Abstract: This essay considers the personal political ramifications of the refusal to make a confession, twice enacted in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace . Professor David Lurie refuses officially to apologize for sexually abusing a student; and, later, his daughter Lucy, the victim of a gang rape, refuses to lay charges or speak of what has happened. In a context informed by the recent experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the novel thus raises the question of what it is to come to terms with a history of terror and subjection, both for the perpetrator and for the victim. It proposes, as an alternative to a Christianized confession, a secular atonement - in effect, a physical abjection, a dogged acceptance of humiliation - the forms of which are conventionally feminine, or at least emasculating. The essay examines the gender significations of this abjective alternative, especially in a situation where an ethic of unstinting love requires the elision and/or subjection of the body of the woman.

Abstract: Preliminary Table of Contents: Preface and Acknowledgments Note on Translations List of Abbreviations and Acronyms 1. Introduction: Engineering History and Engineering Literature 2. Official Writers: The Engineers of the Congolese Soul 3. Sony Labou Tansi: Commitment, Oppositionality and Resistance 4. Henri Lopes: Collaboration, Confession and Testimony 5. Emmanuel Dongala: History, Memory and Reconciliation 6. National Conferences and Media Decentralization in Francophone Africa Notes Bibliography Index

Abstract: A LOVERS COMPLAINT IS A COMPRESSED POEM detailing the predicament of an abandoned female lover who laments her undoing at the hands of an unscrupulous male seducer. It was first printed at the end of Shake-speares Sonnets, published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609, where it is preceded by a separate heading and a further ascription to Shakespeare. The poem has long presented something of an enigma to scholars and has for centuries been overlooked and undervalued. Readers are often frustrated by the poem's complex syntax, which occasionally verges on impenetrability; more significantly, the poem's reception history is characterized by uncertainty about its attribution to Shakespeare and doubts over whether its 1609 appearance was authorized. Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza recently revived the authorship debate, arguing on the basis of computerassisted textual analysis that both A Lover's Complaint and A Funeral Elegy "fail too many Shakespeare tests to look much like Shakespeare'." Other scholars have concluded to the contrary that the poem can confidently be attributed to Shakespeare and, further, that it was written at some point between 1602 and 1605. Ilona Bell has confirmed the insistent thematic links between A Lover's Complaint and the Sonnets, arguing that the longer poem functions as both a "commentary on and reader's guide to the drama enacted by and concealed within the Sonnets."2

Abstract: Introduction 1. The call to confession in Kierkegaard's Works of Love 2. Provoking the question: deceiving ourselves in Fear and Trembling 3. The poet, the vampire, and the girl in Repetition with Works of Love 4. The married man as master thief in Either/Or 5. Seclusion and disclosure in Stages on Life's Way 6. On the way.

Abstract: This study focuses on the records of confessions by individuals accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, both those presented in direct discourse and in reported discourse. We analyze the material from two viewpoints: the pragmatic features of the discourse and narrative structure and function. The data consists of 29 individual records, with eight cases selected for closer scrutiny. The records span the period from March through September 1692. In the pragmatic analysis we study the question and answer patterns from the point of view of the examiners and the accused. The analysis of narrative patterns is based on Labov’s work in oral narratives. It provides a multilayered approach to understanding both the structure of the confessions and the spread of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem. The categories of orientation and complicating action reveal that each confession presents a vivid representation of the devil, the accused, and the sociohistorical context.

Abstract: Treason plagues Macbeth from its opening: by the second scene of the play, the first Thane of Cawdor has betrayed King Duncan, and, by the fourth scene, Malcolm confirms Cawdor's execution for treason. Reporting on the event, Malcolm declares of Cawdor that "very frankly he confess'd his treasons, / Implor'd your Highness' pardon, and set forth / A deep repentance" (1.4.5-7).1 These lines reveal the dying last words of a traitor, familiar to its Jacobean audience as a monologue spoken from the scaffold by hundreds of prisoners.2 Such speeches were characterized by a confession of guilt and a prayer to the monarch as illustrated by Cawdor's own words.3 Recorded in chapbooks, ballads, and state papers, the "scaffold speech" was delivered by prisoners prior to execution, serving as a critical site for the apparent affirmation of the monarch and a re-establishment of communal, public order, as notably argued by Michel Foucault for early modern France, and J. A. Sharpe and Lacey Baldwin Smith for England.4

Abstract: Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

Abstract: In Finland, confession has been an object of discussion within the Church for a long time. While people have demanded that its role be increased, it has almost solely been discussed in terms of quantity. This study examines people's experiences of confession on the basis of 200 letters. These experiences show that it is not the form of confession that is the central issue, but rather its function, that is, giving relief. Thus the artificial borderline between confession, pastoral counselling, and psychotherapy is blurred. The goal should thus be not to stimulate confession, but rather to stimulate ways of helping people. The starting point must be a person's distress and on the basis of this one should decide which form of help is the most relevant in any given situation.

Abstract: In this article, it is argued that the Lydian and Phrygian inscriptions known as the 'confession inscriptions' should be regarded as 'reconciliation inscriptions'. Through analysis of the narrative and syntactical structure it appears that the inscriptions were written as testimonies of appeasement of divine wrath, rather than admittances of guilt. The divine intervention and the acts of piety are emphasized in the texts, while the accounts of transgression often have a secondary position. In particular, the verbs describing the dedication of the stele are stressed, being placed as a conclusion of the text. In addition, the concept of 'reconciliation inscription' is in accordance with the cults surrounding this genre and explains the purpose of raising these inscriptions.

Abstract: This paper examines the changes in contemporary documentary practices, in particular the shift to a 'first-person media'. By looking at certain types of first-person and confessional speech forms in factual television, I hope to offer a case study in how we might continue to distinguish between different kinds of program and to determine their relationship to the public sphere. The rise of first-person media can be seen as a response to the need for a public space in which 'life world politics' and 'emotional deomcracy' are fundamental. The dispersal of intimate speech and confessional discourse is an expression of the changes that have occurred in our social and economic lives. This paper explores documentary and factul television's role in this process.

Abstract: One confession deserves another: in my heart of hearts, I doubted that Lantolf was a practising postmodernist. For one thing, it was often too easy to figure out what he was saying. Still, his exposition of the postmodernist position would satisfy committed post-modernists, which is to say it gets things wrong in the same way they do.

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Part I AIDS Fiction 1 Laygues: The Ambiguity of Witnessing 2 Juliette: Masculinist Desires and Sexualities 3 Winer: Masculinity, Grief and Sexuality PART II AIDS Testimony 4 Testimony, Self-Avowal and Confession Simonin: The Forgotten Witness Aron: The Overlooked Witness 5 Dreuilhe: Metaphor/Phantasy and Mobilisation Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore the politics of coming out by homosexuals. There are two points to which I wish to draw attention. First, the discourse of liberationists who aim to move toward the liberated state of nature by telling sexual matters results in homophobic insistence. Second, social constructionists who regard telling of one's own sexuality as a confession conspire with the deployment of sexuality by not questioning one's own positionality in it.Through the analysis of the lawsuit on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's decision that homosexual groups should not be allowed to use Tokyo's youth center, the following three points on coming out are propounded. First, coming out is a resistance to change how power is exercised in homophobic society through taking a position within the power relations instead of remaining outside of them. Second, coming out shows that heterosexual norms are exclusive to neither the public sphere nor the private. Third, coming out problematizes the frame of knowledge that the truth of self is produced through the deployment of sexuality by constituting sexual pleasures as secrets.

Abstract: I begin this chapter with a confession. As a cultural anthropologist who studies contemporary American society, I never used to think of the interviews I do in the course of my fieldwork as ‘oral history’. This changed when I discovered that the most promising source of funding for my ethnographic study of a farming community in western Minnesota was not one of the traditional anthropological foundations, but the Minnesota Historical Society. Thus, in my grant application, I wrote of my intent to conduct ‘oral history’ interviews, choosing to use this term instead of the more familiar ‘ethnographic’ or ‘in-depth’ interview. Under the circumstances it seemed wise to appear as historically minded as possible.

Abstract: Analyse critique de la Premiere Profession de Foi de Londres (1644) et de ses sources. Ce texte a modele la theologie et la pratique, et l'identite, de l'eglise baptiste particulariste anglaise (English Particular Baptists).

Abstract: (Simic 6), a "Mozartian" love poet (Vendler, "Ardor" 101), a "magician" (Fraser 3), and so richly gifted that he seemed "extraterrestrial" (Allison Lurie qtd. in Mendelsohn 16). But the reviewers were also struck by how autobiographical his poetry is when seen as a whole. Even Adam Kirsch, who complains of Merrill's ironic detachment and aestheticism, concludes that in his autobiographical poems he was one of"the finest American poets of the last half-century" (44). Charles Simic believes that Merrill's escape from the "aesthete's aloofness" by the time he published Water Street (1962) was in part inspired by confessional poetry, especially Lowell's Life Studies, with its "autobiographical bent and shameless self-concentration." Simic writes that Lowell deeply influenced Merrill's autobiographical preoccupations and stylistic directness, but he adds that Merrill did not share Lowell's "need to blurt out dark secrets" (6).' The inevitable reservation of critics, when they relate Merrill to the confessionals, is that he is never genuinely confessional. For example, when David Kalstone compares Merrill's poetry to "so-called 'confessional' poetry," he argues that Merrill, unlike Lowell,

Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyse the expanding autobiographical literature concerned with neuro‐psychiatric problems from a sociology of knowledge perspective. The literature shows a tendency towards objectivity and distancing, which supports a thesis of proto‐professionalisation. But the accounts are impregnated with frames of understanding other than only scientific ones, with regard to both form and content. The confessional character of the accounts and the prevalence of themes such as truth, falsehood, guilt, shame, trial, redress and reconciliation indicate that moral, existential and even religiously coloured perspectives of interpretation are being applied. By way of conclusion, these autobiographies will be discussed against the background of socio‐political changes in recent times, and also against the background of basic cultural features in modern societies.

Abstract: When Sir Richard Southern wanted to illustrate the moral compromise that was the inevitable cost of being a courtier and servant of King Henry I of England—the culture of whose court encouraged profiteering and sharp practice—he found the material to hand in a number of surviving letters of the unfortunate Nigel d'Aubigny. At some time between 1109 and 1114 Nigel fell ill, and he believed himself dying. He dictated to his royal master a letter—on which one can almost see the spots of the tears—begging him to confirm the restorations of land that he wanted now to make to various churches he had formerly deprived. Another letter was to his brother, listing further—rather weighty—restorations he wanted made to numerous laymen likewise defrauded by him in the course of his career. Perhaps he felt rather silly when he got better, as he did, and lived for many years more to meditate on his unworthiness.Sir Richard proved his point, but it occurs to me that the same evidence can be used to explore further a different but related issue: how it was that these men who lived and worked in Henry's service were so very conscious of the moral compromises they had made. If Nigel d'Aubigny was brought to the state that his letters reveal that he was, when he was threatened by death, it can only be because he had been aware of actions that might be considered his sins for quite some while.

Abstract: Modern confessions expect a moment of de-alienating authenticity, of revealing one's true self. Yet, in distinguishing an imperfect, existing self from the mature ideal towards which it should grow, modem confession also divides the self, raising the question whether its main de alienating presupposition - that there is such a thing as an authentic self - can be upheld. This essay aims to trace the career of this typically modem paradox. It argues that the combination of an undertow of modem occultism and the development of the 'society of the spectacle' through commodification and screen technology has increasingly shifted confession towards a multiplicity of spiritual ideals of self-reform. Thus, it undermines the individual autonomy on which humanist modernity based its fears of alienation. In 1982, a St. Louis, Missouri broadcast company angered and offended its viewers when it interrupted a soap opera with newsflashes of the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Rome. Not only did the actuality of global news disrupt the viewers' soap opera, it did so for no good reason, since the victim was not even an American (as reported by Keyser (2000: 28)). It seems that, for some, the television screen's fictions overruled the news of what happened to the most powerful religious leader in the world. A puzzling hierarchy of values appears: the simulacrum of the screen seems to be preferred over the actuality of global news. Had the Pope been an American, the reaction might have been different - but that merely raises the question why some imagined communities are privileged over others (Anderson 1983). Most believers in a grand narrative of modernization or progressive emancipation will interpret this event as degeneration or alienation. Whether classified as a temporary aberration or as a doomsday prediction of the decline of civilization, it marks a loss of objectivity, a failure of reason to choose fact over fiction, and a loss of individual autonomy to the powers of the culture industry. In contrast, certain poststructuralist thinkers would read the event as a challenge to the grand narratives of rationalization and individualization and see it as an invitation to explore a new politics of simulacra, fiction and subjectivity, alternative to one based on emancipation by objective knowledge. I would like to keep an initial distance from the moral imperatives of both positions, and start with the simple observation that what we encounter here is a capacity to fixate one's life on a television screen that violates a certain 'modern' expectation of how life should be lived. This raises

Abstract: The Reformed Churches in South Africa and the relation with the government : opportunities and problematic areas Since its founding in 1859, the Reformed Church in South Africa (RCSA) has maintained a critical distance in the relationship with the magistracy (civil government). The churches of the RCSA also adhere to the biblical principles regarding the position and calling of the government as we confess in Article 36 of the Belgic Confession. According to this confession, a neutral state is not acceptable. Every government is a servant of God and called by Him to play a positive role in the coming of his Kingdom. With the transition to a new political dispensation in 1994, a constitutional state has been established in South Africa. At the same time, the South African state is also a secular state. In this state the executive powers are subject to the Constitution with its Bill of Rights in which, inter alia, religious freedom is guaranteed. The South African Constitution, as well as the government, simultaneously maintains a policy of the equality of religions, a policy that is in contrast with the biblical truth that the Triune God is the only true God. In future, this policy could have a negative impact on the relation between church and state. Nevertheless, the church, under all circumstances, has to continue to fulfil her God-given calling, especially in witnessing the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

Abstract: In April 1678, soon after the publication of the comtesse de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, the Mercure Galant proposed the following question, now legendary in the annals of literary history, to its readers: Je demande si une Femme de vertu, qui a toute l'estime possible pour un Mary parfaitement honneste Homme, et qui ne laisse pas d'estre combatue pour un Amant d'une tres-forte passion qu'elle tache d'etouffer par toute sorte de moyens; je demande, disje, si cette Femme voulant se retirer dans un lieu ou elle ne soit point exposee la veue de cet Amant qu'elle scait qu'il l'aime sans qu'il scache qu'il soit aime d'elle, et ne pouvant obliger son Mary de consentir a cette retraite sans luy decouvrir ce qu'elle sent pour l'amant qu'elle cherche a fuir, fait mieux de faire confidence de sa passion ce Mary, que de la taire au peril des combats qu'elle sera continuellement obligee de rendre par les indispensables occasions de voir cet Amant, dont elle n'a aucun autre moyen de s'eloigner que celuy de la confidence dont il s'agit. (1) In subsequent issues, correspondents throughout the provinces responded to the call, offering their own interpretations and judgments of Mine de Cleves's dramatic confession (aveu) to her husband that she was in love with another man, the Duc de Nemours. (2) This outpouring of interest can undoubtedly be attributed to a certain voyeuristic fascination: seldom had a novel gone so far in revealing the inner emotional life of a marriage. Beyond this sensationalistic appeal, however, the scene raised troubling questions about the interplay between marital intimacy and desire. Was it plausible that a woman might take her husband as a confidant so as to regain control over her most forbidden and uncontrollable desires? And what kind of man, conversely, would be willing to be his wife's confessor? Although both the novel and many of its subsequent critics would have us believe (with some justification, as we shall see) that Mine de Cleves's confession is unique and unprecedented, (3) the aveu only becomes fully comprehensible when it is inscribed within the broader problematics of confidentiality within the text. A comparison of La Princesse de Cleves with Lafayette's other major work, Zaide, reveals that confidential ties are central to the narrative and ideological fabric of both novels: confidants are plot devices; they are a basic component of the social universe through which the novel's characters must navigate; and, perhaps most important, they are conduits of information to the reader. Lafayette, of course, is hardly the only (or the first) novelist of her period to exploit confidants in such ways; it will be argued, instead, that her originality lies in the ironic manner in which she plays these various functions off against each other. Jean-Baptiste Henri du Trousset de Valincour, author of the Lettres a la Marquise [...] sur le sujet de la Princesse de Cleves, was perhaps the novel's most sophisticated seventeenth-century critic. One of his central preoccupations was the question of what (and how) readers know about the fictional universe of a novel: D'ailleurs, pour revenir a la Princesse de Cleves, il serait difficile a ceux qui voudraient la prendre comme une histoire, de deviner sur quels Memories l'historien a travaille. En effet, les principaux faits n'ont ete sus que de ceux qui y ant eu part' et il ne parait point qu'ils les aient jamais recontes a personne, ni qu'ils aient pu jamais parvenir a la connaissance de l'auteur, que par le moyen d'une revelation particuliere. (4) Valincour begins with the premise that the La Princesse de Cleves might be read not a self-consciously fictional "roman" in the tradition of d'Urfe's Astree (what we might call a "romance"), but rather as an "histoire." Although it is difficult to find an adequate translation for "histoire," the term clearly suggests a genre that is closer in some respects to historical discourse than to the stereotypical seventeenth-century romance (something akin to an historical novel, perhaps). …

Abstract: Not everybody wants to be a saint. — Jonathan Hullah, MD, in Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man [1][1] The activities of the World Trade Organization (WTO) do not normally attract much attention from the medical community. However, the defence by manufacturers and governments of patent protection

Abstract: This manuscript offers an interpretation of Doblin's Schicksalsreise in regard to authorial identity. Schicksalsreise appeared in 1949, but long suffered from critical neglect. Now a few analyses of the work exist and effectively explicate its "confession" or "conversion" theme. The problem with this analytical approach is that by overemphasizing the confessional narrative, it misses other features of the book. Schicksalsreise reveals a complex author – not only a Christian convert, but a "former" Jew who has not turned his back altogether on Jewish political concerns and, also, a German who is drawn back to postwar Berlin and whose diction betrays the excitement of hearing his native language spoken on native soil. Important as religio is to Schicksalsreise, the work does not invite an interpretation that reduces these other elements to religious terms. The manuscript relies on a recent study by Roland Dollinger, who has represented Doblin as an "epic" writer constructing his works out of "fragments" – a perspective that is suited to Schicksalsreise and its "fragmentary" author. It is suggested that "exile" supplies a frame of reference in which to view the ambivalence of Doblin's identity.