bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
X(Grandpa’s Crossed Sabers)
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Although Lucille Ballard greets Grandpa as “Grandpa Prophater” at the dance, finally identifying him as Mrs. Smith’s father, the movie omits almost everything else about him. Benson’s stories had given him a historically important hometown (Harpers Ferry, West Virginia), a military past (as a Civil War veteran and prisoner in the notorious Andersonville), and a previous career (“At one time he had owned three boats that ran from St. Louis to New Orleans”). But the stories never explain what appears in the film, his room’s collection of exotic hats and antique weapons (the sabers, mounted in an X on the wall, near the matched pair of pistols: “They’ll all be safe with me,” he cheerily assures Mr. Smith. “I’ve got twelve guns in my room”). The fez (French Foreign Legion?), the Zouave cap (the Civil War?), the Chinese hat (an overseas mission?), the crossed sabers (souvenirs of a victory or a defeat?)— these objects offer a set of potential histories, any combination of which would complete the character named “Grandpa Prophater.” The writer, who must assert such details, withholds their significance at the risk of provoking the reader’s question: “Why are you keeping something from me?” In the cinema, however, where objects are simply presented without apparent effort (Hollywood hides its work), and where what Seymour Chatman calls “a plenitude of visual details, an excessive particularity” appears “natural,” that question is forestalled. Thus, Grandpa himself remains the X in an equation, an unknown requiring additional information. Or, in another analogy, Meet Me in St. Louis seems to underwrite “Grandpa” with something like Fermat’s promissory note accompanying his famous theorem: “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which, however, this margin is not large enough to contain.
You and I”
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The song that serves to reunite the Smith family is not, in fact, an old tune from the turn-of the century, although it was designed to sound like one. “You and I” appears to have been written expressly for Meet Me in St. Louis by Nacio Herb Brown (music) and producer Arthur Freed (lyrics), the team responsible for “Singin’ in the Rain,” a much older song dating back to 1929. For the movie, Freed himself supplied the singing, dubbing for Leon Ames, who mouths the part. What conceals this substitution? First, the human brain’s inability to retain a sound’s precise timbre ensures that a viewer will only remember the exact register of Mr. Smith’s speaking voice for a few seconds: By the time the song begins, the voices of Ames and Freed will have become indistinguishable. Second, and more important, the timbre of a singer’s performance often fails to coincide with his speaking voice. With Judy Garland, for example, a distinct “break” occurs when she begins to sing, and someone familiar only with her speaking voice might prove unable to identify her in performance. By 1944, however, this break had begun to sound increasingly old-fashioned. Bing Crosby, the most popular singer of the first half of the twentieth century, was also among the first to make his singing voice an extension of speech. By avoiding the operatic break, which suggests artifice, Crosby’s apparently natural style conveyed sincerity and intimacy.
A Physical Response
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

Staring is a universal part of our cognitive architecture that natural selection has bequeathed us. The evolutionary origin of staring is a startle response. When staring is intentional—as in the long loving look or the hostile glare— we are masters of our eyes. When an unexpected sight grabs our attention, however, staring is spontaneous and volatile. As the epigraph to the previous section says, “staring, in its pure and simple essence, is the time required by the brain to make sense of the unexpected.” We cannot, even when we try, ignore compelling visual stimuli; we can only withdraw the stare once it is in play (Yantis 1998, 239). Intense, persistent looking and the ability to interpret such stares are fundamental to our survival as social beings as well. Human infants and mothers stare long and emphatically at each other to cement their relationship (Baron-Cohen 1985, 39). We enact social hierarchies through visual dominance displays (Ellyson and Dovido 1995). Even very young infants show surprise by staring for longer periods at scenes that violate the laws of physics or seem physically implausible than they look at a predictable or expected event.
Revelation And Its Transmission
Authors: Martin Francis
Published: November 2023

The dogmatic constitution Dei verbum was promulgated on November 18, 1965. The final vote that day on what was the seventh form of the document was 2,344 placet and 6 non placet: a major accomplishment for a constitution that twice required papal action in order to facilitate an impasse on the council floor. It is not my intention to trace the ‘‘text production’’ process of Dei verbum; there are excellent historical studies of Dei verbum that the reader may consult. I wish rather to offer a theological commentary on the document as it stands, with particular attention to its power for renewal, a power it possesses precisely because of its fidelity to tradition.
Inspiration And Interpretation
Authors: Farkasfalvy Denis
Published: November 2023

The dogmatic constitution Dei verbum was the product of a lengthy ‘‘struggle,’’ and even the final version is not the ‘‘mature conclusion’’ of the process that produced it. Here I neither discuss its detailed history nor trace the path that the theology of revelation and inspiration has traveled between the two Vatican councils. Instead, I undertake a historical inquiry to demonstrate a double thesis: For the theology of inspiration, inerrancy, and the ecclesial use of scripture, Dei verbum has successfully restored the proper context in which tradition developed and nurtured them. In chapters 3–5 Dei verbum applied a renewed theology of revelation, to which the aforementioned topics belong, but the effort of synthesis resulted in an incomplete text that is still awaiting full development.
The Decree On The Apostolate Of The Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem
Authors: Oliver Robert W
Published: November 2023

The Decree on the Lay Apostolate presented unique challenges to the conciliar fathers relative to the other documents of the Second Vatican Council. The president of the initial commission on the lay apostolate, Ferdinand Cardinal Cento, observed to the Central Preparatory Commission that Vatican II would be the first ecumenical council to systematically consider the topics assigned to his commission. In contrast to the ‘‘vast patrimony’’ available to the other commissions, the commission on the laity faced a special task in developing proposals in accord with the Church’s tradition, doctrine, and legislation.
Introduction “Women Are the Backbone of the Church”
Authors: Braude Ann
Published: November 2023

An old saying among members of African-American churches can be applied to most religious groups in the United States: “Women are the backbone of the church.” The saying has a double meaning. Women provide essential support for the church and affirm its moral role, but their work happens in the background and their support is invisible. It is the men who play the leading roles in religious organizations. As a result, most people assume that women have had little importance in U.S. religious history. Few groups had women as leaders before the 1970s, and the largest ones still do not. Men administered the sacraments, wrote the prayer books, preached the sermons, and made the decisions.
I. Introduction
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods This book analyzes and compares the substantive law of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (“Convention” or “CISG”) with the Sales provisions of Article Two of the Uniform Commercial Code (“Code”) and the UNIDROIT Principles on International Commercial Contracts (“Principles”). The text follows the structure of the Convention. An appendix is included to enable readers to cross-reference the relevant provisions of the Convention with the Principles and the Code. Unlike the Uniform Commercial Code and the Principles, the Articles of the Convention do not have titles. To avoid creating unnecessary confusion and misunderstanding, I have not attempted to create titles for the Articles.
Articles 14-24
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Consistent with generally accepted contract principles, the Convention bases the effectiveness of an offer on the offeror’s intent to be bound as well as the commuication being definite enough to determine the substance of the offer. In addition, the Convention provides a safe harbor for definiteness by providing that “a proposal is sufficiently definite if it indicates the goods and expressly or implicitly fix or make provisions for determining the quantity and the price.” If there is an otherwise valid offer under Article 14, but the parties have not provided a price, under Article 55, the parties are presumed to have agreed to the price generally charged at the time the contract is concluded. Some have read the two sentences of Paragraph 1 of Article 14 not as stating a rule of definiteness and then providing a safe harbor, but instead, as providing an absolute requirement of a price term.
Obligations of the Buyer
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Article 53 describes the general responsibilities of the buyer in an international sales transaction.944 This section recognizes the primacy of the contract in defining the parties’ obligations. This article applies absent a contractual agreement between the parties.
Third-Party Rights
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

To the extent that the Convention applies to a transaction, it addresses only the rights of buyer and seller, and it does not cover the rights and obligations of third parties. The rights of third parties are found in law other than the Convention. The Principles provide rules that govern the rights of third parties to the contract. The third-party rights are determined by the agreement between the parties, and these rights may be either expressly or implicitly created in the agreement. To create rights in a third party, the beneficiary must be identifiable, but need not be in existence at the time the contract is made. The agreement may provide for lim ited or excluded liability of the beneficiary.
The International Chamber of Commerce: Incoterms 2000-The Terms And Their Usage
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Out of long-standing practice, international contracts for the sale of goods often contain standard shipping and delivery terms. However, even the most common terms, such as FOB or CIF, do not necessarily have the same meaning in different ports or centers of trade. In an attempt to end this confusion, the International Chamber of Commerce has published lists of shipping and delivery terms known as Incoterms. Incoterms were first published in 1936. Subsequent revisions and additions were made in 1953, 1967, 1980, 1990, and most recently in 2000. The Incoterms 2000 is set out in ICC Brochure No. 560, and these terms have important differences from the earlier versions.
Extra Masculinity: Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Cruising
Authors: Nystrom Derek
Published: November 2023

Saturday Night Fever may have largely eluded the gender and sexual disorder of the 1970s, but it did so only by depicting its working-class characters as mired in a pre-1960s worldview. (Such strategic nostalgia was aided, no doubt, by the film’s adoption of many musical generic conventions.) But not every new nightlife film chose to avoid the 1960s. Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) both confronted contemporary gender and sexual relations more directly. In doing so, they seemed to indicate that this new social terrain could not be mapped using the old cinematic tools, whether those of the musical or romantic comedy—in large part because the terrain itself was so bewildering. Molly Haskell argued that the achievement of Goodbar came from its recognition of the “social nightmare” of heterosexual dating in the late 1970s, a world “in which there are no mutually understood signals, no rituals, no codes for deciphering the intentions of another individual.” Cruising, in turn, made visible another set of mixed social codes: the film’s persistent comparisons of gay S/M practices to law enforcement procedures (and vice versa) caused the New Yorker’s Roger Angell to be so unsure of the line dividing them that he wondered, “Are all cops, or most cops, gay?” Gender and sexual identity was being revised so quickly and so utterly in the late 1970s, it seems, that one needed a scorecard to keep all the players straight (as it were).
“For She Asks Forever Only Help”: The Critique of Maternalist Reform Discourse in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

In 1928, when Horace Liveright published Djuna Barnes’s avant-garde domestic novel, Ryder, two paragraphs on the dust jacket listed her among “the ré-voltés of The Little Review group” who “one by one … have come into their own.” Inducting Barnes into a hall of fame already inhabited by such American luminaries as Sherwood Anderson and Maxwell Bodenheim and such “international flgures” as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, Liveright’s advertising copy proudly swathed her debut novel in that charismatic—and faintly Parisian—atmosphere of aesthetic and social radicalism which we now routinely associate with a leading strand of literary modernism. When it came to being a révoltée, Barnes’s credentials were better than most. Upon moving to Greenwich Village in 1915 at the age of twenty-three, she found her way to the left-wing milieu of the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild, and supplemented her first literary and dramatic efforts with an impressive career in freelance journalism. Sent to Paris by McCall’s in 1921, Barnes soon became a fixture in that city’s expatriate community, using the earnings from her newspaper and magazine work to support a transatlantic lifestyle divided between Paris and New York. By the time Ryder became a brief bestseller in the fall of 1928, she was already known to New York readers as a witty commentator on topics ranging from urban amusements and Village bohemia to labor activism, women’s suffrage, and celebrity culture.
Tortured Bodies and Twisted Words: The Antidomestic Vision of Jean Toomer’s Cane
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

In Jean Toomer’s 1922 play, Natalie Mann, the title character offers a shocking comparison to convey the force of her aversion to the domestic ideals of her day. When a well-meaning Washington matron advises Natalie to trade in her bohemian commitment to free love and modern art for a safer life of domestic respectability, the young woman protests the silencing of her creative potential that such a choice would entail. She declares, “I would rather die outright, be burnt or lynched, than to build myself such a sepulchre, to cheat death by calling it home” (NM 296). In characterizing the promise of domestic security as a form of cheating, a kind of death-in-life, against which even lynching would be preferable, Toomer’s protagonist signals her impatience not only with prevailing sentimental definitions of women’s domestic role, but also with the contemporary elaboration of sentimental and domestic discourse as a leading site and source of modern social transformation.
Freaked: Eastern European Immigration and the “American Home” in Edna Ferber’s American Beauty
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

Between Barnes and Toomer, the earliest lineaments of a racially exclusive welfare state appear, one prepared—up to a point—to provide for and protect white women and children because they were white and to deny the same provisions and protections to black families because they were not. But in this period, exactly who was white, and on what grounds, was an open question. Disturbed by a new wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that began in the 1880s, nativist thinkers and reformers of various stripes entwined the racial question of who was white with the political and cultural question of who was “American.” Unable to come to agreement among themselves, they turned to the emerging welfare state with conflicting ideas of how that double question might be answered.
“Not Charity Yet!”: State-Supported Capitalism and the Secret Life of God in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, Wise Blood, follows the life of Hazel Motes, a young GI who migrates to the progressive southern city of Taulkinham upon his release from the army. Hailing from a line of preachers in rural Tennessee, Haze is another angry prophet from the hinterlands like the “Thompson or Johnson” who grips the imagination of Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust. But unlike most prophets, Haze urgently desires release from mankind’s covenant with God. The self-appointed apostle of the new Church without Christ, he attempts to enter by force the secular frame of modern life that the novel’s other characters already occupy with resignation, if not ease.
Arbitration in Sweden as a Method of Dispute Resolution
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

The Phoenicians were a prominent trading nation who, from the middle of the second millennium bc engaged in industry, trade and shipping in the Mediterranean area. It is said that Phoenician merchants were prepared to use any measures whatsoever in order to succeed in business, even going as far as to be honest, if nothing else helped. The existence of such a business ethic, for which evidence is found not merely in the history books, leads to the conclusion that an efficient commercial dispute resolution procedure has been a necessary feature of each society. It appears also to be the case that the earliest cultures which are known to us possessed well-developed systems for resolving commercial disputes, in which what we might call arbitration played a prominent role.
Sources of Law in Swedish Arbitration
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

Arbitration is characterised by the absence of detailed regulations with respect to the procedure. Flexibility in the procedure is thereby achieved. The regulations contained in the Act state that the arbitrators shall handle the dispute “in an impartial, practical, and speedy manner” (section 21). The procedural rules in the Act also state (section 24(1)) that the arbitrators must ensure that the parties are afforded “to the extent necessary, an opportunity to present their respective cases” and that “an oral hearing” must be held upon request by a party provided that the parties have not otherwise agreed. A party shall also (section 24(2)) be afforded an opportunity “to review all documents and all other materials pertaining to the dispute” which are supplied to the arbitral tribunal. These scanty rules provide great scope for the parties to determine the structure of the proceedings.
25 Years of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods Welcome Address
Authors: Sekolec* Jernej
Published: November 2023

On behalf of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), it is a pleasure to welcome you to this conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (the “Convention”). The Convention currently has over 70 Member States. Their share in cross-border trade represents over two-thirds of the total volume of international trade. The States that are members range from the least economically developed to the most developed and all major legal traditions of the world are represented among them. This makes the Convention a world sales law.
Liquidated Damages, Specific Performance Clauses, Limitations on Remedies, and Attorney Fees
Authors: Gabriel* Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

In those circumstances in which the parties, particularly the buyer, consider the right to specific performance of the other party’s obligations important or essential, it is good practice to embody this right in the parties’ agreement. By doing so, the parties initially signal this allocation of risk, and therefore reduce the risk of a court or arbitral tribunal having to determine whether the parties have in fact allocated this risk.
Militias, Mobs, and Murder: Testing the Limits of the Right to Bear Arms
Authors: Cornell Saul
Published: November 2023

Reflecting on the state of politics in his own state of Massachusetts after Jefferson’s election to the presidency, John Adams wryly noted that “we in this commonwealth are making great advances, if not in the perfectibility of human nature, yet in the great arts of lying and libeling and the other arts which grow out of them, such as wielding the cudgel and pistol.” The ultimately peaceful transfer of power from the Federalists to the Republicans had done little in Adams’s view to dampen partisan rancor. The best-known example of political violence in the Jeffersonian era was the fatal duel fought between the Federalist Alexander Hamilton and his political opponent Aaron Burr. While duels, including the one that took Hamilton’s life, were among the most formal and stylized type of political violence in Jeffersonian America, they were hardly the only occasions when partisan rivalries or animosities led to violence, or even death. Heightened political tensions, as Adams observed, led many to arm themselves as a precaution against political assault. Indeed, the most notorious murder case of the new republic was occasioned by a political feud that turned deadly.
Provisions in the New Generation of U.S. Investment Agreements to Achieve Transparency and Coherence in Investor-State Dispute Settlement
Authors: Tracton Michael K
Published: November 2023

Modern U.S. investment agreements contain a number of provisions that further the objectives of transparency and coherence in international investor-State dispute settlement. These include, but are not limited to, consideration of a possible appellate or similar mechanism to review arbitral awards. (See Annex 1, International Investment Instrument with Provisions to an Appellate Review Mechanism.) In 2004, the United States concluded a rewrite of its model bilateral investment treaty (BIT), which was used as the basis for the BIT signed by the United States and Uruguay in 2005.
Description of the Problem: Uniform Laws and Damages
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

Contract law, whether national or international, has very few mandatory provisions, and hence it is open to the parties to model their individual contractual situations. It is not surprising that the vast majority of contracts do not contain clauses dealing with the breach of a contract. Therefore, one of the problems in contract law is to determine what remedial system is available to an aggrieved party. Such a system must be part of an effective dispute resolution mechanism, because such a system is arguably critical to the success of any economy. The world economy is no exception, especially in relation to the internationalization of the process of law. Such internationalization requires a mechanism for the resolution of international business disputes. The mechanism “of this increasingly global . . . justice [can be traced to] the emergence of a transnational legal profession, institutionalized in new kinds of ‘courts’—and a special body of law.”
Breach of Contract: An Overview
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

Contracts are generally entered into with a view to performing the bargain and to increasing the asset base of each contracting party. However, not all contracts run the intended course, and a breach will mostly likely result in damages to at least one party. The intention of the law is to secure the bargain, but this security is only as good as the ability of courts and tribunals to award appropriate remedies. The ability to award damages is an important economic function, and it is not Surpriseing to find laws regulating the awarding of damages in a variety of legal documents. For example, in Switzerland these laws are found throughout the Civil Code and in the Law of Obligations.
Fundamental Breach and the CISG
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this book is to discuss the regime of damages available under the CISG. It is important to understand that the remedy of fundamental breach or avoidance of contract is an additional or perhaps unique remedy available to the aggrieved party. This chapter offers an explanation of the basic aspects of avoidance and hence fundamental breach and points to the connection whereby the principles link in with the remedy of damages. In brief, the CISG offers two different approaches to a breach of contract. If the breach is “minor,” the aggrieved party simply concludes the contract and asks for damages. If the breach is “major”—that is, if the party is deprived entirely of what he expected under the contract—the contract can be avoided, or terminated, and remedies for breach of contract can be sought.
The Pangs and Politics of Love
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: November 2023

Rādhā is lost to the onslaught of love. She weeps from tree to tree and finally succumbs, searching through the forests and groves. Her braid—a peacock grasps it, taking it for a snake; her lotus feet attract the bees; Her voice with its honey makes the crow in the kadamb tree think her a cuckoo, and caw her away; Her hands—the tender leaves of blossom-bringing spring: thinking so, parrots come to peck; And thinking her face to be the moon on a full-moon night, the cakor bird drinks the water from her eyes. Desperate at thinking perhaps she’d been dismembered, the Joy of the Yadus appears in the nick of time: Sūrdās’s Lord takes that seedbud of new birth and cradles it, a newborn in his arms. See how Hari has arranged his circle dance— Who has ever heard, ever seen such a thing?IWhere has this taste been secreted away? First he conjured up a fine magic spell and spread it everywhere— no one was spared. Then with one fine shot of an arrow he struck everything that moves or does not move. Who knows the recipe for such love? Seeing his eyes’ aesthetics, tasting the lilt of his voice, a welter of murmurs rippled through the army Of Kāma, says Sūr, who could not control his bow. He turned his hands palm-up, that Bodiless One, and then began to dance.
To the Holy Rivers
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: November 2023

Oh Kālindī, whom Keśav loves, Grant to me your own special favor as the Dark One has already done.Oh Jamunā, treasure of glory in all four ages, Yama’s elder sister, mother of the world,Never be angry at what I may have done. My nature, says Sūr, makes me as I am.From the lotus of those beloved feet, it is nectar To divert the bee of a mind of impure thoughtsfrom the dulling liquor of the senses. It flows with less impurity than even ambrosia, the liquid of deathlessness. Its form is inner joy. Its great cooling powers were known by Shiva when he bore it on his head, casting aside the moon And caring nothing for mountains or snakes or the duel in which gods and anti-gods were bound. In all three worlds, says Sūr, that River-of-the-Gods is immanent, immortal, and so free.
High Scholastics
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

THE RELATIVELY FEW EARLY GREEK COMMENTATORS on Aristotle’s Ethics, whose writings were preserved,35 did not add much to the distinction between the two forms of justice. Unfortunately, the commentary of Aspasius (ca. 100–150) on the relevant Book Five of the Nicomachean Ethics has not been preserved36; the same is true for Eustratius (ca. 1050–1120).37 The other authors, whose writings came down to later generations, basically relied on the original text of Aristotle.38 Of some influence in relation to Aristotle’s distinction of justice, is the commentary of Michael of Ephesus (eleventh to twelfth centuries).39 After the important rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings by Arab philosophers in the early medieval era,40 these authors, equally, repeated the former’s view about the two forms of justice without much further analysis.41 A good example is the important Arab philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126– 1198), who wrote the Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.42 In relation to our topic, this author basically restated the thoughts of Aristotle. One short comment of his is nevertheless noteworthy. It concerns the abovementioned example of the officer who hits a citizen or is hit by him.
Late Scholastics
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

BETWEEN THE FIFTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES a great number of scholastics wrote commentaries on the influential works of Thomas Aquinas, who remained the dominant figure in Western religious thought. Other important scholastic works were dedicated to moral theology and ethics, as well as to general philosophical problems. The latter bore witness to the lasting overwhelming position of Aristotle’s works. Many of these late scholastics expounded the Aristotelian concept of justice and especially the distinctions between commutative and distributive justice.
The Modern Use of Aristotle’s Forms of Justice
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

THE TRANSITION TO MODERNITY is again evidently a very gradual process that cannot be reduced to a specific moment in history. Being aware of its inevitable arbitrary character, we assume that for our specific purposes, the modern trends start with the eighteenth century. However, the criterion for modernity is not to been seen exclusively in the specific period of time, but rather in the change of certain ideas. Thus we can still see, in this assumedly modern period, (late) scholastic works—especially by Catholic authors—that do not substantially differ from those of their predecessors in earlier times.762a
Machine-Age Comedy
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

In this latest addition to Oxford’s Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists—including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace—to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.
Goldberg Variations
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

I Though Marcel Duchamp spent a lifetime calling attention to the humor in his work, though it is obvious that several of his most celebrated artworks were meant to be taken, at least on the most immediate level, as jokes, the topic of comedy remains a curiously painful one in the vast critical enterprise that has grown up around Fountain and the Large Glass. The very first serious study of Duchamp’s work, written by Robert Lebel and published in 1959, set the tone with a regretful postscript: “When . . . I undertook my study of Marcel Duchamp, I thought there would be plenty of room for humor. But now that, for better or worse, the book has taken shape, I find that this problem has scarcely been touched upon.”1 Much the same might be said now of half a century of assiduous and dedicated critical analysis, most of which pays some kind of lip service to Duchamp’s humor before becoming far more seriously entangled in alchemy, modern science, or institutional critique.
Introduction
Authors: Cabezón José Ignacio
Published: November 2023

Look around almost anywhere you find yourself in the greater Tibetan cultural world—in Tibet, certainly, but also in Bhutan, Mongolia, and the Nepalese Himalayas—and you see ritual. If you live near a monastery, chances are that you will awaken to the sound of a gong calling monks to their morning prayer-assembly or tsog (tshogs). Even if you live far from a monastery, you may well be roused from sleep by the high-pitched clanging of someone ringing a ritual bell, or by the soft murmur of neighbors reciting khandön (kha ‘don), their daily ritual commitments.
Written Texts at the Juncture of the Local and the Global :Some Anthropological Considerations on a Local Corpus of Tantric Ritual Manuals (Lower Mustang, Nepal)
Authors: sihlé Nicolas
Published: November 2023

Anthropologists of complex, literate religious traditions have rarely succeeded at properly integrating local corpora of written religious texts (canonical scriptures, ritual manuals, etc.) into their ethnographically based analyses. The reasons for this are probably multiple. Messick has suggested that the exclusion of written texts is “virtually an organizing principle” in the disciplinary history of the social sciences.In the particular case of Islam, Bowen has noted that Islamic rituals have been shaped to “local cultural concerns and . . . universalistic scriptural imperatives”; as such, they “fit comfortably neither in an ethnographic discourse of bounded cultural wholes nor in an Islamicist discourse of a scripture-based normative Islam.”There would thus seem to be some inherent lack of fit between written religious texts as objects of study and (at least traditional) understandings of anthropological practices and concerns.
Representations of Efficacy: The Ritual Expulsion of Mongol Armies in the Consolidation and Expansion of the Tsang (Gtsang) Dynasty
Authors: Gentry James
Published: November 2023

Most Tibetan Buddhist ritual is premised on the intimate contiguity between persons, landscapes, and hosts of landscape spirits of all kinds.Such contiguity assumes that human bodies, habitations, and settlements are impinged upon by the nonhuman forces that surround and inhabit them. Safeguarding the health and integrity of the corporate entities of human body, household, and community from the threats posed by contact with the capricious spirit world thus constitutes a major preoccupation for Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialists. Clergy have at their disposal a repertoire of ritual treatments to subjugate these threatening presences, exorcise them from the precincts of body, home, or territory, and restore internal health and cohesion.
The “Calf ‘s Nipple” (Be’u bum) of Ju Mipam (‘Ju Mi pham):A Handbook of Tibetan Ritual Magic
Authors: Cuevas Bryan J
Published: November 2023

Throughout the centuries there has been enduring anxiety among Tibetans about certain types of Buddhist practices and the books that describe them. These are the guarded secrets of Tibetan Buddhism, Tibet’s occult lore. One major category of such literature in Tibet, and one that has yet to attract much scholarly attention beyond a few footnotes, is the be’u bum. This peculiar Tibetan term means “calf ‘s nipple” and implies something that nourishes, something good for maintaining life and health. As a label for a type of text, the term seems to be rather old, dating back to at least the eleventh century, but probably much earlier. Per Sørensen has argued that the term be’u bum may actually be a corruption, perhaps through homophonic error, of pe bum (dpe ‘bum) or “collection of exempla, parables” serving the purposes of edification, instruction, and exhortation.In this light, some have even suggested that the genre label may be an early
The Bibliography
Authors: de J R , Jackson J
Published: November 2023

Abdy, Maria, Mrs John (51797—1867), see also Collections 47, 48 Born in London. Her father, Richard Smith, was a solicitor, and her mother was a sister of the satirical poets Horace and James Smith. She married the Revd John Channing Abdy, Rector of St John’s, Southwark. She was a contributor to the New Monthly Magazine, the Metropolitan Magazine, and to various annuals. Between 1830 and 1862 eight collections of her poems were printed for private circulation.
The Playwright’s Share in Hamlet
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

Practising what was preached in the previous chapter, this chapter will first approach Hamlet through its most reliable sources of guidance as to the playwright’s presence: it will analyse in order the play’s plot, its choreography, and its large patterns of speech. In the light of these findings, it will then consider some of the more debatable aspects of its dramaturgy: its characters and themes. Its conclusion will explore the implications of this analysis for an understanding of the play’s theatre-poetry.
The Role of Othello
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

From the very outset, the role of Othello is an enormously demanding one. Its performer must not only render his character’s struggles with an alien world (he is the Moor of Venice) but meet extraordinary challenges within the workings of the performance¬ ensemble.
Audience-Response: Macbeth
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

What Tis the role of the audience within the performance-ensemble? The subject has received little attention. Most previous comment has focused on reader-response. Audience-response is more complicated because in performance the audience’s relation with the author’s work is not direct but necessarily mediated by performers and because a member of the audience responds not only as an individual but as part of a group. These complications need to be kept in mind and deserve future study. None the less, a start can be made now towards understanding the relation between Shakespeare and his audience. For he does have a distinguishable though indirect share in the impact of one of his plays when it is performed. With the aid of the printed text and by making due allowance for the latitudes Shakespeare grants his interpreters, one can say roughly what the playwright’s share is for a given play and discuss the responses it is likely to produce in an audience.
Shakespeare’s Theatre-Poetry: Some Conclusions
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

However inclusive it may aspire to be, every address to Shakespeare’s text, whether on-stage or off, ends as a study in fractions, and this book is no exception. My method has been to look in an analytical way at the workings of the implied performance-ensemble and especially at how Shakespeare the theatre-poet relates to participants in it. I have deliberately emphasized variety in my choice of plays, seeking the most salient examples of the feature under analysis, with an eye as well to adding something fresh to the body of commentary on the play concerned.
Just Representations Of General Nature
Authors: Parker G F
Published: November 2023

IN a course of lectures on aesthetics which he gave in 1801, A. W. Schlegel applied a withering common sense to the notion that the imitation of nature could properly be said to be the aim of art: As Nature is already present and available, it's a little hard to understand why one should go to the trouble of bringing a second precisely similar version of it into being as art . . .
Johnson And Tragedy
Authors: Parker G F
Published: November 2023

There are two different kinds of comment made by Johnson that could be thought to bear on the subject of tragedy in Shakespeare; these are sometimes run together as though they belonged to the same line of thought, but it is essential to distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand, there are some half-dozen notes on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth that express feelings of intense strain, shock, and dismay: these notes raise questions at the very heart of Shakespearean tragedy. On the other, there are Johnson’s notorious generalizations in the Preface:
A Critical Colloquy: Conrad of Hirsau
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070-c. 1150?) is supposed to have been a schoolmaster in the Benedictine abbey of SS Peter and Paul at Hirsau, in the Black Forest of Germany. In addition to his Dialogue on the Authors, from which selections are translated below, he has been credited with several other works, including Dialogus de mundi contemptu vel amore and a Speculum virginum. The Dialogue on the Authors has resisted efforts at exact dating. Its editor, R. B. C. Huygens, regards it as having been produced late in Conrad’s life, mainly because the surviving manuscripts have a number of errors and gaps which, in his judgement, indicate a penultimate draft; it might even be his final work, left slightly incomplete at the time of his death. But, as L. G. Whitbread has pointed out, ‘faults in later copies may well be due to circumstances other than the author’s age or demise’.3 The single incontrovertible fact about the work’s genesis seems to be that it often makes use of Bernard of Utrecht’s commentary on Theodulus, which was written between 10’]6 and 1099. Three parallels with Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon (c.1127) are inconclusive and may simply reflect a common training in the artes. In sum, as Whitbread concludes, ‘a very provisional dating within the period c.1100-50 is all that the evidence seems to warrant’. The suniving text of the Dialogue is certainly far from perfect. Some of its errors and omissions are of a kind which are difficult to explain by reference to the vagaries of manuscript transmission. There are several passages of misunderstood or garbled information which would have annoyed a more careful grammarian (to view the matter in the light of medieval standards of competence). But Conrad’s overall plan is quite clear and rather impressive. The work falls into three sections, beginning with the ‘necessary preliminaries to reading the authors’, that is, basic definitions of literary terms (like book, prose, rhythmus, metre, and so forth). Here Conrad follows Bernard of Utrecht, who had drawn on Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae either directly or through some medieval intermediary.
Scriptural Science and Signification: From Alexander’s Sum of Theology to Nicholas of Lyre
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

From the thirteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, Aristotle was ‘the Philosopher’. The stimulus provided by his libri naturales and other recently recovered works can hardly be exaggerated. He caused medieval academics to reconsider long-established definitions of and methods in all the arts and sciences, and to analyse as never before their relationship with the queen of the sciences, theology. The implications for the commentary tradition were considerable. Aristotelian theory of causality encouraged exegetes to adopt a new type of prologue organized around the four main causes described by ‘the Philosopher’, an approach which encouraged new attitudes to such matters as authorship and authority, and literary style and structure. Aristotelian epistemology gave the human faculties and human perception a new dignity; late medieval scholars afforded the ‘body’ of Scripture, its literal sense, a corresponding dignity. A new semantics emerged. Meaning was no longer believed (as in twelfth-century exegesis) to have been hidden by God deep in the biblical text; rather it was expressed in the literal sense by the human authors of Scripture, each in his own way or ways. The allegorists’ obsession with auctoritas at the expense of the particular auctor receded to reveal divinely inspired yet supremely human beings who possessed their own literary and moral purposes and problems, their sins and their styles.
Placing the Poetics: Hermann the German; An Anonymous Question on the Nature of Poetry
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

When Aristotle came to the West he did not travel alone: he had many companions, the most important being Averroes (lbn Rushd) of Cordova in Islamic Spain, who lived from 1126 until 1198. This Arab scholar became known simply as ‘the Commentator’ on the Philosopher; The consequence of greatest concern to historians of literary theory and criticism is the fact that it was Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics which dominated the scholarship on that text for over four centuries-until, according to 0. B. Hardison, the study published by Ludovico Castelvetro in 1570. The form in which Averroes’ main exposition of that work, the so-called ‘Middle Commentary’ on the Poetics, was best known was in the Latin translation made in 1256 by Hermann the German, a monk living in Toledo.3
The Transformation of Critical Tradition: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

An attempt to describe in detail the debt of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francis Petrarch (1304-74), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), to medieval literary theory, and the extent to which they transformed traditional doctrines, would require a book in itself. The present chapter, which is of necessity highly selective, offers extracts from Dante’s Convivio (written between 1307 and 1319), Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters (written mainly bewteen 1325 and 1366) and Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gentile Gods (between 1350 and 1374). Since the attribution to Dante of the commentary-section of the Epistle to Can Grande de/la Scala is hotly disputed, and it may well not be tiles poet’s own work, tiles appears in Ch. X, as do our extracts from Boccaccio’s Short Treatise in Praise of Dante and his commentary on the Divine Comedy, because they very obviously fall within the category of ‘assessments of title new author’, Dante being regarded by many as a new actor as well as the great ‘new poet’. The Divine Comedy itself (which was written between 1314 and 1321) is believed to have established Dante as ‘one of the few poets who belong to all times and all nations’, but it is also very much a product of Dante’s own time and place, and especially of the main intellectual movement of the day, namely scholasticism.
Assessing the New Author: Commentary on Dante
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

The success of Dante’s Comedy was immediate and all-pervasive: only the Bible was read or recited from with greater frequency in fourteenth-century ltaly. The poem’s popularity brought with it, at all levels of society, a great eagerness for explanation, for clarification, and for more detail on specific episodes: a demand, in short, for commentary. In this final section we shall see how the critical resources developed over several centuries of commentary on biblical and classical authors were put to work on the great text of the ‘new author’, Dante Alighieri. Before concentrating upon Dante commentary proper we should note that this learned tradition represents just one aspect of the Comedy’s fourteenth century reception. This greater literary history may be considered at three levels: popular writing; learned poetry; learned commentary. The Comedy is full of good stories: many of these were plucked from their original context and elaborated in a series of popular forms. Learned and semi-educated poets alike were eager to try out the new verse form, terza rima. The efforts of learned poets to develop and extend the enterprise of the Comedy throughout the fourteenth century form instructive parallels with the interpretative efforts of commentators.