bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Evolutionary Biological Issues in Edith Wharton's The Children
Authors: Saunders Judith P
Published: January 2007

Plot, theme, and setting in Wharton's 1928 novel clearly provoke biosocial investigation: her portrait of the Jazz Age highlights intergenerational conflict and disturbed familial interactions. Characters in the parental generation neglect their progeny to such an extent that they imperil the survival of their own lineage. Characters in the younger generation react by formulating utopian plans for sustaining an alternative family group, thereby creating loyalties that supersede actual kinship ties. From a Darwinian perspective, both generations are engaged in biologically maladaptive behavior, and Wharton targets a rapidly changing social landscape as its principal cause. Illustrating the workings of evolutionary biology, her narrative focuses on the breakdown of adaptive mechanisms in an aberrant environment. At the same time, nonetheless, she suggests the moral worth of idealistic projects and altruistic choices which may be inspired by the failure of culturally and biologically driven patterns of human behavior.
Muriel Rukeyser Goes to War: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Politics of Ekphrasis
Authors: Allison Raphael C
Published: January 2007

Muriel Rukeyser is often regarded as a poet of the 1930s literary left.As this essay argues however, Rukeyser underwent a transformation during the 1940s from a proletarian into a pragmatist committed to pluralist values necessary for confronting totalitarianism abroad. Ultimately, this commitment to pluralism and multiple perspectives led to her use of ekphrasis (poetry descriptive of visual art), which is itself a "pluralist" form that incorporates both language and visual imagery. Part of this wartime transformation was derived from her readings of John Dewey,William James, and the nineteenth-century chemist Willard Gibbs. Another part of this shift grew out of her work developing warposters
at the Office of War Information, President Roosevelt's World War II propaganda
agency. Both Gibbs's theories of multiple perspectives and the war-poster itself suggested a formal pluralism opposed to fascist unity. This new perspective is most evident in her major war poem "Ajanta" (1944).
Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War
Authors: Scott Jonathan
Published: January 2007

This essay brings to light an important area of Langston Hughes's work as a writer and an intellectual that has been neglected by critics and scholars. In the discipline of American studies, Hughes is known primarily as a "folk poet," yet in his life he produced an enormous body of work that cannot be contained by this limited categorization, in particular the writing he published during the height of the cold war. The general conception of Hughes is that he went into political hiding after 1953, following his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, for the rest of his career, steered clear of socialist projects such as the politicization of literature. But a reflection on his writing of the 1950s compels a different conclusion. Specifically, The
First Book of Rhythms, published in 1954, based on a writing workshop for young people Hughes conducted in Chicago, is the focus of this paper. It embodies the main themes and strategies that unified Hughes's prolific literary output during the cold war.
Cohesion in the Novels of Alex La Guma: A Dialogic Analysis
Authors: Wanyama Mzenga
Published: January 2007

This article identifies and analyzies features of style and technique that make for unity and cohesion in Alex La Guma's novels. It shows that La Guma's deliberate cohesive strategies impact and illuminate the course and drift of heteroglossia in his novels. In "Discourse in the Novel," M. M. Bakhtin argues strongly that the novel genre constitutes a world of social languages in which the author's language is but one of several, and that authorial idiosyncrasy as a criterion of stylistic analysis is thus not adequate. However, Bakhtin then reads the prose of certain novelists because they quintessentially illustrate his generic theory of dialogic imagination, thereby seeming to suggest that not all novels and novelists lend themselves equally to dialogic analyses.This essay argues that a relationship of complementarity exists between traditional stylistics and Bakhtin's dialogic imagination, and that authorial idiosyncrasy is a crucial category in both of the theories.
Asking the Right Question about Pain: Narrative and Phronesis
Authors: Frank Arthur W
Published: January 2007

A story about postoperative pain care initiates an exploration of thinking with stories, as opposed to thinking about stories. One story leads to another, and the initial story about hospital care morphs into the medieval romance of Parzival, the knight who must learn to ask the right question of someone in pain. Learning to ask the right question is presented as an example of Aristotle's concept of phronesis, a type of knowledge that is not adequately recognized in contemporary medicine.
Narrative and Beyond
Authors: Hartman Geoffrey H
Published: January 2007

In "Narrative and Beyond," a teacher, who has also been active setting up interviews with Holocaust survivors, reflects on the role literary study can play in fostering the listening process. While recognizing the difference between survivor interviews and specifically medical relationships, his essay argues for the personal as well as strictly medicinal benefit to both sides when life stories are elicited and an alliance is established in which storyteller and listener participate on an equal basis. The care giver may find herself in the position of vulnerable observer listening to passion narratives about grave illness and disaster that cast doubt on the idea of a "sovereign consciousness." The essay warns, at the same time, against easy assumptions that the study of art can be mobilized for empathy training. It ends by suggesting that however important the narrative component of literature is, a close attention to other literary features such as figurative language could yield further insights for the developing discipline of narrative medicine as an endeavor at once clinical and compassionate.
Narrating, Attending, and Empathizing
Authors: Schafer Roy
Published: January 2007

An introduction briefly reviews the author's efforts to rework psychoanalytic conceptualization away from mechanistic entities, forces, energies, and structure and toward action and narration, both broadly conceived. Then, examining the actions of attending and empathizing in the clinical psychoanalytic situation the author argues that it is not possible to treat attending and empathizing as independent variables: a clear differentiation of the two is precluded by the multiplicity and complexity of cues constantly flowing between analyst and analysand, inevitably selective choices and weighted judgments, and consequently the extent to which reference to each variable implies the other. A brief discussion follows emphasizing the play of power and affiliative tendencies in the adoption of, and adherence to the selective principles implied in narrative preferences. The essay concludes with an example of controversy between two schools of psychoanalytic thought, each with its own, though overlapping, preferred metanarratives concerning the best focus for attending-empathizing.
Learning How to Tell
Authors: Schnell Lisa Jane
Published: January 2007

Positioning itself first in the difficult space of personal tragedy (the terminal diagnosis of the author's infant daughter), this paper explores the emotional, physical and intellectual experience of grief, and in particular the intimate relationship between mourning and narrative. Working from Freud's theories of object-relations, particularly as he theorizes them in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the more contemporary work of neuro-psychoanalysts Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, the essay reflects in ways both literal and abstract on the manner in which concepts of space are central to both mourning and narrative. The essay is also the story of a remarkable relationship between a doctor and a patient, a story of medical wisdom and the physical and emotional healing that wisdom facilitated.
Cartographies of Resistance: Poetics and Politics of Space in Chicano/a Writing
Authors: Mermann-Jozwiak Elisabeth
Published: January 2007

This review essay of Mary Pat Brady's Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, and Monika Kaup's Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative places these recent publications within a context of works that focus on spatial politics in Chicano/a Studies. It pays particular attention to the authors' methodologies.
A "Patch of England, at a three-thousand-Mile Off-set"? Representing America in Mason & Dixon
Authors: Olster Stacey Michele
Published: January 2007

Mason & Dixon's examination of America's origins is informed by a dual temporal perspective: that of the late eighteenth century during which the modern nation-state was conceived and the late twentieth century in which a globalized economy and rise of huge conglomerates have led critics to proclaim the era of the nation-state as over. With New World slavery jettisoning all notions of American exceptionalism, colonial faction preventing national consolidation, and the very shape of the earth making the actuality of America impossible to determine with any fixity, establishing what is American becomes an act of representation. Pynchon portrays that act as less a function of politics, as the colonists demanded, and more a question of aesthetics, as the pictorial mapping in which his surveyors engage illustrates.
Riotous Discontent: Ralph Ellison's "Birth of a Nation"
Authors: Waligora-Davis Nicole
Published: January 2007

Through a reading of his fictional account of the Harlem race riot of 1943 that serves as the closing scenes of Invisible Man, this essay delineates Ellison's racial philosophy, a rubric as much an expression of black nationalism as it is the formation of an ethical system for human interaction and accountability. It is a reading, though, that necessarily traces Ellison's racially gendered critique of the State and its domestic colonial practices, and the (unevenly) shared psychological consequences of American racial violence on the public sphere. And, in its end, this essay maps the connection Ellison makes between racial injury and the possibility of black patriotism.
The Scopic Drive and Visual Projection in Heart of Darkness
Authors: Devlin Kimberly J.
Published: January 2007

Using Jacques Lacan's arguments about the gaze, this essay examines the dialectic of looking and being looked at that runs through Marlow's tale in Heart of Darkness. The scenes of looking often contain ideological symptoms of colonialist voyeurism, in their repeated emphasis on intrusive and yet thwarted vision. The scenes of being looked at frequently produce sensations of "scotomization": a term I borrow from Lacan to describe experiences when the human subject feels reduced, imagines himself as insignificant, invisible even—transformed into a dark spot or scotoma in the visual field. The scotomization of Marlow 's European I/eye during the river trek, in particular, suggests his precarious mastery over the foreign region he visually explores. The larger trajectory of Marlow's tale, I argue, ultimately reveals a visual sublimation, as it turns from physical sights that are threatening, inscrutable, or fascinating toward the metaphysical insight purportedly provided—through vicarious vision—by Kurtz.
Naming the Bones: Bodies of Knowledge in Contemporary Fiction
Authors: Hogue Bev
Published: January 2007

Does fiction function as archive or as repertoire? Diana Taylor's distinction between these two modes of memory fails to fully explore fictional attempts to capture a repertoire of performance within the archival page, while Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Janet Frame's The Carpathians, and Jose Saramago's All the Names posit the novel as a site where repertoires of embodied knowledge can be captured within the literary archive, producing memory as a powerful presence by interring its mediated images within the silent page. A comparison of these novels suggests the richly paradoxical relationships among fiction, cultural performance, and memory.
"Do We of Necessity Become Puppets in a Story?" or Narrating the World: On Speech, Silence, and Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Foe
Authors: MacLeod Lewis
Published: January 2007

This article argues for a radical reassessment of J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe, claiming that the novel's current critical oeuvre duplicates rather than critiques universalizing discursive practices. In particular, it suggests that the critical assumption that Friday lacks a tongue results from a too-ready recourse to the established critical templates of postcolonial (and, to a lesser extent, feminist) discourse. These templates make it difficult to entertain ideas outside of their own methodologies and assumptions. The article recognizes that Friday may well have a tongue, and offers a provisional re-reading of Friday's silence as an act of wilful restraint and defiance rather than as the straightforward result of an act of physical mutilation.
Portrait humoral du polemiqueur: Aleas de l'humeur et du style du XVIe au XVIIe siecle
Authors: Brancher Dominique
Published: January 2007

The correspondence between "style" and "temperament" plays an important role in the rhetorics of the Renaissance. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the temperamental determinations marking polemical enunciation by confronting medical and rhetorical theories. From the sixteenth century onwards, the "sanguine" ideal of Ciceronian style gives way to the rival temperament of the melancholy, characterized by genius but also prone to pathological and stylistic fury if yellow bile gets in the way. Polemists consider humoral inspiration either as an enslaving to physical diseases or as a freely consented physiological engagement, thus restating the fundamental question of stylistic free will. The dispute between Garasse, Ogier and Guez de Balzac around 1620 testifies to the fact that classical esthetics switch from the tragic grandeur of poetic "furor" to more reasoned poetics that demystify the temperamental Muse.
La poetique de l' enrollement au temps des guerres de religion
Authors: Junod Samuel
Published: January 2007

Cet article propose une exploration de la "poetique de l'enrollement" dans la litterature des guerres de religion comme un moyen de penser l'engagement litteraire � la Renaissance, dans des termes qui sont propres � cette periode. Les prises de position de Jodelle, Ronsard et l'echec relatif de l'intervention de l'ecrivain dans l'histoire immediate sont mises en regard du desengagement de Montaigne et de la dimension theologique de l'engagement chez Agrippa d'Aubigne.
Gerard agonistes
Authors: Jeanneret Michel
Published: January 2007

A praise of Gerard Defaux, an expert in French Renaissance literature, this opening essay starts by pointing out the main achievements of Defaux as a specialist in Rabelais, Clement Marot, Maurice Sceve and Montaigne. It then pays hommage to Defaux as a fighter, a scholar who committed himself passionately to the defense of his ideas, notably the Christian dimension of Humanism and the rejection of deconstructionist theories.
Early Soviet Cinema and American Poetry
Authors: Kadlec David
Published: January 2007

Early Soviet film developed documentary modes of presentation--particularly that of the worker testimonial--that came to appeal strongly to U.S. poets. Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, when they were beginning their epics, "A" and Paterson in the 1930s and 1940s, were especially attentive to the films of Eisenstein and Vertov. The quick, choppy cuts in Soviet film were known generally as "Russian montage," and derived from material shortages of film stock in the U.S.S.R. Vertov's approach to documentary materials showed Objectivist poets how to extend the na�ve referentiality of Imagism into an account of historical events; Soviet film helped establish history as a fitting subject matter for modernist poetry. Particularly the long montage poems of Zukofsky and Williams owe a debt to Soviet filmmakers, and the forms these poems share indirectly express the utopian spirit of the early Soviet experiment.
Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys
Authors: Rosenberg Leah
Published: January 2007

Focusing on the representation of artists and their models in the work of Jean Rhys and Claude McKay, I argue that during the interwar years, Caribbean artists produced a modernism that critiqued European modernist aesthetics as complicit in the bourgeois projects of nation and empire. Caribbean artists criticized the merging and sexualizing of black and female identities in European modernism by redefining modernist conceptions of the prostitute and the primitive. Asserting alternative conceptions of the primitive, of sexuality, and of community, they produced aesthetics and politics that challenged European modernism and modernity as well as the anglophone Caribbean nationalisms emerging in the 1930s.
Churchgoing in the Modern Novel
Authors: Lewis Pericles
Published: January 2007

In works by James, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, lone wanderers, often with touristic inclinations, visit churches and puzzle over the question of what sort of power these "tombs and sepulchers of God" (Nietzsche) contain in an era when public rituals no longer command universal assent. The churchgoing scene plays such an important role in the modern novel, I argue, because it stages the encounter between the great public monuments of Christian faith and the intimate monuments of an increasingly privatized form of religious experience, modern novels. I challenge the "secularization hypothesis" that has dominated studies of the modern novel and discuss the origins of this hypothesis in the social sciences of the modernist period.
The Shanghai Foxtrot (a Fragment) by Mu Shiying: Introduction
Authors: Macdonald Sean
Published: January 2007

Since at least the mid-1980s, the work of Mu Shiying (1912-1940) has
received renewed attention as an example of early modernist writing in
Chinese, and "The Shanghai Foxtrot" is one of his most well-known stories.
First published in 1932, "The Shanghai Foxtrot" is notable for its use of
montage and repetition, sometimes reproducing entire passages that appear
to mimic the camera pan. However, while his narrative techniques were
clearly inspired by international modernism, Mu Shiying's story also
represents an allusive historical glimpse of a semi-colonial Shanghai in
the 1930s, a decadent and sometimes violent metropolis during a period of
war and occupation.
Lost in Translation: Stein's Vichy Collaboration
Authors: Will Barbara
Published: January 2007

This essay takes as its starting point the recent controversy over the meaning of Gertrude Stein's collaboration with the Vichy regime during World War II. Focusing on Stein's unpublished translations of Marshall P�tain's Paroles aux fran�ais, I suggest that whatever the terms of Stein's decision to embark on the P�tain translation project, there is little doubt that it occasioned both anxiety and uncertainty. By placing the P�tain translations in their historical and biographical context, and by reading them within and against her earlier theory and practice of modernist translation, I argue for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Stein's apparent pro-fascism.
The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan, Courbet, Du Maurier
Authors: Daly Nicholas
Published: January 2007

This article examines the links among Whistler's epochal White Girl (1862), Courbet's infamous L'Origine du Monde (1866), and George Du Maurier's best-seller, Trilby (1894). The most obvious connection is Whistler's one-time model and mistress, Johanna Hiffernan, the original of the White Girl, but also the probable model for Courbet's painting, and, I suggest, for Du Maurier's heroine, Trilby O' Ferrall. I argue that (a) Whistler's 1862 painting is a "sensation" painting, a visual assault that rejects narrative content for painterly abstraction, shocking the viewer out of a contemplative attitude to the art work, and thus part of a more general 1860s sensation culture that attempts to process modernity; and that (b) Du Maurier's novel is a piece of art theory in narrative form that demonizes his one-time room-mate, Whistler, as Svengali (his "abstraction" of Hiffernan into a "symphony in white" appears as Svengali's turning Trilby into an unconscious singing machine), but also that the recurring fetishism of Trilby in the novel (her much-worshipped feet, for example) suggests that Du Maurier knew of Courbet's "secret" painting of Hiffernan, and that he theorizes Whistler's modern abstraction as disingenuous—as another kind of fetishism that depends on harnessing Hiffernan's sexuality just as much as L'Origine does.
Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials
Authors: Pickford Henry W
Published: January 2007

Through a juxtaposition of two recent memorials in Berlin—the Neue Wache in central Berlin and the "Places of Remembering" memorial in the Bavarian Quarter neighborhood—I explore ongoing controversies in the aesthetics and politics of remembrance in Germany. After situating the study within the larger debate surrounding "collective identity" and "social memory," I draw on Walter Benjamin's notion of "dialectical image" in order to trace the fault-lines that fissure the Neue Wache memorial throughout its history, even as it is used repeatedly to forge national unity that conflates civil and military traditions in remembering the war dead. Following a brief excursus in which I argue for the futility of Holocaust memorials oriented around the (im)possibility of representing historical catastrophe, I turn to the Bavarian Quarter memorial as itself constituting dialectical images which induce the lived or pragmatic perception of what Benjamin called "non-sensuous similarity" as a genuine historical experience.
Use of Jessor's Theoretical Framework of Adolescent Risk Behavior in Ethiopia: Implications for HIV/AIDS Prevention
Authors: Astatke Hibist , Black Maureen M , Serpell Robert
Published: January 2007

Objectives: To identify determinants of sexual behaviors among Ethiopian secondary school adolescents using Jessor's theoretical framework.
Methods: A cross-sectional study design was used to examine determinants of sexual behaviors among 537 high school students aged 14-20. HIV risk and protective factors were identified based on a review of the literature. Focus group discussions and informal interviews were carried out to validate theoretical constructs and, together with the literature review, to guide questionnaire construction. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine associations between each risk and protective factor and each sexual behavior.
Results: Most students (64 percent male and 89 percent female) were not sexually active. Only 56 percent of the sexually active youths reported ever using condoms. Family involvement, age of boy/girlfriend, expectations for aca-demic achievement, and substance abuse were associated with at least three of the six sexual behaviors or intentions examined. Risk and protective factors in
the personality, perceived environment, and behavior domains were associated with at least one sexual behavior or intention.
Conclusion: The findings are consistent with Jessor's theoretical framework and suggest that risk and protective factors from several domains contribute to Ethiopian adolescents' involvement in sexual behavior.
Recommendation: The findings of this study may be used to design culturally sensitive school-based HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Ethiopia. Recommendations are made on how to design school-based HIV prevention programs and to carry out further research on gender differences in sexual behavior and HIV risk factors among students and out-of-school adolescents.
Community Knowledge and Perceptions about the Causes, Prevention, and Treatment of HIV/AIDS and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) in Bahir Dar
Authors: Gebre. Ayalew
Published: January 2007

Objective: To study knowledge and perceptions among residents of Bahir Dar about the causation, prevention, and treatment of sexually transmitted illnesses.

Methods: Sixty randomly selected informants, including 20 key informants, were interviewed about the occurrence of the most common sexually transmitted and other diseases, as well as illness perception, causation, prevention, and treatment in Bahir Dar using semi-structured interview guides. Ten health practitioners also were interviewed about their knowledge and attitudes about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and patients infected with them.

Results: The five most frequently named STDs were AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, chancroid, and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV), in that order. HIV/AIDS and gonorrhea were relatively well known compared to the other STDs, reflecting their high prevalence. Community members used many local vernacular names to refer to sexually transmitted illnesses. This use of euphemisms reflects the cultural belief that such diseases should not be talked about openly. While the considerable stigma attached to all STDs inhibits open discussion, it is easier to talk about AIDS because of the wider publicity the epidemic has received. A number of misconceptions about causes and ways to prevent STDs were identified. Government health services were found to be used relatively
infrequently by persons with STDs. Stigma, inconvenience, problems in patient-provider interactions, and issues of confidentiality and privacy were major factors in both the underutilization of public health services and the widespread use of self-medication, traditional healers, private doctors, and injectionists (local practitioners who administer medical injections for a fee).

Conclusion and Recommendations: A combination of persisting misconceptions about the causation, transmission, and treatment of most STDs exists. The ethnomedical environment surrounding these diseases is characterized by strong stigmas, secrecy, delayed treatment, widespread self-medication, and problematic patient-health services relationships, all of which impede the prevention and control of STDs in Bahir Dar. Development and implementation of collaborative programs involving official health services and community-based organizations may increase STD clinic utilization rates.
Potential HIV Risk Behaviors among Ethiopians and Eritreans in the Diaspora: A Bird's-Eye View
Authors: Beyene Yewoubdar
Published: January 2007

Objectives: Significant gaps exist in addressing the HIV/AIDS prevention needs of culturally diverse populations in the United States, particularly in African immigrant communities. This anthropological research examines culturally specific factors that impede understanding of HIV transmission and prevention education among African immigrants in California.

Methods: One hundred twenty study participants (60 men and 60 women) were recruited through community organizations; 33 percent were Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants. The study methods consisted of focus group interviews with key informants, in-depth individual interviews, and a brief self-reported HIV risk behavior survey. This study reports data pertaining only to Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants. Relevant research literature and government HIV/AIDS statistics also were reviewed.

Results: Members of the immigrant community are aware of HIV/AIDS; however, they do not recognize their own HIV risk behaviors. Potential HIV risk behaviors reported among these immigrants include not using condoms, having multiple sexual partners; consuming alcohol; stigma, denial, and fear surrounding HIV testing; and risk behaviors associated with vacationers traveling back and forth between Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the United States.
Conclusion and Recommendations: Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in California hold similar attitudes and behaviors to those found in their country of origin, and they underestimate their HIV risk from engaging in various risky behaviors. The various barriers to HIV testing must be addressed if these immigrants are to take advantage of access to early treatment and prevent further HIV infection in the community. There is an urgent need for community leaders in these two immigrant groups to provide culturally appropriate venues for breaking the silence surrounding HIV risks in the community before the situation worsens.
Femme Fatale--Negotiations of Tragic Desire
Authors: Bronfen Elisabeth
Published: January 2007

The article uses Stanley Cavell's claim that tragedy be thought of in terms of avoiding recognition of the other as a way to discuss a genre - film noir - which is usually ignored by tragic theorists. A close reading of Billy Wilders classic film Double Indemnity serves to present a way to think tragedy not just as a narrowly defined dramatic genre, but as a mode or structure of feeling, with the femme fatale as a particularly resilient contemporary example of tragic sensibility. For in the world of film noir she elicits fantasies of omnipotence, supporthing the hero's desire to stave off knowledge of his own fallibility at all costs. At the same time she performs a tragic acceptance precisely by assuming responsibility for her fate, because she comes to discover freedom in her embrace of the inevitability of causation. This article thus claims the femme fatale is not merely a stereotype, symptom or catchphrase for dangerous femininity but rather the subject of her narrative, an authentic modern heroine.
I Want to Die, I Hate My Life--Phaedra's Malaise
Authors: Critchley Simon
Published: January 2007

My focus is on the character of Phaedra and the nature of her malaise. I begin by trying to elicit the dramatic pattern of Phaedra's confessions of her desire, a desire that produces a guilty subjectivity that I illustrate with reference to Augustine's Confessions. I go on to describe Phaedra's existence as defined by the fact that, unlike the conventional tragic hero, she is unable to die, that existence is, for her, without exit. I pursue this thought by turning to Emmanuel Levinas's brief reading of Ph�dre and linking it to what is arguably the enabling motif of his work, namely that existence is not the experience of freedom profiled in rapture, ecstasy, or affirmation, but rather it is that which we seek to evade in a movement of flight that simply reveals-paradoxically-how deeply riveted we are to the fact of existence. Counter-intuitively perhaps, I try to show how this Levinasian thought has its home in Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, in particular in his treatment of the concept of Befindlichkeit (state-of-mind or attunement) and its relation to thrownness and facticity. This is the ontological meaning of Phaedra's guilt: one's fundamental self-relation is to an unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs one down without one's ever being able to pick it up. I try to show how this experience of guilt injects a fearful languor into Phaedra's limbs, a languor that I trace to the experience of erotic stupefaction: Phaedra is hypnotized by the desire that she loathes and it is here that she languishes. After linking languor to the concept of original sin, I seek to take seriously the possibility of Christian tragedy, that is, an essentially antipolitical tragedy that would consist in the rejection of the worldly order and the radical separation of subjectivity and the world. I conclude with a remark as to how Racine's Ph�dre might lead us to question some of our critical and theoretical doxai about the nature of tragedy.
Stalking A New World Order
Authors: Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly
Published: January 2007

The chapter reviews some of the conceptions of order as applied to the social sciences, stressing the notion of complex order which includes a dialectic tension between differentiation and integration. The claim made is that despite cultural and temporal differences, complex order is a goal that is endorsed by human communities everywhere. In a period of often catastrophic globalization, it is argued that the elements of a new world order must be discovered and implemented, or else the tensions inherent in the increasing inequality of access to resources might lead to even more violent conflicts than hitherto experienced on the planet.
Leveling the New Old Transcendence: Cognitive Coherence in the Era of Beyondness
Authors: Stafford Barbara Maria
Published: January 2007

The underlying claim of this essay is that contemporary technonoetic culture--from artificial intelligence systems, to genetics, to nanotechnology--is rooted in the binary hyper-logic of transcendence. This principle of impossible-to-resolve oppositions was introduced in its extreme form in late neoplatonism and powerfully re-articulated for the moderns by the romantics. Despite claims that we exist in a multiverse of multiple realities, a rhetoric of beyondness continues to undermine any notion of bringing coherence to physical and mental worlds. But recent developments in cognitive science and neurobiology allow us to consider how knowledge might be extended and distributed into cross-linking patterns. Uncannily resembling the convergences of times and spaces in a single individual stimulated by viewing a Cornell box or the intersective universes of the cabinet of wonders, phenomenologically-inflected consciousness studies offer a coalescing alternative to the vertical impulse of vanishing perspectives.
Periodization and Difference
Authors: Mattix Micah
Published: January 2007

While it is almost universally recognized that period terms are, at best, an arbitrary imposition on an otherwise dynamic system of human culture, and, at worst, as Foucault has argued, a means of controlling knowledge and consolidating power, their use is frequently defended because, it is claimed, they make difference apparent. This, however, is false. The treatment of the poetry of Frank O'Hara is analyzed in three recent literary histories to show that rather than make difference apparent, period terms obscure it by superimposing a predetermined schema that is inescapably reductive.
Decadence as a Theory of History
Authors: Morley Neville
Published: January 2007

The concept of decadence is closely related to ideas of temporality and historical change. However, although it is most commonly associated with the 'cyclical' approach to history offered by writers like Spengler and Toynbee, the idea of decadence is not dependent on a single theory of history for its intellectual underpinning; it is not necessarily tied to the organic metaphor, and it does not imply a single, unvarying trajectory towards a specified terminus. This paper explores the place of 'decadence' in historiography, considering its relationship to the related (but, curiously, less controversial) notion of 'decline' and to ideas of continuity and discontinuity between past and present. It compares the narratives of modern decadence with the critiques of modernity offered by Marx and Nietzsche; these present a similar perspective on the present but emphasize possibilities for the future, whereas decadence sees only a return to one of the possibilities already mapped out in the past.
Decadence and Historical Understanding in Flaubert's Salammbo
Authors: O'Gorman Ellen
Published: January 2007

This article considers the issue of decadence and historical understanding through a reading of Flaubert's Salammb�. To understand any period as "decadent" is to raise fundamental questions about the possibility and worth of historical understanding itself. Flaubert's novel, I argue, constitutes a radical attempt to free the decadent from a history of progress and to allow it to work not only on that history of progress but on the idea of history itself. Debates by both ancient and modern historians about the importance of the Carthaginian Mercenary War are reconfigured in the novel through the representation of characters who fail to understand the history that they enact.
Nietzsche, Decadence, and the Greeks
Authors: Silk M. S
Published: January 2007

"Decadence" is Nietzsche's last great preoccupation, which has a decisive role in the books he composed in 1888: Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Wagner Case, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo. From a conventional view of modern decadence established by French writers like Gautier and Bourget, Nietzsche constructs a radically new set of relationships whereby decadence is understood as a perennial and inevitable phenomenon, but one that is peculiarly dominant in the modern age, and one whose antithesis is to be found, above all, in the culture of pre-Socratic Greece.
Response to Harpham
Authors: Edmundson Mark
Published: January 2007

Edmundson's response to Geoffrey Harpham praises his piece for its conviction, sincerity, and for its striking thesis about the uses of the humanities. Edmundson finds nothing to disagree with in the piece, but only wants to extend it. He wants to encourage professors to see humanisitic study not only as a way to understand the past, but also as a way to shape the future.
Monsters, Inc. : Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education
Authors: Freeman Elizabeth
Published: January 2007

This essay reads the film Monsters, Inc. (Pixar Studios, 2001), as an allegory for the humanities in the age of global capitalism. Using the film's ending and Citibank advertisements as examples, Freeman argues that corporations have appropriated many of the classic ideas about the value of a humanities education. She claims that the corporate world recasts these values in the language of the market such that the ideal corporate citizen has what she calls a "neoliberal arts education" designed to facilitate people skills in service and trade relations. With the film's relations between monster and child characters as a touchstone, Freeman contends that humanities practitioners must risk 1) addressing the positive role of bodies, desire, and psychoanalytic transference as they affect teaching and learning in the humanities disciplines, and 2) acknowledging how these energies disrupt the smooth transfer of knowledge into commodities and students into salespeople.
Beneath and Beyond the "Crisis in the Humanities"
Authors: Harpham Geoffrey Galt
Published: January 2007

One way of focusing the perennial crisis in the humanities is to think of it as a crisis of rationale, an inability by humanists to articulate what they do in a way that makes clear its distinctiveness and value to the larger culture. This paper attempts to establish the elements of a rationale. The first is the fact that the object of humanistic study is best conceived as a "text," a material and public medium produced in the past and requiring disciplined attention. The second is the premise that humanistic understanding entails a speculative recuperation of a complex, deep, and overdetermined subject, situated in a particular time and place. Third, humanistic understanding requires the reader to engage with the mind of the author in a way that fosters self-understanding, strengthens and enriches our imaginative powers, and gives a distinctive kind of intellectual pleasure.
Humanities for Taxpayers: Some Problems
Authors: Morris Meaghan
Published: January 2007

The reminder that crisis is a permanent feature of the humanities is a useful corrective to arguments that treat the problems we face as intellectual and internal in kind (the rise and fall of theory, disciplines versus studies, the decline of a public vocation, etc). However, if a sense of crisis "in" the humanities is generated by the critical mission itself, it does not follow that the challenges posed "to" the humanities in universities world-wide today are of this kind. Since the early 1980s, the global mainstream of nationally regulated, state-funded higher education has progressively been transformed by a neo-liberal policy movement that not only redistributes funding away from the humanities but seeks to alter the material context and framework of values in which all research is produced. Inducing a managerial version of permanent revolution, the new order conjoins global competition with a promise of community benefit or (in countries where the notion is relevant), "taxpayer" accountability; in the process, the ideal of academic independence is explicitly overthrown. Examining experiences of this process in Australia and Hong Kong, this article asks what happens when humanities scholars have no choice but to conceptualize their work from perspectives of interest to industry on the one hand, and the public or the community on the other.
Thoughts on the Role of the Humanities in Contemporary Life
Authors: Stewart Susan (Susan A.)
Published: January 2007

This response to New Literary History's call for thoughts on the current crisis in the humanities roots humanistic study in the circumstances and consequences of judgment. The humanities are discussed in relation to the concerns of religion and science-- with particular attention to the pressing need for humanist responses to the rise of fundamentalism among the former and the rise of technologies intervening in the life process among the latter.
Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of Historical Experience
Authors: Stock Brian
Published: January 2007

This essay discusses the difficulty of teaching ethics through literature based on the models for such instruction provided by the Hellenistic and late ancient periods. Some reasons are given for the contemporary lack of confidence in the teaching of ethics by means of the humanities, in particular, for the abandonment of historical disciplines in ethical debates. The educational method used in teaching ethics in the Graeco-Roman world is briefly outlined, after which a comparison is made between the attitude toward reading and ethics in Seneca and Augustine. The essay ends with reflections on the differences between ancient and modern instruction in ethics through reading: these include the lack of a secular contemplative tradition in literary studies and the implicit assumption that the reader is not ethically responsible for what is read.
To Write with the Use of Cixous
Authors: Gibbons Reginald
Published: January 2007

Cixous has written extensively about the act of writing. Far from being limited to theoretical formulations, Cixous's writing on writing is of a kind that is of great use in the practice of writing—especially her ideas about the play of language; the unconscious; how writing produces a sense of the self as other; writing as a departure and as death. It is also useful for an American writing in English to consider the contrast of English-language and French-language colorations of language play and trope. This essay is not an analysis of Cixous's Rootprints, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, and a few of her essays, but rather a discussion of using them.
Portraits of H. C. as J. D. and Back
Authors: Milesi Laurent
Published: January 2007

The essay sets out to explore in three interrelated thematic scenes or tableaux, and in the light of the increasingly numerous textual crossings between them, how Derrida (J. D.) and Cixous (H. C.) write (self-)portraits of themselves as other in their fictional encounters, one of whose central restagings is the inaugural, asymmetrical first-time meeting "face to back" (H. C. seeing J. D. with his back turned, not seeing her). Working through convoluted threads of linguistic play in French involving seeing (or blindness) [voir], knowing [savoir], (not) having [avoir] and being, the Jew as foreign or other being [autre, être] "to the letter" [lettre], etc., this study analyzes how these textual portraits can be framed within, or read against, a broad philosophical tradition (Descartes, Hegel) linking them to withdrawal [retrait] of being and of themselves as impossible gifts for the other in substitution.
Helene Cixous's Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog
Authors: Segarra Marta
Published: January 2007

Hélène Cixous has extensively written about cats, her real cats, and on the cat's figure as the privileged other of the subject. This article focuses on another animal, the dog called "Fips," a significant character in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, and in an earlier and shorter text, "Stigmata, or Job the Dog." It also takes into account "Mon chien à trois pattes" ("My Three-legged Dog," in Le Jour où je n'étais pas là), a text entwined with Clarice Lispector's "The Crime of the Mathematics Professor." These texts are the best examples of what Jacques Derrida called "la pensée de l'animal," a "poetical" and "prophetic" way not only to think about animality and humanity, but also to begin to consider the world differently.
Between "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia": Constituting the Neoliberal Girl Subject
Authors: Gonick Marnina
Published: January 2007

This article investigates two of the discourses currently organizing meanings of girls and girlhood. These are the multi-stranded "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia," which both emerged in the early 1990s. I argue that "Girl Power" and "Reviving Ophelia" set up an intriguing illustration of not only competing definitions of femininity but also how discourses may interpellate feminine/feminist subjects in a non-unitary way. At first glance, the two discourses seem to offer opposing significations of femininity. On the one hand, "Girl Power" represents a "new girl," assertive, dynamic, and unbound from the constraints of femininity. On the other hand,"Reviving Ophelia" presents girls as vulnerable, passive, voiceless, and fragile. However, this article demonstrates that it is also possible to view the two discourses as other than opposing, competing, and contradictory. Rather, this article investigates how the two discourses position girls in varying ways in relation to the emerging configurations of subjectification demanded by shifting relations of production, globalizing economies, and redefined relationships between governments and citizens related to the rise of neoliberal policy and practice.
The Meaning of Natural Childbirth
Authors: Cosans Chris
Published: January 2007

The term "natural childbirth" encompasses a variety of methods, including the Lamaze, Bradley, and home-birth approaches, which place more or less reliance on medical technology.Aristotle's analysis of three levels of human activity—digestion and reproduction, perception and locomotion, and abstract thinking—and Pellegrino and Thomasma's classification of the "living body," "lived body," and "lived self," provide a principled framework in which each of these childbirth practices can be considered natural.
Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess at Thera
Authors: Ferrence Susan C , Bendersky Gordon
Published: January 2007

This paper presents a new interpretation of a unique Bronze Age
(c. 3000-1100 BCE) Aegean wall painting in the building of Xeste 3 at Akrotiri, Thera. Crocus cartwrightianus and its active principle, saffron, are the primary subjects at Xeste 3. Several lines of evidence suggest that the meaning of these frescoes concerns saffron and healing: (1) the unusual degree of visual attention given to the crocus, including the variety of methods for display of the stigmas; (2) the painted depiction of the line of saffron production from plucking blooms to the collection of stigmas; and (3) the sheer number (ninety) of medical indications for which saffron has been used from the Bronze Age to the present. The Xeste 3 frescoes appear to portray a divinity of healing associated with her phytotherapy, saffron. Cultural and commercial interconnections between the Therans, the Aegean world, and their neighboring civilizations in the early 2nd millennium BCE indicate a close network of thematic exchange, but there is no evidence that Akrotiri borrowed any of these medicinal (or iconographic) representations. The complex production line, the monumental illustration of a goddess of medicine with her saffron attribute, and this earliest botanically accurate image of an herbal medication are all Theran innovations.