bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala
Authors: Few Martha
Published: December 2005

Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely available to men and women of all ethnic and social groups in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the capital city of colonial Central America. At the same time, chocolate acted as a central vehicle of women's ritual power, used as the basis for magical potions to cast supernatural illness, in sexual witchcraft practices, and even, at times, as a flash point for women's disorderly behavior in public settings. The gendered associations of chocolate with ritual power and disorder in Guatemala are considered within the broader context of the changing cultural uses and meanings of New World food products during European expansion in the Americas.
In the Lobby of the Energy Hotel: Jevons's Formulation of the Postclassical “Economic Problem”
Authors: White Michael V.
Published: December 2005

While the usual caveat on responsibility applies, I would like to thank John Aldrich, Robert Dixon, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Peter Groenewegen, John King, Harro Maas, Bruce McFarlane, Bert Mosselmans, and participants in a History and Methodology Group seminar, Faculty of Economics and Econometrics,University of Amsterdam, for helpful comments and/or discussion. I am particularly indebted to Philip Mirowski for detailed comments and suggestions.
Informative Prices, Rational Investors: The Emergence of the Random Walk Hypothesis and the Nineteenth-Century “Science of Financial Investments”
Authors: Preda Alex
Published: December 2005

Research for this article was supported by a Barra International Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New York Historical Society. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and criticisms. Yuval Millo and Franck Jovanovic have also provided very useful suggestions and information. A previous version of this article was presented in November 2000 at a workshop titled“Financial Cultures” organized at the University of Bielefeld,Germany.
News, Blues, and Cowper's Busy World
Authors: Ellison Julie
Published: December 2005

Julie Ellison is professor of English at the University of Michigan and director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, A National Initiative. She is author of Emerson's Romantic Style (1984),Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (1990), and, most recently, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999).
Individuality and l'Esprit Français: On Gustave Lanson's Pedagogy
Authors: Wolff Mark
Published: December 2005

Mark Wolff is assistant professor of French at Hartwick College. His research interests include the nineteenth-century French novel, the sociology of literature, popular literature, and canon formation. He is also actively involved in humanities computing.
Ethics and Aesthetics North and South: Translation in the Work of Ricardo Piglia
Authors: Waisman Sergio
Published: December 2005

Sergio Waisman is assistant professor of Latin American literature and director of translation studies at San Diego State University. His most recent translation is The Absent City (2000), by Ricardo Piglia, for which he received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship Award.
The Return of Anachronism
Authors: Aravamudan Srinivas
Published: December 2005

Srinivas Aravamudan is associate professor of English at Duke University. He is author of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency,1688-1804 (1999), which won the Modern Language Association award for outstanding first book in 2000, and editor of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period, volume 6 (1999). He specializes in eighteenth-century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory.
The Age of “The Age of” Is Over: Johnson and New Versions of the Late Eighteenth Century
Authors: Griffin Robert J.
Published: December 2005

Robert J. Griffin is associate professor of English at Tel Aviv University. He is author of Wordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (1995) and editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on anonymity from 1600 to 1900. He is completing a book on the cultural history and poetics of anonymity during the period 1695-1835.
Perioddity: Considerations on the Geography of Histories
Authors: Reiss Timothy J.
Published: December 2005

Timothy J. Reiss is professor of comparative literature at New York University. His most recent books are Knowledge, Discovery, and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism(1997), the edited collection For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite (2001), and the second edition ofSisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature (2001). Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange and the edited collection Literature, Music, and Cultural Unity in the Caribbean are forthcoming.
The Short-Lived Avant-Garde: The Transformation of Yu Hua
Authors: Kang Liu
Published: December 2005

Liu Kang is associate professor of comparative literature and Chinese at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Aesthetics and Marxism:Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (2000) andBakhtin's Dialogism and Cultural Theory (1996; published in Chinese).
“Everlastinge to Posterytie”: Chatterton's Spirited Youth
Authors: Russett Margaret , Dane Joseph A.
Published: December 2005

Margaret Russett teaches at the University of Southern California. She is author of De Quincey's Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (1997) and of articles in ELH, Discourse, andStudies in Romanticism. Joseph A. Dane is professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is author of Who Is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's Book (1998) and of articles on bibliography and printing history in recent issues ofGutenberg-Jahrbuch, The Library, PBSA, and Studies in Bibliography.
Presence and Passage: A Poet's Wordsworth
Authors: McHugh Heather
Published: December 2005

From 1984 to 2000 Heather McHugh was Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. She now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent books include The Father of the Predicaments (poems; 1999) and Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, revised edition (essays; 1999).
Building Brand Byron: Early-Nineteenth-Century Advertising and the Marketing of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Authors: Mason Nicholas
Published: December 2005

Nicholas Mason is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. His publications include volume 1 of Pickering and Chatto's British Satire, 1785-1840 series and articles on Victorian theories of drunkenness and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. He is finishing a book on the relationship between the advertising and literary systems of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain.
Historical Difference as Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel
Authors: Underwood Ted
Published: December 2005

Ted Underwood is assistant professor of English at Colby College. He has published articles on Romantic poetry and science and on nineteenth-century historicism. His essay “The Science in Shelley's Theory of Poetry”appeared in MLQ 58:3 (September 1997).
Picturing the Poetry of Anna Margolin
Authors: Mann Barbara
Published: December 2005

Barbara Mann is assistant professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish studies at Princeton University. Portions of a book in progress titled A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space have appeared in Representations, Jewish Social Studies, and Prooftexts.
Resisting the Plague: The French Reactionary Right and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty
Authors: Spreen Constance
Published: December 2005

Constance Spreen is Harper-Schmidt Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Her research engages issues of aesthetics and politics in France. She is preparing a book on the political dimensions of literary escapism in twentieth-century France.
Being “Out of Place”: Edward W. Said and the Contradictions of Cultural Differences
Authors: Armstrong Paul B.
Published: December 2005

Paul B. Armstrong is professor of English and dean of the college at Brown University. He is author of The Phenomenology of Henry James(1983), The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (1987), and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (1990). He is also editor of the Norton critical edition of E. M. Forster's novel Howards End (1998). He is at work on a book about the politics of reading and the modern novel.
Before National Literary History
Authors: Helgerson Richard
Published: December 2005

Richard Helgerson is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of The Elizabethan Prodigals(1976), Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (1983), Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992),and Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (2000).
Almoravides at Thebes: Islam and European Identity in the Roman de Thèbes
Authors: Sanok Catherine
Published: December 2005

Catherine Sanok is assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan. She has published on medieval uses of classical narrative inStudies in the Age of Chaucer. Her recent work appears inExemplaria, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, andNew Medieval Literatures. She is currently working on late medieval saints' legends, with an emphasis on questions of gender and national identity.
Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please
Authors: Thorne Christian
Published: December 2005

Christian Thorne is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.
“Books and Bad Company”: Reading the Female Plot in Teresa de la Parra's Ifigenia
Authors: Byron Kristine
Published: December 2005

Kristine Byron is assistant professor of Spanish at Michigan State University. She has published on Latin American literature, Cuban history, and Irish literature and is completing a comparative study of women, revolution,and autobiography.
Mechanical Means: Emersonian Aesthetic Transcendence and Antebellum Technology
Authors: Gilmore Paul
Published: December 2005

Paul Gilmore is assistant professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (2001).
Predicting the Past
Authors: Bahri Deepika
Published: December 2005

Deepika Bahri teaches postcolonial literature and theory in the English department at Emory University. She has coedited Between the Lines: South Asians and Post-coloniality (1996) and Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects for Rhetoric Education (2003) and is author ofNative Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003), as well as of AIDS Prevention and Control in Tamil Nadu, a USAID/ CDC report based on her preliminary research on HIV/AIDS in developing countries. She is currently working on the influence of media technologies on postcolonial national identity and culture.
Shakespeare, Women, and French Romanticism
Authors: Boutin Aimée
Published: December 2005

Aimée Boutin is associate professor of French at Florida State University. She is author of Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine (2001) and“Inventing the 'Poétesse': New Approaches to French Women Romantic Poets,” Romanticism on the Net, nos. 29-30 (2003).
Rights, Commandments, and the Literature of Citizenship
Authors: Lupton Julia Reinhard
Published: December 2005

Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis, with Kenneth Reinhard (1993), and of Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (1996) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (forthcoming). She is founding director of Humanities Out There,an educational partnership between the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and the Santa Ana Unified School District. Her Web site,www.ThinkingWithShakespeare.org,features individual and collaborative projects on matters both civic and Shakespearean.
Reembodying the Aesthetic
Authors: Schmidgen Wolfram
Published: December 2005

Wolfram Schmidgen is assistant professor of English at Washington University. He is author of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (2002) and is currently completing a manuscript titled“Bastard Forms: Multitude, Mixture, and Modernization in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
History, Literature, and Settler Colonialism in North Africa
Authors: Omri Mohamed-Salah
Published: December 2005

Mohamed-Salah Omri teaches Arabic and Mediterranean studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and directs the Centre for Mediterranean Studies at the University of Exeter. He is editor, with Abdeljalil Temimi, ofThe Movement of People and Ideas between Britain and the Maghreb(2003).
Gendering the Revolution: Language, Politics, and the Birth of a Nation(1789–1795)
Authors: Vallois Marie-Claire
Published: December 2005

Translated by John Galvin and Marie-Claire Vallois
The Marxian Critique of Citizenship: For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question
Authors: Kouvélakis Stathis
Published: December 2005

Translated by Alex Martin
Religious Communities in Harbin and Ethnic Identity of Russian Emigrés
Authors: Chernolutskaya Elena
Published: December 2005

Translated by Julia Trubikhina
Looking at Cuba: Notes toward a Discussion
Authors: Hernández Rafael
Published: December 2005

Translated by Dick Cluster
In Medias Res Publicas: On Intellectuals and Social Criticism in the Cuban Public Sphere
Authors: Navarro Desiderio
Published: December 2005

Translated by Alessandro Fornazzari and Desiderio Navarro
Untitled (Havana 2000)
Authors: Bruguera Tania
Published: December 2005

Translated by Achy Obejas
Towards a Lyric History of India
Authors: Mufti Aamir R.
Published: December 2005

For Professor C. M. Naim, ihtiraman
Reading the “Lucid Interval”: Race, Trauma, and Literacy in the Poetry of Ed Roberson
Authors: Crown Kathleen
Published: December 2005

Although avant-garde poetic practices have been understood historically in terms of producing disjunction, rupture, and shock in public consciousness,recent critical accounts of vanguard poetry have focused on its affirmative potential to create communities, empower the disenfranchised, and develop new literacies. Situating the work of Ed Roberson within this latter framework,the article argues that his innovative poetry responds to the contemporary crisis in the readability of history by proposing new relations among trauma, history, and literacy. Developing strategies of the visual sign and the aural fragment in order to investigate the “templet noise / between each word,” Roberson's poems attempt to refigure the visual practices of reading and writing in ways that can bring unclaimed experiences and traumatic histories into public, collective memory. Although his work provides an avant-gardiste assault on conventional literacy as a mode of knowing,Roberson's historical revisionism requires that he also offer new“literacies of the interval.”
Lyric Cryptography
Authors: Shoptaw John
Published: December 2005

Poetry readers have traditionally followed Alexander Pope's dictum,“The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” In this model, poetic sounds at most second or underscore meanings already there. In this article I describe a different kind of poetry writing and reading, one in which sound actually precedes and helps produce meaning. I suggest, for example, that the surprising “shatter” in Milton's “Lycidas” (“I come to / Shatter your leaves...) is a distortion of the more commonscatter, and that Shakespeare's description of “boughs whichshake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs...” is partly shaped by the syllables of the author's name. I call this processlyric cryptography. I justify cryptography by recourse not to authorial intention (Milton and Shakespeare may not even have been aware of the cryptographs I identify in their texts) but to what I call the textual act: the poet's act of setting the text and letting it stand. Cryptography is a form of productive reading, a practice that involves taking the poem neither as an isolated object nor merely as a document for cultural study, but as the product of multiple forces, some of them deriving from the poet (his or her psyche, biography, education, poetics,intention, etc.), others from his or her history, culture, and especially language.

My aim in this essay is to explore the whole range of cryptographic possibilities and also to differentiate cryptography from other related phenomena (puns, wordplay, Freudian slips, and so on). I hope to demonstrate that cryptographic writing (and, to a lesser extent, reading) is utterly pervasive—a feature of mainstream as well as avant-garde writing.
“I manured the land with my mother's letters”: Avot Yeshurun and the Question of Avant-Garde
Authors: Lachman Lilach
Published: December 2005

Although historians of the avant-garde have noted the double requirement for innovators to dramatize a provocative verbal action that experiments with form, the interaction between the ideology and poetics of avant-garde poetry has been largely neglected. Recent studies point to the contradiction between avant-garde poetry's stance of rebellion and its inevitable historicization. Less attention has been paid to the relationship between the negated or undermined tradition and the process whereby experimentation becomes a new tradition.

In this paper I explore these questions with reference to the work of the Israeli poet, Avot Yeshurun—in particular, how the mother tongue underlying his Hebrew writing forms a subversive tradition and, as such,fulfills new, unprecedented roles in his poetry. I discuss the ways in which the montage (of words, perspectives, languages, and cultural worlds) and the interplay between autobiography and poetics inform the gradual self-codification of his work. Of central importance is the dynamic whereby quotation montage is made to carry the transgressive force of Yeshurun's work—with ideological and historical, as well as poetic, consequences. All this leads to a reevaluation of Yeshurun's position vis-à-vis Israeli modernism.
Mapping the Real in Cyberfiction
Authors: McCallum E. L.
Published: December 2005

Cyberfiction offers a tantalizing view of what a completely networked world might be like; yet even with distance transcended by computers and phone links, the real world persists as an important component of these narratives. Examining the representation of real spaces in cyberpunk fiction not only reveals the narratives' reliance on events in “real” space but also shows how their assumptions about organizing space and distributing power are more colonialist than futurist. In conjunction with this geography, these narratives also employ the genre most closely associated with colonialism—namely, adventure. The reliance on first-world/third-world divisions leads us to question why these seemingly innovative narratives would rely on “old” geographies and “old” genres in their re-vision of a new, postdistance world. The innovations of Pat Cadigan'sMindplayers offer sharp contrast to the standard texts of cyberfiction, particularly classics by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. The difference shows that only by questioning narrative structure, interrogating the conventions of genre, and mapping a geography of real space that is closer to home can cyberpunk narratives stop reinscribing technological change in terms of the exotic and begin to explore the repercussions of technology on the scale of the familiar. This change in narrative and geographical imagination must happen in order to achieve the aim that all these fictions seek: that is, to challenge our understanding of what this new technological power will enable.
Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel
Authors: Suleiman Susan Rubin
Published: December 2005

This essay explores questions about memory and its relation to historical truth, chiefly through an examination of the “Wilkomirski case,”involving a highly acclaimed Holocaust memoir that has now been shown to be a fake. I argue that the categorical distinction between memoir and novel, while not always easy or even possible to determine, is nonetheless important;Wilkomirski's Fragments is neither an authentic memoir nor a novel but a false or deluded memoir. I discuss in contrast to this work a passage from the recent memoirs of Elie Wiesel, in which Wiesel himself revises a fragment of his acclaimed work Night. Such revision enriches both the author's and the reader's interpretations of a life-shattering experience.
Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge
Authors: Dolezel Lubomír
Published: December 2005

In this article poststructuralism is treated as a bundle of trends in intellectual history united by a common endeavor to revise structuralist assumptions, theories, and methods, and to cultivate themata the structuralists neglected. Four trends are considered: deconstruction,interactional pragmatics, empirical study of literature (empirische Literaturwissenschaft), and Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Poststructuralism is commonly contrasted with its immediate predecessor,French structuralism of the 1960s. This article examines the theoretical parallels between poststructuralist trends and the first system of structuralism, the pre-World War II system of the Prague school, an examination that indicates the contrast between poststructuralism and structuralism has to be considerably mitigated. Many of the theoretical ideas and methods of analysis advanced in the poststructuralist period were introduced in the structuralist thought of the Prague school.
Justice in Prague, Political and Poetic: Some Reflections on the Slánský Trial (with Constant Reference to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera)
Authors: Steiner Peter
Published: December 2005

This article deals with the proceedings against the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, and thirteen other high officials. The most striking feature of confessional trials such as his is the lack of any manifest culpability for gross miscarriages of justice. To explain the phenomenon, this essay draws an analogy to poetic techniques that inform Franz Kafka's universe of discourse (prolepsis, actualization of figures of speech, illocutions lacking conventional force). The concluding section illustrates howguilt that was suppressed for fifteen years burst into the open in Milan Kundera's novel The Joke, and howthis text prefigured the discourse of reformist Communism during Prague spring of 1968.
Keats's Hyperion: Time, Space, and the Long Poem
Authors: Lachman Lilach
Published: December 2005

Romantic critics have traditionally viewed Keats as a master of the lyrical“still object” and his Hyperion as a narrative failure. In this article, I aim to present a different Keats, one whose work, moreover,sheds light on the relationship between our making sense of the world (as a time-space construct) and the development of narrative modes in the long poem. In exploring the time-space poetics of Keats's Hyperion, this essay takes as its point of departure the narrative questions posed by the shift from the classical model of Enlightenment epic to the Romantic long poem, and so connects Keats's narrative experimentation to a new (Romantic) paradigm. Throughout, the central question is why and to what effect space became the focus of this paradigmatic shift in the composition of the long poem. Various possibilities of space poetics are examined, always (unlike Joseph Frank's“spatial form”) as an interaction of the axes of world and composition, as well as in relation to temporality. Time-space organization functions in this context as an image of the world and as a device for activating the reader. Historically, the changing hierarchy between world and composition and their interplay with time should also enable us to trace(dis)continuities between the Romantic model and its (post)modernist variants.
Narrative Time and the Space of the Image: The Truth of the Lie in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's Testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Authors: Klopper Dirk
Published: December 2005

The article begins by examining the relationship between truth and reconciliation as propounded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It contrasts a linear conception of this relationship with an iterative conception and equates these conceptions with the narrative and the image,respectively. The article then proceeds to explore the implications of the image, or the imaginary, as the “other” of the TRC narrative. It argues that the distinction between narrative and image in respect to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's testimony makes possible an understanding of her evasions as lies that reveal a different kind of truth from the one the TRC had expected to uncover.
“Making the Paper Speak Well,” or, the Pace of Change in Consumer Magazines for Black South Africans
Authors: Laden Sonja
Published: December 2005

Against arguments that would reduce the magazine form among black South Africans to a form of cultural imperialism, in this essay I argue that the socio-semiotic work of magazines extends way beyond their immediate or most apparent use value. Assessing some of the ways consumer magazines function seminally as “cultural tools” through which specifically urban,middle-class repertoires are confirmed, codified, disseminated, and transformed for and by black South Africans living in urban(izing)environments, the essay singles out their evocative power, that is, the way consumer magazines authorize “aspired to,” not necessarily“given” states of affairs. More specifically it examines how the use of English in consumer magazines for black South Africans has been strategically mobilized and (re)activated as (1) part and parcel of the urban,middle-class repertoire of discursive and cultural disposi-tions initially derived from the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise in South Africa and(2) a means of strategically transforming this repertoire “from below,” in keeping with the current needs and interests of many black South Africans. Providing their readers with an efficient means of integrating and transforming oral traditions, such as public debate, oral poetry and song,storytelling and oral narrative, all received sources of African“cultural capital,” into literate modes of print culture and“urban ways of knowing,” consumer magazines for black South Africans also operate as participatory public forums enhanced by urban technologies.
Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781)
Authors: Zunshine Lisa
Published: December 2005

In this article I explore the possibility of a dialogue between cultural studies and cognitive science by proposing a “cognitive” reading of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's 1781 book Hymns in Prose for Children. Literary critics have pointed out that the tacitly catechistic mode of Barbauld's Hymns implicates it in the eighteenth-century ideological project of socializing children, particularly those coming from working-class families, to their proper stations in life. I investigate possible cognitive underpinnings of one particular aspect of Barbauld's “catechist,”namely its reliance on a functional approach to human beings (i.e.,“children are made to praise God who made them”). I argue that, to get an integrated account of the rhetorical appeal and the ideological potential of such a functional approach, we should inquire into the ways it mobilizes the contingencies of our evolved cognitive architecture involved in our differentiation between natural kinds and artifacts.
The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature
Authors: Turner Mark
Published: December 2005

The cognitive turn in the humanities is an aspect of a more general cognitive turn taking place in the contemporary study of human beings. Because it interacts with cognitive neuroscience, it can seem unfamiliar to students of the humanities, but in fact it draws much of its content, many of its central research questions, and many of its methods from traditions of the humanities as old as classical rhetoric. Its purpose in combining old and new,the humanities and the sciences, poetics and cognitive neurobiology is not to create an academic hybrid but instead to invent a practical, sustainable,intelligible, intellectually coherent paradigm for answering basic and recurring questions about the cognitive instruments of art, language, and literature.
Humor Mechanisms in Film Comedy: Incongruity and Superiority
Authors: Vandaele Jeroen
Published: December 2005

In humor studies, incongruity and superiority are traditionally regarded as two independent concepts. Taken separately, each concept both under- and over-determines the field of humorous phenomena. When redefined, incongruity and superiority do not represent incompatible views of humor but are strongly interwoven in at least four specific ways: (1) normalization, (2) evaluation through indirect communication, (3) solution, and (4) conditioning. Moreover,such an integrated view of superiority and incongruity helps reduce the gap between concepts and observations. These findings are based on a detailed analysis of two films, The Naked Gun and AFish Called Wanda. Their relevance for humor in other genres, contexts, and uses remains to be verified.
How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an Analysis of Argumentation in Discourse
Authors: Amossy Ruth
Published: December 2005

Based on a rhetorical approach, claiming that shared values and beliefs work not only for communication but also for verbal efficacy, this essay explores the constructive functions of doxa in literary and nonliterary genres of discourse. Instead of condemning commonplaces in the name of innovation, or of denouncing collective representations by exposing their ideological foundations, the analysis of argumentation in discourse views doxa as an essential ingredient of all literature, classical and modern. This essay raises first the question of the nature of doxa: is it an orderly whole to be reconstructed as such or an aggregate of elements participating in a loose intertext? Is it the expression of a universal common sense or the mark of a given sociohistorical worldview? There follows an attempt at a taxonomy to provide some tools for text analysis. Rhetorical topoi as empty structures(Aristotle's topoï koinoï) are distinguished from pragmatical topoi in Oswald Ducrot's sense and from commonplaces in the positive sense of the term; the notions of idée reçue,of cliché, and of stereotype are described and reinterpreted in an argumentative perspective stressing their fundamental role in human communication. Expressed through a series of implicit and explicit forms–previously discussed within different disciplines and here integrated in a coherent model of text analysis–doxa appears as a condition of intersubjectivity and as a constitutive element of any verbal interaction.
Doxa and Cognitive Breaks
Authors: Angenot Marc
Published: December 2005

Are public languages (as opposed to esoteric, i.e., scholarly or disciplinary discourses) that coexist in a given state of society to be distinguished–beyond their diverging points of view, the clash of data retained or set aside, the disparity of their objectives as well as of the interests that fuel them–by their incompatible cognitive and argumentative characters? The author suggests that such breaksmay divide at a given point the topography of public opinion. For heuristic ends he outlines three degrees of argumentative breaks: (1) a weak form, in which the impression of insurmountable disagreement is superficial, the conflict between the individuals in question being attached to mannerisms of thinking and expression; (2) argumentative impasses that are linked to presuppositions and premises resolutely placed beyond any doubt; (3) finally,and most radically, certain ways of reasoning about the world, of finding connections and meaning in it, of perceiving a direction over the course of things, of posing oneself as a subject in society and history, and legitimizing this worldview, no longer differ only in their presuppositions,premises, and the basic axiology, but in the very rules defining the“arguable”–to the point that some of these ways of reasoning will appear, to those who remain “on the outside,” as unintelligible, unacceptable, and arising from a “crazy” type of logic.
Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
Authors: Ryan Marie-Laure
Published: December 2005

The concept of narrative has been widely invoked by theorists of digital textuality, but the promotion of what is described as thestorytelling power of the computer has often relied on shallow metaphors, loose conceptions of narrative, and literary models that ignore the distinctive properties of the digital medium. Two myths have dominated this theorization. The myth of the Aleph (as I call it) presents the digital text as a finite text that contains an infinite number of stories. The myth of the Holodeck envisions digital narrative as a virtual environment in which the user becomes a character in a plot similar to those of Victorian novels or Shakespearean tragedies. Both of these myths rely on questionable assumptions:that any permutation of a collection of lexias results in a coherent story;that it is aesthetically desirable to be the hero of a story; and that digital narrativity should cover the same range of emotional experiences as literary narrative. Here I argue that digital narrative should emancipate itself from literary models. But I also view narrative as a universal structure that transcends media. This article addresses the question of reconciling the inherent linearity of narrative structures with the multiple paths made possible by the interactive nature of the digital text by distinguishing four forms of interactivity, which result from the cross-classification of two binaries: internal versus external interactivity; and exploratory versus ontological. Each of these categories is shown to favor different narrative themes and different variations of the universal narrative structure.
“YOU ARE HERE”: Reading and Representation in Christine Brooke-Rose'sThru
Authors: White Glyn
Published: December 2005

Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru is a strikingly provocative postmodernist text. Instead of examining how Thru deconstructs fiction through the literary and linguistic theory that it includes, this essay looks at how theory—specifically Roman Jakobson's diagram of communication—is altered within the context of fiction. The analysis considers the mechanisms through which criticism differentiates itself from reading and how Thru manages to expose such distinctions. I foreground the text's disrupted graphic surface in order to suggest that this may be the basis for the pragmatic reader to gain the advantage over the critic in achieving a productive view of this complex text.
A Cognitive Approach to Metaphor in Prose: Truth and Falsehood in Leo Tolstoy's “The Death of Ivan Il'ich”
Authors: Danaher David S.
Published: December 2005

Russian has two words corresponding to English truth and four words corresponding to English lie. While studies have detailed the semantic and pragmatic differences between these two terms, how these domains are metaphorized in everyday language—and exploited in literature—has yet to be examined. In the first half of the article, I present an analysis of everyday metaphorical expressions for Truth and Falsehood in contemporary Russian. Linguistic evidence suggests that these domains are understood via a small set of interrelated conceptual structures. Metaphorical expressions in Russian cluster around one basic metaphor (KNOWING IS SEEING) and three image-schematic structures (STRAIGHT, PATH, and CONTAINER). This network of everyday metaphors serves as a point of reference for an examination of Tolstoy's aesthetic representations of the same domains. In the second part, I examine Tolstoy's extensions and elaborations of metaphors for Truth and Falsehood in his postconversion works, and I argue that they comprise a central metaphorical motif, the full complexity of which has yet to be appreciated, in his novella “The Death of Ivan Il'ich.”
“Ocular Proof”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response
Authors: Knapp James A.
Published: December 2005

A new materialism in literary and cultural criticism has regrounded much scholarly debate in the archive as a corrective to ahistorical theorizing. Often, in granting archival discoveries the evidentiary status of fact,historical criticism fails to attend to the difficulties surrounding the mediation of historical understanding by material things. In order to get at the thorny issues surrounding the material as an authorizing category in cultural analysis, I focus on Shakespeare's well-known literary meditation on visual proof (and visual perception) in Othellogy. Reemphasizing the problems that nag materialist epistemologies, I examine the role of material(ocular) proof in Othellogy, in the form of the much discussed handkerchief. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of perception, I argue that Othellogy provides a parable about the disaster of confusing the objecthood of things with the stories we tell about them. I conclude that as cultural history moves into its next phase—beyond the return to the archive—it must respond to the phenomenological challenge and avoid the temptation to stop with either thing or theory, always working to occupy the space between.
Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable
Authors: Pence Jeffrey
Published: December 2005

Cinema's power to represent animate life, and produce a profound impression of reality, warrants and supports its other fascinating capacity, namely, to fabricate frank yet appealing illusions. In certain instances, audiences may respond to the fantastic creations as if to a new reality. Cinematic realism thus raises questions about the nature of belief and reality that are of perennial, yet acutely contemporary, interest in film history. A genre of the spiritual film—distinct from religious films that rely on traditional sources of religious authority—explores these questions of being and the limits of the knowable. Recent film criticism has inadequately responded to this genre. Film studies has aligned itself in various ways behind Walter Benjamin's call for an iconoclasm that would sever art's connections with cultic traditions and contribute to social progress. The consequent suppression, or translation to secular terms, of films' spiritual aspirations comes at great cost. Complex works that address spiritual topics in form and content, such as Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), are treated as evidence by a self-affirming and secularizing critical method. In neglecting the central concerns of such films, critics are complicit with the worst features of modernity. A criticism that evades an open engagement with the limits of the knowable becomes instrumental; a criticism geared exclusively toward demystification ultimately produces reification. A more proper analytic response is to attend to the ways in which such films produce experiences, and call for responses, at the edge of the knowable. Such an approach begins with abandoning methodological certainty; the spiritual film demands an alignment of perception that cannot be contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an open-ended ethical self-fashioning and may protect critical discourse from itself by preventing the standardization of cultural experience.
Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis
Authors: Hayles N. Katherine
Published: December 2005

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance,as if it were a pregiven entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's“meaning” will also take into account its physical specificity as well.

Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.
One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth
Authors: Eaglestone Robert
Published: December 2005

The aim of this article is to come to terms with the implications of Wittgenstein's remark that “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.” Arguing that ethics, truth, and aesthetics have been implicitly or explicitly part of literary discourse for many years, despite being constantly disavowed, I suggest that the recent movement called the “New Aestheticism” can contribute much to understanding the relationship between ethics and literature. The article discusses Heidegger's concept ofaletheia—and correlations in Wittgenstein—and its relation to art. I then suggest that this, in conjunction with an understanding of metaphysical inquiry as ethical, offers a deeper and as yet unexplored sense of “ethics and literature” as an expression of truth. This sense of truth contrasts with what I take to be the two“wings” of recent “ethical criticism” (roughly, a more narrative-based neo-Aristotelian “wing” and a more deconstructive“wing”) and brings to light a shared presupposition in both“wings”: that a literary text offers a certain sort of positivist knowledge. This means that neither “wing” comes to terms with the“world revealing” aspect of literature and the ways in which“ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”
Configuration and Government: Stefan George'sThe Star of the Covenant
Authors: Kinzel Ulrich
Published: December 2005

This essay on the German poet Stefan George and his poetry book The Star of the Covenant (1914) is part of a broader study of literary models of an ethics of the self in the context of governmental practices. For George and his circle of followers, the particular lines of this context can be seen to emerge in a fusion of sociology and aestheticism at the fin de siècle, a fusion which George, who in his eighth book of poetry takes on the role of a lawgiving authority, tries to transmute in order to regain an ethical and a governmental function for literature. A critical reading ofThe Star of the Covenant, however, will have to examine whether George's attempt to achieve a return to ethics also implies a return to the self.
State Legislative Staff Influence in Health Policy Making
Authors: Weissert Carol S. , Weissert William G.
Published: December 2005

State legislative staff may influence health policy by gathering intelligence, setting the agenda, and shaping the legislative proposals. But they may also be stymied in their roles by such institutional constraints as hiring practices and by turnover in committee leadership in the legislature. The intervening variable of trust between legislators and their support staff is also key to understanding influence and helps explain how staff-legislator relationships play an important role in designing state health policy. This study of legislative fiscal and health policy committee staff uses data from interviews with key actors in five states to model the factors important in explaining variation in the influence of committee staff on health policy.
Reexamining the Evidence of an Ecological Association between Income Inequality and Health
Authors: Mellor Jennifer M. , Milyo Jeffrey
Published: December 2005

Several recent studies have made the provocative claim that income inequality is an important determinant of population health. The primary evidence for this hypothesis is the repeated finding—across countries and across U.S. states— that there is an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes. However, most of these studies examine only a single cross section of data and employ few (or even no)control variables. We examine the relationship between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes across thirty countries over a four-decade span and across forty-eight U.S. states over five decades. In large part, our findings contradict previous claims.
Community-Oriented Primary Care: A Model for Public Health Nursing
Authors: Cashman Suzanne B. , Bushnell Frances Kathleen Lopez , Fulmer Hugh S.
Published: December 2005

The American Public Health Association defines public health nursing as the“practice of promoting and protecting the health of populations using knowledge from nursing, social, and public health sciences.” In 1993,celebrating the centennial anniversary of its founding, nurse leaders recognized systemic changes have required nurses to function in clinical,illness-oriented roles rather than in their more traditional community and public health roles. With nurses' public health skills atrophying, these leaders urged members of the profession to eschew specialization and return to their generalist roots founded on the principles of community-based prevention and health promotion. Soon the Public Health Functions Project, designed in part to identify skills and curriculum needs of an array of practicing public health workers, examined the public health nursing profession. Its recommendations seek to ensure that public health nurses are trained to respond to current challenges that face public health. In this essay, we describe how a fellowship program that predated this national project by almost a decade anticipated the recommendations for shaping public health nursing by enrolling midcareer nurses in a program that taught the principles and practice of community-oriented primary care. Such principles represent a merger of clinical care with population health sciences; its more recent expressions teach clinicians to work as partners with communities to identify and address health problems. In reporting on this program, we show how nurses in practice can embrace their generalist roots, meet current challenges, and play a lead role in realizing the nation's goals for the year 2010. These aims incorporate recent recommendations for preparing public health nurses for change in the health care system.