exactly be a palm either, although I do intend it as a token of admiration. It is no secret that Susan and I are old acquaintances—old friends, even—united in what I trust are resilient bonds of affection. Those bonds have never constrained our free exchange of often critical opinion; and as long as she has made hers public in a decidedly mixed review of my Oxford History of Western Music, I am happy to follow suit now that she has been honoured by Ashgate with a collection of reissued essays called Reading Music1—one in a series, Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology, that also includes volumes devoted to the writings of Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson, Simon Frith, and Nicholas Cook—and also with a Festschrift called Musicological Identities (2008),2 assembled and edited by Raymond Knapp, her UCLA colleague, and her former pupils Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick. This pair of tributes invites a comprehensive stocktaking of McClary's achievement and impact.

Isn't it Time to Stop Accepting Handouts for our Educational Efforts?

Isn't it Time to Stop Accepting Handouts for our Educational Efforts?

Two Important Studies of Galicia

YaroslavHrytsakis the director of the Institute for Historical Research at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and visiting associate professor at the Central European University in Budapest. One of Ukraine's most prominent liberal intellectuals, Hrytsak writes historical essays that often enliven the pages ofKrytyka, Ukraine's equivalent ofThe New York Review of Books. The monograph under review is entitled, in translation, “A Prophet in His Own Fatherland: Franko and His Society (1856–1886).” This is not Hrytsak's first book about the poet and polymath Ivan Franko, but it is certainly his best, betraying many years of reading and reflecting, thinking, and rethinking. In 2007 Hrytsak's new biography of Franko won the “Best Ukrainian Book” prize in the nonfiction category in the competition sponsored by the weeklyKorespondent. Very readable, this new biography is full of fresh perspectives. Hrytsak states in his introduction that “in the general hierarchy of scholarly values I place the discovery of new methods of conceptualization of already known facts above the collection of new facts” (20). For his new biography on Franko, Hrytsak chose an interesting illustration for every chapter and then interpreted the illustration in the text. This device is but a characteristic creative moment of Hrytsak's style.

Commentaries and Readings

“Austro-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else […] I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole” (p. 79). This quotation from Sigmund Freud’s diary appears in an essay on the Austrian writer, Joseph Roth, in John Maxwell Coetzee’s latest collection of critical essays. Coetzee has never displayed much enthusiasm for post-colonial studies, but his latest collection of critical essays, the first since Stranger Shores (2001), and the first since his voluntary exile from post-apartheid South Africa to Australia, reveals a new interest in post-colonial themes. As was the case with his earlier volume the majority of the essays first appeared in the New York Review of Books , but the new collection shows a marked shift in interest away from Africa towards the wider world, to central Europe, the United States, South America and the West Indies. More than a third of the essays in the earlier collection dealt with African authors and topics, but only one essay in the new collection, a study of South Africa’s other literary Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, does.

"I'm nothin. I'm nowhere": Echoes of Queer Messianism in Brokeback Mountain

"I'm nothin. I'm nowhere":Echoes of Queer Messianism in Brokeback Mountain Richard Block (bio) To read the reviews of Brokeback Mountain, one would believe that the central issue of the film is whether this is a gay love story or a love story for everyone. Arguably mainstream America's favorite critic, Roger Ebert, defends his praise for the film by insisting that its appeal is universal and not just gay: "It could be a gay cowboy movie. [But] the more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker" (2005). Without fancying what it means to have wanted to be a life-long marine while watching two cowboys screw, I will merely point out that universality is evidently not a quality that inheres in love stories that are "really" gay cowboy movies.1 David Mendelsohn, writing for the New York Review of Books, insists that Brokeback Mountain is a queer love story, focused on obstacles specific to homosexuals forced to endure Wyoming and so-called cowboy country in the closet (2006). What such discussions overlook is whether or not this is [End Page 253] even a love story. Do a "couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year," as Jack laments, constitute love? Or is it precisely a gay love story because it never materializes? Equally perplexing is that at least one-half of the film follows the lovers as members of a traditional family and their travails as heterosexuals. Almost every time we see Jack and Ennis together, the following scene concerns life on the heterosexual home front where girlfriends, wives, children, and in-laws both protect and threaten the closet. This binary is a first indication of the movie's understanding of homosexuality as pure inversion; it always stands in reverse relationship to heterosexual marriage, which governs the center and essence of all sexuality. The back cover of the DVD could not be more explicit in its marginalizing of homosexuality. There are four images. At the left margin is Ennis Del Mar; at the right margin is Jack Twist. Center left are Ennis and his wife; center right, Jack and his wife. In other words, gravity pulls even queers to a center occupied by heterosexual unions. To focus on the universal dimensions of homosexuality obscures issues of class and race—an oversight all the more striking given how "coming out" or moving out of the closet is so central to the concerns of critics. Class is hardly obscured in the film. Jack Twist, the one whose marriage jumpstarts his social mobility, is ever ready to come out and set up house, thereby triangulating class, coming out, and domestication. Ennis del Mar, on the other hand, may live in a mobile home and move from job to job, but he goes nowhere fast. Mobility, at least for him, is a fiction. As is his family name, del Mar. He is "of the sea" or queer to mountain country, and apparently, of Hispanic origin despite his porcelain skin. The sexual partners Jack finds on the other side of the border in Mexico for backroom, anonymous adventure are therefore metonymies for the one Hispanic who remains forever removed by a border of a different kind. But the love story, if there is one, is over before it begins; metonymous, anonymous sex fills the void. Their relationship, as we will see, is always seen through a rear-view mirror; its rear end always in sight before anything begins,2 and such rear viewing renders class and race inconsequential. Those antagonisms have already been played out. This brings us to the most glaring oversight of all: the time line. The film begins in 1963 or pre-Stonewall and ends in 1983, post-Stonewall and the [End Page 254] beginning of the AIDS crisis. Perhaps that explains why, in the middle of Buttfuck, Wyoming, everyone has homosexuality on his mind. In the period during which the narrative of coming out is being (re)constructed as essentially a gay...

The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's L'usage de la photo

Ever since the advent of the medium in the mid‐nineteenth century, photography has been engaged with literature in an almost constant dialogue and process of intersemiotic cross‐fertilization. The ...

Remaining Still

Remaining Still

The Difficulties of Being an Independent Intellectual

The obituary that appeared in the York Times after the recent death of Elizabeth Hardwick, a native southerner, a critic, a fiction writer, a founder of the York Review of Books, and the second wife of Robert Lowell, informed readers that she achieved her dream as a girl in a Protestant household in Lexington, Kentucky, to become a New York Jewish intellectual. The newspaper did not note the irony that she was among the last of that breed. The generally accepted view is that the group of independent York intellectuals, most of them Jewish, has almost disappeared and is not perpetuating itself. Although some were professors, their identity belonged to the group of York intellectuals, not their academic appointments. An example is Lionel Trilling, the first Jew to secure tenure in the Columbia English department, who believed his literary vocation was centered in a wider world than university life. In the twentieth century there was also another group of American intellectuals, as alienated from American life as were the York intellectuals who also rejected the notion that their primary identity was to be found in academic life. These were the southerners involved in what is now called the

Iran's Power in Context

Iran–US relations – strained at the best of times since the 1979 Iranian revolution – have never been worse than during the past six years, due to the much more intense interaction between the two ...

The Myth of Ritual Murder. Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany

From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion.-Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal Hsia has...succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes.-G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best.-Library Journal A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent.-Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Munster, 1535-1618

Breath, and: X

Breath, and: X Lance Larsen (bio) Breath Snakes bless our gardens with their muscled hurryslip in and out of the underworlddust of the earth italicized and fanged etc but who bothers to pick one up let alone coil itinto a mood ring that circles the pinkythree times except some boy like this one shirtless nine years old going on thirty yearsno probation who already has a packof feral seven year olds watching and a reader looking over his shoulder decadesafter the fact and me looking over yoursno way to step outside this alley behind the butcher shop this rosary of decayhe has already pouredthe snake straight into his mouth and lifted his arms to the sky like a kid on his birthday ridinga bike with no handsgo ahead call this symbolic but symbols have a way of swallowing the interpreterthe snake diving one inchthen three down the boy's throat before he pulls on the tail this happened before snow conesbefore shoeswhat is a boy which garden where does the alley end [End Page 85] questions more endless then the serpentwhich has lodged by mistakeI wish I could say snake equals darkness and that biting in two what chokes ussets the world straightfirst the pulsing skin then muscle and bone like crunching the banana peelbut this slows downwhat happened a panicked boy crazy for air I wish I had a story that fast forwards to a swarthyadult drifting the Midwest like a hailstormno he remains what he was then the boy who ate snakeyou should have seen him spit and spitthen chew grass to kill the taste meanwhile and always I stare at the stump endate eats will eat has eaten is eatingwhich tense lies the least a lost Saturday a story that wiggles on its way downa snake instead of a tongue the boy whoI am and never will be that boy before he let it drop before bravery or shamebefore breath that stump thrashedthe air a definition trying to strike the right word [End Page 86] X Something dumb in me attempts to spell the deathof God as crucifiction, as if the cross were a liar's art, then I catch myself, delete, and supply the necessary "x."Spell-check, appeased, agrees to look the other way. X stands tall, crossed arms multiplying what they touch,a mystery, a quality unnamed like love or death. No, love in death. Also place: treasure buried deep.But for whom? Some days I half envy my greedy cat— sleeping off this world, an infidel whose purrs and thirstsand rutty mewings sing. Of what? Ditto my life. Let me try again: I'll write His death by hand till shamemakes prayers of what boils my blood. I'll hum. X—two nails, a sign for those without a name, a kissto be redeemed, a sideways cross searching for a god. [End Page 87] Lance Larsen Lance Larsen's recent collection, In All Their Animal Brilliance, recently received the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of Erasable Walls, and his work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press