bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hymns
Authors: Brooks Joanna
Published: November 2023

Samson Occom maintained a lifelong interest in hymnody. Song had long been an important element of community life and ritual among Occom’s Mohegan and other southern New England tribes. However, forces of dispersal including war, territorial infringement, indentured servitude, and boarding schools removed young people from their families, clans, and tribes, reducing their exposure to traditional languages, songs, and stories, and threatening the continuity of tribal song traditions. After the Great Awakening, many tribal communities in New England adopted hymn singing as a ritual of community reconciliation, consolation, and celebration. Samson Occom helped foster these new song traditions by composing original hymns and publishing A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1774.
Writing on the Tablet of the Heart
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

This book explores a new model for the production, revision, and reception of Biblical texts as Scripture. Building on recent studies of the oral/written interface in medieval, Greco-Roman and ancinet Near Eastern contexts, David Carr argues that in ancient Israel Biblical texts and other texts emerged as a support for an educational process in which written and oral dimensions were integrally intertwined. The point was not incising and reading texts on parchment or papyrus. The point was to enculturate ancient Israelites - particularly Israelite elites - by training them to memorize and recite a wide range of traditional literature that was seen as the cultural bedorck of the people: narrative, prophecy, prayer, and wisdom.
The Influence of Mesopotamia
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

The picture of scribal education and textual production in the previous chapter becomes particularly significant when we consider how influential these practices were across the Near Eastern area surround- ing Mesopotamia. Forty years ago, William F. Albright observed: I do not think we can overestimate the importance of the Sumero- Akkadian educational system for the development not only of Akkadian higher culture, but also of higher culture in the surrounding countries, especially in Syria and Palestine, where linguistic differences were comparatively minor.1 Subsequent years of finds and publications have strengthened and nuanced this thesis. There were other major cultural centers in the Near East, to be sure. None, however, had the extensive and documentable influence on other cultures that the Sumero-Akkadian educational system did. In what follows, I survey the distribution of this system in areas surrounding Israel, before narrowing to take a look at how this system is reflected in Ugarit, Canaan, and later Israel as well. Overall the initial survey moves in rough chronological order while also following movement from East to West.
Egyptian Education and Textuality
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

As we turn to Egypt, we find a culture that is, if anything, even more textually oriented than the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. Where only isolated kings in Mesopotamia (e.g. Shulgi or Ashurbanipal) claimed ability to read, a number of royal inscriptions in Egypt claim a writing competence for pharaohs, and writing implements have been found in some of their tombs. Virtually all officials, whether they were required to write or not, went through the scribal educational process, and scribes maintained their prestige later in Egyptian history than in Mesopotamian history.2 Indeed, writing had immense prestige in Egypt. It was seen as a means of overcoming the faults of memory and as a tool from the gods.
Qumran as a Window into Early Jewish Education and Textuality
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

The finds in the caves near Khirbet Qumran provide the most important evidence to date of various levels of education and textuality. In Ben Sira and the Pseudepigrapha, we must extrapolate a picture of education in the Second Temple period from their presuppositions and indirect references. In contrast, the Qumran manuscripts provide direct testimony to a process of education, along with physical evidence of textuality and education. Moreover, the Qumran documents diverge some from the priest-temple focus of the writings discussed in the previous chapter. Though I will show how priests (come to) play a prominent role in the community, the Qumran documents provide a model of priestly instruction of nonpriests, one in which priests are the bearers of the teaching but the community as a whole achieves a hitherto unseen level of education in Scripture and higher mysteries.
Anti-Hellenistic Curriculum
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

In an article I wrote in 1996, I argued that the destruction of the temple and its immediate aftermath was the key period for the consolidation of the Scriptures reflected in Josephus and 4 Ezra;1 this chapter will modify that position somewhat. I will argue here that the origins of (1) widespread Hebrew study outside the temple and hardened Scriptures lie earlier. Both developments were integrally connected to the Hasmoneans’ promotion of a purportedly anti- Greek and pro-Jewish culture, a highly hybrid construction that reflected forms of Greek culture even as it—initially—opposed that culture. Though some forms of Judaism did not accept key parts of this construction (e.g., the anti-Hasmonean, Qumran community), the textual-educational system that was part of it was decisive in shaping much of subsequent Judaism.
Concluding Reflections on the Hellenistic Shaping of Jewish Scripture From Temple to Synagogue and Church
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

The preceding chapter explored the origins of the hardened Hebrew collection of Scriptures and emergent transtemple educational- textual system. Both developments are distinctive vis-a`-vis earlier Second Temple Judaism. Earlier I surveyed testimony of Ben Sira and others—up to the first century c.e.—to forms of textuality and education that were deeply linked to the temple. In chapter 9, I argued that Qumran represented a crucial window both to the temple- and priest-dominated textuality of the pre-Hasmonean period and to a hybrid Jewish example of nontemple textuality shaped by Hellenis- tic community models and the Hellenistic meal. Yet the Qumran settlement, apparently founded in part by priests who split off from the temple with the rise of the Hasmonean priesthood, does not yet reflect the sharply defined collection of Hebrew Scriptures testified to by sources like Josephus and 4 Ezra. Rather, I have argued that the pre-Hellenistic contents, Hebrew focus, alphabet-like numbering, and other features of the Hebrew Scriptures are best set in the context of the Hasmonean priest-kings’ promotion of distinctively Hebrew culture in their widening kingdom. I have acknowledged that these kings had their opponents, such as those found at Qum- ran, and they did not command the assent of all Diaspora groups or even peripheral groups—for example, the Samaritans—within their miniempire. Nevertheless, the Hasmoneans are the most likely agents to have had the power and motivation to make this move.
The ‘king ‘khufuî And the ‘magicians
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The Papyrus that has preserved this story was given to Lepsius, over fifty years ago, by an English lady, Miss Westcar, who had brought it from Egypt. Acquired by the Berlin Museum in 1886, it was first made known by a summary analysis of it published by A. Erman, Einneuer Papyrus des Berliner Museums, in the National-Zeitung of Berlin (May 14, 1886), and has been reproduced by A. Erman,.£gypten und.£gyptisches Leben imA!tertum, 8vo, Tubingen, 18851, pp. 498-502; Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des alten.£gyptens, 8vo, Berlin, 1887, pp. 129-131. The translation given by me in the second edition of these tales was not so much a literal version as an adaptation, founded partly on a German translation, partly on a transcription in hieroglyphic characters communicated to me by Erman. Since then an English paraphrase has been inserted by W. M. Flinders Petrie in his Egyptian Tales, 1895, London, 12mo, vol. i, pp. 91142, and the text itself has been published in facsimile and in a hieroglyph transcription, and also translated into German by A. Erman, die Miirchen des Papyrus Westcar (forming vols. v-vi of the Mittheilungen aus den Orientalischen Sammlungen), 1890, Berlin, 4to, who has since reproduced his translation with various corrections in his pamphlet, Aus den Papyrus der Koniglichen Museen, 1899, Berlin, 8vo, pp. 30-42, and has introduced several passages of his transcription into hieroglyphs in his .£gyptische Chrestomathie, 1904, Berlin, 12mo, pp. 20-27.
‘The ‘Lamentations Of ‘The ‘Fellah
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

This tale seems to have been very popular throughout the period of the Theban Empire, as four manuscripts are known that contain it, three at Berlin and one in London. The three Berlin manuscripts have been published by Lepsius in the Denkmaler ausk:gypten und./Ethiopien, Abtheilung VI, then in Vogelsang-Gardiner, die Klagen, des Bauern (forming vol. i of Erman’s Literarische Texten des Mittleren Reiches) 1908, Leipzig, folio. 1ST. The Berlin Papyrus No. 2 (Berlin 3023), of pl. ro8-no of Denkmaler (cf. plates 5, 5a-17, 17a of die Klagen) consists of three hundred and twenty-five lines in a large script of the early part of the XIIIth dynasty; carefully written at first, it becomes increasingly careless towards the end. The beginning and the end of the narrative are missing. 2ND. The Berlin Papyus No. 4 (Berlin 3025), of pl. n3-114 of Denkmaler cf. pl. 18, 18a-24, 24a of die Klagen) comprises a hundred and forty-two lines of very rapid writing of the same period as that of the preceding manuscript. It seems to have been damaged by prolonged handling, and the lacuna: caused by usage combined with the lack of neatness in the writing, render it difficult to decipher. The parts which are preserved contain an additional fifty lines towards the end, but even so the end of the story is missing. Fragments of these two manuscripts, which had escaped Lepsius, were acquired by the late Lord Amherst of Hackney and formed part of his collection at Didlington Hall. The most important of these contain several of the missing fragments of pages of the Berlin Papyrus No. 4. Others belong to Berlin Papyrus No. 4, and have been published by Percy E. Newberry, The Amherst Papyri, 1901, vol. i, pl. IA-Land pp. 9, ro.
The Shipwrecked Sailor
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The Papyrus that contains this story belongs to the Imperial Egyptian Museum of the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. It was discovered in 1880 by W, Golenischeff, and by him brought to the notice of the scholars who took part in the fifth International Congress of Orientalists, at Berlin in 1881. He did not then edit the text, but he has published a translation in French; Sur un ancien conte egyptien. Notice Jue au Congres des Orientalistes a Berlin, per W. Golenischeff, 1881, without publisher’s name, large 8vo, 21 pp. Breitkopf and Hartel, Leipzig. It was inserted in the Verhandlungen des Internationalen Orientalisten-Congresses, Berlin, 1882, 21es Theil, Erste Halfte, Africanische Section, pp. roo---122. This is the version I repr duced in the two first editions of this work, modifying it slightly on certain points, and it was from it that a Russian translation was made by Wladimir Stasow: Jegipetskajaskarka otkrytaja w Petersburgskom Ermitaze (An Egyptian tale discovered at the Hermitage of St. Petersburg) in the review Westnikjewropy (the Messengers of Europe), 1882, vol. i, pp. 580---602, and the two English translations given by Griffith in W. Flinders Petrie, Egyptian Tales, 1895, London, 12mo, vol. i, pp. 81---96, and F. LL Griffith, Egyptian Literature, in Specimen Pages of a Library of the World’s Best Literature, 1898, New York, 4to, pp. 5233---5236.
‘How Thutiyi Took The City Of Joppa
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The Fragments of this story cover the first three pages that exist of the Harris Papyrus No. 500, where they immediately precede the Story of the Doomed Prince. Like the latter, it was discovered in 1874 by Goodwin, who took it for fragments of a historical narrative, and announced his discovery at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archreology, March 3, 1874: Goodwin, Translation of a .fragment of an historical Narrative relating to the reign ofThotmes the Third, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Arch£ology, 1874, vol. iii, pp. 340-348. Wiedemann,Altagyptische Sagen und Marchen, small 8vo, Leipzig, 1906, pp. 112-117. The beginning is lost. At the point where we take up the story, there are three personages in the scene: an Egyptian officer named Thutiyi, the prince of a Syrian town and his equerry. The name of the country where the action is laid in that part of the story which is still preserved was read by Goodwin as Imu, and identified by him with the Emim of the Bible (Genesis xiv, 5, Deut. ii, 10, 11). The real form is Jopu, or according to Greek orthography Joppa. This reading has been objected to in its turn (Wiedemann,..&:gyptische Geschichte, pp.
How Satni-Khamois Triumphed over the Assyrians
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

For a long time the romantic character of the narrative told us by Herodotus in the second book, chapter c:xli, of his history has been recognised. It is the story of Sethon, priest of Vulcan, who triumphed over the Assyrians and their king Sennacherib. One would gladly agree that it is an Egyptian version of the facts recorded in the Bible in The Second Book of  kings (xix, 35, 36), but we do not know who the Sethon was to whom popular imagination ascribed this miracle. King Zet, whom Africanus adds to the lists of Manetho at the end of the XXIIIrd dynasty, is perhaps only a slightly altered double of the Sethon of Herodotus, and up to the present the monuments of the Assyrian or Ethiopian epochs have given us the name of no sovereign that corresponds exactly with the Greek name.
The Daughter of the Prince of Bakhtan and the Possessing Spirit
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

Now, while this was happening between Khonsu, who rules destinies in Thebes, and the spirit, the prince of Bakhtan was there with his army stricken with terror. And when they had made a great offering before Khonsu who rules destinies in Thebes, and before the ghost, from the prince of Bakhtan, while celebrating a feast day in their honour, the spirit departed in peace whithersoever it pleased him, according to the command of Khonsu who rules destinies in Thebes. The prince of Bakhtan rejoiced greatly, as well as all the people of Bakhtan, and he communed with his heart, saying, “Since this god has been given to Bakhtan, I will not send him back to Egypt.” Now after this god had remained three years and nine months at Bakhtan, when the prince of Bakhtan was laid down on his bed, he saw in a dream this god issuing from his shrine in the form of a sparrow-hawk of gold which flew towards Egypt; when he awoke he was shivering greatly. He then said to the prophet of Khonsu who rules destinies in Thebes, “This god who has dwelt with us, he wills to return to Egypt, let his chariot go to Egypt.” The prince of Bakhtan granted that this god should depart for Egypt, and he gave him numerous presents of all good things, and also a strong escort of soldiers and horses. When they had arrived at Thebes, Khonsu who rules destinies in Thebes repaired to the temple of Khonsu in Thebes, the good counsellor; he placed the gifts that the prince of Bakhtan had given him of all good things in the presence of Khonsu in Thebes, the good counsellor, he kept nothing for himse1£ Now, Khonsu the good counsellor in Thebes returned to his temple in peace, in the year xxm, the 19th Mechir, of the King Uasimariya-Satapanriya, living for ever, like the Sun.
The Exploits of Sesostris
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

As has been said in the general Introduction to these tales (pp. cxxii, cxxiii), Ramses II was divided by tradition and gave birth to two different personages, one named Sesdstris, after his popular name, Sesusriya, which is found on several of the monuments, while the other was called Osimanduas, or Osimandyas, from the prenomen Uasimariya. The form Sesdstris and the legend attached to it is of Memphite origin, as I have had occasion to show elsewhere (La Geste de Sesdstris, in the Journal des Savants, 1901, pp. 599-600, 603).
The Story Of ‘Rhampsinitus
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

THE earliest known form of this story was transmitted to us by Herodotus (II, cxxi). It is found among most nations, both of the East and the West, and the question of its origin has often been discussed. In the Introduction to this volume I have given my reasons for believing that if it was not invented in Egypt it had been Egyptianised long before Herodotus wrote it down. I will add here that the name of Rhampsinitus was given in Egypt to the hero of many marvellous adventures. “The priests say that this king descended alive into the region that the Greeks call Hades, that he played at dice with the goddess Demeter, sometimes beating her, sometimes beaten by her, and that he returned, bringing with him as a present from the goddess a golden napkin’’ (Herodotus II, cxxii). These lines contain a brief summary of an Egyptian tale, the two principal scenes of which recall in a remarkable manner the game played by Satni and Nenoferkephtah in the first place (pp. 109-no), the descent of Satni into Hades with the aid of Senosiris in the second place (pp. 122-125). The French translation adopted here was that of Pierre Saliat, slightly touched up; by a singular coincidence, it has served to re-introduce the story into the popular literature of Southern Egypt. In 1884 I gave a copy of the first edition of this book to M. Nicholas Odescalchi, then master of the school at Thebes, who died in 1892. He related the principal points to some of his pupils, who told them to others. Since 1885 I have acquired two transcriptions of this new version, one of which was published in the journal Asiatique, 1885, vol. vi, pp. 149-159, the text in Arabic with a French translation, but reproduced in Etudes egyptiennes, vol. i, pp. 301-3n. The narrative has not been much altered; although one of the episodes has disappeared-that in which Rhampsinitus prostitutes his daughter. One can understand that a schoolmaster, speaking to children, would not relate the story in all its native crudity.
The ‘Voyage Of ‘Unamunu To The Coasts Of Syria
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The manuscript that contains this story was found in the autumn of 1891 near the village of El-Hibeh, almost opposite Fechn, and the principal part of the fragments of which it consists were acquired shortly afterwards by Golenischeff. They comprise the first quarter and the last half of the first page, the second page almost complete, and several lines much mutilated that Golenischeff attributed to the third page. In 1892 Henri Brugsch discovered in a quantity of papyrus just acquired by him, a fragment that completed the second page. Since then no other fragment has been recovered, and it is to be feared that the manuscript will always remain incomplete. In 1898 Golenischeff inserted a Russian translation, accompanied by a phototype of the first twenty-one lines, in the Recueil de Memoires presented to M. de Rosen by his pupils of the University of Petrograd on the occasion of his jubilee.
Introductory Note
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

THE foregoing stories are sufficient to give the general public an idea of the romantic literature of the Egyptians. I might without inconvenience have stopped after the High Emprise far the Throne of Amon; none of my readers would have demanded the publication of the fragments that follow. I have thought, however, that there was some interest that should not be neglected in these poor remains; if those of literary tastes see nothing of importance in them, scholars will perhaps find it worth while not to ignore them entirely. In the first place, their very number clearly proves how many of the kind to which they belong were popular in the valley of the Nile; it provides one more argument in favour of the hypothesis that places the origin of some of our folk tales in Egypt. Also, some of them are not so mutilated that it is impossible to find anything of interest in them. No doubt twelve or fifteen lines of text can never be interesting to read as a mere matter of curiosity; a specialist may perhaps gather from them some detail in which he will recognise an incident known to him otherwise, or the hieroglyph version of a narrative still possessed by different nationalities.
The Quarrel Of Apôpi And Saqnûnrîya
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

This narrative covers all that remains of the first pages of the Sa/lier Papyrus No. 1. For a long time it was regarded as an historical document; the style, the expressions employed, and the actual groundwork of the subject all indicate a romance in which the principal parts are played by personages borrowed from history, but of which the ideas are almost entirely those of popular imagination. Champollion twice saw the papyrus at the house of its first proprietor, M. Sallier, of Aix in Provence-a few days before his departure for Egypt in 1828, and again on his return in 1830. The notes published by Salvolini show that he recognised, if not the actual nature of the narrative, at any rate the historical significance of the royal names in it. The manuscript, bought in 1839 by the British Museum, was published in facsimile as early as 1841 in Select Papyri. Hawkins’ notice, evidently drawn up on indications given him by Birch, read the name of the antagonist of Apophis that Champollion had not read, but attributes the cartouche of Apophis to king Phiops of the Vth dynasty. E. de Rouge was the first who actually discerned what was contained in those pages of the papyrus. In 1847 he accorded Saqm1nriya his proper place in the list of the Pharaohs; in 1854 he pointed out the name Hauaru in the fragment, and contributed to the Athenceum Franrais’ a somewhat detailed analysis of the document.
The adventure of the sculptor ‘petesis And ‘king ‘nectonabo
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The form of the characters and the texture of the papyrus determined Leemans to assign the writing of the fragment to the second half of the second century B.C.; Wilcken placed it in the first half of the same century, and attributed it to a personage who formed one of the company of recluses of the Serapeum. The part that has survived is composed of five columns unequal in length. The first, which is very narrow, contains twelve lines, of which only a few words are legible; but these enable us to restore conjecturally the title of the story “the sculptor Petesis and the King Nectonabo.” The second and fourth columns each contain twenty-one lines; the third twenty-four. The fifth only consists of four lines, after which the story breaks off suddenly in the middle of a sentence, like the Quarrel of Apopi and Saqnunriya in the Sallier Papyrus No. I. The scribe amused himself by drawing a comic figure of a man below the writing, and left his story unfinished.
‘Fragments Of The ‘Theban Coptic ‘Version Of The ‘Romance Of Alexander
Authors: El-Shamy Hasan
Published: November 2023

The remains of a romance of Alexander were discovered among the manuscripts of Deir Amba Shenoudah, acquired through me in 1885-8 for the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. Three leaves of it were first published by U. Bouriant, Fragments d’un roman d’Alexandre en dialecte thibain, in the Journal asiatique, 1887, viiith series, vol. ix, pp. I-J8, with one plate; printed separately in 8vo, 36 pp. Then three more leaves, a few months later, by U. Bouriant, Fragments d’un roman d’Alexandre en dialecte thibain (Nouveau Mimoire) in the journal asiatique, viiith series, vol. x, pp. 340-349; printed separately, 8vo, r2 pp.
Kubrick in Space
Authors: Mamber Stephen
Published: November 2023

The pretentiousness of 2001: A Space Odyssey has been a considerable obstacle to appreciating its status as masterpiece. The collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick’s own statements about the film have obviously obscured how deeply it connects to the rest of his work. The diversion provided by the film’s technologies that has led to enjoyable but incidental books like HAL’s Legacy makes it too easily the Kubrick movie to talk about by people who don’t know much about movies.1 Pondering such issues as the meaning of the monolith, whether HAL is really IBM a letter-back-each, or Bowman’s journey to star child has kept 2001 criticism in an interpretive dead end for a long time.
The Cinematographic Brain in 2001: A Space Odyssey
Authors: Landy Marcia
Published: November 2023

There is as much thought in the body as there is shock and violence in the brain. There is an equal amount of feeling in both of them.

The brain gives orders to the body which is just an outgrowth of it, but the body also gives orders to the brain which is just a part of it. 2001: A Space Odyssey is an allegory of the evolution of human intelligence, deliberately appropriating the cinematic apparatus to embark on its philosophic journey, which is realized in its conception of the “cinematographic” brain. The film has a subversive agenda and a design on the spectator. Critical to its own journey, the Odyssey probes conceptions of the human brain: is it the rational center for and seat of knowledge about a constant and determined world, the embodiment of intelligence whose evolution began with the tool-wielding ape and culminated in the computer that never errs? Or is there more to understand about the history and trajectory of evolution? And how does the technology of space in conjunction with the cinematic apparatus enter into the film’s allegory of perception, affect, and intelligence.
Reading Hal Representation and Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Mateas Michael
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I wish to focus on HAL 9000. Rather than reading HAL as a Frankensteinian cautionary tale, a representation of our disquiet over the cybernetic blurring of the human, of our fear of an evolutionary showdown with increasingly autonomous technologies, I’d like to read HAL as a representation of the goals, methodologies, and dreams of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As a representation, HAL, and the role he plays within 2001, both captures preexisting intellectual currents that were already operating within the field of AI and serves as an influential touchstone, which has had a profound impact on individual AI practitioners and on the aspirations of the field.
Double Minds and Double Binds in Stanley Kubrick’s Fairy Tale
Authors: Toles George
Published: November 2023

Obviously space is our destiny, that much I concede. After all I live there myself. But the excitement of the great voyages of discovery will pass me by; I will always belong to those who are left behind on the quay waving goodbye to the departing; I belong to the past, to the time before Armstrong put his big corrugated footstep on the face of the moon. That was another thing I got to see that afternoon, for without thinking anything in particular I had drifted into a sort of theater where there was a film about space travel. I found myself sitting in one of those American swivel chairs that hug you like a womb, and setting off on my journey through space. Almost immediately tears came to my eyes. Emotion ought to be inspired by art, and here I was being misled by reality; some technical wizard had worked optical magic to strew the lunar gravel at our feet, so that it was just as if we ourselves were standing on the moon and walking around. In the distance shone (!) the unimaginable planet Earth.
“Just Looking” Charles Tomlinson and the ‘‘Labour of Observation”
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

To include in a book dealing primarily with American poetry a chapter on an Englishman may seem illogical or counterintuitive, but Charles Tomlinson makes an important connection between the age of high modernism and the contemporary scene and between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As a technician he has remained conservatively, solidly at home, with few extraterritorial excursions in style or subject. To some readers his poetic landscape might seem spectral or monochromatic. But is consistency a flaw? Must the poet constantly reinvent himself? We can pose the question analogously with reference to painters: Matisse and Picasso offer one paradigm, the more exciting one, for the modern artist; Mondrian, Morandi, and Rothko another, perhaps more exacting one. Having found their terrain, they exploited it for all that it was worth.
John Ashbery’s Haunted Landscapes
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

Including John Ashbery in a book about description, indeed, labeling him a descriptive poet (or any other specific kind of poet) may seem presumptuous or simply special pleading, as it has been his fate to have evaded easy categorizing ever since the publication of Some Trees in 1956. Nevertheless, Ashbery’s descriptive urges and gestures can furnish readers with a handle or a possible entry into the vague morass, the swamps and thickets of the verbal terrain that he has mapped out for half a century. Ashbery’s poems often seem like verbal equivalents of a kaleidoscope that contains different parts of speech instead of rapidly whirling colored particles. Amid rambling speculations, syntactic confusions, obscure references, missed connections, layers of magnificently mottled diction that sometimes fail to cohere, his descriptions are often the first things that deviate into sense. They suggest that he is observing the world steadily if momentarily, and they prove the ineluctable modality of the visible as one strand, among many, in his various trains of thought.
Introduction: Crime Films And Society
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Crime films reflect our ideas about fundamental social, economic, and political issues while, at the same time, they shape the ways we think about these issues. When we look at the relationship between crime films and society, we see a dynamic interplay of art and life. This book examines that interplay from the multiple perspectives of film history and technique, social history, criminal justice, and criminology.
Why They Went Bad: Criminology in Crime Films
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Crime films serve as a cultural resource, creating a reservoir of images and stories on which viewers draw when they think about the causes of crime. Many crime films also endorse a particular explanation of crime. Whether they merely hint at a criminological theory or beat us over the head with one, crime films expose viewers to national (even international) debates about the causes of crime. Films draw on popular criminological explanations and in turn embody these explanations, feeding them back to mass audiences.
Prison and Execution Films
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

The prison film genre took shape during the days of silent cinema; to¬ ward the end of that period, studios were releasing one or two movies about prison life each year. Ranging from stories of jailbreaks and inmate reformation through melodramas about unjust convictions and hangings, these silent films created a cinematic vocabulary that was incorporated by talkies in the 1930s and could still be found, almost unaltered, in the 1990s success The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Movies of this type are essentially fantasies, films that purport to reveal the brutal realities of incarceration while actually offering viewers escape from the miseries of daily life through adventure and heroism. Presenting tales in which justice is miraculously restored after long periods of harsh oppression, prison movies enable us to believe, if only briefly, in a world where long-suffering virtue is rewarded. But in recent decades, a few filmmakers have begun producing movies that critique the traditional fantasy formulas or bypass them entirely, an indication that, after close to one hundred years, the prison film may be on the verge of transformation.
The Alternative Tradition and Films of Moral Ambiguity
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Crime films provide a celluloid rendezvous where audiences engage with major social issues: criminal responsibility, the nature of heroism, the impact of gender and race on legal decisions, and the nature of justice. To treat these issues, mainstream crime films have traditionally relied on a formula whose main ingredients are heroes, villains, and satisfying endings. In these films, justice is achieved-not painlessly but without final frustration. Films in the classic Hollywood tradition, I have argued, characteristically exhibit a double movement, first challenging the status quo with questions, then reassuring us that justice has been served (or will be), that moral dilemmas can be resolved, and that good guys win.
How is Biodiver sity Threatened by Hum an Activity ?
Authors: Chivian Eric , Bernstein Aaron
Published: November 2023

Although species have gone extinct since life began, what distinguishes present-day extinctions from those that have occurred in the past is a distinctive human fingerprint. This chapter considers how human activity has resulted in environmental changes that are known to threaten species. Although each of these changes is discussed as if it were acting in isolation, the reality is that threatened species most often come under pressure from several environmental assaults at once. In some cases, these changes may even work synergistically, such that their combined impact is greater than the sum of their individual effects. They can also act in such a way that one insult sets the stage for another, as may have occurred with the demise of some species of harlequin frogs in Costa Rica, where climatic changes are thought to have predisposed them to chytrid fungal infections1 (see chapter 6, page 212).
Genetically Modified Foods and Organic Farming
Authors: Chivian Eric , Bernstein Aaron
Published: November 2023

No discussion of biodiversity and food would be complete without an examination of the subjects of genetically modified (GM) foods and organic farming. Both practices have enormous implications for biodiversity and for food production, and as a result, for human health. And debates about their risks and benefits will continue to occupy policy makers and the general public worldwide for many years to come as they grapple with trying to feed rapidly expanding numbers of people using fewer and fewer acres of arable land and fisheries that are being increasingly depleted. As detailed in chapter 8, this issue is one of the central challenges of our time. We recognize that GM foods and organic farming are topics that are widely, and at times heatedly, debated, both generally and within the scientific community, with strong proponents on both sides of the issues. Below, we review the evidence for each of these agricultural technologies as completely as space allows, but we encourage those who would like to delve more deeply into their complexities to consult the references provided and form opinions of their own. The decisions we make in coming years about how we grow food, both for the health of world populations and for that of the global environment, must be based not on politics or vested interests, or on widely quoted but often inadequately studied assumptions, but on objective scientific grounds.
Introduction
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

Lionel trilling’s essay on Emma begins with the startling observation that, in the case of Jane Austen, ‘‘the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itself.’’ The comment is especially surprising in view of the essay’s origin as an introduction to the Riverside edition of Emma: rather than take readers straight into the novel, Trilling ponders the impossibility of approaching it ‘‘in simple literary innocence,’’ because of the powerful feeling generated by the name ‘‘Jane Austen.’’ Almost half a century later, opinions of Austen have multiplied as fresh issues have arisen to divert and divide subsequent generations of readers.
Opinions of Emma
Authors: Austen Jane
Published: November 2023

Captain auste n.1—liked it extremely, observing that though there might be more Wit in P. & P.—& an higher Morality in M. P.—yet altogether, on account of it’s peculiar air of Nature throughout, he preferred it to either. Mrs. F. A.2—liked & admired it very much indeed, but must still prefer P. & P. Mrs. J. Bridges—preferred it to all the others.
Emma; a Novel. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, &c. 3 vols. 12mo. London. 1815.
Authors: Scott Walter
Published: November 2023

There are some vices in civilized society so common that they are hardly acknowledged as stains upon the moral character, the propensity to which is nevertheless carefully concealed, even by those who most frequently give way to them; since no man of pleasure would willingly assume the gross epithet of a debauchee or a drunkard. One would almost think that novel-reading fell under this class of frailties, since among the crowds who read little else, it is not common to find an individual of hardihood sufficient to avow his taste for these frivolous studies. A novel, therefore, is frequently ‘‘bread eaten in secret’’; and it is not upon Lydia Languish’s toilet alone that Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle are to be found ambushed behind works of a more grave and instructive character.
Jane Austen, ob. July 18, 1817
Authors: Farrer Reginald
Published: November 2023

The concluding storms of a great conflict had hardly died down, when her world, almost unaware, bade farewell to Jane Austen; now, amid the closing cataclysms of a conflict yet more gigantic, we celebrate the hundredth year of her immortality. Time is the woodsman who fells the smaller trees and coppice in the forest of literature, and allows us at last to see the true proportions of its enduring giants; and the century that has passed since Jane Austen’s death now sees her preeminence securely established. An early editor could only dare timidly to suggest that perhaps she might be found not wholly unworthy of a place in the same shelf with Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth. Alas for both these, gone by now into the spare bedroom, and become the dusty curiosities of literature! Not even Jane Austen’s devotion has availed to save Fanny Burney from a too-general oblivion, whereas Jane Austen herself has long since taken rank as the centre of a cult as ardent as a religion.
Control of Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma
Authors: Booth Wayne C
Published: November 2023

Henry james once described Jane Austen as an instinctive novelist whose effects, some of which are admittedly fine, can best be explained as ‘‘part of her unconsciousness.’’ It is as if she ‘‘fell-a-musing’’ over her work-basket, he said, lapsed into ‘‘wool-gathering,’’ and afterward picked up ‘‘her dropped stitches’’ as ‘‘little masterstrokes of imagination.’’ The amiable accusation has been repeated in various forms, most recently as a claim that Jane Austen creates characters toward whom we cannot react as she consciously intends. Although we cannot hope to decide whether Jane Austen was entirely conscious of her own artistry, a careful look at the technique of any of her novels reveals a rather different picture from that of the unconscious spinster with her knitting needles. In Emma especially, where the chances for technical failure are great indeed, we find at work one of the unquestionable masters of the rhetoric of narration.
Emma “Woman, Lovely Woman, Reigns Alone”
Authors: Johnson Claudia L
Published: November 2023

There was a time, and not too long ago, when Jane Austen was considered to be above—or was it really below?—the anxieties of authorship. For Richard Simpson, as for many of Austen’s Victorian admirers, it was necessary to presume an “unconsciousness of [Austen’s] artistic merits” in order to regard her, in his own words, as “dear Aunt Jane,” a kindly spinster who never minded being interrupted while at work because her “powers were a secret to herself,” and who was gratefully surprised to earn even the little money she did because she rated her own abilities too low to expect acknowledgment.1 Encouraged by members of Austen’s own family, who in the “Biographical Notice” and the Memoir protest with obtrusive defensiveness that Austen put her family before her art, such views have survived well into our own century. Taking particular care to “redeem” Austen from “any possible suspicion of superiority or conceit,” R. Brimley Johnson asserts that Austen’s “taste was strong against any parade of authorship, and her affection would have accused herself of both conceit and selfishness, had she required privacy for work, or allowed herself to be so absorbed as to neglect any social or domestic duty.” R. W. Chapman later affiremed that “the sweetest reward of her labours” was nothing more ambitious or independent than “to have pleased her family.
Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text in Emma
Authors: Litvak Joseph
Published: November 2023

In the madwoman in the a tti c, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe the fate of the Austenian heroine as a “fall into literacy” (Gilbert and Gubar, 139). To fall into literacy is to “fall from authority into the acceptance of one’s status as a mere character” (GG, 161), to be at once silenced and confirmed—in the words of one chapter title, to be “Shut Up in Prose.” Yet Gilbert and Gubar show how heroines like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot subvert the patriarchal structures in which they are inscribed, imaging Jane Austen’s own quiet subversion of the repressive ideology her novels seem to endorse. In reclaiming authority, both Austen and these characters assert their “irrepressible interiority” and their “belief in female subjectivity” (GG, 179).
Filming Highbury: Reducing the Community in Emma to the Screen
Authors: Troost Linda , Greenfield Sayre
Published: November 2023

Sir walter scot t, in his review of Austen’s Emma, observes that the “author’s knowledge of the world .. . reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader” (Scott, 197). To explain the different positions of the community of Highbury in the two 1996 films of Emma, let us start with a comparison to two Flemish painters that spring to mind. The Miramax film of Emma, written and directed by Douglas McGrath and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, is like the work of Vermeer. In his pictures, we see the artist’s gaze focus on the details of genteel life and on subjects that project calm self-possession. The Music Lesson, for example, focuses contemplatively on two people surrounded by the trappings of tasteful gentry life—a viola da gamba, a virginal, and a Turkish carpet—complementing the calm, confient, and independent subjects in the portrait, the woman’s face reflected in a mirror. The Meridian telefilm of Emma with Kate Beckinsale (screenplay by Andrew Davies and directed by Diarmuid Lawrence), by contrast, has something of Bruegel to it, perhaps his Wedding Feast.
Clueless in the Neo-Colonial World Order
Authors: Wald Gayle
Published: November 2023

Seldom has a contemporary U.S. “teen flick” risen to the levels of both critical and commercial popularity attained by Amy Heckering’s 1995 film Clueless, an Americanized and updated version of Jane Austen’s novel Emma.1 One of four Austen film adaptations released in U.S. cinemas in the space of two years (the others were Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and a much-hyped version of Emma featuring Gwyneth Paltrow), Clueless not only attracted generally high critical regard in the mainstream and independent film press, but in its video version the film became a fast best-seller, particularly among the young female teenagers who were its primary target audience. Indeed, in a year that also witnessed the release of Larry Clark’s frankly dystopian Kids, a movie with which it was frequently contrasted in reviews, the fate of Clueless seemed almost as charmed as that of its protagonist, the ever fortunate Cher Horowitz. Modelled on Austen’s heroine Emma Woodhouse, Cher lives a life that appears as orderly and abundantly provided for as her over-stocked clothes closet, as seen in the film’s opening sequence. It is a life untouched by the social and familial conflict, drugged-out confusion or sexual turmoil that characterize other cinematic depictions of adolescence, including Heckerling’s own classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness
Authors: New Melvyn
Published: November 2023

I will begin with a seemingly noncontroversial observation by a recent critic of Tristram Shandy, anonymous simply because it is the sort of comment any one of a hundred might write today: “Sterne’s point,” he asserts, “is clear enough: life is a confused muddle of intent and accident.” It is the sort of generalization many have accepted at least since E. M. Forster in 1927 declared “muddle” to be the God ruling over the work. However, a closer examination of this particular formulation, not a jot different from that of countless others, might suggest an interesting problem.
Tristram Shandy and the Appositeness of War
Authors: Descargues Madeleine
Published: November 2023

The motto to this article is the opening sentence of Uncle Toby’s three-page-long “apologetical oration,” a problematic passage set in the sixth volume of Tristram Shandy. The sources of the uneasiness are several. There is of course the moral and political judgment one may pass on Toby-as-character’s “private views” despite his attempt at vindicating himself from them. Then there is the philosophical and ethical problem posed by the oration, i.e., the ambivalence of Toby’s figure as Everyman, a compound of Christian “goodness” and “excellency,” celebrated by his nephew Tristram (TS, 3.34.265), when taken with his more sanguinary appetites. Also the composition of the oration, a criss-cross of intertextual references, makes it a puzzle set for the reader. Only the working out of this may eventually suggest an interpretation of this apology for war as such and within the narrative structure of Tristram Shandy.
Keeping It All in Balance: Teaching Asian Religions through Illness and Healing
Authors: Vargas-O’Bryan Ivette
Published: November 2023

Initially, my fascination with teaching a course on illness and healing in Asian religions grew out of my experience of working with undergraduate students in religious studies and the sciences at Harvard University who wanted to learn about the cultural beliefs and customs of Asia in unconventional ways, crossing disciplinary boundaries and creating a net of interconnections between various fields like religious studies, medicine, anthropology, and sociology. Intersecting with my own doctoral work at the time on illness and renunciation in Tibetan Buddhist biographies, I was thrown into a search for what I saw as an exciting field of inquiry—illness, healing, and religion. I found that these themes appear throughout a number of traditions within Asia, have an overarching human element that crosses cultural boundaries, and have historical and current-day prominence. Thereafter, teaching several courses on the topic as junior tutorials at the same university and as undergraduate courses at two liberal arts colleges helped me consider large pedagogical questions: How do I teach an engaging yet informative introductory course on Asian religions year after year? How do the lenses of illness and healing help students understand Asian religious traditions? How do I engage responsibly in comparative and interdisciplinary studies? This essay discusses how the journey of teaching a course on illness and healing in selected religious traditions of India, Tibet, and China from a large urban setting to smaller isolated liberal arts colleges led to several revelations.