Abstract: This dissertation provides a contribution to a new history of exact thought in which the existence of a break between "non-modern" and "modern" abstraction is put forward to account for the possibility of the "modernization" of probability theory, mathematics and logic during the 19th- and early 20th-century. The articles that make up the dissertation are all concerned not with the "modern" idea of a formal axiomatic system as such, but with what allowed it to become conceivable and they understand the way in which this came about not from the perspective of the "modern" but from that of the "non-modern". The articles can be read on four different levels - the first two of which form the main body of the text. Firstly, as detailed historical studies of the work of "non-modern" probabilists, mathematicians and logicians (ca. 1830-1930). Secondly, as an elaboration of a general view of "non-modern" conceptions of probability theory, mathematics and logic - a negative characterization which suggests that the later modifications of some of the ideas of "non-moderns" were unthinkable for them given the foundations of their position. Thirdly, as a contribution to a post-Kuhnian history of "modernization" in these realms of exact thought which evokes, fourthly, a theoretization of the philosophical "break" in abstraction that underlies the "modernist transformation."

Abstract: When the "sender-receiver", also known as "communicating compartment", instead of "the cell", is adopted as the universal unit of structure and function of living matter, organic- and cultural evolution automatically emerge as the two sides of the same coin. This proposed conceptual switch makes "problem-solving activity" instead of gene-protein activity a key in understanding adaptation and evolution. The concept "problem-solving activity" has no teleological meaning in neo-Darwinism. This paradigm shift also allows for a plausible definition of "life" (L), as the sum of communication acts (C), L = ∑C. Any sender-receiver harbors two memory systems: genetic and cognitive. Using a human metaphor, where relevant, two types of progeny can (co)exist: "physical children" and "pupils". Any act of communication is a problem-solving act, because all messages, regardless of their nature, are coded. Hence, any receiver invariably faces the problem of how to extract and respond to the incoming information. Some biological problems are solved "the hardware way" (Darwinian organic evolution), others "the software way" (Lamarckian cultural evolution). Mega-Evolution means life's evolution as a hardware-software double continuum governed by the principles of both genetics and communication.

Abstract: Sometime around 1800, toward the end of his period of programmatic neoclassicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between "art" and "nature." While seemingly in flight front one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: "Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, / Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden" (Though art and nature seem sore disunited / Yet each, before you think, to each is turning).1 Reassured by this apparent reconciliation of nature and art, the speaker declares that his antipathy ( Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetic trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself drawn equally to both. This bold beginning raises a series of questions, arising in no small part from the multivalence of the very terms "nature" and "art," which are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas. "Nature," as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is "perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language," and judging by the lengthy entry in the Grimms' Deutsches Worterbuch, the same can certainly be said fot Natur in German.2 One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of "nature" is in play here? "Art" is somewhat less prodigiously polysemous, but it was significantly more so in Goethe's day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of art, around 1800, Kunst, like "art" in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of "craft." Such crafty "arts" could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon's novum organon in order to induce "nature" to surrender "her" closely guarded secrets.3 What kind of "art" is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with "nature"? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent reunification be effected?In this essay, I propose to explore these questions from an ecocritical and ecophilosophical perspective. In particular, I wish to reconsider German Romantic-era understandings of the interrelationship of art and nature from the perspective of the burgeoning new field of multi- and interdisciplinary study that became known in the 1980s as "biosemiotics."Biosemiotics entails the examination of those multifarious and multifaceted communicative processes (semiosis) that are intrinsic to the existence and interactions of all living organisms (bios). Discussions of the historical antecedents of biosemiotics not infrequently allude to the legacy of German Romantic biology and Naturphilosophie. Prisca Augustyn, for instance, refers to the "Romantic Biology or natural organicism of Kant, Goethe, and Schelling that sees nature as creative force and creation at once, where perfect form is found in plants and animals as in poetry or art," as the "bedrock of biosemiotic thought."4 Similarly, Donald Favareau, in his detailed "Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics" acknowledges the importance of German Romantic thought in the intellectual milieu of one of the major forefathers of biosemiotics, the German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944), and its legacy in his language.5 Such legacies nonetheless remain underresearched and even appear at times to be a source of concern to contemporary biosemioticians. For example, Tommi Vehkavaraa is at pains to distinguish the account of the continuity between biological life and human mental activity developed by another biosemiotic forefather, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), from that of Schillings Naturphilosophie,6 while Romantic science does not even rate a mention in Favareau's "Brief History of the Sign Concept in Pre-modernist Science," which appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal Biosemiotics in 2008. …

Abstract: Introduction This paper examines the ethical issues that arise when ordinary beings apply upaya-kausalya in practical situations. (3) First, background is given on the term upaya-kausalya and its use. Next, the ethical tensions and issues that arise in upaya-kausalya are examined through various parables in the Lotus Sutra, the Therlgatha, and examples from ordinary life. After elucidating the potential problems of hubris, paternalism, projection, and failure, I raise a hypothetical example to press these concerns, focusing on the permissibility of deception. Next, I propose a solution of learning from textual uses of upaya-kausalya by paying attention to two epistemological gaps: knowledge of how to help, and knowledge of the audience. Finally, I argue that our responsibility to help others comes from our ability to influence others, as well as its unavoidability. Upaya-Kausalya The Sanskrit term upaya-kausalya (Pali: upaya-kosalla) is typically translated as "skill in means" or "expedient means" and usually abbreviated as upaya ("means" or "device") when meant to refer to the entire compound (Pye 8-12). In Sanskrit, the term has a neutral valence. According to Jay Garfield, "In Tibetan it is translated as thab mkhas, a term with valorizing connotations (indeed often conferred on monks as an ordination name), associated with a kind of wisdom (mkhas pa [khepa]), or pedagogical understanding" (272). Michael Pye proposes that English translations "tend to suggest a lower degree of ethical responsibility than should fairly be ascribed to Mahayanists" (9) and it would be misleading to associate a "pejorative sense of deviousness" (10) with it as merely a device. (4) The negative connotation is most prominent in the modern usage of the Japanese translation as hoben meaning "expedient." The Japanese is adapted from the Chinese, where the issue is more complicated. Though typically abbreviated as fangbian (upaya), the full term is shanquan fangbian (upaya-kausalya). It is also rendered as shanqiao fangbian, qiaofangbian, fangbianli, quanfangbian, quanbian, and shanquan (Karashima 133). The word shan literally means "good" or "virtuous," hence in the complete rendering of upaya-kausalya, the connotation is positive. However, the most commonly used abbreviated rendering fangbian leaves this crucial word out and has a neutral valence, meaning "method," or a positive valence, meaning "convenient." (5) These problems in translation aside, this Buddhist concept has mainly been studied as a Mahayana innovation used to introduce new ideas into Buddhism. Additionally, it has been examined as a hermeneutical device, (6) and a philosophy of practice. (7) Pye points out that upayakausalya can refer to the teachings of buddhas and bodhisattvas that are meant to "help ordinary beings," practices performed by ordinary beings "in order to make spiritual progress," and much in between (158). To clarify the upaya-kausalya performed by ordinary beings, Pye does not explicitly mention the use of it as a strategy to help others (which I will address in this paper), but rather he has in mind practices to cultivate oneself, such as chanting. Especially in the context of Mahayana, he concludes, "In short, Buddhism is skilful means" (158). Not limited to Mahayana, the parable of the raft in the Pali Canon suggests that all Buddhist teachings are upaya-kausalya, that is, they are provisional and instrumental constructs that are abandoned after they have served their purpose. Another conversation on upaya-kausalya, taken up by Damien Keown and Charles Goodman, involves the ethical implications of its use within the Buddhist canon. (8) Keown identifies the four aspects of upayakausalya as: the Buddha as a skilful teacher (found in the Pali Canon), Dharma or text as skilful means (in the Lotus Sutra), a bodhisattva's practice (in the Vimalakxrti Nirdesa Sutra), and a source that allows bodhisattvas to break precepts (in the Upayakausalya Sutra) ("Paternalism" 202). …

Abstract: JAZZ AND BANDS Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. By Thomas Brothers. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. [xi, 594 p. ISBN 9780393065824 (hardcover), $39.95; ISBN 9780393350807 (paperback), $19.95.] Music examples, illustrations, discography, bibliography, index.A continuation of Brothers's Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), this book focuses on ten years of Louis Armstrong's life and music from 1922. Brothers divides the decade into Armstrong's two "modern" styles: the first, "created around the years 1926-28" which was typified by his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, and the second, "the result of efforts to succeed in the mainstream market of white audiences" (p. 9). Although Brothers does not define the term "modern," underlying Armstrong's modern styles is the notion that he created "a modern black identity" (p. 196) by internalizing and then transforming "the AfricanAmerican musical vernacular" (p. 3), which is described as "the orally based traditions that were formed on the slave plantations of the Deep South and continued to provide the everyday basis for cultural expression among lower-class blacks" (p. 4).Brothers's basic contentions are themselves indisputable: for example, that Armstrong's music is inherently African American in nature and that he was deeply indebted to his musical background in New Orleans; however, his assertion that nearly all aspects of Armstrong's music are direct manifestations of African legacies is problematic. For example, he argues that the fixed and variable model, as the underlying principle of Armstrong's first modern style, is "a musical model that is still ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa, from which enslaved people brought it to the New World" (p. 6). Focusing on the rhythmic aspect of West African percussion music, Brothers explains that on the fixed level "one instrument (or group of instruments) plays a repeated rhythmic figure," while "the 'variable' instrument or group brings the music to life by departing from the repeated figure in interesting ways" (ibid.). Arguing that Armstrong applied this model to "melody and harmony as well as rhythm" (ibid.), Brothers broadens it to include any variable musical element superimposed on any underlying musical structure at all levels, encompassing displacements of rhythm, harmony, melody, phrasing, timbre, and form, with specific examples of syncopation, substitute harmony, harmonic anticipation, extended harmony, and nonharmonic tones.This overarching model might be a result of an attempt to overcompensate for the loss of a direct African legacy, because while acknowledging that "details of West African drum ensembles did not survive in the American South," Brothers claims that "the fixed and variable model not only survived, it flourished" (p. 94), as "the general principles were retained and applied to different instruments, techniques, repertories, and styles" (p. 93). In fact, he ironically argues that "by making the fixed and variable model so central to his music, Armstrong intensified the audible presence of his African heritage" (pp. 6-7; italics in the original) and that "this African legacy was strengthened" (p. 196). This is a problematic model not only because it is too broad to be meaningful, but also because Brothers does not provide any supporting evidence, and because his understanding of African music simplistically equates it with West African percussion music while ignoring the extraordinary musical diversity in the West African region alone. Ironically, Brothers claims that a prejudice in jazz history that emphasizes rhythm rather than melody has failed to recognize Armstrong as a great melodist (p. 457), while he himself employs a similar approach to African music. Another self-contradictory example is his emphasis on improvisation as an integrally African musical practice, while repeatedly stressing that Armstrong's solos and New Orleans jazz in general were not improvised, but rather worked out over time. …

Abstract: This article reflects the division in the field of the study of complexity, between a mainly philosophical and epistemological approach (Edgar Morin called it "general complexity") and a mainly scientific and methodological approach (called by Morin as "restricted complexity"). The first perspective would be well represented by Morin's "complex thinking," while the second by the new "science of complex adaptive systems." We show the potential and limits of each perspective, and conclude by claiming the need to relink both the perspectives into a comprehensive "paradigm of complexity" that is capable of providing, and following the original definition of Thomas Kuhn, at the same time a worldview ("general complexity") and examples of scientific achievements ("restricted complexity").IntroductionAccording to Edgar Morin 21, we can distinguish between the two approaches to the phenomenon of complexity: "general complexity" and "restricted complexity."On the one hand, a "general complexity," is a fundamentally epistemological approach developed by scientists and philosophers such as Edgar Morin, Ilya Prigogine, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, among others. It was developed primarily between the 70s and 80s from new disciplines such as cybernetics, systems theory, dissipative structures theory, catastrophe theory or autopoiesis theory. Morin's complex thinking would be one of its best syntheses.On the other hand, a "restricted complexity," is a primarily methodological approach developed by scientists such as Murray Gell-Mann, John Holland, Stephen Wolfram, Stuart Kauffman, and Robert Axelrod since the creation in 1984 of the Santa Fe Institute in the United States and the improvement and sophistication of computational technologies. Complex Adaptive Systems Science is currently its dominant trend."General complexity" approaches the phenomenon of complexity from a natural language. It draws its epistemological implications from the point of view of the subject who knows: complexity would compose a "new paradigm" 21 or "new alliance" 23 which is potentially transdisciplinary. Therefore it gives a theoretical account of the properties of self-organization and autonomy of the physical, biological, and social systems from the perspective of the process of their observation. Complexity would express the extent of ignorance of an observer who is unaware of the information of the observed system itself 2 and the process of "construction" 9 of an external object that is unattainable by the cognitive system of a subject. It is characterized more by their own "operational closure" and "internal consistency" 24 than by the faithful representation of the external reality. This approach, going back to the historic Macy Conferences (1946-1953) on Cybernetics7, was widely developed in the 70s since the transition from a "first-order cybernetics" or cybernetics of observed systems27 to a "second-order cybernetics" or "cybernetics of observing systems"9.Complexity, at the same time, expresses the self-organized and systemic nature of the world and the cognitive limits of human observers and it would call into question the deterministic, reductionist, and positivist principles of classical science. This approach has even included ethical proposals through authors such as Edgar Morin or Fritjof Capra. For these authors, the "paradigm shift" would not only have epistemological implications and imply the change of view of science or reality, but it would have ethical implications that tend toward a more harmonious relationship with nature, other people, and cultures from a "holistic" or "systemic" capability. Such a capability, integrating several complementary elements, makes up the biosphere and the entire humanity into a harmonious whole."Restricted complexity," instead, approaches the phenomenon of complexity from a formal language by trying to model using new computational techniques. …

Abstract: Complaining about James Hogg's excessive life-writing, John Wilson, as "an Old Friend with a New Face," writes to "Christopher North," the pseudonymous editor of Blackwood's (who is also John Wilson), asking "how many lives of himself does the swine-herd [actually shepherd] intend to put forth?" Cataloging Hogg's series of "lives" according to the periodicals in which they appeared, the Old Friend notes a "good many lives of him in the Scots Magazine--a considerable number even in your own work, my good sir--the Clydesdale Miscellany was a perfect stye with him--his grunt is in Waugh--he has a bristle in Baldwin" (Blackwood's 10:54, 43). The Old Friend represents this propagation of lives as an effort to transform "a very ordinary common-place animal" into a record of enduring fame: "his death will be remembered like a total eclipse of the sun" (44). He claims that these autobiographical attempts are disseminated through and inadequately regulated by the periodical industry. Lamenting that neither Captain Brown, of the Edinburgh police force, nor Francis Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, will "interfere" in this self-aggrandizement, the Old Friend resolves to bring Hogg to justice with his own counter-life, in which he dismantles Hogg's claims to accomplishment, including several that are not actually in the autobiographies. In response, Wilson, as "Christopher North," intimates the Old Friend might be Hogg himself, or certainly his close friend; he glosses this letter as "banter and good humour" meant to "tick[le]" the public sympathy" for Hogg and thereby "put a few cool hundreds in his pocket" (52). The Old Friend's indignation is in part about the very textual ambiguity he is exploiting: the recognition that the word "life" had come to mean not just the collective experiences of an individual but the written account, and accounting, of those experiences. His letter insists that the representation of a person, its narration within public discourse, was a defining component of that person's own existence, and North's note underscores the financial implications of that claim. The Old Friend emphasizes this formative function of life-writing in a parodic moment, in which Hogg's multiplying lives drive him to claim credit for the notorious 1806 murder of William Begbie as an aesthetic counter-balance to his own textual instability. The salience of textual lives applied to celebrities of the Romantic period, as Tom Mole has demonstrated, using Byron's own dialectical relation to his print-culture avatar as his prime example. And, indeed, the Old Friend (mis)accuses Hogg of publishing his own two "imitations of Wordsworth" written by Byron, and imagines Hogg physically trying to impersonate Byron: "Does Hogg believe, that if he were to steal Lord Byron's breeches and coat, and so forth, and walk along the Rialto, that the Venetian ladies would mistake him for his lordship?" By contrast, the Old Friend avers with irony, when Hogg attempts an "imitation" of "himself' (not just writing as himself), he achieves a "true specimen of the stye-school of poetry" (49). Building on Mole's analysis, I contend that periodicals, as a locus of the ideology of possessive individualism, required that this paradigm of celebrity infiltrated the space of the ordinary. In this way, the periodical industry joins with the early nineteenth-century novel in commitments both to individualism and to ordinariness. Nancy Armstrong has demonstrated that "Austen's novels mark the simultaneous modernization of the individual and maturation of the novel (7). Reviewing Austen's Emma, Walter Scott defends and theorizes the novel in the Quarterly Review (1816), as an act of "pleading our own cause" making the "our" ambiguously stand in for readers, novelist, reviewer, and editorial consciousness. Scott uses the adjective "ordinary" eight times in the review, to modify "novelists," "life" (three times), the reader's "experience."; the "probabilities of life,"; "walks of life," and the male reader's "business of life," emphasizing the ordinary life as amenable to literary scripting (Quarterly 14:27, 188-201). …

Abstract: By-roads and hidden treasures: mapping cultural assets in regional Australia, edited by Paul Ashton, Chris Gibson, and Ross Gibson, Crawley, Western Australia, UWA Publishing, 2015, vi + 220 pp., US$39.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-7425-8624-3 By-roads and Hidden Treasures begins with a deceptively complex research question: "how can we best map regional culture in contemporary Australia so that we can assess that culture's value?" (p. 3). This inquiry began with the Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia project, which combined a collaboration of universities, local governments, and community actors, as well as scholars studying locality, political economy, culture, and place-based community politics. While the book complicates as many questions as it resolves, it nonetheless provides useful guidance for scholars, cultural planners, policymakers, and political actors. The book provides a flexible roadmap for how to assess, engage, and support local communities' "cultural assets" in a manner appropriate to places of marginality, exclusion, and conventionally unrecognized vibrancy. The collection proves timely. As Ross Gibson explains, this is "a time in national and global history when the most basic precepts in planning, governance, and cultural geography [are] being interrogated" (p. 1). The shift in Global North nation-states like Australia toward postindustrial economies has put "culture" in a double bind. On the one hand, immaterial things like knowledge are increasingly commodified, yet, on the other, conventional systems of valuation have been thrown into doubt. The collection does not theorize these transnational processes, but rather asks how "the local" has responded. Offering important insights for cultural geographers, these authors rethink conventional conceptions of "the local", culture, value, and place, though scale remains less richly theorized. For instance, Deborah Stevenson reframes "culture" as a way of life, challenging cultural planners' conventional focus on "the arts". She also reappropriates "creativity" from its conscription by Richard Florida's "creative class" and the "creative industries", in which "economic ends are dominant" (p. 102). Andrew Warren and Rob Evitt explore how young Indigenous hip-hop artists practice place through the ways they negotiate their marginalization. "Place is crucial" for them as a source, mediator, and product of their music (p. 137). Place is relational and hybrid for these artists, emerging at the intersection of local politics and transnational black hip-hop solidarity. While others describe "place" as "sites" of creativity (e.g., see Gibson, Warren, and Gallan's chapter), Emily Potter describes the "shadow places" that haunt Australian landscapes. Drawing on the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2008), Potter argues that "[e]very place has in its composition the imprint of other places" (p. 83). This "web of responsibility" implicates both the centers and the margins (p. 84). This ethos seems vital given, on the one hand, Australia's (post)colonial legacies of marginalizing Indigenous folks, often through planning policies, and, on the other, neoliberal place-making that centers "culture" as consumption. …

Abstract: Introduction Recent years have seen an explosion in literature surrounding religion and the environment, partly in response to developments within religious traditions themselves. (3) Faced with environmental pollution, global warming, and species extinction on an unprecedented scale, religious leaders worldwide have not been found wanting in their responses. This is unsurprising given the eco-crisis' unique capacity to cut across traditions and geographical location like few issues today. Whether we like it or not the consensus seems clear: we are in the same boat together. The dilemma's universality provides a kind of ethical meta-problem, an overarching paradigm in marked contrast to the heterogeneity characterising more traditional, human-centred ethics. Indeed, though they may differ on, say, the correct response to abortion, "No religious tradition ... is likely to react favourably to an impending global environmental catastrophe. To indicate otherwise would be an act of the grossest folly" (Harris "Getting to Grips" 182). Amid such unanimity, the potential for Buddhism to capitalize on environmental issues through what might be called "religious green-wash" has drawn cynicism from the sidelines. As Ian Harris comments: "the Dalai Lama ... now regularly takes the opportunity to publicise his environmental credentials on the international stage" (183). (4) Such inflammatory polemics aside, Harris alerts us to an important fact: the crisis provides unrivalled opportunities for shoring up popular support by appealing to shared values. Thus, contemporary representations of Buddhism as inherently "green" call for a critical eye. This essay focuses on a particularly controversial articulation of Buddhist environmentalism I call "holistic eco-Buddhism": one that draws on the Madhyamaka/Huayan doctrines of dependent origination (prautyasamutpada) and mutual non-obstruction for inspiration towards a "holistic" or "deep ecological" environmental ethic founded on identification with the natural world. Although this kind of Buddhist environmentalism has been roundly criticized for its heterodoxy-most vehemently by Harris, who describes it as "an uneasy partnership between Spinozism, New Age religiosity, and highly selective Buddhism" ("Discourse" 378)-this essay finds inadequate attention has been paid to specifically East Asian sources. Problems surrounding eco-Buddhism, namely, problems of identity and difference, universalism and particularity, have a long history in Chinese Buddhist thought, and were not simply introduced by contemporary Buddhists ex nihilo. Prautyasamutpada did not evolve from the twelve-fold chain of causation to a doctrine of universal causal interrelatedness in eco-Buddhist hands (Harris "Ecology" 124), and neither does it entail nihilism, monism, or Spinozism. The reality is more complex. Part one outlines and critiques the phenomenon that is "holistic eco-Buddhism." Some preliminary questions are raised and discussed. Outstanding issues then guide part two, which examines the notion of "merging with things" in early (pre-Huayan) Chinese Buddhism, asking why this idea took shape and how Chinese exegetes understood the ontological and soteriological relation between "identity" and "difference." Part three tackles Huayan proper, focusing specifically on Dushun's understanding of shi and li, and Fazang's "building" analogy. I end with some suggestions for a coherent holistic eco-Buddhism based on functionality and activity in Chinese thought. What is Holistic Eco-Buddhism? "Holistic eco-Buddhism" is used here to describe a popular strand of contemporary environmentalism drawing upon traditional Buddhist doctrine and theory, particularly Madhyamaka interdependence and the Avatamsaka/Huayan doctrine of mutual interpenetration or nonobstruction, to encourage self-identification with, and sensitivity to, the natural (non-human) world. Holistic eco-Buddhism is often quoted alongside the "deep ecology" of eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who argued for a "relational total field image" where organisms are no longer perceived as isolated but "knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations" (95). …

Abstract: This paper explores McQuire’s concept of "relational space", a term he uses to describe the transformed horizon of social relationships within the smart city. Although there is no exact definition, the smart city is predicated on both the rise of digital technology and ubiquitous wireless connectivity. The city, of course, has always been intimately connected with technology. Yet it is clear that this most recent innovation constitutes a significant reconfiguration of the urban experience. Possibilities abound in terms of how citizens might interact with services, the environment and each other. Yet, this paper argues that these transformations are intimately linked to wider changes in thought and experience. As post-industrial cities become more complex, and their communities more dispersed, questions such as "where is home?" and "where and how do I belong?" become increasingly pertinent for a deeper, more sustained understanding of "relational space" and its impact on how we might experience our lives. This paper, drawing on the outcomes of a small project, argues that creative writing can play a fundamental role within the development of the smart city, empowering citizens to redefine "relational space" in terms of our deeper need for "home".

Abstract: This special volume of Spenser Studies begins with a question that is as venerable as it is trendy, as old-fashioned as it is cutting-edge: what does it mean to be "human"? Throughout his writing, Spenser contributes to a longstanding philosophical tradition that probes the ontological, ethical, educational, and political dimensions of this question. Engaging the varied positions of classical and humanist thought, Spenser does not so much propose a definitive answer as offer new ways of thinking through this question. His work therefore offers a vital resource both to scholars studying the intellectual history of the concept of "the human" and to recent theoretical work in posthumanist studies. By way of introducing this volume's stakes and scope, below we briefly discuss the related frameworks of humanism and posthumanism as they relate to Spenser studies before outlining the contents of the volume.At least since Aristotle, the validity of understanding "the human" as a distinct ontological category has been up for debate, and this philosophical history attests that clear taxonomies of human identity and claims of human exceptionalism are fairly recent inventions. Indeed, it was only when Descartes explored the distinction between the cogito of the human, defined in terms of the capacity to think self-consciously, and the automatic motions of the bete-machine that the blanket categories of "the animal" or "the machine" began to be understood as humanity's ontological opposite. And the ascendency of the Cartesian model was itself contested and uneven. Until the early seventeenth century, the dominant model had been that articulated in Aristotle's De anima, which postulated a more fluid taxonomy in which higher forms of life incorporated all souls below it, so that human beings were on a continuum with nonhuman animals.This view influenced the writings of theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and humanists such as Ficino and Pico, for whom "true" humanity required the exercise of faith and reason, a requirement that brought with it the corollary possibility that human beings could become indistinguishable from beasts. Even more radically, philosophers such as Montaigne observed that certain animal behavior appears rational and thereby questioned whether "human" reason is indeed a special capacity, while natural philosophers such as Thomas Browne and Margaret Cavendish continued to imagine hybrid life forms that included human, animal, vegetable, and machine characteristics. In the realm of politics and colonialism, the seemingly abstract question of what defined the "human" had urgent and concrete effects: to take just two instances, the Valladolid debate in 1550 over the Amerindians' humanity and rights and early justifications of the nascent African slave trade starkly revealed the political and ethical consequences of early modern discourses of human exceptionalism.Recent work in posthumanist theory has continued to question the validity, ethics, and politics of defining "the human" as a distinct and privileged ontological category. Work by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, and Graham Harman has stressed instead the permeability of boundaries between human and other forms of life. These posthumanist theorists have focused variously on animal rights, environmentalism, science and technology, and the history of modern philosophy, and their work has offered new frameworks and vocabularies for considering the connections as well as the disjunctions of "human" life and cognition, on the one hand, and that which is traditionally seen as other-thanhuman, on the other-from cats to computers, trees to trash. This work has prompted many scholars in the humanities, and particularly literary studies, to think anew about agency, knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics. Much posthumanist theory has, however, tended to focus on a twentieth- and twenty-first-century archive, and therefore has neglected the complex history of thought that anticipates, complicates, and enriches many of its key questions and insights. …

Abstract: Cameras, transistor radios, gramophones—objects introduced as technologies of mo- dernity appear ordinary in Okri's fiction, which is otherwise replete with highly symbolic actions and spaces. Furthermore, these technologies frequently carry on functions that belong more conventionally to the symbolic realm of the traditional, passing seamlessly into that realm. Thus writing on the role of the photographer in The Famished Road, Philip Whyte notes that he functions as "a bridge between the traditional and the modern" be- coming "indispensable" at occasions such as weddings, funerals, homecomings, where he performs in the role of the traditional "praise-singer" or "griot" (22). Although assimilated into existing cultural practices with ease, the photographer and the images he produces in Okri's novel do surprise all the same. They provide compel- ling "new ways of seeing the world," both Azaro's immediate world and places farther afield like the United States South, or South Africa (Whyte 23). 1 And, more importantly, the photographer is politically significant, exposing corruption and thus becoming a target, along with the people, of an oppressive regime. The photograph itself passes into the ordinary of Okri's spiritually charged universe and forces a confrontation between that universe and the "real" and historical. Okri has called the photographer "the con- cretizer," the "visualizer," and the "maker-realer." The photographer is, furthermore, in Okri's words: "representative of the changing consciousness of the people" and hence a powerful marker of the historical (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). He and Azaro occupy different temporalities: "he gives the present where Azaro gives timelessness" (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). The photograph as truth-telling challenges Azaro's sense of his own visions and throws him off balance (Whyte 24). Okri, however, is engaged by the tension between the two forms of the visual and what they reveal about each other rather than being interested in making commentary on the obsolescence of one, or danger of the other. Thus he also describes the photographer as the "counterpart to Azaro's conscious- ness," the one who facilitates a "dialogue between technology and tradition" (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). In The Famished Road, we find a matter of fact acceptance of the camera and an engage- ment with what it does, rather than a fetishizing of the object. Michael Taussig argues that it is the "scienticity" assumed of the medium (its function primarily to record reality, to be in Okri's world the "concretizer") that enables the camera to be easily assimilated and become almost transparent (199). By contrast, Taussig's close reading of the colonial archive for accounts of early encounters between Europeans and primitive cultures shows that phonographic equipment (the Victrola) and the music it played retained a much greater

Abstract: The year 2015 marks in general a number of milestones that lead me to reflect on how much has happened in the past half century or so--while I am still around to do so. It is now seventy years since the end of World War II (which, Deo gratias, I missed by two years--I was born at the beginning of the Great Depression year, January 6, 1929, so that I could with Louis XIV say: A pres moi la deluge!), roughly fifty years since the religion-rocking Vatican II, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and about the same for the founding of Temple University's Department of Religion and my teaching here. On the other end of the time spectrum, this will also mark the beginning of the Journal's being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Here, then, are some of my current thoughts about dialogue. In 1992, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University made the idea of a "Clash of Civilizations" prominent. (1) Many have since pointed out that although there clearly is a clash among civilizations occurring in the world today. There is, in fact, a growing dialogue among civilizations. The question is: Which is winning? I want to argue not only that dialogue is beginning to win, that, in fact, we are at a "Tipping Point"--but also that, because victory is by no means guaranteed, I wish to contribute to dialogue's victory, as I have been endeavoring to do for over half a century. (2) I invite all who read my words or hear my voice to join in this desperately vital struggle. To think intelligently about a "Dialogue of Civilizations" we need first be clear about what "civilization" and "dialogue" mean. Even before we can talk about civilization, however, we must recognize that at the heart of every civilization is religion, which both shapes and reflects that civilization. Hence, I would like to begin with a brief description of how I understand religion--and today, its functional equivalent, ideology. I. Religion (Ideology) There is much talk among scholars about what religion is, with a plethora of descriptions and definitions. Here is my definition, which I believe is relatively comprehensive, and yet sufficiently brief, clear, and memorable as to be a helpful tool in the study and understanding of religion: Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly, based on a notion and experience of the Transcendent. Every religion normally contains the four Cs: Creed, Code, Cult, and Community- structure. Creed refers to the "meaning" aspect of a religion, everything in the "explanation of the ultimate--not partial, like the biological, psychological, sociological, etc.--meaning of life. Code of behavior, or ethics, includes all the rules and customs of action--what we should or should not do--that follow from the Creed. Cult means all the ritual activities that relate the follower to the Transcendent, either directly, such as prayer or meditation, or indirectly, such as behavior toward "representations" of the Transcendent, such as Torah scrolls, consecrated hosts, Qur'ans, etc. Community-structure refers to the relationships among the followers; this can vary widely, from an egalitarian relationship, as with Quakers (no clergy-- all members are equal), through a "republican" structure as Presbyterians have (representative presbyters or elders make the decisions), to a monarchical one (wherein one person finally makes the decisions), as Catholics have with a bishop in each diocese and the pope overall. The Transcendent, as the roots of the word indicate--Latin: "trans," beyond; "scend," to go, as in "ascend" or "descend"--means "what goes beyond" the everyday experience of reality. It can mean spirits, gods, a Personal God, an Impersonal God, Emptiness, etc. The religious person not only "thinks" this is the case, but also, at least at some minimal level, "experiences" or "feels" this to be so. …

Abstract: Education is society in process of becoming. Education is humanity on its knees, confessing the inadequacy of what has been. Education is humanity's effective aspiration for a world nearer every heart's desire. Education is the germ of transformation within the shell of the old, the unfolding and growth of the new, its flowering and its decline. --Goodwin Watson, The Social Frontier The ideals of education, whether men are taught to teach or to plow, to weave or to write must not be allowed to sink to sordid utilitarianism. Education must keep broad ideals before it, and never forget that it is dealing with Souls and not with Dollars. --W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Artisan What is Education? The Problem of Turning Answers into Questions In the first paragraphs of Democracy and Education, John Dewey differentiates "between living and inanimate things." The latter, such as a stone, he argues, may be acted upon in such a way as to fragment its shape from without or, if the stone's "resistance is greater than the force" exerted upon it, the stone "remains outwardly unchanged." On the other hand, "while living things may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence." Dewey utilized this metaphor to distinguish between two types of learning: "conservative," that which reproduces the status quo through cultural transmission and socialization (the stone that is acted upon), and "progressive," wherein living things grow out of the conditions that gave them life by consciously directing "the energies which act upon [them] into means of [their] own existence," for the purposes of experiencing "growth" and broadening "potentialities" (1944, p. 1, p. 41). These two purposes of education, often perceived as dichotomous, have existed since the Sophists' appeared in ancient Greece. (1) At bottom, they represent two diametrically opposed purposes of education: to control or to liberate. Dewey recognized this primordial schism during his own time. In 1934, he quoted Roger Baldwin, a founder and executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who pointed out that teachers and students were being manipulated and objectified by external forces in order to maintain categorical support for existing social arrangements: "The public schools have been handed over to" reactionary groups, according to Baldwin, that were "militant defenders of the status quo," including the "the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, the Fundamentalists, the Ku Klux Klan, and the War Department" (Dewey, 2011, p. 27). Dewey also criticized the implementation of "compulsory patriotic rites," required Bible reading in schools, and teaching a doctrinaire knowledge of the Constitution. "Three [American] states," he disparaged, made it "a crime" to teach "evolution," and several more required "loyalty oaths" among "students as a condition of graduation." He was appalled by the fact that teachers unions and tenure were under attack, all of which represented an atmosphere that he described as "militant" and formulaic. Unlike the inanimate rock that is objectified and acted upon in Dewey's Democracy and Education, teachers and students he believed must act within their given milieu "to translate the desired ideal over into the conduct [and] detail of the school in administration ... and subject matter," so that schools could "consciously" reconstruct "society" (Dewey, 2011, p. 27, p. 29). Dewey and other social reconstructionists were attempting to penetrate America's long cultural resistance to intellectualism. They were defending and trying to validate what they believed was the essence of authentic education, inquiry stripped from, but not aloof to, its cultural, social, political, and economic veneers. Their attempts to critique existing institutions were characteristically met with contempt because critique threatened to fracture the existing socio-political system and rupture a deeply woven social fabric fashioned by and deeply laced with a conservative exceptionalism. …

Abstract: "The earth," Hannah Arendt writes in her "Prologue" to The Human Condition, "is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice" (2). (1) The earth is the first, paradigmatic instance of the given in the book, and repudiating the repudiation of this "free gift from nowhere," requisite to any theory and action that deserve the name, may be Arendt's first and last critical commitment in the work. Still, the status of the earth is by no means the main focus or high aim of The Human Condition, which culminates in nothing less than a theory of political freedom and the conditions under which it might be realized: the luminous sphere of the polis in which persons visibly enact their collective story in words and deeds, itself dependent upon the fabricated world through which they relate to one another with some degree of permanence. Both spheres are extricated at high cost over the course of the text from the earth, which connotes "the circular movement of biological life" and every undignified opposite of freedom (19). The fate of the earth, dubious in the Cold War, Space Age situation "against whose background this book was written" impinges on the Prologue and the final chapter of The Human Condition like a sorrowful slightly incredulous concession, not an aspiration (6). Of Arendt's reconstructed image of ancient political freedom in the sphere of the polis, one could very exactly say: "they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright / Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty" (Blake, Jerusalem 98.28-29). Like the high-impact, dramatic expressions of redeemed Humanity at the climax of William Blake's Jerusalem, that is, Arendt envisions "action and speech as sheer actuality," proper to humans in their plural capacity for spontaneous beginning and incalculable consequence, effects unpredictably "Redound[ing]" (Arendt 207). Agents unloose their speech-acts among and before each other under conditions of hyper-visibility--"reflecting each in & clearly seen / And seeing"--in performances of freedom, both authors insist, that are "humanly disclosed by the word" (Arendt 179; Blake J 98.39). "[E]very word & Every Character / Was Human," says Blake, productive of "exemplars of Memory and of Intellect": words and deeds by which "the best" of the species, in Arendt's terms, "attain an immortality of their own," proving themselves to be "really human" against the cycle of procreation and perishing to which they are bound by "biological life" (Arendt 19, Blake J 99.3). In The Human Condition, no less than in Jerusalem, this polis and its freedoms are carved out in systematic opposition "from all the Earth, from the Living Creatures of the Earth," the dominion of necessity, mortality, futility, cyclicity, biological survival and bodily need (Blake J 98.54). Arendt's regret that among moderns "the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public," rather than decently hidden in the private sphere of the household, is palpable (46). How is it that Arendt concedes her Prologue to a stirring defense of the terrestrial condition, allowing the matter of "earthly nature," which defines "the private sphere" for the bulk of The Human Condition, to appear in public, as it were, as "a political question of the first order"? Or that Blake's first Songs of Experience stage an analogous struggle over whether Earth can or ought to appear when called? (2) In this essay, I respond to Robert Mitchell's and Richard Sha's searching inquiries into the risks and promises of Romantic(ist) enthusiasm for "the experience of the experiment" by exploring the surprising commitment to addressing the Earth in Arendt and Blake, two punishing critics of experimentalism who would otherwise seem to converge, if at all, in their undisguised (not to say unromantic) contempt for Nature. …

Abstract: This article is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of the theme "community" and the implications the multiple meanings of community hold for the field of qualitative research. This theme surfaced from Waldern's 2003 study entitled Resistance to Research in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which dealt with participant resistance to joining research efforts, and deserves the attention of all social researchers. In this article, the politics of the research process are discussed to evaluate and suggest improvements for reflexive methods of inquiry. Determining that the idea of "community research" is a myth, this work is concerned about making qualitative methods more sensitive to social inequality without compromising their rigour. Key Words: Community Research, Resistance, Reflexive Methods, Methodology, Urbanology, Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and University Relations ********** To me, "community" and "community research" are troublesome words. Though widely spoken, the term "community" lacks a common definition. The word "community" is extremely complex because it is linked to class tensions that are intimately related to struggles over claims to space and social identities: It is therefore politically potent. Reflecting popular values regarding democracy and inclusion, it is a popular word. It is perhaps a word frequently employed by researchers who cherish such values. However, its meaning is quite vague and its use inconsistent. If researchers have not decided on a common definition of "community research" and use the term "community" vaguely, then the question surfaces as to why they refer to "community research." My paper addresses how "community research" reflects a liberal democratic ideology, espoused by the researchers who refer to this mysterious term. I believe that "community research" is a mythology. That is, the term expresses an aspiration rather than actual practice; the hope of facilitating the equalization of social relations and creating improvements to social conditions through social research. I want to talk about the disjuncture between what appear to be "community research" ideals and research practice in this paper. The term "reflexive methods" seems to be the most appropriate for research methods aimed at social action through increased participant-researcher collaboration. Looking at the limits of new or modified methods, I consider that many researchers have idealized and romanticized their work to alter research practices by applying the misnomer "community research." I think that they have done so out of an assumption that the participants have necessarily benefited by virtue of the researchers' intervention. Their assumption is based on a hope rather than a detailed assessment of the methods and outcomes of their work. The key to understanding this fallacy and substantiating my position is investigation into the politics of research and the power relations in research processes and institutions. I draw from my Master's of Arts research project (Waldern, 2003) called Resistance to Research in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES) in order to study "community research" as a problematic term. My project analyzed selected quotations from interviews that drew out these themes, exploitation of research participants by university-based researchers; ethical considerations of research among poor or otherwise marginalized research participants; and the complications of the term "community." Highlighting the third theme, this article presents the ideas of community, resulting from my interviews with varied DTES research parties. It explains the complexity and inconsistencies of the use of this term by examining the political context of urban expansion, policy shifts, and institutional changes. Using this information, I now propose that community research is a myth. This myth, if perpetuated, is likely to lead to further disappointments and tensions in qualitative research. …

Abstract: Under a roof in a country villa, a man lies awake; his friends sleep nearby. (1) As he reflects, the sound of water coursing through the channel behind the baths strikes him as out of place: "it seemed very strange that the sound of the same running water was at one time quite clear, and again less audible." (2) He ponders the cause until one of his students reveals that he too is awake and can provide an answer: "What do you think ... but that leaves of some kind, which continue to fall in abundance in the autumn, block the narrowness of the channel by their volume; and that at times they are dislodged and yield to the pressure of the current, and again they accumulate to stem the flow?" (Augustine, De Ordine, pp. 17, 19). Accepting this answer, Augustine presses his student (the poet Licentius) for philosophical reflections: what is the origin of his own admiration the causa of this disorder? the nature of ordo as such? The answer becomes the touchstone for what follows. The sound has a cause beyond the evident order of things ("praeter manifestum ... ordinem"), but this is no mystery: "nothing is done apart from order" (pp. 18, 19). This charming scene, performing the deviation from ordo that the subsequent dialogue tries to explain, begins Augustine's short treatise on providence, design, and the problem of evil, De Ordine. The first work he composed after conversion, the dialogue was the outcome, to channel the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, of hour upon hour of "extreme enthusiasm" during the summer before his baptism in 386. (3) Hosted by his friend Verecundus in the countryside outside Milan, Augustine and his friends met daily, read Virgil, and discussed philosophical and theological questions. De Ordine starts from variation and disorder in nature and attempts to explain the "integral fittingness" latent in the world's structure (p. 9). The inquiry echoes Augustine's abiding concerns and patterns of argument--that there is no variation that does not form part of a larger order; that there is no word or sign whose meaning cannot be known through amor, a passionate will to know, operating under the guidance of God's light. (4) "Order is that which will lead us to God, if we hold to it during life; and unless we do hold to it during life, we shall not come to God" (Augustine, De Ordine, p. 53; emphases deleted). Hopkins, in the summer before his ordination in 1877, composed many of his nature sonnets, reflections in their way on the structure to be found by contemplating nature's piedness, variation, and hidden potential--the order to be gleaned from such phenomena as "wilder, wilful-wavier /Meal-drift" (clouds) and "shining from shook foil" (lightning) ("Hurrahing in Harvest," no. 124,11. 3-4; "God's Grandeur," no. Ill, 1. 2). Hopkins had his own version of the phenomenon that puzzled Augustine, in "Winter with the Gulf Stream" (no. 7): "hoarse leaves" that "crawl on hissing ground" and a "clogg'd brook" that "runs with choking sound," "Kneading the mounded mire that stops/His channel under clammy coats/Of foliage fallen in the copse" (11. 5, 9, 10-12). (5) In moments that amount to cognitive and spiritual ignition, Hopkins puts forward, in minutely noticed phenomena, the thought "that all things are upheld by instress." (6) This is his version of order, the subjective apprehension of a structure latent in any inscape (or occurring form). Through the discerning of a beholder, this vision of ordo binds and weaves, and nothing obtains apart from it. In reflections scattered throughout Hopkins's journals, sermons, and letters, he probes his conception of order in ways that parallel scientific and philosophical debates in the Victorian period, articulating a via media between overly materialist factions of the scientific establishment and unduly exacting arguments in the tradition of natural theology and design. Scholars including Tom Zaniello, Gillian Beer, Jude V. Nixon, Daniel Brown, and Marie Banfield have amply catalogued these connections. …

Abstract: While the ethnic/religious term "Arab-Jew" has at the very least been the object of heated debate and polemics, the linguistic/cultural term "Judeo- Arabic," paradoxically, has been widely accepted as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry-especially within the realm of Jewish studies. Most languages, including the languages or dialects spoken by Jews, are palimpsestically complex and layered with various linguistic strata. Yet the case of Judeo-Arabic raises complex questions. This complexity is partially traceable to the persistence of the "Arab versus Jew" dichotomy, as well as to the corollary negation of the "Judeo-Muslim" hyphen, which had been crucial for the genealogy of Arabic written and spoken by Jews for millennia. Against the conceptual binary that mandates that "Jew" and "Arab" be antonyms, I argue that the linguistic/cultural question of "Judeo-Arabic" is inseparable from the ethnic/religious concept of the "Arab-Jew." My argument here is premised on my earlier critique of the taboos against joining the word "Jewishness" with the word "Arabness" (a taboo encapsulated in the very term "Arab-Jew") as well as against joining the word "Judeo" with the word "Muslim" (encapsulated in the "Judeo-Muslim"). That critique has been central to my scholarly work over the past three decades. Does the good/bad bifurcation between the terms "Arab-Jew" and "Judeo-Arabic" as objects of analysis reflect a different ideational status of the hyphen in the two terms (i.e., linking Jews to Arabs in the case of "the Arab-Jew" while delinking a Jewish language from Arabic in the case of "Judeo-Arabic")? Rather than take for granted "Judeo-Arabic" as a fixed natural language, I argue that the term-like "Arab-Jew"-requires a critical engagement. Both terms are equally entangled in the anxiety provoked by the idea of an Arab cultural genealogy for a Jewish identity.This essay does not concern itself with the extremely rich, indeed invaluable, scholarship in the related fields of "Judeo-Arabic" and "Jewish languages." Rather, it attempts to examine the implications of these terms, assumptions, and axioms for identity mapping. The essay interrogates the premises and conceptual frameworks associated with the rubric of "Judeo- Arabic language." If Jewish studies scholars have tended to conceive "Judeo- Arabic" within a ghettoizing approach to the history and culture of "the Jews," scholars within Arab studies have treated it with skepticism. Arab studies scholars ask, in effect, whether Judeo-Arabic even has any actual existence apart from its source language-Arabic. Rather than divide these two zones of inquiry, I hope to bring them into dialogue through addressing some of the specificities of Arabic written and spoken by Jews. In doing so, I cast doubt on the view of "Judeo-Arabic" as always-already belonging to the separate realm of "Jewish languages," which is itself arguably a newly invented and in some ways problematic category. At times, scholarly discussions within Jewish studies have acknowledged the difficulty that the "Jewish languages" rubric poses for linguistics scholars. Often, however, these projects have gone beyond invoking this category as a sociolinguistic classification to embracing "the uniquely Jewish" character of an increasingly expanding number of "Jewish languages of the Diaspora."1 Both the qualitative and quantitative procedures assume Jewish linguistic uniqueness, implicitly homologizing the idea of a unified national expression. This essay, in contrast, highlights multiple relations, addressing "Jewish languages" generally and "Judeo- Arabic" more specifically as linked not merely to other "Jewish languages," but also to any number of related languages and similar dialects within the various cultural geographies from which they emerged. I address the case of "Judeo-Arabic" simultaneously in relation to the notions of "Jewish languages" (safot yehudiyot in Hebrew) and of "Arabic dialects" (al-lahjat al-'arabiyya in Arabic). …

Abstract: IntroductionWhat is post-slavery? Post-slavery can (and usually does) refer to the process of renegotiation of social positions of freedom and constraint in the aftermath of the legal abolition of slavery. This process is, however, generally referred to as emancipation, as explained in the introduction to this special issue. In this article I search for a more nuanced meaning of post-slavery, which I believe is more than a synonym for emancipation.The newly negotiated positions of emancipation are brought about by the social and cultural institutionalization of these positions. In these processes, control over future generations of people of slave descent by future generations of originally free people is brought about through the continued albeit indirect control over labor through control over productive land and social space. Another form of control is the endurance of racial systems of social inclusion and exclusion, typical of most post-slavery societies in the Americas. This, however, does not necessarily hold for other post-slavery societies, especially in Africa, although it is a possible repertoire of power there as well. Another noted form of control, especially in African societies, is the creation and acceptance of slave genealogies and family structures. The latter is an especially revolutionary development, as slaves were not supposed to have either, which at once brings slave descendants into the fold of free society, but paradoxically directly forms an instrument to recognize slave descendants over the generations. These forms of control are essentially forms of control over the memory and history of slavery that are in turn brought about by processes of remembrance and historification, leading to encoded patterns of political, cultural, social, and economic interactions, thoughts, and behaviors. This brings me to the essence of what post-slavery is: historical discourse.What does the "post" in post-slavery mean? "Post" acts as a disruptive temporal marker. It indicates that previously valid meanings and understandings marked by the signifier following "post" cannot be lifted over a marker event. This indicates a definitive change from past to present. But of course it is not as simple as that. While "post" is intended to mark a rupture, it also does the opposite. It also functions as a reminder that what the "post" refers to is in fact not yet over, not yet fully in a closed past. This is because the meanings and understandings (sometimes transformed) of the subject that is taken to now be "post," to be over, remains the point of reference in an implicit appreciation made of these meanings in what is seen as "the present" of that particular subject, embodied in a discursive past. The appreciation of this point of reference is largely created in institutionalized forms of historical discourse. Thus, "post-slavery" is a mode of historicity in the sense Francois Hartog gave that term: the way a society treats its past and acts upon it, and the way it treats and acts upon historical times.1 It is the creation of a present in reference to an active past that, by creating a particular discursive and narrative memory of that past, influences the present. These situations, in which past and present collapse onto each other, or are invoked one in the other, have been described by Saadi Nikro as anachronic tensions, a term I adopt here to describe the discursive workings of the historical regime of postslavery.2Abolition is the temporal marker that divides history into a slavery and postslavery situation. Abolition is used here not as a law adopted in a specific moment, but rather as a moral abolition, an "ought to be abolished." The "post" in post-slavery is a reminder that, despite its legal abolition, the after effects of slavery can still largely determine social, economic, and even political relations within a society. These can thus be studied as social phenomena in the context of a slavery past. …

Abstract: The nature and the role of sensation sit at the heart of classic enlightenment debates about the nature of knowledge. While these debates, in their modern form, came into being several hundred years ago, many key words from them remain with us today. As a result, a number of culturally particular assumptions also remain as part of the semantic composition of these words (e.g. Wierbicka 2010). In the following, we examine such assumptions, particularly in relation to sensoriality. We contrast the classic empiricist and rationalist views on sensation, including their broader epistemological stakes, and bring forth a third account through Peircean semiotics. We suggest that the classic debate between rationalists and empiricists can be re-examined by asking how repetition exists in the world. By thinking about the ontology of repetition, and by highlighting some of the basic semiotic principles of this, we suggest that sensoriality needs to be recognized as a dynamical system rather than a system that exists for the documenting of "what there is". In this account, neither sensoriality nor the nature of existence, including the physical world, are anchored toward absolutes on any level. This point, however, does not lead us toward rationalist claims about the non-importance of senses or the body, but toward recognition that while patterns and stability play a significant role in living systems, there is always room for plasticity and open-endedness. It is in this space between stability and change, where meaning is brought into being.

Abstract: During the past two decades, in the wake of dire predictions by late twentieth century environmentalists of "futures not worth having" (1) caused by human-induced climate change, the discourse of sustainability has offered hope and energy for action. E. F. Schumacher's 1973 work Small is Beautiful has proved particularly inspiring for the sustainability movement; indeed, Chris Turner wrote in 2007 that "almost anywhere I found sustainable life on my cartographic travels, I was looking at an homage to Schumacher." (2) However, authors such as Donald Worster and Albert Bartlett have expressed reservations about the oxymoronic nature of "sustainable growth." (3) Worster suggests that the ambiguity of sustainability has the potential to be treacherous, as mainstream organizations employ the "magic word of consensus" to 'greenwash' their companies, while assuming that "sustainability can be achieved" with the "institutions of capitalism, socialism, and industrialism and their values intact." (4) Schumacher's status within the sustainability movement emerges from his clear articulation of the foundational pitfalls of the discursive assumptions of progressive materialism. Among other aspects, Schumacher argued that in order to live sustainably, it is necessary to reject "an attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth--in short, materialism." Such a mode of being "contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited" and therefore it "does not fit into this world." (5) Furthermore, a "lifestyle designed for permanence," according to Schumacher, must be guided by "wisdom" rather than human cleverness, and be centered on "spiritual and moral truth." (6) "Wisdom," Schumacher wrote, "demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful." (7) He suggested that sound economics, social justice, and ecological integrity could result from following the "wisdom" based teachings of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or "any other of the great Eastern traditions." As an example, Schumacher replaces "the meta-economic basis of western materialism" with the "teachings of Buddhism," to show how definitions of "economic" and "uneconomic" are fundamentally discursive. (8) To a certain extent, sustainability necessitates a spiritual view of the world, or at least opens a space for non-materialistic perspectives. Halal organic food production exemplifies the convergence of multiple motivations. For people whose "life and worldview ... have been steeped in Islamic tradition," solutions to modern environmental crises cannot be secular concerns. (9) This "eco-halal revolution" (10) is spearheaded by initiatives such as Norwich Meadows Farm in upstate New York, (11) Willowbrook Farm near Oxford, UK, (12) Abraham Natural Produce in Somerset, UK, (13) Whole Earth Meats near Chicago, (14) Green Zabiha in Virginia, (15) Nature's Bounty in California, (16) and BlossomPure Organic in Toronto, (17) which are run by Muslims who strive towards sustainability by integrating religious values with ecological goals. Some of these organizations emphasize the dual organic and halal foci on their websites, while others cater to the broader organic market. An outstanding 2008 article about Norwich Meadows Farm in the food journal Gastronomica describes how this integration of halal and organic enables faith-based approaches to sustainable agriculture to "become an extended form of religious practice." (18) Two main modes of interpreting religious sustainability feature prominently in environmentalist literature. The first emerges from a secular worldview, which tends to evaluate religion based on contemporary scientific principles. For example, in a study of the impact of education in inculcating ecocentric/"ecological" or anthropocentric/"spiritual" conceptions of nature, sociologist Gabriel Ignatow has argued that "the public adoption of an ecological worldview is predicated on modern, secular, Western-style mass education. …

Abstract: Military historians claim with some justice that, since the 1960s, the Western Front of 1914 to 1918 has been partitioned into a "Western Front of history" and a "Western Front of literature and popular culture," the latter being "profoundly unhistorical" (Badsey 51, 39). Much of the blame for this state of affairs is fairly placed on "Paul Fussell's very influential book of 1975, The Great War and Modern Memory, which has played a major part in the teaching of the war's literature. In particular," Stephen Badsey claims, "Fussell and his followers argue that the Western Front can only be understood as a uniquely unhistorical event, taking place outside time" (43). Brian Bond more generally blames "teachers of English rather than history," who "still have more influence in the shaping of views on the First World War, through the teaching of war poetry, and from a narrow selection of poems, especially those of Owen and Sassoon" (Unquiet 88). I largely agree with Bond about the necessity and justice of Britain's participation in the Great War (2-13) and see real merit in his idea that "popular notions of the First World War in general, and Britain's role in particular, were largely shaped in the 1960s, in part reflecting the very different concerns and political issues of that turbulent decade, but [also] in part resurrecting 'anti-war' beliefs of the 1930s" (51). As a teacher of English and an interdisciplinary scholar of the Great War, I admit to being shocked on occasion by the historical ignorance, not only of students but of colleagues with expertise in Canadian and/or Modern literatures. At the same time, I am troubled by the historian's uncomplicated reliance on "fact" versus "fiction," as when Bond takes "the famous official film The Battle of the Somme" as clear-cut evidence that "the film helped to give viewers some idea of what war was really like," strengthening "their resolve to persevere to achieve victory" (13), or when he insists that authors of "war literature" at the end of the 1920s were concerned with "individual experience," not with the public record (26). In analyzing the form of The Battle of the Somme, I detect a rather different truth in this film because of its embedment in the industrial process. Poets and novelists who were quite bitter about their "individual experience" were no less bitter about a film that hailed the mechanized temporality of industrial assembly and its denaturing of the human body. The cinematic war thus became a synecdoche for vast changes taking place in the mode of production and in the conditions of modern life. Here, it seems to me, military historians will have to do far better than carp at "postmodern" culture (Badsey 43) for popularizing a "myth" of the Great War that "has displaced truth" (Bond 77)--first, by ceasing to privilege the referent over the form in which it appears, and, second, by asking how cultural change may be linked to changes in the mode of communication. In turn, literary scholars will have to take a more dialectical approach to the processes of cultural transformation in order to show how changes in the mode of communication are linked to changes in the mode of production, a method that I failed to consider in previous work. "The Myth of the War" According to the British cultural historian Samuel Hynes, the First World War "altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about war but about the world, and about culture and its expressions" (xi). As he sees it, "That change was so vast and so abrupt as to make the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before, and that discontinuity became a part of English imaginations" (xi). Yet, when Hynes turns to cinema, its cultural impact, like that of print literature in the first decade after the war, looks very traditional. British Instructional Films, the leading producer of film, was set up in 1919 to recreate key military campaigns of the Great War. …

Abstract: This essay aims to advance the critical conversation about ways of reading The Excursion by proposing that, in the twenty-first century, the poem appears at its most provocative and rewarding when it is read as life-writing: as a poem that tells the stories of many lives, in order to raise questions about what an individual life might mean, and what the act of narrating it might involve. (1) Such a reading is "active," in the sense best summarized by Sally Bushell: "no narrative should be responded to in complete isolation ... each demands to be "re-read" ... in the light of what comes before and after it" (Bushell 1). The need to consider multiple points-of-view results from the very form of the work, which appropriates the genres of life-writing within the framework of a "dialogic" or--to use Charles Lamb's term--"conversational" poem. (2) In this kind of reading, no subjectivity is privileged: not the Poet's, and not even the Wanderer's. Every narrative of a life is explicitly or implicitly questioned, and even subverted, by other narratives that surround it. Recognizing the centrality of life-writing in the poem also develops a point first made by William Galperin: that Book I of the poem already documents a "discrepancy between narrative and life" that testifies to "the inadequacy of narratives in general, and to the very selfhood, which is neither so autonomous nor so authoritative as we may want to believe" (37). Galperin argues that, as Wordsworth moved further away from the visionary moment and its promise of reconciliation with an "active universe," he was forced into questioning the autonomy of the poetic self, and an exploration of those sources of a poet's authority that might lie outside the self. This move, by which Wordsworth voluntarily relinquishes the stance of the inspired "chosen son" for a more relational one, that of a man among men, is figured in the poem as the Poet's "resignation of self' (Galperin 33), yielding priority, for most of the poem, to the Wanderer, Solitary, and Pastor. The Excursion is life-writing in the sense that it dramatizes and debates the question that is implicit in all biography and autobiography: how a person should live. It raises this question, not abstractly, but by locating it in the contemporary political and social context, in a Britain riven by political conflict and damaged both socially and economically by nearly two decades of war. Therefore, to recognize that a large proportion of the poem is given to narratives of lives is not to propose a flight from history back into the subjective. The dialogic structure, as Adam Potkay has argued, moves the reader toward a "project of knowing together" (Potkay 170)--though an attentive reading of the poem tends to reveal something rather different from the ideal that Wordsworth longingly anticipated in Home at Grasmere-. "true community, the noblest Frame / Of many into one incorporate" (Home at Grasmere 90 [MS B Reading Text, 11.819-820]). Hazlitt and Coleridge both believed that the life-narratives were a digression from the real aims of the poem. Coleridge announced that The Excursion "had disappointed [his] expectations" (Letters, 4:572-3), evidently because it fell short of delivering the ambitious philosophical poem he thought Wordsworth had planned. (3) Hazlitt was still more explicit about what he took to be the discrepancy between the philosophical ambitions and the narrative method: "We could have wished that our author had given to his work the form of a didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and description, which sometimes hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven with the text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the end of the volume" (Works, ed. Howe, 4:113). Hazlitt's impatience with the "load of narrative and description" and his complaint that it "hinders . …

Abstract: Introduction In Buddhist Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, Damien Keown defines the field of Buddhist ethics as "how Buddhism might respond to the ethical dilemmas confronting the modern world" (x). One of the ethical dilemmas that confront not only Buddhists but all religious communities is the issue of how to respond to religious difference. With the contemporary proliferation of communicative technologies and the increased displacement of people across the globe, this issue becomes increasingly difficult to ignore for any religious community. In the popular imagination, Buddhism has the reputation of being a religion that embraces tolerance, inclusion, and pluralism. Yet, as several scholars have recently remarked, this reputation is a "romanticized perception" that is "open to question" (Kiblinger 3; Hayes 65). From among studies that have examined the historical Buddha's perspective on religious diversity according to the Pali canon, Abraham Velez de Cea has argued, "the Buddha's view of religious diversity is best understood as a form of pluralistic-inclusivism and his attitude as pluralistic" (1). By contrast, Richard Hayes has argued that pluralism in the contemporary sense of "the attitude that variety is healthy and therefore something to be desired," "is not one of the values promoted in the literature of classical Indian Buddhism" (1, 18). Still, other scholars such as Kristin Kiblinger have highlighted incidents where the historical Buddha adopted an inclusivistic attitude towards other religions (33-38). Thus, even with regards to a single figure's--the historical Buddha's--attitude towards religious difference, there is scholarly disagreement. With regards to traditional Buddhist discourse addressing religious difference, Perry Schmidt-Leukel and John D'Arcy May have suggested, "As far as its traditional discourse is concerned [Buddhism] seems to have been, by and large, as exclusivistic or inclusivistic in its soteriological claims as any other of the major religious traditions" (15). Indeed, there lacks a single pan-Buddhist attitude towards religious difference. For example, Mahayana Buddhist thinkers such as Zhiyi (538-597 CE), Zongmi (780-841 CE), and Kukai (774-835 CE) used the strategy of "hierarchal inclusivism," to acknowledge other traditions of Buddhism as valid but subordinate to their own (Burton 321-322). On the other hand, Nichiren (1222-1282 CE) is well known for taking an exclusivist attitude towards other Buddhist traditions (Burton 324). Thus, when considering the issue of Buddhist attitudes towards religious diversity, it is important to keep in mind that Buddhist thinkers from different historical periods and cultural milieus held varying attitudes towards religious difference. One important historical example of a Buddhist response towards religious difference was the so-called non-sectarian or rime (Tib. ris med) "movement" of nineteenth-century eastern Tibet. The term "rime" means "impartial" or "unbiased." In the context of discussions of inter-religious and intrareligious diversity, it is often rendered into English as "non-sectarian." Members of the non-sectarian "movement" included Jamgon Kongtrul, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, Chokgyur Lingpa, Dza Patrul, Ju Mipham, and others (Smith 237, 250). While the usage of the term "movement" for describing this religio-cultural phenomenon is disputed (Gardner 111; Schapiro 51), the significance of the legacy left by this group of Buddhist luminaries is widely acknowledged. Jamgon Kongtrul and his colleagues' profound influence upon contemporary forms of Tibetan Buddhism is well known, with Geoffrey Samuel remarking, "Tibetan Buddhism today outside the Gelugpa order is largely a product of the Rimed movement" (537). Similarly, Alexander Gardner notes, "Many Tibetan lamas who teach in the West have come to characterize themselves and their teaching as 'Rimay'" (113). Indeed, many contemporary Buddhist centers, events, teachers, and teachings carry the label "rime" For example, Khentrul Rinpoche is described as a "rime master"; this title was awarded by Lama Lobsang Trinley and conferred by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 2003 (Tibetan). …

Abstract: In this essay, I explore areas of accord and discord between two efficacious modes of research: "practice" approaches and the Ethnography of Communication (EOC). As an interpersonal and intercultural scholar, I carefully analyze these approaches in order to find innovative ways to describe the diversity that I see in modern social interaction. Working against paradigms that suggest using "either" one approach "or" another, I engage this project hoping (expecting?) to find "and/both" alternatives for communication study. I argue that, in spite of their differences, practice and EOC traditions co-exist in a "mutually beneficial relationship" for the study of communication. Key words: Ethnography of Communication, Practice Approaches, Ethnography, Pluralist Research, and Qualitative Methods. ********** There are many different ways to study human behavior. How do I make sense of two viable approaches to the study of interpersonal and cultural communication? In what ways does the description of social "practices" relate to the research interests of the Ethnography of Communication (EOC)? Is this a relation of connection, distance, or both? As a scholar who is interested in maximizing, rather than reducing, the layers of understanding available in qualitative research, I pursue answers to these questions in this essay. In my research experience, I primarily use phenomenology and ethnography to study the intrinsic connection between communication, culture, and identity. These scholarly traditions stress heavy description of communicative phenomena, an emphasis that compels me to foreground contingency in varying degrees. We can never fully describe all that we experience. Therefore, rather than seeking "closure, certainty, and control" (Stewart, 1991, p. 356), I assume that communication research is more "partial, partisan, and problematic" (Goodall, 2000, p. 55; see also Eisenberg and Goodall, Chapter 2). There will always be alternate ways of describing communication. Working from an assumption of contingency involves numerous opportunities to categorize with binaries. I frequently must answer whether phenomena are "personal" or "political," or whether "micro-" or "macro-" social phenomena influence communication, etc. I make choices between research approaches. For example, I chose hermeneutic phenomenology over standard rhetorical criticism and written scholarship instead of staged performance. Once I select an approach, I feel obliged to perform in some ways over others. For example, I write by using more modernist and standard forms of representation instead of those that are more postmodern and esoteric. This experience of choice within binaries is likely influenced by the reality that many scholars assign greater "rigor" and "validity" to privileged approaches. A comprehensive treatment of why we choose certain methods, and the subsequent complications of these choices, is beyond the scope of this essay. To be sure, endemic to research is some aspect of choice and, to varying extents, a need to negotiate with binaries. This negotiation takes many forms. Instead of foregrounding "either" practice approaches "or" EOC, I engage both in one conversation to better understand their areas of accord and discord. There are a variety of benefits related to this form of analysis. First, my goal to analyze these approaches in tandem does not mean that I hope to find a superior method for studying communication. Each has specific aspects that make the approach more helpful than the other. However, I offer this essay as a model of how to constructively study two research traditions with an overall goal of seeking connection, rather than distance. Second, and similarly, I describe how such a connection might be performed. This enables an understanding of the ways scholars can use these traditions to enrich each other. Thus, I suggest communication research to be an open-minded search for possibilities, rather than a hostile, mean-spirited critique. …

Abstract: Resource-ful Consulting: Working with your Presence and Identity in Consulting to Change. Karen Izod and Susan Rosina Whittle. London: Karnac, 2014The Introduction to this book opens with "This is a book about consulting to organisations ..." (p. xvii). It is clear from the outset that the authors' focus is on the "I" and the "me" within the change process, seeing "all consulting work is mediated through my sense of self" (p. xix). This requires attention to be paid to identities (who I am/am not at any time); presence (described as behaviour regulation when experiencing anxiety or complacency); and preoccupations (what I habitually latch on to, ignore, or avoid).The book has grown out of the authors' extensive experience as professional development consultants and practitioners, notably their time developing and leading The Tavistock Institute's "Practitioner Certificate in Consulting and Change" (P3C) programme and reads almost as a workbook for the programme. It is clearly written for a consultant-practitioner readership and wears its depth of scholarship lightly. Written in the first person, it is a slim volume, clearly structured and including a wealth of "analytic" checklists and questions about practice that invite the reader to put the ideas to which they have just been introduced into practice. Most of these are clearly explained and provide helpful templates for encouraging critical selfreflection in pursuit of sharpening our consulting practice.In identifying a perceived need for their book, Izod and Whittle suggest that "stuckness" is just as likely to be experienced by consultants as their clients. And since its offer of encouragement to work through consulting dilemmas in what they describe as an "asset-based approach to consulting" (p. xviii) is of practical value to consultants seeking to effect change. The text includes plenty of short, pithy vignettes that help to keep the focus on the "practical and vital" (p. xviii). Much of the book is written in the first person and to accord with its spirit and avoid "clunky" sentence constructions, I have stayed with the first person when summarising these sections.The book contains seven chapters, the first of which explores "potential space" (Winnicott, 1971), a playful place of transition between "reality" and "fantasy" where creativity and change can happen and where I am neither "me" nor "not me". "Play does not lose touch with reality, but creatively reinvents it" (p. 7), and is seen as a space to experiment free of judgement (phrases such as "I'm only playing at it" give me a licence to experiment without claim to striving for competence), but this space can quickly lose its "potential" in the presence of a judgemental figure. Games, in contrast to play, tend to have pre-established rules, and with them, offer less scope for creativity.The chapter goes on to outline how the authors use co-creation as a form of disruptive learning, encouraging both participants and facilita tors/consultants to "step out of their routines" (p. 8). Taking a risk and not being drawn into "over-designing", requires "real time" feedback between the course directors (and, Weick (1998) would argue, good levels of trust and shared experience of "playing" together) to keep open the "potential space".The notion of holding open "potential space" underpins the subsequent chapters, including Chapter Two, which explores how identities support and constrain the work of change practitioners and consultants, and outlines three dynamic aspects of identity-recognition; regulation, and revelation-that the authors have found typically preoccupy consultants.Identity signifiers may be descriptors of characteristics that I have little or no choice about-my gender, the colour of my skin, my ages, where I was born, etc.-or they may be signifiers that I have chosen how much to reveal for myself-for example, the age and sex of my children, the football team I support, or my political inclinations. …

Abstract: One of the reasons for the famously "inimitable" quality of Dickens's style is its oscillation between the literal and the figurative uses of vocabulary Dickens's texts are monuments to the idiom of his times--shape-shifting monuments in which figurative language often turns into fabula details and sometimes seems to generate fabula events In this paper, I shall focus on one specific figure of speech, namely hypallage, metaphor's neighbor, which shares some features of metonymy and enthymeme I shall discuss the local effects of this figure and its possible connection with fabula events The Greek meaning of hypallage is "interchange, exchange"; the most common example is "her beauty's face" In the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Joyce provides us with hypallage as word play: when Joe Hynes offers the narrator a drink, saying "Could you make a hole in another pint?" the answer is "Could a swim duck?" (405) According to Walter Shandy in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, love can hardly be discussed without this quaint trope: "You can scarce," said [my father], "combine two ideas together upon it [love], brother Toby, without an hypallage"--What's that? cried my uncle Toby The cart before the horse, replied my father-- --And what is he to do there? cried my uncle Toby-- Nothing, quoth my father, but to get in--or let it alone Tristram Shandy, VIIIxiii501 Walter uses the idiom "the cart before the horse" as an image-bearing example of "exchange or inversion"; Toby hears it literally, reviving the metaphor and personifying the cart as "he" In his rejoinder, Walter extends the metaphor by cancelling Toby's personification, reinterpreting the "he" as a human subject faced with one of the radical absurdities of the human condition and having to consider taking a plunge and getting trapped in the container (1) This is where Dickens must have gone to school for the use of extended metaphors Yet the Dickensian hypallage is not the same as Walter Shandy's Rather, it belongs to the more narrowly defined but also more broadly used variety of this trope, namely epithet transfer, in which inversion takes the shape of the attribution of a quality to the wrong exponent (2) Unlike Irish-bull transpositions, such as "Could a swim duck?", epithet transfer is akin to metaphor in that it moves a feature from one object to another Yet unlike metaphor, epithet transfer does not involve a substitution of a noun for a noun-adjective phrase, as in "he is a lion" instead of "he is a very brave person" Instead, it transfers the adjective from an unnamed noun or pronoun to a non-metaphorical noun Here are some examples of epithet-transfer hypallage in poetry, before and after Dickens In "Tintern Abbey," recollecting his unhappy five years between his two visits to the river Wye, Wordsworth's speaker places himself "In lonely rooms / Amid the din of towns and cities" "Lonely rooms" is a hypallage: it is the lyrical hero who felt lonely--the rooms were no hermitage but spaces of precarious separation from the urban din This epithet shift has a metonymic force rooted in contiguity: "compressing" two inputs, an alienating indoor space and the lover of nature who inhabits it, the "conceptual blend" (see Fauconnier and Turner, esp pp 113-37) suggests that loneliness, solitude, an almost Platonic reality, was extended over (and perhaps also forced into) the Procrustean container of unloved lodgings It is in and from that setting that the speaker had his escapes into memories of the landscapes of earlier days and into moments of recreated joy in which the aesthetic, the psychological, and the mystical became interfused Mental escape is less valorized in another poem of nostalgia, Thomas Hardy's "The Self-Unseeing," where the speaker revisits his childhood home The first stanza is as follows: Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in …

Abstract: Confucian Marxism: A Reflection on Religion and Global Justice, by Weigang Chen. Leiden: Brill, 2014. x + 352 pp. euro135.00/US$175.00 (hardcover).One of the most alienating experiences in my life as academic occurred many years ago, when, relatively new to British academia, I attended a presentation by Chantal Mouffe in the context of a conference at my home institution. Uninitiated in the refined world of political philosophy, I could barely make sense of a single word spoken. The fact that Weigang Chen quotes Mouffe within the first 500 words of his reflections was therefore discouraging.The book's blurb, which is also the first paragraph of the Acknowledgments, focuses on contemporary China and the possibility of developing the notion of a primacy of social justice that transcends the limits of liberal democracy, promising an investigation of Confucian Marxism-a distinctive perspective on civil society. Chen proposes the term "Confucian Marxism" to mark the contrast between the concept of "public hegemony" developed by Chinese Marxists and Gramsci, as opposed to the Weberian scheme of the Protestant social. The term also denotes "the Weberian moment" of the Comintern, which Chen identifies as having taken place during the Yan'an period, when, as he puts it, "sophisticated efforts" were made to mesh a mass democratic revolution with a Confucian ethical legacy. Secondly, Chen uses the term to denote the theory of public hegemony as a Marxist alternative to Weber's Protestant social. "In this view", Chen writes, "the real source of autonomous public life lies in the ethical substance of the traditional ethical polity". It denotes the re-appropriation of the ethical-public sphere of public society by the laboring masses. The "social" is thus conceptualized as the public ethical, namely public hegemony (pp. 23-24).Following the Introduction, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One ("Class and the Protestant Ethic") Chen includes three chapters; "Religion and the Problem of the 'Social'"; "Class and Economic Interaction: Historical Materialism as a Theory of Liberal Modernity"; and "Legitimation versus Theodicy: Weber's Comparative Religion". This part is intended to provide a general conceptual framework for the inquiry, and examines a number of major intellectual developments in modern Western social thought that "prepared the ground for the rise of Weberianism as a dominant perspective on the modern world order" (p. 24).The three chapters that form Part Two ("The Confucian Turn") are titled "Hegemony and Democracy", "Class Consciousness or Ethical Hegemony" and "The Confucian Turn: New Democracy and Ethical Hegemony". They deal with the dilemma encountered by Marxist revolutionaries in their efforts to initiate a democratic mass revolution in the peripheral world. Comintern strategists tried to transform Marxism into an ideology/faith, as apparently evidenced in the Confucian turn within Chinese Marxism. Chen does not provide any details or analysis as to how this shift took place.Part Three ("Confucian Marxism and the Protestant Social") is perhaps the most interesting; here, one starts to get a better idea of what Chen is arguing. It is divided into four chapters: "Communal Cults and World Religions", "God's Justice on Earth: Sittlichkeit versus the Ethical State", and two chapters both entitled "Public Hegemony and the Sectlike Society" (Parts 1 and 2). Chen here puts forward his central argument, which is a major critique of bourgeois publicness. He presents bourgeois civil society as the appropriation of the ethical domain by the realm of labor as well as the bourgeoisie's monopoly of the ethical: the dominant economic group constitutes the de facto institutional base of private people in Western democratic societies for the formation of the public. It is here that Chen makes a leap to pronouncements on global justice, and where he argues- based on very scant evidence indeed-that, as in the case of minority groups within Western nations, the more a non-Western nation assimilates to the global culture of liberal democracy, the more it is marginalized in the capitalist world order. …

Abstract: [1] The 846-page wire-bound tome that is Aural Skills in Context, with its lightweight paperboard covers, does not seem likely to physically survive the four semesters of extensive use for which authors Evan Jones and Matthew Shaftel, with Juan Chattah, planned its contents. In its breadth as well as its purposes and aspirations, the project-the book and its computer-based peripherals-is clearly modeled on other richly contextualized and integrated scholarship that characterizes many of the recent texts designed for written-theory curricula.(1) This essay will review the authors' strategy for creating a similarly "comprehensive approach" to several of the salient components of aural skills, and will consider their success in doing so.Overview[2] The subtitle of this book-A Comprehensive Approach to Sight-Singing, Ear-Training, Harmony, and Improvisation-also serves as a clear and succinct summary of its goals.(2) The pedagogical strategy behind the subtitle is most clearly stated early in the Preface: "The consistent goal is to help students become fluent in musical patterning while providing them the freedom and opportunity to manipulate those patterns in a creative and real-time manner" (xiv). As "creative" and "manipulation" imply, improvisation is embraced throughout this book; it is both a teaching agent and "an important vehicle for musical expression, which demonstrates a synthesis of theoretical understanding and musicianship" (xiv). Methods and materials are brought together to provide a "programmed arrangement of musical extracts and exercises. . . designed to foster a heightened awareness of melodic function, rhythmic patterning, and the harmonic-contrapuntal structure of tonal music" (xiv). But the authors recognize that drills and exercises alone will not lead to real fluency; rather, skills need to be made relevant through their incorporation into other parts of a growing musician's musical life. Two of the book's foundational elements play especially significant roles in encouraging this sort of integrated practice. One is the decision to use "real" musical examples throughout the book, an element I will consider later.[3] The other is the determination that "every melodic extract [be] consistently retained in its harmonic and/or contrapuntal context. . . allow[ing] an overall organization along harmonic lines, paralleling a written theory curriculum" (xiii). For this reason the book is laid out in three units of seven chapters and one unit (IV) of six, preceded by an unnumbered chapter, "The Foundations of Aural Skills" (hereafter, "Foundations"). The unit titles indicate a fairly standard harmony sequence; Unit I is purely diatonic (this includes some work with pentatonic scales), to which Unit II adds chromatic embellishments. The second year of study begins with "Advanced Melodies, Modulation, and Introduction to Musical Form" in Unit III, and ends with "Advanced Chromaticism and Larger Forms" in Unit IV, tracking common-practice harmony up to the edges of tonality. While a generic harmonic design like this will not satisfy all needs or align well with all harmony curricula, part of the authors' intent here is to enable flexibility in the book's usage, another aspect to be considered in later discussions.Materials[4] Aside from the Preface and part of the "Foundations" chapter, the book has little prose beyond a brief overview at the beginning of each chapter and occasional commentary about a particular musical example or set of exercises. That allows most of the book's great heft to be devoted to the nine to fifteen or more musical excerpts that constitute the subject matter of each chapter, and to the pages of focused studies that follow. While "Foundations" gives an overview of the book's practices and procedures, the book's actual instruction is accomplished almost entirely through these exercises.[5] A typical chapter offers plentiful exercises of various types. …