bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Or, a diversionary voyage to New South Wales
Authors: Wilson Kathleen
Published: January 2008

Scholars from Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown to Mita Choudhury and Joseph Roach have documented the complex ways that eighteenth-century drama reflected and intervened in Britain's overseas expansion and materialized its transoceanic flows. But what do we do with plays that, although performed wherever the British dared to tread, were not "about" empire in any sense? This essay will explore the global fate and meanings of one such play, Nicholas Rowe's Fair Penitent, tracking its performance from England to Jamaica, Calcutta and New South Wales. In these colonial sites, the theatricality of colonial power, the counter-theatre of the enslaved, the indigenous and the incarcerated, and the performativity of English theatre, converged to make Rowe's she-tragedy a remarkable index of local power struggles and a contested carrier of the values of Englishness itself. One could say that this study demonstrates an early example of the working of the "capitalist machine" of empire, whereby English theatre and social performance collided to "deterritorialize" foreign lands in order to "reterritorialize" them as British possessions. Or one could say more simply that the global fate of Rowe's distinctly unrepentant heroine eloquently exemplifies how culture travels, and how it is transformed.
Reuniting the World: The Pacific in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes
Authors: Jimack Peter , Mander Jenny
Published: January 2008

At first sight, the Pacific Ocean seems to be almost ignored in Raynal's discussion of European explorations and settlements in the East and West Indies. But despite his condemnation of the harm done by Europeans, the predominant message of his work is positive, evoking the material and cultural benefits that will flow from communication and unhindered commerce between peoples. In fact, the Pacific is implicitly ever-present as the crucial link that will complete the circle of the world's trade. Realization of its potential has been obstructed hitherto by the weakness and misguided policies of the Spanish; extraordinary men of energy such as Cook are needed to overcome such obstacles.
Shifting Edenic Codes: On Two Exotic Visions of the Golden Age in the Late Eighteenth Century
Authors: Kapor Vladimir
Published: January 2008

The topos of Edenic far-flung islands seems a self-explanatory cliché rooted in contemporary popular mythology. However, the archaeology of its origins across eighteenth-century travel writing reveals the existence of two strongly contrasted models of the exotic golden age: the eroticized social utopia depicted in Bougainville's account of Tahiti and the chaste exotic pastoral world which provides the backdrop to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. By revisiting these two seminal texts and their legacy, this article strives to account for the drift or derivation of Edenic codes from the eighteenth century onwards, while sketching the unsuspected lineage that links the two image-generating models to modern exoticism.
Listening to Others: Eighteenth-Century Encounters in Polynesia and Their Reception in German Musical Thought
Authors: Agnew Vanessa
Published: January 2008

The article observes two shifts in Enlightenment ideas about the power of music. First, although neo-Platonist thought declined in significance towards the end of the eighteenth century, ideas about musical agency continued to be espoused about non-Europeans. Second, music came to be seen as a potentially dangerous rather than ameliorative force. Focusing on European encounters with Polynesia during the Cook voyages, the article partially attributes these shifts to scholars' increased engagement with non-European music and the challenges posed to aesthetics by the cross-cultural encounter. The article argues that the performative use of music gave rise to new ethnomusicological insights yet also exposed the susceptibility of Europeans to the instrumental effects of non-European music. German scholars responded by minimizing the sophistication and emotional content of Polynesian music, a gesture that would be preserved in nineteenth-century musicological thought.
Performance Anxieties: Grief and Theatre in European Writing on Tahiti
Authors: Smith Vanessa
Published: January 2008

This essay investigates a prevalent skepticism about the veracity of Oceanic sentiments, evident in accounts of early contact in Tahiti. It places this skepticism in the context of broader philosophical concerns about the capacity of individuals to evaluate the emotions of others as genuine or false. It focuses on Tahitian mourning, which incorporates an element of excess, including practices of self-mutilation, whose ethical value must be negotiated within European accounts. Adducing the insights of eighteenth-century performance theory, the essay argues that the dismissal of such practices as false theatrics involves a justification of comparative European reserve that chimes with contemporary philosophical writing on the emotions, in seeking to invest performativity with suspicion.
An Officer and a Diplomat? The Ambiguous Position of Philip R. Faymonville and United States–Soviet Relations, 1941-1943
Authors: Glantz Mary E
Published: January 2008

Colonel Philip Faymonville (U.S. Army) played a significant and controversial role in United States–Soviet relations in the 1930s and 1940s. The first U.S. military attaché to the Soviet Union, Faymonville provided dispassionate, accurate assessments of the Red Army's military worth. Yet he earned the enduring hostility of his military and diplomatic colleagues. During World War II, Faymonville returned to Moscow as lend-lease expediter. He reported directly to the White House, and worked independently from the military attaché and the Embassy, solidifying his position as an outsider and raising questions about the role of military officers in the conduct of diplomacy.
Recovering the Korean War Dead, 1950–1958: Graves Registration, Forensic Anthropology, and Wartime Memorialization
Authors: Coleman Bradley Lynn
Published: January 2008

During the Korean War, the American Graves Registration Service, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, developed an innovative system to recover, identify, and repatriate deceased U.S. servicemen. In doing so, the U.S. armed forces returned their dead to the United States during major combat operations for the first time in military history. This article describes and analyzes the handling of the Korean War dead. It concludes that the wartime program exemplified the country's adaptation to limited war during a time of prosperous insecurity.
Defining Military Culture
Authors: Wilson Peter H. (Peter Hamish)
Published: January 2008

This article outlines a conceptual framework to analyse the norms and values influencing the behaviour of soldiers in the past. It will argue that military culture is a specific form of institutional culture and that viewing armies from this perspective offers new insight into how they functioned and the nature of their interaction with state and society. It also addresses definitions of militarism, arguing that these generally blur distinctions between cultural and material factors. By disassociating military culture from particular forms of rule or modes of production, it can be studied in societies where it has been forgotten or hidden in the historical memory.
"The Powers of the Heavens Shall Eat of My Smoke": The Significance of Scalping in Pawnee Warfare
Authors: Logt Mark van de
Published: January 2008

This study examines the cultural significance of scalping among the Pawnee Indians. Pawnee warriors took scalps to obtain spiritual power. When sacrificed in a special ceremony, scalps ensured the vitality and well-being of the Pawnee people. Sacrificing scalps also raised the status of men in Pawnee society and improved their prospects for marriage. Scalps were also taken to avenge the killing of tribal members by enemies, to strengthen diplomatic ties, or to end the mourning period of people who had lost a friend or relative. The quest for scalps could be a reason to launch military expeditions.
The Great War and China's Military Expedition Plan
Authors: Xu Guoqi
Published: January 2008

This article examines the long-ignored issue of China's plan to send military expeditionary forces to Europe during the First World War. Based on sources from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, the article uses an international history approach to address the following questions: why China was interested in the war, why China tried so hard to join the war, why its military expedition plan did not materialize, and what kind of role China played in the so-called Great War. The article argues that the First World War is an important chapter in the history of modern China and of China's internationalization.
The Failure of Abercromby's Attack on Fort Carillon, July 1758, and the Scapegoating of Matthew Clerk
Authors: Kingsley Ronald F , Alexander Harvey J
Published: January 2008

The unsuccessful attack by a massive British army against the French position at Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga) on July 8, 1758 came as a shock to the British Empire. The failure of the attack has been attributed to a range of causes. The most prominent among them has been the accusation that an over-optimistic report on the French defenses made by a young engineer, Matthew Clerk, was the reason for an unsuccessful frontal attack. While many historians place the blame for the defeat on general mismanagement of the British army by the expedition's commander, General James Abercromby, few have disputed the general's claim that Clerk deserves a large share of the blame. Evidence from letters and other documents associated with the engineer serves to clarify a complex and confusing episode in the history of the French and Indian War.
How Culture and Science Make Race "Genetic": Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous
Authors: Condit Celeste Michelle
Published: January 2008

Scientists, medical personnel, and others have recently re-asserted the equivalence of human genetic variation and social categories of "race". This essay identifies strong cultural and scientific motives for creating, defending, and deploying that equivalence. However, the essay employs visual depictions of human genetic variation and critical analysis of scientific and lay vocabularies to show that human genetic variation has a complex structure that cannot be directly fit into a simple category set of race terms. The essay suggests that efforts to equate patterns of human genetic variation and social terms for "race" rely on the rhetorical strategies of casuistic stretching and the deployment of a mediating term through a two-step argumentative structure. The essay closes by discussing the difficulties involved in implementing social policies based on this procrustean category system, utilizing the case of the "race-based" heart disease drug Bi-Dil.
Artistic Simulacra in the Age of Recombinant Bodies
Authors: Murray Timothy
Published: January 2008

Abstract: Enveloped in the rhetoric of a brave new world of genomic application, surrounded by a culture enlivened by hopeful medical breakthroughs, and awash in media rumors of secret stock trades and biotech deals, a groundswell of artistic activity has been inhabiting the interface of technology and culture, biology and body, algorithmic computing and artistic creation for almost two decades. Of particular cultural and artistic importance is the combination of interdisciplinary research and creative production brought about by the arrival of The Human Genome Project. Employing concepts articulated by Walter Benjamin, most notably "artistic simulacra," this essay considers the range and cultural stakes of artworks, exhibitions, and catalogues that dialogue with the Human Genome Project, as well as the cultural stakes of such artistic experimentation. It demonstrates how projects in digital and technological art have articulated with prophetic forcefulness the complex sociocultural challenges facing humanists in an increasingly corporatized intellectual and political culture.
The Big Bad Wolf: Masculinity and Genetics in Popular Culture
Authors: Schell Heather
Published: January 2008

This essay examines the role of evolutionary psychology in shaping the popular understanding of genetics and human behavior. Evolutionary psychology draws heavily on comparisons to other social mammals to speculate on the underlying biological bases of human social behavior. Although the discipline's relationship to genetic science is tangential, evolutionary psychology has heavily influenced popular ideas of genetics. We can see this best in depictions of wolves and men, most specifically in examples that embody both: the alpha male and the werewolf. Tracking this wolf-man through multiple genres—from werewolf films to dog-training manuals and supernatural romances—reveals a dramatic shift over the past several decades in the understanding of predatory male behavior: what once was seen as villainous has become sexy. Genes have been marshaled as a justification for embracing predatory sexuality and ruthless competition as a model of healthy, attractive masculinity.
Editor's Afterword: Private Bodies/Public Texts: Literature, Science, and States of Surveillance
Authors: Holloway Karla F. C.
Published: January 2008

This essay offers a literary history relevant to contemporary methods of surveillance attached to genetic identities. It reads Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson into emergent juridical and scientific panics regarding identity and indicates how our nation's obsessive regard of race has provoked science-based public policies that are designed to protect and maintain an identifiable whiteness. The construction of DNA databanks at the historically black Howard University, the isolate prison populations in Guantanamo, and those immigrant and native populations subject to nouveau biologic forms of state scrutiny reify the historic interests of US culture in the discernment and targeting of the racialized other in the midst of the US populace. Science and the law have historically cooperated in these identitarian projects, and the fact of our national fiction, like Twain's novella, is evidence of this preoccupation.
The Poetics of Life: Luther Burbank, Horticultural Novelties, and the Spaces of Heredity
Authors: Thurtle Phillip
Published: January 2008

This paper studies the hybridization practices of plant breeder Luther Burbank in order to better understand how the gene theory of heredity emerged from late nineteenth and early twentieth century spatial practices. Although Burbank bred plants that could fit the consumption habits of an industrialized America, he never adopted the informational practices useful to industry, such as standardized forms or numerical record keeping. Consequently, Burbank's hybridizations brought forth lives built on and intended to exploit new industrial spaces but Burbank never saw the incentives for describing these lives in terms genes, a language made possible by the spaces of the distribution of large amounts of manufactured goods.
The Devil in Our DNA: A Brief History of Eugenics in Science Fiction Films
Authors: Kirby David A
Published: January 2008

The persistence of eugenic themes in cinema over the last 100 years reflects fundamental societal beliefs about heredity's role as the source of social problems. From its earliest days science fiction cinema's critiques of eugenics were not aimed at the movement's underlying assumptions that humanity's fundamental nature lies within its genome and its relationship to social problems. Most science fiction films either implicitly accept these assumptions or incorporate them into their narratives and visuals. At the same time, however, these films criticize anyone who would change human heredity. By accepting the proposition that the essence of humanity, both the good and the bad, is deeply rooted within our genome, science fiction films take a conservative stance by critiquing any attempts to change the elements that make us "human."
Open-Ended Stories: Extinction Narratives in Genome Time
Authors: Turner Stephanie S
Published: January 2008

As a mode of narrative, scientific accounts of extinction trace the decline of species into total loss. With anthropogenic extinction, the narrative of loss becomes an apocalyptic mode of expression: extinction, the endpoint in the drama of threatened and endangered species, resists representation in both popular science writing and fiction. This paper examines how techniques of genetic science and assisted reproduction, such as DNA extraction from recently extinct animals and cross-species surrogacy in backbreeding, work within and against the apocalyptic mode of expression in extinction accounts. Hypothetical and fictional scenarios of recuperating extinction through these techniques reflect the bodiless, multi-medial viability of DNA. Developing Jay Clayton's notion of "genome time," the sense of a "perpetual present" created by the infinite mutability of the DNA molecule, I examine woolly mammoth and thylacine recuperation efforts to show how such projects revise evolutionary narratives to fulfill cultural imperatives.
Culturing the Pleebland: The Idea of the "Public" In Genetic Art
Authors: Lynch Lisa
Published: January 2008

This essay explores the relationship between genetic art — art incorporating material from genetic research — and the construction of a public sphere of debate about genetic research. First considering an exhibit titled Paradise Now that toured in 2000, the author then turns to Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny project and finally to the work of Steve Kurtz, an artist who has been trying since 2004 to untangle himself from an FBI investigation associated with his work on transgenic organisms and biotoxins. While the Paradise Now exhibit and Katz's work show the fault lines between the didactic aspirations of much genetic artwork and the reality of its reception; Kurtz's case has revealed a perhaps more troubling disjunction — between the artist's notion of the "public" as participant and spectator and the US government's notion of the "public" as a group of citizens that need to be protected from the hazards of experimental art.
Flora, Not Fauna: GM Culture and Agriculture
Authors: McHugh Susan, Ph. D
Published: January 2008

Even narratives critical of new economic structures of globalization have come to focus on animals, often rare, genetically modified (GM) animals, in a world in which every year markets for GM plants and plant products grow astronomically, a propensity signaled by the adoption of the Monarch butterfly as a symbol of the anti-genetic-modification movement. This adoption suggests a broad representational problem: why do animals (and not plants) loom large in the transgenic imaginary while plants (and not animals) become the medium of daily encounters with transgenic organisms? This article explores this complex dynamic through the interconnected stories of GM potatoes, people, and insects in Ruth Ozeki's novel All Over Creation (2003), which closely follows the commercial introduction and unprecedented, rapid recall of the first bioengineered crop plant to be marketed. Although at key moments the novel invokes animal stories that limit the terms of GM debates, its structure significantly models the nonhierarchical, nonlinear relationships that distinguish the unfolding histories of genomic science and plant fictions alike, thereby indicating at least one way in which literary representations might revolutionize public discussion.
Racial Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in a Biotechnological Age
Authors: Weinbaum Alys Eve
Published: January 2008

In recent years humanists, scientists, and the press have argued that race is no longer a meaningful concept. Alongside evidence that there is no gene for race, we hear the mantra that genomics leads us "beyond race." Indeed assertion of the non-existence of race comprises what may be dubbed the "post-racial" consensus. And yet, when people purchase genetic materials for reproductive use (artificial insemination, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization), participate in recreational genealogy, or practice race-based medicine, they routinely proceed as if genetic race is of paramount import. The concept of "racial aura" describes the paradoxical status of race in contemporary culture. It is also a concept, built on ideas formulated by Walter Benjamin during the rise of Nazi eugenics, which powerfully describes contemporary visual art. Such art simultaneously meditates on the purported "end of race" and on race's persistent reanimation in everyday life. In this way such art teaches viewers about the vexed concept of race in our biotechnological age.
Sacrifice, Individuation, and the Economies of Genomics
Authors: Mitchell Robert
Published: January 2008

Even as the biotechnological and genomic revolutions have promised spectacular life-saving and life-extending drugs and therapies, social and cultural critics have highlighted injustices associated with contemporary systems of biocommerce, often drawing on concepts of "sacrifice" and "savagery" to highlight social and class inequities. While sympathetic to these critiques, Mitchell argues that the concept of sacrifice is a problematic means for addressing these inequities, for it binds critics to the Enlightenment logic of the systems of biocommerce that they question. After outlining the sacrificial logic of "innovation" that runs through public policy defenses of biocommerce, Mitchell turns to two cinematic depictions of biocommerce (Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) and Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil (2002)), as well as to philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon's concept of "individuation," to argue that these films outline an approach to biomedical innovation that allows us to think injustice beyond concepts of sacrifice.
Beyond the Religious and the Secular in the History of the Novel
Authors: Seidel Kevin
Published: January 2008

Making the relationship between the religious and the secular a special object of inquiry represents less a new way of thinking about the role of religion in literary studies, as Michael W. Kaufmann contends, than a return to the status quo. This essay articulates that status quo by examining recent work on the history of the novel in English in light of Vincent Pecora's book Secularization and Cultural Criticism. Next, it contrasts Pecora's approach to Talal Asad's in Formations of the Secular. Finally, the essay briefly describes some of the terrain between the religious and the secular in the novel that Asad leaves unexplored in his criticism.
"The Secular" as Opposed to What?
Authors: Fessenden Tracy
Published: January 2008

For all its unfashionable teleological inevitability, its brash aspirations to universality, the story of advancing secularization remains the one progress narrative to which professional literary study typically attaches its own discourses and aims. Michael Kaufmann urges literary scholars to bring critical scrutiny to bear on the ostensibly closed (if embattled) narrative of secularization in the interest of revisiting normative assumptions that have shaped and constrained the development of professional identity. Underscoring Kaufmann's call, Fessenden looks beyond the institutional grounding of literary studies to consider broader political consequences of leaving the religion/secular binary unexamined and undisturbed. In particular, she notes the problematic deference religion receives when its relation to the secular is mapped onto a familiar liberal model of private and public domains.
The Narrative Interactions of Silent Spring : Bridging Literary Criticism and Ecocriticism
Authors: Foote Bonnie
Published: January 2008

How do narratives work in the world? How can literary criticism characterize their full life-cycles and effects? This article suggests a model of narrative interaction to account for the intricacies and power of narratives, from background and composition to ultimate impacts. It applies the model of narrative interaction to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a landmark narrative which has incorrectly been dismissed from literary criticism's purview, and to ecocriticism, the activist critical practice which has taken Silent Spring for its own. In so doing the article shows how literary criticism can re-conceptualize and expand its own field of inquiry.
Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)
Authors: Bruns Gerald L
Published: January 2008

This essay is an attempt to elucidate the concept of "becoming-animal" that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari develop in a number of their writings. Basically "becoming-animal" is a movement in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability but rather is folded into a nomadic mode of existence in which one is always an anomaly, that is, inaccessible to any form of definition. It is a movement from body to flesh, where the one is a figure of unity and strength, while the other is in an interminable state of disarticulation or disfigurement, as in many of Francis Bacon's paintings of faceless heads. It is not animal metamorphosis but an achievement of non-identity, which for Deleuze and Guattari is the condition of freedom (for animals as well as for the rest of us, whoever we are).
The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession
Authors: Kaufmann Michael W.
Published: January 2008

Histories of the discipline of literary studies have long relied on a narrative of secularization that traces the gradual transformation of a profession that was once more religious into one that is now largely secular. Recent work in a number of different disciplines has revised and challenged the basic assumptions behind secularization narratives, in part by complicating our understanding of the processes by which the categories "religious" and "secular" are constructed and differentiated. This essay begins with an account of some of this recent work, primarily from cultural anthropology and religious studies. In light of these theories, the essay then examines how various attempts to differentiate the religious and the secular have shaped disciplinary boundaries and identities as manifested in histories of the profession. To indicate how an account of these continued acts of differentiation is central to an understanding of professional history and identity, and to literary critical practice, the essay concludes with a brief look at some recent work in literary studies that has moved away from reliance on a straightforward narrative of secularization, and has instead re-instated questions about the on-going relationship between the religious and the secular.
Henry Mackenzie's Ruined Feelings: Romance, Race, and the Afterlife of Sentimental Exchange
Authors: Lilley James D. (James David)
Published: January 2008

Scholars often read the sentimental romance as a democratizing genre in which marginalized subjects, excluded by their gender or race, can make their feelings and voices heard in the public sphere. Lilley's essay complicates this approach by identifying mutual aesthetic processes of inclusion and exception that enable these feelings to be collected by the sentimental community. He argues that while Mackenzie's work promotes the public principles of sympathy and affection, it also mourns the ruin of utterly private feeling that such publicity entails. Rather than simply championing liberal ideas of freedom, charity, and public equality, the sentimental romance secretly longs for the prestige of singular and private differences that have been ruined by, and excluded from, this new political community and its concepts of universal feelings and rights. By examining how this erotics of private ruin fragments heterosexual desire and stains the body with the fateful force of race, Lilley shows how the aesthetics of sentimental romance inflects the formal structure of our modern systems of identity and belonging.
"The Language of Tenderness and of Passion" or The Place of Sex in Paradise: A Response to Gavin Miller
Authors: Camden Vera J
Published: January 2008

My response to Gavin Miller's excoriation of contemporary theory's "taboo on tenderness" applauds the critique he is offering of the stultifying effects of theory on the language of literary criticism, while at the same time demurring that a "taboo on sexuality" unfortunately exists in the relational psychoanalytic movement he celebrates in this paper. Drawing on recent reevaluations of Freud's "drive theory" in light of his own biographical conflicts around what he called the "oceanic feeling" of infantile merger, I review how the relational movement in contemporary clinical psychoanalysis came about through a charting of the mother/infant dyad largely avoided in Freud's theories. My concern expressed in this response is that relational psychoanalysis itself has turned away from a full encounter with the drives and with sexuality in its efforts to idealize and theorize "baby love." Noticing an ironic parallel in Miller's own paper as he tends to idealize Ian Suttie's view of love while perhaps avoiding the importance of sexual passion, I take up Sandor Ferenczi's ur-text, "Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion" to reflect upon the place of sex and love in psychoanalysis. I finally turn to poet John Milton's pre-lapsarian language of "Paradise Lost" to offer a modest resolution of this tension between the discourse of tenderness and desire.
What Is the Matter? Or, What Literary Theory Neither Hears nor Sees
Authors: Mandell Laura
Published: January 2008

Concerned with the relationship between sound and images on the printed page, this essay analyzes two poems by William Wordsworth, connecting their cognitive operations to the changes in print technology that affected reading practices of the time. I show in Wordsworth's lyrics a shift in the stimulus that he deploys to evoke sound. The process of code-reading afforded by computers and software reveals Wordsworth's practice of making sounds for the eye, a practice that has been virtually invisible to close-reading and high theory, as a material substrate capable of generating lyric subjectivity.
A Wall of Ideas: The "Taboo on Tenderness" in Theory and Culture
Authors: Miller Gavin
Published: January 2008

The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment. Developmental psychology, however, has demonstrated that infants are social agents, rather than selfish narcissists. Psychoanalytic theory of culture must therefore recognise the masculine "taboo on tenderness" which underlies its own early formulations, and which is apparent in a diverse range of cultural phenomena—from the eighteenth-century revolt against sensibility, to the commodification of sentiment, and the contemporary sexualisation of both love and touch.
"Like a dog. . . like a lamb": Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Kafka and Coetzee
Authors: Danta Chris
Published: January 2008

Beginning with Franz Kafka's astonishing claim to Max Brod that the writer is the "scapegoat of mankind," this article discusses the treatment of the biblical figure of the scapegoat in Kafka's story "A Report to an Academy" and Coetzee's two novels, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. Through a comparison of these works, I argue that the reader's/character's/author's identification with the figure of the sacrificial animal constitutes a primal scene of narrative in the work of both Kafka and Coetzee.
Connecting Rooms: Entering "Father's Bedroom" in Robert Lowell's Life Studies
Authors: Kearful Frank
Published: January 2008

With a novelist's attention to significant detail, in Life Studies Robert Lowell depicts a suite of connecting rooms in which generations of Lowells and Winslows enact their roles in a cultural narrative of the decline and fall of two of New England's leading families. This paper focuses on three of those rooms – a dining room, a bedroom, and a ship's cabin – and on how Lowell connects family history and cultural history through use of significant detail evoking Asian associations. Additional rooms, ranging from the prototypical Beacon Hill living room of the Boston Brahmins, to fictional rooms in New England crime novels, to an attic room in Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, are also glanced at on the way to "Father's Bedroom" in Life Studies. By way of historical prologue to the cultural narrative inscribed in those rooms, the paper begins with a brief account of the origins of New England Orientalism in the China trade and the opening of Japan, before closely examining how Lowell tellingly integrates allusions to the China trade and New England Orientalism in "Fourth of July in Maine" and "Soft Wood," where they link New England's past and present, and are assimilated into a broad cultural critique. The detached, ironic rhetorical stance Lowell adopts as New England historian and cultural critic is less distanced, more complex in Life Studies, where he engages with a central personal theme, his problematic relationship with his father.
Dialogue and Authoritativeness in "We" Fictional Narratives: A Bakhtinian Approach
Authors: Marcus Amit
Published: January 2008

The essay addresses /-/- in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel /-/- the link between authority, ideology, and formal features of discourse in "we" fictional narratives. It presents three main types of relationships between the individual "I" narratives and the "we" group to which he or she belongs as well as between the "we" group and "other" (often hostile) groups. These types differ in the group's stability and cohesion, the possibilities of transition from this group to another community, and the importance of the role attributed to the individual (or to a particular individual) and to other groups in constructing, sustaining, and (re)shaping the identity of the "we." These patterns of relationship suggest that not only can "we" fictional narratives be dialogical but also that they often challenge the norms and values uncritically accepted by the group and subvert the authority of their communal-voice narrator(s). Especially notable in this context are "we" fictional narratives in which the main conflict is instigated by an outsider, who is neither a full member of the group nor a member of a rival group and whose "disorienting discourse" undermines the hegemonic discourse. These types of disagreement, which demonstrate the centrifugal forces of the story, are evidence of the fragility of the group and of its tendency to disintegrate, unless these forces are balanced by the centralizing, centrifugal ones. First-person-plural narration is as much a force of disintegration, discord, and instability as of unison, concord, and stability
Taina Naita. Narrative Stance in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Authors: Barabtarlo Gennady
Published: January 2008

The paper discusses Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first English experiment in constructing a model of a possible metaphysical contact between the world of human consciousness and a mysterious dimension beyond it. Nabokov's almost invariable principles of composition make the narrative stance of the novel open to various interpretations; the paper argues in favor of the version in which the title character's secret (Russ. Taina Naita) is his calculated absence from the book of which he appears to be the biographical subject. The Appendix presents some results of archival study of the novel's extant manuscripts.
A "World of Nothing, but Pure Wit": Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Imaginary
Authors: Mascetti Yaakov
Published: January 2008

This paper delineates the early-modern re-conception of gender categories in the work of Margaret Cavendish, and her opposition of imagination and wit to the disenchanted reality produced by male thinkers of her time. Conceptions of "knowledge" and "truth" changed significantly during the first six decades of the seventeenth century, fashioning contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Against the background of the rise of modern science, within a system of epistemic hegemony synonymous with male strength and social superiority, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, initiated a tacit work of feminine redemption by endorsing and elaborating conceptions imposed by the dominating habits of thought of her time. Responding to those philosophical discourses in which intellectual inquiry had taken on the traits of an allegorical penetration of the masculine "mind" into the secrets of a feminine nature, Cavendish reconceived that mind as the "Rational Soule," understood as the source and objective of human knowledge. Cavendish forged an epistemological system which was intended not to oppose this "patriarchal" system, but to define a fanciful and witty dimension parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right for a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house. The privacy of her "solitary mind" was not a prison but the independent locus of feminine cognition and enfranchisement.
Velimir Khlebnikov in Hebrew
Authors: Segal Nina
Published: January 2008

The article presents the history of translation of Velimir Khlebnikov's poetry into Hebrew. Khlebnikov (1885\-\-1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism, was a trailblazer of new linguistic and philosophic vistas in poetry. His poems are singularly difficult and original in their highly involved idiom and construction, as well as the subject-matter which borrows from such diverse fields as history, mythology, mathematics, and biology. The translations of his poems into Hebrew, starting with those by Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlyonsky, and Eliyahu Tesler in the pioneering 1942 collection "Shirat Rusiia" ("The Poetry of Russia") and ending with Aminadav Dykman's in his magisterial anthology of Russian poetry "Dor Sheli \-\- Khaia Sheli: MiShirat Rusiia BaMea HaEsrim" ("My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century," 2002), are characterized by ingenuity in rendering Khlebnikov's "trans-sense" idiom while transposing his thoroughly Russian world-view into Hebrew realia. The article also discusses the Israeli reception of Khlebnikov as poet and philosopher, as reflected in Dan Avidan's poetry and Mikhail Grobman's paintings.
"When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight": Re-Reading McEwan's Saturday and Arnold's "Dover Beach"
Authors: Hillard Molly Clark
Published: January 2008

This paper examines the climactic scene in Ian McEwan's novel 2005 Saturday in which the protagonist's pregnant poet daughter fends off a home invasion by reciting Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." My broader goal is to demonstrate that McEwan constructs not a nostalgic longing for a Victorian past, but rather a moment of neo-Victorianism: one that turns to Victorian reflections upon domestic and foreign politics, history, and the literary form in order to make meaning in a contemporary literary or cultural text. The essay explores the phenomenologies (and politics) of reading and re-reading, and works toward the idea that certain acts of postmodernist re-reading lead to a kind of reflection on literary influence that originates (at least for McEwan) with nineteenth-century literature. McEwan's scene of the reading and rereading of "Dover Beach" in Saturday presents the Arnold poem as an always already reread text — in the sense both that it is a text that rereads itself (containing within the space of the poem oppositional readings of the self and the community), and that it is a text that rereads other, prior texts.
Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
Authors: Toker Leona , Chertoff Daniel
Published: January 2008

The paper analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in terms of the narrative techniques that cause the reader to re-enact the cognitive process by which the characters come to comprehend their predicament. It links these techniques with the ethical implications of the novel's reshaping the topoi of dystopian fiction in view of the modern concerns with cloning and organ transplant.
Time, Duration, and Defoe's Novels
Authors: Yahav Amit
Published: January 2008

What is the relation between public notations of time and the personal experience of duration? And how have these two different approaches to temporality been explored in early novels? This article considers Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, arguing that through renderings of objective time and of the experience of duration Defoe differentiates between two different modes of sociality: contractual relations on the one hand and intimate attachments on the other. Furthermore, in these novels Defoe lays the terms for one of the main tropes through which later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels represent both domesticity (in its inherent duality of love and marriage) and temporality (in its inherent duality of duration and time). This is a trope of parallax view, which captures an important condition of these dualities – that their poles can never be viewed simultaneously even as they coexist in the same phenomena.
The constraints and institutional challenges facing industrial policy in South Africa: a way forward
Authors: Kaplan David E
Published: January 2008

Industrial policy is a central plank of ASGISA. However, industrial policy in South Africa faces two key constraints – internally, a macroeconomic framework focused on inflation; and, externally, international agreements that limit the scope of industrial policy generally and of export support in particular. In addition, there are a number of institutional and governance concerns. Currently industrial policy lacks coherence with no clear locus of coordination in government; governmental capacities are very limited; distributional conflicts lead to multiple objectives with poorly specified trade-offs; a severe shortage of skills and simultaneously limited training restrain productivity increases; and, finally, strategic collaboration between government and business is largely absent. Two conclusions result. First, industrial policy should not, in the current context, be too ambitious. Second, given limited governmental capacities, a more prominent role should be accorded to the business sector. Institutional mechanisms need to be established so as to allow business to play the leading role in identifying the constraints and opportunities facing a sector and the policies designed to address these. Government then must support those policies that accord with its social and economic objectives. By way of example, the Western Cape Microeconomic Development Strategy (MEDS) is outlined. The central feature of the MEDS is the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) – an effective institutional form that allows for such a strategic collaboration between government and business.
The strange death of liberated southern Africa
Authors: Saul John S
Published: January 2008

In writing the present essay, I have poached my title from a highly regarded old book by George Dangerfield entitled The Strange Death of Liberal England – chosen mainly for the bleak but, as I shall argue, appropriate catchiness of the spin I’ve sought to give to the title here. But there’s a substantive resonance to the link as well. Dangerfield writes of the period of proto-revolutionary upsurge in Britain on the eve of the First World War – encompassing actions by women, workers, the Irish – and of the role of the Liberal Party, caught up in the maelstrom of the time. The parallel is by no means entirely apposite, of course, but one sentence in the book’s opening pages did catch my eye. The Liberals, Dangerfield writes, emerged from the fray ‘flushed with one of the greatest victories of all time’ yet, he adds, ‘from that victory they never recovered’ (1997:19). Something similar can be said of Frelimo, of the MPLA, of SWAPO, of ZANU and of the ANC. For these movements, although still ‘in power’, have come to preside over the death of the promise that they were once thought to epitomise and their victories, or at least the way they came about, are arguably ones from which they too may never recover. It is with this paradox in mind that I chose not only this title but that of one of my recent books – The Next Liberation Struggle. For such a ‘next liberation struggle’, I live in hope.
Does South Africa have a 'racial bargain'?: a comparative perspective
Authors: Southall Roger
Published: January 2008

Before the democratisation of South Africa in1994, blacks were overwhelmingly excluded from political and economic rights, while the politics of whites, who were enfranchised, revolved around identity as well as racial exclusivity. Necessarily, therefore, the democratic settlement was involved with accommodating racial and ethnic differences. The article argues that even though the agreed constitution formally espoused non-racialism in response to the racist oppressions of apartheid, it rested upon an informal but widely understood ‘racial bargain’. In other words, while the white minority would concede political power, they would (for the moment at least) retain control over major sectors of the economy. Even so, although the economy would be run on deracialised market principles, it would provide for greater levels of black participation and ownership in order to overcome the racially polarised nature of South African society. However, it was to be the slow pace of social and racial change which resulted from reliance upon the market which led to the state effectively renegotiating the bargain by implementing an increasingly assertive programme of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). It is proposed that South Africa’s racial bargain cannot be understood unless it is located in the context of decolonisation. This is illustrated by comparative reference to the nature of related decolonising racial bargains in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malaysia which were shaped, variously, by history, demography and other dynamics. These diverse experiences indicate that while racial bargains can be broken (Zimbabwe), albeit at considerable cost, their essence is that they are continuously being renegotiated in accord with changing political dynamics. It is concluded that progress towards substantive racial equality is the rock upon which the democratic right of individuals belonging to racial minorities is founded.
The colour of success: a qualitative study of affirmative action attitudes of black academics in South Africa
Authors: Durrheim Kevin , Boettiger Merridy , Essack Zaynab , Maarschalk Silvia , Ranchod Chitra
Published: January 2008

A number of studies have shown that white people’s attitudes towards affirmative action are largely negative and ambivalent. This ambivalent opposition to affirmative action has been explained in terms of a commitment to equality and sympathy for the plight of many poor black people, on the one hand, but lingering racial prejudice, intergroup competition and ideological conservatism on the other hand. This study sought to address the paucity of research on black attitudes to affirmative action to determine the nature and range of black attitudes. Since the main explanations of white opposition to affirmative action (anti-black prejudice and intergroup competition) do not apply in the case of blacks, a second aim of this study was to identify factors that could account for opposition to affirmative action among black people. Eight openended interviews were conducted with black academics employed at a historically white university in South Africa. Interviewees spoke about affirmative action in general as well as the role that it had played in their own careers. The results revealed high levels of tension and conflict in the talk about affirmative action, which we characterise as ambivalent support. The prime reason for opposition to affirmative action was the stigma associated with being a (potential) beneficiary of the policy.