Abstract: Desire in the Canterbury Tales by Elizabeth Scala. The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Elizabeth Scala's most recent monograph, Desire in the Canterbury Tales, reads Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a discourse of desire. She argues that this discourse is not only rooted in the topics chosen by individual pilgrims in the frame narrative, but can also, more significantly, be found in various acts of misreading occurring in the frame narrative that produce compulsive desires and that can in turn be traced in the structure of the language and in signifying chains connecting the tales. The frame narrative, Scala argues, is where Chaucer sets up a "pretended unity" among the pilgrims, "a unity that then gets tested and discomfited" (2-4) and results in competitive fictions that are often linked to misrecognitions and misreadings of the tale tellers. Scala's work, as a whole, contributes a structural reading of the tales to ongoing debates in Chaucer studies. But her monograph also productively intervenes in current criticism by linking her structural analysis of Chaucer's language to the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. Scala argues that the "conscious means by which speakers pursue various desires and goals" are linked to the "structure of unconscious desire assumed with language" (11). Psychoanalytic theories help her to explain "the subjects position within the complex and socially structured world of symbolization, the Symbolic order" (11). Scala's readings are therefore heavily influenced by Saussure's structural linguistics regarding the signifier in language (the '"audible image' of a sign"), which Lacanian theories separate from the mental concepts the signifier inspires. Lacans essay on the "Mirror Stage" is referenced more particularly to point to the "imaginary identifications and gestures of communication" which arise from mistaking other subjects as our "selves" (24). Her individual chapters trace these structural and psychoanalytical theories in the frame narratives and tales of Fragment I, as well as in the marriage group and the religious stories of the Canterbury Tales. Her analyses therefore also consider how desire might be linked to gender and sexuality, as well as to religion. She moreover frames her argument by considering other voices in Chaucer studies (including debates by New Critics and Historicists) and, more specifically, the questions these schools of thought leave unanswered about language, selfhood, and expressions of desires in medieval texts (15-20). Her introductory chapter, "Mobility and Contestation," describes her overarching argument for the book, and frames it by setting up her critical apparatus and her definition of Chaucer's discourse of desire. She begins her analysis of the primary source by quoting the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue and pointing to the "function of desire" in his poetry. Verbs like "longen" and "seken," framed by the "artifice" of nature ("rains, warming winds, and budding stems") and birds that mimic human lovesickness, are examples Scala draws on to explain the juxtaposition between sexualized desire and its buildup from "gentle awakening" to being "violently erotic" and "penetrative" (5-6). This analysis sets the stage for reading burgeoning desires and misrecognitions in the frame narrative and in the tales of, specifically, Fragment I. Scala's first chapter, '"We Witen Nat What Thing We Preyen Heere': Desire, Knowledge, and the Ruse of Satisfaction in the Knight's Tale," comments not only on the frustrated desires of characters in the "Knight's Tale," but also references Chaucer's act of appropriating source material and reappropriating his own previously penned "Palamon and Arcite" into the Canterbury Tales. This act of "suturing" another story into the Canterbury Tales not only "[alters] the romance he formerly wrote" but also "[crafts] a particularized response and aggressive reading of it" (84). …

Abstract: Sandra Fahy, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 272 pp.The most precious thing for man is life, but socio-political life is more precious than that of the physical body, and the life of the social community is more precious than that of individuals.-Kim Jong Il (2014)It is within the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, encompassing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the death of "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, and a series of devastating natural disasters, that one can place Sandra Fahy's Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. The book is a linguistic analysis of some 30 oral accounts of the famine years from defectors1 now residing in Seoul and Tokyo, and is the first of its kind to present such ethnographically evocative material in English. In the years signaling the end of communism, American political rhetoric, popular news media, humanitarian discourse, and academic efforts have lent to the consolidation of an unshakeable image of the DPRK2 as an evil-totalitarian- military-dictatorship-nuclearized-Stalinist-cult-regime where "the people" suffer under the excess of power. Fahy's work gestures toward a much-needed counterpoint that positions "ordinary" north Koreans as "active agents making sense and negotiating the difficulties of their lives" (3). Although the book does much to achieve that end, it succeeds only partially, as it also perpetuates the very narrative it seeks to dispel.The book's six chapters are organized chronologically, following the emergence and development of the famine (Chapters 1 and 2), its critical stages (Chapters 3 and 4), the decisive points of defection (Chapter 5), and the aftermath (Chapter 6). Each segment features extensive passages from Fahy's interviews interspersed with analysis and historical context- a practical way to utilize oral accounts, but not the most imaginative given anthropology's commitment to writing and the question of representation. Fahy's long-term engagement with defectors is premised on the idea that a better understanding of "[w]hat North Koreans did, how they understood things, how they made sense of difficulties" during the famine would not only "challenge the notion that North Koreans are brainwashed" (8), but also "explain how countries such as North Korea have survived as long as they have" (2). However suggestive, her aim to examine the relationships between famine and language, power and discourse, and to answer the "natural question" of "why people didn't rise up in the face of such deprivation and difficulty" (8) reproduces assumptions about socialist experience that need to be critically examined. This review focuses on Chapter 3, "The Life of Words," and Chapter 5, "Breaking Points," in an effort to retrofit the analytical and theoretical apparatus most often employed in the study of north Korea.Chapter 3, for instance, takes the "disconnect between discourse and reality" (84) as its starting point, making reference to Austinian performativity, only to shape it as a perpetual performance of dissimulation or to describe a life lived in lies (102). This type of analysis is not unfamiliar to the field of postsocialism (and postcommunism), and is problematic because it relies on simplistic binaries of truth/lie, oppression/oppressed, state/people, control/resistance, public/private that have been used to portray life under socialism. Alexei Yurchak's (2006) concept of "performative shift" provides an alternative framework. A similar perspective should be afforded by Caroline Humphrey (1994), but her concept of "evocative transcripts" is taken up as part of the chapter's analysis and regrettably not addressed in the context of larger debates in postcolonial studies. Scholars in this field have shown that ideological language and ritual discourse cannot be explained in terms of false consciousness or models of mimicry. The task now is to situate the famine experience and the many rich ethnographic moments Fahy assembles within north Korea's socialist legacy. …

Abstract: This thesis examines Marcel Duchamp’s "The Large Glass" in relation to Homer’s "Odyssey" and by extension to James Joyce’s "Ulysses." It focuses on the idea that Duchamp may have had in mind Penelope and her Suitors when he was creating the Bride and her Bachelors. The aim of the thesis is threefold – to clarify a problematic area in avant-garde art by restoring the important role the "Odyssey" played in the modern culture as evidenced by preceding and contemporary artists; to detect possible Homeric traces on the "Glass" as such, but also by exploring references to Homer in related works by Duchamp; and finally to compare the "Glass" with "Ulysses," which seems to be as convoluted in its relation to the "Odyssey." The thesis is correspondingly divided into three parts. The first places Duchamp in a broader culture that is directly influenced by the Classics and Homer’s "Odyssey." The second sets out to explore possible references to Homer in seminal works of Duchamp, which reveal that he discreetly based his working method and conceptual rationale on the appropriation of tradition. The final part deals with the ways in which specific aspects of the "Glass" may be critically interpreted as Homeric in origin. Throughout the thesis runs a comparison of the "Glass" with "Ulysses," which exemplifies how safe Homeric attributions may be bent by appropriation to serve their authors’ ends. This study is primarily theoretical and thematic, attempting to piece together perhaps a better understanding than before of one of 20th century’s most seminal artistic figures and elusive bodies of work. Thus, the "Glass" may turn out to be read as a morality story about archetypal issues with which human nature grapples eternally – violence, intoxication and lust. As such, the "Glass" may enigmatically emerge as a Homeric paradigm of man’s initiation to inner freedom, which Duchamp called the “beauty of indifference.”

Abstract: THE SUB-TITLE OF CHANCE declares it to be "A Tale in two parts."1 The novel is a fabula duplex in ways more subtle and complex than merely in its overtly bi-partite form: this is a novel full of dichotomies that provide deeply thematic as well as formal structures. A choice between two options even characterized its author's deliberations over the novel's direction, as he reveals in his "Author's Note":like a sanguine oarsman setting forth in the early morning I came very soon to a fork in the stream and found it necessary to pause and reflect seriously on the direction I would take. ... My sympathies being equally divided and the two forces being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end. (vii)This essay will consider the topic of work, which features in two of the novel's dichotomies - work and leisure, and work on shore versus work at sea - in order to demonstrate that Chance is strongly concerned with the ethics of working life, and that this concern reflects Conrad's ambitious attempt to anatomize British society at the beginning of the twentieth century.Both of these dichotomies are presented at the novel's opening, in which a confrontation between Charles Powell and a waiter in a riverside inn on the Thames estuary is witnessed by the novel's frame narrator, as well as one of its many internal narrators, Marlow. Powell, a yachtsman, addresses the waiter as "steward," revealing him also to be a sailor: for Powell, the sea has provided work as well as leisure. "Presently," we are told, Powell "had occasion to reprove that same waiter for the slovenly manner in which the dinner was served." He does so "with considerable energy" before addressing Marlow and the frame narrator:"If we at sea," he declared, "went about our work as people ashore high and low go about theirs we should never make a living. No one would employ us. And moreover no ship navigated and sailed in the happy-go-lucky manner people conduct their business on shore would ever arrive into port."(3-4)Powell expands with a sweeping condemnation of all trades and professions that do not involve the sea:No one seemed to take any proper pride in his work: from plumbers who were simply thieves to, say, newspaper men ... who never by any chance gave a correct version of the simplest affair. This universal inefficiency of what he called "the shore gang" he ascribed in general to the want of responsibility and to a sense of security. (4)What becomes clear as we read on is that Powell's observations are more than merely one man's rather jaded opinion. For a start, his view is supported by another jaded commentator, Marlow, whose "patronizing comments for women readers outlining the superior ethics of seamanship as opposed to the corrupt morals of those living on land" in the serial text were, as Susan Jones has revealed, "severely cut in the book version" (2009: 293).The novel's exploration of the ethics of work goes well beyond the commentary of its internal narrators. Part I features an extensive cast of representatives of the "shore gang," many designated only by their employment: Chapter 1 alone has, in addition to the hapless waiter, a doorkeeper, cab-drivers, boot-black boys, policemen, and sentries. Later in Part I we meet characters designated as "the governess," "the financier," and "the pressman" and hear much about the late Carleon Anthony, who is repeatedly "the poet." Few of these characters emerge from the narrative with a positive assessment of their conduct and morality.In order to demonstrate how the novel endorses Powell's jaundiced view of the ethics of work on shore, this discussion will focus on three representatives of the "shore gang": de Barrai, who, before he became a swindling financier, was a clerk; John Fyne, a civil servant; and de Barral's cousin, a manufacturer who becomes Flora's guardian after de Barral's conviction for fraud. …

Abstract: Evgenii Akel'ev, Povsednevnaia zhizn' Vorovskogo mira vo vremena Van 'ki Kaina (Daily Life of the Thieves' World in the Time of Van'ka Kain). 413 pp. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2012. ISBN-13 978-5235035089. Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America. 386 pp. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. ISBN-13 9781620402399. $28.00. David Nasaw, opening a 2009 American Historical Review roundtable on biography, expressed the attitude many historians have toward the genre when he wrote that it "remains the profession's unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff." (1) Many scholars, Nasaw noted, believe that biographies cannot provide the "analytically sophisticated interpretation of the past that academics have long expected." (2) The roundtable featured nine articles from well-known historians, most of whom qualified their entries by claiming that their books were not "typical" biographies. These apologies aside, all the articles offered useful ideas for broadening the genre's boundaries. Lois Banner emphasized the "power of culture in shaping the self, in accord with the belief that culture, not nature, is the primary force molding individual personality." (3) Judith M. Brown declared that she does "not see myself as a biographer" but as "a historian of a time and a region ... who uses the medium of 'life histories,' of individuals and groups of individuals, to seek evidence to probe many key issues." (4) In the case of historians working in ancient and medieval history, the sources for biography are limited, a situation that Robin Fleming uses to explain why scholars in these fields turn to prosopography, or multiple biographies. (5) In his contribution to the roundtable, Jochen Hellbeck argued that traditional cradle-to-grave biographies "seem to limit, rather than enrich, historical understanding," because their "focus on a single thinking and acting personality easily breeds self-absorption, at the expense of larger transpersonal dimensions." Instead, he suggested that scholars should focus more on "how and why the sources that we treat as biographical raw material were produced in the first place," a method that would "shift the perspective from a thinking and speaking biographical subject to the making of subjects of biographical experience." (6) Finally, as Kate Brown argued in her article "A Place in Biography for Oneself," biographies do not even have to be about individuals but could be about places such as the Ukrainian heartland. (7) One key point for historians, Nasaw concluded in his introduction, is to treat individuals as part of larger social structures and cultures. He approvingly cites Marx's view from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past." (8) Yet there is still room for the more "traditional" biographical approach. In her book on the genre, Barbara Caine writes, "biography can be seen as the archetypical 'contingent narrative' and the one best able to show the great importance of particular locations and circumstances and the multiple layers of historical change and experience." (9) Caine even writes that "a biographical turn" has taken place, one that involves "a new preoccupation with individual lives and stories as a way of understanding both contemporary societies and the whole process of social and historical change." (10) A biographical boom has certainly taken place in our field of late. The study of Soviet subjectivity that began in the mid-1990s introduced a major rethinking of how we understand the modern self in general and the creation of Homo sovieticus in particular. Other scholars have charted equally ambitious, innovative approaches that span the centuries, even while treating the term "biography" with caution. …

Abstract: Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, by Jennifer Waldron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. 316. Hardcover. $95.00A longstanding, critical religious paradox of the early modern stage is this: the Protestant Reformist culture abjured icons, idols, and shows, yet somehow the theater thrived under these anti-theatrical conditions.In the 1990s Huston Diehl, in Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (1997), turned this paradox inside out by reminding us that Foxe and Calvin invoked all kinds of images and rituals to further their cause. In polishing a tidy historical narrative that cleanly divided so-called "idolaters" from "anti-idolaters" we had neglected to consider that Protestant iconophobia and iconoclasm actually could have been generative rather than obstructive.The "paradox" was one of our own making, a function of historiography.This theatrical re-examination took place amidst a much broader attempt to recapture the historical continuities between Medieval Catholicism and Protestant Reform.Simply put, the absolute "break" most have assumed could not have been that absolute.Jennifer Waldron, in Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater, has a powerful and lucid thesis about all this-one that links this discussion to critical examinations of the body, material culture, and consciousness. Waldron argues that, for Reformers, the body of the actor was an "entirely distinct and nonidolatrous location of the holy, one consecrated by God himself" (25). The body is a "temple," a true and acceptable temple wherein the divine appears. Reading Calvin closely, as did Diehl, Waldron reminds us of the import of "lively" images and how Reformers juxtaposed such liveliness to "dead" images like statues.For Waldron, then, the religious moment at the end of The Winter's Tale is the emergence of the actor's live body from the seemingly "dead" statue form of Hermione: "the actor's lively body is as fundamental to breaking the illusion of statue-worship as it is to confirming the holiness of the 'actions' that end up looking so much like those of theater" (79). The scene shockingly shifts our attention from unlawful magic to the "iconoclastic functions of live performance within Protestantism itself" (82).Liveliness, she quips, is "next to godliness" (51).We have, again, been all too quick to render Protestant Reformers "antimaterialists" through and through, devotees of the "spirit" at the expense of the body, zealous in their commitment to a spirit/body dualism. But Calvin insists the "whole natural world is infused with God's quickening power" so the problem comes not from material substance but when there is an "unnatural instrumentalization of a material substance" (49). God is in material substances, Reformers insisted, especially bodies.The theater had the power to remind an audience of this distinctly Protestant point. A Faustus, for example, as imagined by Christopher Marlowe, sees only an "abstract and not embodied" relationship between God and the world. As Faustus sees it, to reach Godlike status the body must be sacrificed. But that is to miss a critical Reformist point. The character discovers, to the opened eyes of an audience, that he is "not the author of the body he inhabits" (111). According to Waldron, when Faustus loses control of his own limbs, and then has those limbs torn asunder, an audience is forced to consider a thoroughly Protestant form of justice, a joining-via shocking disjoining-of soul and body. …

Abstract: H enry Louis Gates, Jr, in his The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), states that the black vernacular tradition stands as a metaphoric signpost at the "liminal crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference at which Africa and Afro-America meet" (4) However, the concept of liminality within Afro-diasporic experiences, and more specifically within the (African-)American context, is itself a slippery signifier As a transitional or marginal state, the term also suggests fixedness, or a stopping point-a condition of stasis, or non-movement This, in turn, places in question the possibilities of both voice (the power of enunciation) and agency At the same time, though, the historical legacy of slavery and the continued experience of racial oppression mean that peoples of African descent are often socially, economically, and politically positioned at the "margins" of the dominant culture, the Africanist presence remains central to the foundation of America Although the democratic ideal, in material terms, has not been realized, just as the Founding Fathers did not recognize the direct contributions of black people in the building of the American nation, American culture remains (always already) the product of black style and innovation While black cultural production itself continues to endure the problems of cross-over invention, freedom movements (particularly white women's and gay liberation movements), music, language use, sports, and fashion are indebted to the cultural experiences of African peoples in America1 Similarly, while contemporary identity politics suggests that the (monolithic) subject is now "decentered," such a reconfiguration of History proposes, paradoxically, that the condition of the "dispersed" and the "fragmented" is the representational modem experience Indeed, "what the discourse of the postmodern has produced is not something new but a kind of recognition of where identity always was at" (Hall 114, 115), and as a result "de margin and de center," to use Mercer and Julien's phrase, is forever a convergence of the twain The crossroads of culture is at once both liminal and "polymorphous and multidirectional," for the juncture represents the possibilities of movement (as opposed to confinement or stasis); it is the paradigmatic "scene of arrivals and departures" (Baker 7) Such arrivals and departures form the central motif in SuzanLori Parks's play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989-1992)2 The "death" of the play's title, however, does not represent the end of life as such, for the folkloric Everyman that is the eponymous figure of the drama continues to pass over, and through, Time and Space in a cyclical ritual of adversity and survival Death of the Last Black Man represents, Louise Bernard holds master's degrees in Theatre and Drama and in English literature from Indiana University, Bloomington A version of this paper won the 1995 Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Award (Graduate Division), from the Black Theatre Network This paper could not have been written without the generous help and encouragement of Radiclani Clytus

Abstract: The installation of managerialism as the core subjectivity of the discipline of rhetoric and composition is therefore not so much an indicator of the field's ''success" as evidence of its particular susceptibility, the very terms of its intellectual evolution intertwined with the university's accelerated move toward corporate partnership, executive control, and acceptability of profitability and accumulation as values in decision making.-Marc Bousquet, "Composition as a Management Science"Introduction-The Political-Economic in Rhetoric and CompositionAt its most basic level, the study of political economy seeks to understand the relationship between the specific material situation and the realm of the ideological/superstructural, where systems of valuation are established and maintained. How labor, capital, and the administration of the workforce come together to constitute the realm of the "social" represents the most fundamental aspect of the political-economic investigation. To an extraordinary degree, questions about rhetoric and composition's status and legitimacy as a discipline are tied up with the labor conditions in first-year writing (FYW). In the realm of administering composition programs, the vast majority of labor is centered on the teaching of FYW, often described as a scene of exploitation of a captive labor force.1 While there has been extensive study and documentation of the economic conditions that have resulted in the casualization of the writing instruction labor force (Bousquet; Bousquet et al.; Schell; Schell and Stock; Scott), scholarship focusing on rhetoric and composition's shifting understandings of itself as a field of inquiry in relation to economic regimes such as neoliberalism has been less visible. How, for example, does a specific definition of what constitutes "the field" serve local and national economic imperatives, as these imperatives are discursive formations informing what it means to "do" rhetoric and composition? What connections exist between the increasing casualization of the FYW workforce and the continually shifting conceptions of rhetoric and composition? If, to paraphrase the title of Marc Bousquet's famous JAC article, composition is a management science, how has that science shaped the professional horizons and aspirations of the field? One must theorize this question as a function of political economy, examining it in relation to larger economic trends (retrenchment of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism) and in calls for increased accountability within higher education to promote conceptions of "writing" as "a skill" (Adler-Kassner and Harrington). As part of the effort to teach writing as a skill, the domain of rhetoric and composition has necessarily remained nebulous and ill-defined as part of the effort to remain responsive to the calls for reform mandated by these external parties. Rhetoric and composition accrues tactical advantages for itself by keeping the disciplinary concepts guiding its inquiries vaguely defined, so as to remain responsive to the political-economic gains associated with its key disciplinary foci. Indeed, political-economic benefits accrue to the field as a result of a seeming commitment to conceptual indeterminacy with respect to loosely defining "writing," "rhetoric," and "literacy," even if the effects of this conceptual indeterminacy are not entirely clear. Similar to the dereferentialization of excellence described in Bill Readings's The University in Ruins, the relative emptiness of large signifying terms at the center of our disciplinary enterprise actually works productively. Think of the elasticity of the following "keywords in composition": "context"; "discourse"; "network"; and "materiality" (Heilker and Vandenberg). The imagination runs ahead of these "keywords" as a result of their conceptual breadth, filling in discursive spaces, and, at the same time, seeking to make the case that our expertise extends into them. …

Abstract: Fishkin, Joseph (2014). Bottlenecks. A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 267 p., ISBN 9780199812141.What immediately catches the reader's attention in this book is a proposition in which the author affirms the idea of opportunity pluralism. In Fishkin's words, this idea brings a "shift in focus" from questioning "whose opportunities are equal or unequal" to a more "structural way", (p. 1) that incorporates the creation, distribution and control of opportunities. He goes on to describe the multiplicity of ways in which people think about equality of opportunity, indicating categories and concepts such as class, gender, the family and so forth, on the one hand, and the different structuring of opportunities in various societies, on the other. In the introductory part, the author claims that his book is "about the ways societies should, and do, structure opportunities" (p. 10). He then gives a rather well-chosen example from Bernard Williams regarding the "warrior society", in which the state hypothetically introduces equality of opportunity by also allowing children of "non-warriors" to participate in the competition for the limited number of military jobs; however, this has little impact on the outcome, as warriors' children come to the competition much better prepared. Although the example is unrealistic, "different modern societies resemble the warrior society to a greater or a lesser degree" (p. 13). The concluding part of the Introduction reminds the reader that racial discrimination, health disparities, the gender-role system and other such phenomena create bottlenecks. "But so too can certain testing regimes, credential requirements, forms of economic organization, oppressively conformist social norms, and many other stones that our usual ways of approaching equal opportunity might leave unturned" (p. 18).The first chapter of Fishkin's book addresses, above all, the conception of fair contest, and proceeds by discussing the theories of thinkers such as Rawls and Dworkin, to mention just the most outstanding names. This very detailed examination of different arguments, concepts and antagonisms is interwoven with a wide range of problems linked to the family, nature, education, merit, jobs, the starting gate, etc. Many representative and evocative examples are given, as is typical of a kind of thinking based on the paradigm of analytical philosophy. In view of this line of thinking, Fishkin finds "Nozick's vision of radically decentralized pluralism /.../ too unrealistic" (p. 77), and therefore advocates a "different kind of equal opportunity".The second chapter examines relations between opportunities and human development: "/.../ this chapter explains why we ought to be concerned not just about who has more opportunities and who has less, but also about which opportunities or what kinds of opportunities are open to people" (p. 83). The author presents a variety of theories and misconceptions (such as those based in genetic science, environmental studies, chance, etc.) and, of course, does not omit a discussion of the notorious difference between nature and nurture. In this context, he mentions the "Flynn Effect", which makes linking everhigher IQ to genetics very problematic. However, he also very persuasively does away with "oversimplifications" in views on the "intergenerational transmission of inequality" (p. 108). In the same chapter, Fishkin also tackles complex problems concerning interactions with the world of employment, questioning the notion of merit, but also exposing some mindboggling problems with the ideas of equality and equalising. The problems become clearly comprehensible as challenges when we see them through the author's interpretation of wellchosen examples from social situations and courtrooms. School as an "equaliser" is one of the important matters of discussion in this chapter, and practices such as testing are thoroughly examined and exposed as problematic. …

Abstract: David Valentine's Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's The Lives of Transgender People, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011There is something vertiginous about the swirl of scholarly work on transgender. Over the last decade, an explosion of interest in such topics produced dozens of volumes and literally thousands of articles examining the phenomena from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Many such studies posit a "massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks" (Brubaker 2016, 1). The positioning of "transgender" seems somewhat paradoxical in these instances; it activates discourses of category crisis and rupture while serving as an increasingly ossified category of meaning in its own right. It is in this area that something we might call a queer method has the most purchase.If we employ the standard "queer" interpretation that positions subjects and subjectivities as "fluid, unstable and perpetually becoming" (Browne and Nash 2010, 1), it would seem impossible to fashion a concrete methodology or indeed anything resembling a coherent subject. But there is a varied tradition within the social sciences of thinking queerly about transgender people and communities. Both texts reviewed in this essay make the basic move of resisting prior classification schemes and allowing for research subjects to make complex meaning of their identities, communities, and social experiences. A queer perspective on transgender topics makes two primary intellectual moves: first, such studies take a humanistic approach, conferring the "dignity of belief" upon the "felt sense of gender" that research subjects describe (Salamon 2014, 116). Second, such studies deploy what I'll call a "trans* epistemology." The truncation symbol, or "*" at the end of "trans*," symbolizes the openness to a variety of endings, meanings, and interpretations, a multiplicity of as-yet undefined articula- tions. The "subject" of research, previously considered a static, knowable, coherent, and self-knowledgeable entity, bound by the imagination of the researcher, is redrawn as an open question about how the forces of culture, discourse, self-understanding, and social group membership interact to produce frameworks of meaning into which subjects position themselves. Such an epistemological orientation allows for multiple, unstable, contingent meanings, while still recognizing that individuals "bring a high degree of intelligible order to their circumstances" (Blommaert and Rampton 2016, 36), even when such circumstances seem dauntingly complex.David Valentine's pathbreaking ethnography, Imagining Transgender (2007), is an example of precisely this approach. It opens with a problematic that structures the ensuing three hundred pages. Valentine sits on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a support group for transgender-identified people living with HIV. Both Valentine and the group facilitator are cisgender, white, homosexual men. None of the five group participants, all either African American or Latina, identify as transgender. They refer to themselves as "girls," as "fem queens," and often as "gay" but never transgender (3). In popular valence, the term transgender consolidates a vast array of gender-transgressive identities, from transsexual-identified people to those like the group participants, who have more complex gendered identifications. Yet while the group members rejected transgender identification for themselves, there was disagreement about Valentine's presence. One participant said he might keep attending because they were "all gay," while others wanted him to leave because he wasn't "a girl," like them (5). While transgender represents an ontological separation of gender from sexual orientation in the popular imagination, for Valentine's research subjects the division between the two concepts is strikingly complex. …

Abstract: Benjamin Gregg, The Human Rights State: Justice Within and Beyond Sovereign Nations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 288 pp.In this book, Benjamin Gregg calls for a "post-metaphysical" approach to human rights (2), thus accepting the human origins of rights. Human rights, Gregg argues, are social constructs which have no biological or cosmological basis, and are thus open to cross-cultural borrowings. But this embrace of social constructivism is where Gregg and anthropologists who study human rights part company. Indeed, this book illustrates the significant gap between philosophical and anthropological approaches to human rights.Gregg organizes his argument in three sections. In Part I (Chapters 1-3), he makes the case for what, in his Coda, he calls "a community of nation states practicing domestic cosmopolitanism" (210). In Part II, he explains how a human rights-centered "politics of persuasion" can function in university classrooms (Chapter 4), among post-Cold War Eastern European nation states (Chapter 5), and in new forms of digital technology (Chapter 6). In Part III, he responds to the challenge of patriotism (Chapter 7), seeks to differentiate between democracy and the rule of law (Chapter 8), and briefly discusses the efficacy of humanitarian interventions (Chapter 9).In Part I, Gregg explains how a "human rights state" (not a formal state, but a voluntary group of individuals) can be the catalyst for developing an acceptance of human rights within existing nation states. This must be an organic movement, grounded within local communities, "in terms," he argues, "that resonate with that community" (4). Once established, these local movements, composed of "ordinary people, not local elites" (38), will promote the acceptance of human rights through "institutionalized socialization" (6), the goal being an "assertive selfhood" (7) or, alternatively, a "politics of moral personhood" (71). This will require, he suggests, "an act of political imagination" (27) performed by members who "collectively authorize and recognize their own human rights" (28). Advocates will seize rights from the state (thus negating the claim that rights are granted by states) and thereby assert their own agency (as practitioners of rights). Through this process, members of human rights states will persuade others to follow.Gregg distinguishes between (top-down) universal rights campaigns and a (bottom-up) persuasive project, arguing that while the former is imposed, the latter is a "project of potentially universal participation" and hence "a project of (socially constructed) universal validity" (10). He suggests that as the acceptance of human rights through persuasion increases, so too will the scope and number of human rights states, eventually leading to broad universal agreement on rights (15). By way of example he mentions non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as self-selected groups of individuals who seek to expand human rights.1In Part II, Gregg describes how university classrooms can be platforms for enabling students to develop a "human rights consciousness" (84). This will occur through the cultivation among students of a "human rights style" directed at two targets: nation states and "cultural beliefs and practices" (86). These targets signify Gregg's adherence to liberal thinkers stretching back to John Stuart Mill, who in On Liberty (2006; originally published in 1859) defined the enemy of rights as not just the state, but, more importantly, society. "The despotism of custom," Mill wrote, "is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to...the spirit of liberty, or that of progress and improvement" (2006:70). In Gregg's hypothetical classroom, students are "Western youth" (109) firmly situated "in the West" (93-94). Beyond the reductionism (just who belongs to "The West"?), this perspective suggests not just that human rights are the domain of "The West" while "cultural beliefs and practices" are found elsewhere, but that a human rights state can exist separate from culture. …

Abstract: Although not explicitly tied, the terms "transforming" and "discipleship" relate directly to and fruitfully qualify each other in the most important recent documents in contemporary missiology. Together they frame a profoundly rooted and deeply relevant notion of disdpleship that ties the personal commitment of Christians to the larger Christian communion, work for justice, and the very fabric of our evolving universe. Two Significant Words The phrase "Transforming Discipleship" does not appear as such in the three major documents on mission that have appeared in this second decade of the twenty-first century: The Lausanne Movement's Cape Town Commitment (CTC) of 2010, Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium (EG), and the WCC/CWME mission statement Together towards Life (TTL), both from 2013. (1) The phrase "transformative spirituality" does appear in TTL (29-30), implying that this is the kind of spirituality that disciples or followers of Christ must cultivate. As far as I can tell, however, this is the only place where any of these significant mission documents connect the two words in any way. These two words, nevertheless, occur over and over again in all three documents. In TTL, "transformation," "transformative, and "transforming" appear 17 times; "disciples" and "discipleship" appear eight times. In the longer CTC "transformation" appears only five times, but "disciples" and "discipleship" appear 36 times. In the still longer EG, the transformation words occur 31 times, and the disciple words occur fourteen times. It seems fair to say that these words form a significant part of the vocabulary of contemporary missiology across the churches. This essay will explore the connection between these two words and suggest that they offer a rich entree into missiological thinking and practice today. Discipleship The word "discipleship," has deep biblical roots, with the word "disciples" occurring some 250 times in the New Testament. The Greek mathetes comes from the verb mathanein, "to learn." The Latin translation discipulus comes from the verb discere, which also means to learn. The disciple is one who learns, who constantly sits at the feet of the teacher (in Latin magister or magistra), who is constantly on the journey of wisdom and knowledge as the teacher teaches her or him. "Disciple" is also the root of the English word "discipline," adding an element of action or praxis to its meaning. The disciple accompanies the teacher, follows the teacher, imitates the teacher, practices what the teacher does, learns from her or his mistakes as she or he slowly and sometimes with difficulty learns the teacher's wisdom, integrity, and way of life. In the Christian context, discipleship is rooted in the following of Jesus as Christ and Lord, and so must always be radical discipleship--"thorough-going, committed, and deeply rooted; that is, it must become a way of life." (2) Being a Christian disciple entails the development of a spirituality. It is a following of Jesus on the way, undertaking a pilgrimage into deeper relationship with Christ, taking on his attitudes, his openness, his honesty, his gentleness and tenderness. This is a life's work, and in a real sense, for a disciple, "this journey is our destiny." (3) Christian discipleship is not something that one takes on oneself. One is called to discipleship. It is Jesus who calls the disciples to follow him (e.g., Mk 1:16-20; 2:13-17; Matt 4:18-22; 9:9-13; Lk 5:1-11, 27-32; Jn 1:33-51). Like all references to being especially chosen or elected in the Bible, however, the call to discipleship is not to set one group of persons over or apart from others in terms of privilege. Being called, elected, or set apart is rather for the sake of service. This is the point, Christopher Wright insists, of Israel's election--to be a blessing for the nations. (4) Election, as Lesslie Newbigin has insisted as well, is always for service in mission. …

Abstract: Four developments have been central to the shaping of the field of religious ethics: (1) the shift from Christian ethics to religious ethics, (2) the displacement of normative ethics by descriptive, comparative, and analytical ethics, (3) growth in self-consciousness as philosophical assumptions have come to articulation in critical philosophical consciousness, and (4) the extension of the Social Gospel's traditional agenda into more and different practical social issues. However, this "map" of the field, drawn from 35,000 feet, shows that though the changes have, indeed, been significant, the continuities are far more pronounced (and interesting) than is generally admitted. in the 1960s, the ford humanities project, under the direction of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, published a series of books assessing the status of various humanistic fields. The difficulties the sponsors of the project had in determining both how religion should be treated and what should be included are discussed briefly in the foreword to the second of the two volumes in the series that were devoted to religious studies (Ramsey 1965, vii-viii). This second volume was to review the state of scholarship in religion; Clyde Holbrook's book, Religion, a Humanistic Field, an earlier publication in the series, had provided "a full and wise discussion" of the question of whether the study of religion required creedal commitments and therefore would be incompatible with "free scholarly inquiry." The Ramsey-edited book mirrors the pattern of the dominant Christian Protestant theological curriculum of the midcentury, and thus the dominant pattern of the teaching of religion in liberal arts colleges. The titles of the articles are "The History of Religions," "Old Testament Studies" (authored by Harry Orlinsky, the only Jewish scholar represented), "The Study of Early Christianity," "The History of Christianity," "Theology," "Christian Ethics," and "Philosophy of Religion." The publication of the volume had been held up because of the failure of the

Abstract: What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, "To survive is messy, elaborate, layered," contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. The term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S "Survivor," situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must "survive" in seemingly difficult and "exotic" settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, "survival" is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi's "autographic" memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and David B.'s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significant-ly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi's story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been-at least historically -infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.1Narrating Women's LivesI use the term "autographic" in reference to Gillian W hitlock and Anna Poletti's neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore's conceptual term "autobiographics" in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define "autographics" as "[l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials" (2008, v). As one mode of autographic writing, comics offer what I call here a "frame of recognition" for the subjects they portray. By "frame of recognition," I mean first the physical frame-usually in the form of a line-that encloses images and words in comics, and second, the way that these frames are figuratively deployed to redress overdetermined narratives of marginalized subjectivities, including women's lives. In women's life writing, the work of comics is particularly significant because of the personalized field of vision that the form promotes. As Hillary Chute suggests, "The types of challenges we see in women's graphic narrative are not found anywhere else-or anywhere else in a post-avant-garde horizon," and part of the political significance of these images lies in their complexity and avoidance of an "obviously 'correct' feminist politics" (2010, 4-5, emphasis in original). The reader can observe the subtleties of narrating womanhood in Persepolis with its careful unraveling of cross-cultural codes and expectations.Since the 1970s, women's life writing has gained richness and depth from the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, Wimmen's Comix Collective (1972-1992), and more recently, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (1999), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Need More Love (2007). …

Abstract: "moral" sense of the word (which is predominant in contemporary French and has come to mean "immoral," "perverse" or "disturbing") was employed later in the nineteenth century when it was notably used to describe literary works. If the adjective initially suggested the idea of contamination or contagion (which medical usage distinguishes insomuch as the first is propagated by the non-human, the second by the human), the non-literal sense would tend to be metaphorical. Gerard Genette's study, "Metonymie chez Proust," when the critic speaks of "metonymie contagion"2 and argues that a "metaphor-effect" is often rooted in a "metonymy-cause,"3 enabled me to articulate the notion of "unhealthy" around these two figures. Examples from David Cronenberg's films also suggested that, if a symptom becomes the visible metaphor of the disease, the symptom is nevertheless linked to an invisible metonymical chain of spatial or causal contiguity. L'Imagination malsaine, I did not, however, refer to Susan Sontag's groundbreaking Illness as Metaphor, since she deals with the metaphoric uses of specific diseases, namely TB and cancer, but my thesis does confirm her demonstration that the disease's reality and gratuitousness, or what I would call the disease's corporeality, is, in a sense, repressed by "metaphoric thinking."4 My study of metaphors also backs up Sontag's demonstration that individual diseases such as TB and cancer are feared as if they were "morally, if not literally, contagious,"5 so that the metaphoric seems to become metonymical. With the "unhealthy," I argue, the metaphor is, in effect, rooted in the metonymy. Moreover, if the foreign body and the contagious subject are deemed "unhealthy" to a healthy subject by a subject or the (medical, moral, etc.) law, it is, in fact, the relation between the two that is "unhealthy" (19). This implies a certain degree of subjectivity in the attribution of the value "unhealthy" and raises the question of the relationship between the subject and the law.

Abstract: dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1) The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. Blaise Pascal (2) I must tell you," writes Hopkins to Robert Bridges in 1878, "I am sorry you never read the Deutschland again." (3) Bridges's resistance to his friend's dense and difficult poem had been immediate, intense, and enduring: following his first encounter with it in 1877, he assures Hopkins that he would "not for any money read [the] poem again" (CW, 1: 282). Even when he eventually brings it into print more than forty years later, Bridges characterizes the ode as "a great dragon folded in the gate" of Hopkins's work--a phrase that has since become something of a critical commonplace. (4) And not without reason: Hopkins admits to his frustrated friend that his poem "needs study and is obscure" and allows, with telling litotes, that he was "not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear" (CW, 1: 295). Nearly a century of divergent commentary on the poem has confirmed Hopkins's understatement while validating Bridges's experience--described in his notes to the ode--of being "shamefully worsted" by the dragon "in a brave frontal assault" (p. 106n). Some scholars have taken Bridges's advice (which is modeled on Hopkins's own advice to him) "to circumvent [the poem] and attack [it] later in the rear" in both literal and figurative senses. That is, some readings of "The Wreck" approach it not only from oblique points of entry, but from unconventional critical perspectives. (5) In the 1960s, for example, Elisabeth Schneider suggested that a miracle is represented in the ode, arguing that its obscure twenty-eighth stanza contains the involuted account of a divine vision granted to the five drowned nuns that the poem commemorates. (6) Revisiting the issue some twenty years later in his Martin D'Arcy Lectures, Norman H. MacKenzie gave voice to the current critical consensus that the poem contains no such vision--nor a miracle of any kind. (7) Yet, as Lesley Higgins put it in a recent reappraisal, Schneider still "persuaded two generations of Hopkins critics to read [Stanza 28] miraculously." (8) Bridges's advice (and Schneider's example) notwithstanding, most critics have preferred to engage with the more obvious themes of the ode, exploring its theodicean theology, its biographical resonances, and its peculiar literary form. This last topic is one of the most frequently addressed issues in Hopkins scholarship, and many commentaries have considered the relation of the poem's two uneven parts in great detail. To take a recent example, Imogen Forbes-Macphail has explored the mathematical ratios of the unevenly divided ode, drawing on calculus to clarify its bifurcated form: "the two halves of the poem," she argues, "are held in an integral/differential relationship with each other," with "Part the First" displaying "God's nature in the abstract" and "Part the Second" "describing] God's presence manifested or 'integrated' into the real world." (9) Dennis Sobolov, for his part, takes a rather different critical approach, reading Hopkins's oeuvre through the lens of "semiotic phenomenology," yet his conclusion is not dissimilar: the strategic division between abstraction and integration that Forbes-Macphail finds in the form of the poem, Sobolov sees within the poet himself. His engagement with "The Wreck" thus forms the final chapter of The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins because, on Sobolov's reading, it showcases a symptomatic gap that runs throughout all of Hopkins's work between the faith he professed and his own lived experience. (10) Like the suggestion that Bridges offers in his note to the "The Wreck," these antinomies--between theory and practice, between faith and experience--have their origin in Hopkins, too. His letters and journals are replete with worries about wasting time on poetry, and his early concerns about the incompatibility of verse writing with his religious life led to the period of "elected silence" during which he abandoned poetic composition altogether. …

Abstract: A Response: Difficulty, Opacity, Disposition, Method1 Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Even as they evince their own interests and modes of investigation, these responses to Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns generously correlate the concerns of my project with their own. Generated from institutional locations as diverse as classics, history, medical sociology, and area and postcolonial studies, each response seizes on points of connection that provide a platform for affirming particular values and concerns: of history and interdisciplinarity, of complexity and contradiction, of the problematic travel in concepts. None of these values map onto a discipline; they point rather to habits of thought that are encouraged when we read for method.From this standpoint, it is fascinating to see what appears-and doesn't appear-in these pages. Although Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands begin by invoking what they describe as my book's "pedagogical principle" of historicizing, they quickly move to the affects generated by its epistemological investments. Describing my work as occasionally "difficult and discomforting," they report that it leaves them "with an acute awareness of the problems" of doing the interdisciplinary history of sexuality. They nonetheless applaud the effort to put methodological questions into dialogue with epistemological ones, insofar as it "reshapes our very concept of sexual knowledge as an analytical category. . . . The study of sex becomes the investigation of how sex is turned into knowledge."Similarly intrigued by epistemological processes, Lisa Jean Moore emphasizes the way Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns reveals the procedures by which analytical objects are constituted, thereby allowing us to interrogate "'how categories . . . came to be.'" Portraying our methods as "mutually reinforcing" and bringing my strategies into conversation with her favored scholarly tactics of "getting lost" and "situational analysis," she reformulates points of contact between our projects: "it is the elusive, contested, and controversial problematics around defining . . . objects that is the actual 'data"' Moore's invocation of the notion of "boundary objects" further collocates our mutual interest in "the centrifugal forces of opacity, plurality, and polyphony,' and the "centripetal drives of capturing the range of variation" and complexity.Both of these responses note the ongoing tension between empirical and queer approaches. With considerable force, Moore claims for queer studies an empirical method that starts with taking the world "as if it exists, no matter how it is constructed." Intriguingly, the imperative of that claim is implicitly de-dramatized by her portrayal of her relationship to queer studies as "flirt[ing]." Indeed, methodological flirtation suggests one tactic for sidestepping the double-binding scene of assessment that renders Moore's work too empirical to be "considered part of queer studies" (while "not empirical enough" by the standards of sociology). Flirting, after all, need not require a commitment on either side.Looming large in these responses is the book's advocacy of interdisciplinarity. Highlighting my engagements with, and critiques of, different ways of "doing" history, Fisher and Langlands confirm from their standpoint as practitioners of a large scale interdisciplinary project, "the inherent frustrations and fruitfulness of reaching across" disciplinary boundaries, while embracing what they describe as my "optimistic" brief on behalf of a practice that acknowledges "the impossibility of working together without friction and contradiction." Much of my book is dedicated to confronting such frictions, disciplinary and otherwise. An emphasis on method, I suggest, helps us appreciate that protocols that would lubricate interactions are still in the process of being worked out. Not only does such a practice entail valuing the thorny issue, the dilemma, the impasse, but it also enjoins a willingness to unpack incommensurate idioms and resist the impulse to either assume sameness in the room or strive for premature unity. …

Abstract: INTRODUCTION At the turn of XX-XXI centuries, via synergetics and situational approach, the situation of re-discovery of the universe, place and role of human-anthropos in it, becomes unprecedented. Today the world had already evidentially came across as not just globally evolving, but coevolving, universal, branch-like self-organizing and self-developing system. Distinguishing "absolute" and "ideal", it can be said that for the first time the world came across as the world without Absolute, as the left-alone-universe. Arrival of neoclassic philosophy, including such main novelty, shows (see works of late J. Derrida (Derrida, 1997), E.N. Knyazeva (Knyazeva, 2015), V.A. Lectorskii (Lektorskiy, 2015), V.S. Stepin (Stepin, 2012) and many others), that coevolution is a stage of a new, qualitatively different type of thinking and behavior of mankind in the universe, not of any kind, but only of allowable attitude of a man to himself, this is a new stage of ecological imperative and a man, new mechanisms and ways of integration process of a man and nature, new quality of their convergent interactions. Under such quality are understood new interactions: not only with its nearest part - "geographical environment", "cosmos", but already with eternal-endless Existence. In which is actively present an eternal form of existence as a life that happened in form of anthropos--"observer" on level of a man. MATERIALS AND METHODS Until last third of twentieth century the idea of anthropic principle was one of the major, but in cosmology. The largest "turns to man" had happened several times. Detection of properties of "anthropic principle" and "observer of neoclassical type" will be more fruitful is to compare them with previous ones: "anthropocentrism". Their comparativistics shows that the first one, "anthropocentrism" proceeded from classical world understanding, eventually from the closed ultimate secluded picture of the world, from linearly established Order, Correctness, created and sanctioned by some External Absolute. Assuming this, a man is explained in brought from outside, supernatural manner that is a support of not itself but some Absolute or man assimilating himself to absolute. Unwillingly a man started to be envisioned as the "center" on the universe, and as an observer, positioned seemingly over the world, absolute transcendental and outside external observer. As observer, he strives to absolute truth, not blurred by subjectiveness and subjectness, in his opinion. This particularly happens in "prosperity periods" of classical type of the world view, when a man was outshines by reducibly understood mind, "absolute mind of the Universe", turned into "absolutely reasonable Order". Such "pandeterminism, similar to infective disease" (Frankl, 2006) had infected a significant part of mankind. "Anthropological approach" is determined by seemingly diverse, neoclassical picture of the world. But the picture of the world itself stays the same, relativist-absolutist, relativism became the Absolute, the form of Absolute had changed: now as absolute happened to be accepted not Order, but Chaos; and "rational fascism" and "madness in classic era" were replaced, we can say, by irrational fascism (Deleuze et al., 1972). It seemed that a man came to envision himself being "already in the world", in quality of seemingly internal observer, but immanent, i.e. thrown in bu Absolute from without, but now by irrational, schizoid Absolute. As observer a man turned into confused observer--"narrativist", "nomadologist" living in ontological instability (Saykina and Krasnov, 2015). The life started to be thought as unity of fluxes of becoming with biased basis. The world appeared as plan on which heterogenetic multiplicities, "multiplicities-without-unity" are roaming, homeless in existence, with involvement "into Universal game" (Badiou, 2004). Views of anthropos as observer on his "emergence", status, place and role in life of the universe, in cognition of the universe had changed a little. …

Abstract: the hbo series The Leftovers is set in motion by an incident called Sudden Departure, a rapture-like event in which 2 percent of the world's population (or 140 million people) has disappeared. In both the series and the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, the event is unable to be framed in either a scientific or a religious framework or even a political framework. For the residents of Mapleton and Jarden, which serve as the backdrops for the first and second seasons of the HBO series, respectively, the question of why someone "departed" is simply unexplainable and unknowable, as is the question of who went. One character, in trying to wrap his head around those who have mysteriously vanished, casually remarks, "The Pope I get, but Gary fucking Busey? How'd he make the cut?" ("Pilot"). With no answers or accountability forthcoming, the leftover population has spent the three years since largely attempting to reestablish a sense of social normalcy.Between 1964 and 1988, tens of thousands of people in South America "disappeared" as well. Here in reality, the questions of why and who were much clearer. The overwhelming majority of los desaparecidos ("the disappeared") were critics of the right-wing military juntas that had been consolidating power in many Latin American countries. Despite the answers being terrifyingly clear, most of the citizens preferred to act simply as if nothing was happening. It was in this environment that Brazilian activist and theater-maker Augusto Boal developed the Theatre of the Oppressed (known today as "TO"), his most effective strategy of confronting his country's fearful apathy.Theatre of the Oppressed is a theatrical and theoretical form focused on social and political engagement that concerns itself with providing any group of "oppressed" people the means by which to identify the source of their oppression and actualize real-world strategies to change the power dynamic. Colloquially, Boal referred to the form as "the rehearsal for the revolution" (Boal, Oppressed 3). Consistent with the ideals of liberation pedagogy by which he was inspired, Boal resists defining specific oppressions or connecting oppression to any ideology because he believes that such "limiting categorizations . . . mechaniz[e] . . . actions and reactions and eliminate the possibility of change or individuality" (Oppressed xxiii). Although those participating in Theatre of the Oppressed approach the work from their own understanding of oppression, the form itself is more concerned with the circumstances of oppression than with the idiosyncratic sufferings of individuals. This malleability allows Theatre of the Oppressed to be understood in many separate contexts in many separate communities-precisely the type of political theater that can be wielded wherever an "oppressor" and "oppressed" can be identified.If there is an "oppressed" in The Leftovers, it is the Guilty Remnant (known as the "GR")-an ascetic cult that was organized in the wake of the Departure in order to combat the "so-called Return to Normalcy." The Mapleton, New York, chapter of the Remnant is shown to be made up of former citizens who have disengaged themselves from the oppressive (and now-meaningless) social institutions of the "Old World" and who are engaged instead in the practice of being "living reminders" of what happened. The aesthetics of the Guilty Remnant appear to link to the cult-like features of organizations such as People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, and Westboro Baptist Church-which serves to drive a wedge between the group and the rest of the Mapleton citizenry. Between the two factions is the show's de facto protagonist Kevin Garvey (played by Justin Theroux), who attempts to use his unique position as Mapleton's chief of police to maintain an uneasy truce between his fellow restless citizens and the instigative Guilty Remnant. Under the direction of Patti Levin (Ann Dowd), the group achieves this by employing strategies of both "civil disobedience and political theater" (Perrotta 23). …

Abstract: Mental Recreation in WonderlandIN UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS, scholars often tell their students that children's books fall on one or the other side of an instruction-entertainment divide or, more subtly, that the genre exhibits a tension between the two faculties. Few scholars, however, actually believe it. Perry Nodelman, perhaps the most notable commentator on the relationship between pleasure and pedagogy in juvenile literature, writes that the most successful works "are trying to be optimistic and didactic at once," which seems "inherently self-contradictory" and "leads to ambivalence, subtlety-resonance" Inferior children's books, meanwhile, are "either more purely didactic or more purely optimistic," dispositions that "represent two opposite ways in which adults like to address children, based . . . on different ways of thinking about how children differ from adults."1 I challenge the notion that optimism and didacticism are opposites, that they are a dichotomy. Using Lewis Carroll's Alice stories as exemplary texts, I invite readers to engage in cerebral play and, by doing so, to learn about both thinking and pleasure.I begin by describing a paradigm in which pleasure is cognate with improvement before I briefly discuss Carroll's "mental recreations"-a set of games and word problems he created towards the end of his life with the express goal of nourishing cerebral pleasure. The Alice books are probably more effective catalysts of play than these recreations because they invite their readers to experience entertainment and instruction as not only compatible, but intimates, and even indistinguishable from one another. The games and problems, however, have an unavoidable pedagogical goal even though they are designed to be enjoyed. My argument covers some familiar ground: much of the writing on literary nonsense, which treats Carroll as canonic, focuses on the genre's concern with logic and play with meaning;2 and numerous linguists, philosophers, and literary theorists have explored Carroll's instructive and entertaining manipulation of language and concepts.3 So, too, Jan Susina has noted the importance of play and games not only in the Alice books but in the corpus of Carroll's academic and amusing literature.4 And Kathleen Blake has remarked that although "the Alices are famous for being playful and moral-less . . . without explicit ulterior motive or benefit . . . they do bear a relation to reality and say something about life."5 I argue that Carroll aims to teach his readers not so much propositional knowledge "about life," but rather a specific type of procedural knowledge: "how to" engage in mental recreation. Hence, I will describe four mechanisms that Carroll uses to teach his readers to play with their minds: he distorts familiar material to defamiliarize the reader; presents conversations that have a riddlelike character to invite continued puzzlement; models cerebral play for the reader to emulate; and draws attention to the musical properties of language. In glossing the instructive-entertaining devices that Carroll uses in Alice, I argue for the unsurprising conclusion that pleasures can be taught and that learning can induce pleasure. Lewis Carroll is often seen as the father of entertaining children's literature, but his longstanding desire to instruct and improve is also well known. This essay, then, also seeks to explain how "two seemingly disparate facets of Carroll's personality,"6 his logician's earnestness and his poet's playfulness- might have, in fact, not only coexisted with but enhanced one another.Feeding the MindIn response to Nodelman's dichotomy, Roderick McGillis suggests that we would do better to distinguish not between didacticism and optimism but between two kinds of pleasure-"elemental pleasure" (an "immediate sensation")7 and "alert pleasure" (a result of "cerebral exercise," of "attention and learning").8 As they appear in Alice, some of these sorts of pleasures require previous knowledge (for instance, some of the repartee benefits from a sensitivity to language or familiarity with the distorted material). …

Abstract: Recent theorizing about diaspora focuses on the etymology of the word (to scatter; to sow; to inseminate) and on the biological, reproductive Oedipal logic that inevitably shapes the core of its conventional formation. For example, Julia Emberley's analysis of archetypal blood-and-belonging literary diasporas as patrilineal accounts of father/son inheritances provides a standard of how maleness and heterosexuality function in many texts. (1) Kinship and belonging are also central themes in Daniel MacIvor's Marion Bridge, but his drama about three complex women has nothing to do with their relationships with men. Instead, MacIvor's play challenges the heterosexuality of the family tree that typically structures diasporic narratives, and it proposes alternatives based not only on the mother/ daughter line but also on sexual diversities and diverse identities. A two-act play produced in 1998, then published and nominated for a Governor General's Award in 1999, Marion Bridge (2) consists of a series of short, chronologically ordered scenes, each containing a monologue delivered by one of the three main characters. The MacKeigan sisters, all in their thirties, have gathered in the family home to be with their gravely ill mother. Agnes, the eldest hard-living sibling, has left a faltering acting career in Toronto to come back to Sydney, Nova Scotia; Theresa, a cloistered nun, has taken a leave of absence from a religious community in New Brunswick; and Louise, the unemployed perennial "outsider," has never ventured beyond Cape Breton. They fall into familiar patterns of behaviour: Agnes and Theresa argue and bicker while Louise watches television. As they all act out, their dying mother (unseen throughout the play) is upstairs, still exerting her will. Eventually, she commands her daughters to visit their neglectful father. This stirs up more resentment, for he represents the dangers of the past. While they are making that call to him, their mother dies. Each sister grieves the mother's passing in her own fashion, then, in a plot twist worthy of Louise's favourite soaps, find ways to reconnect with Joanie, the daughter Agnes placed for adoption fifteen years before. By the end of the play, the sisters have decided to bring Joanie "home" En route, they also find a way to honour the memory of their deceased mother by detouring to a place she had loved: Marion Bridge. (3) Because their mother had loved it so well, Marion Bridge holds a mythic place in the imaginations of the three main protagonists. Their stories about how they remember a family trip to this small community about twenty kilometres from Sydney invoke what Stuart Hall calls "a narrative of displacement" that recreates "the endless desire to return to lost origins" (402). Further, for Igor Maver, Marion Bridge would stand in for the MacKeigan's nostalgically invested and contested "home," and, paradoxically, it would be "a place of no return" ("Introduction" x). In the play, glimpses into how the three sisters reimagine Marion Bridge map an intense longing for events that have been lost, perhaps not even experienced. What this "homeplace" comes to represent is a profound state of turning backward in time, of being temporarily en route to a displaced self and destination. All of this resonates with the diasporic condition as it is theorized by Smaro Kamboureli. Like Hall and Maver, Kamboureli analyzes the diasporic state as a journey toward an origin that one is "never destined to return to ..." (132). Kamboureli also notes that a shift or change often occurs during a subject's "becoming" diasporic, specifically at the moment of realizing that the "otherness" of identity is defined by something "foreign" or outside the self. Kamboureli calls this a "self-identification by negation" and postulates that this process sets up a binary of the "I" and "not-I" selves. Within that paradigm, the subject realizes identity cannot be found through a relation to some remote place that s/he is attached to, but it must be discovered in the context of self-negation in present place and time (139). …

Abstract: David Brauner and Axel Stahler, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. 456 pp. £150.00Despite its size and scope, and its self-declared ambition to "deghettoise Jewish fiction," The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction is a more meditative than assertive volume.1 In part this diffidence arises out of the book's commendable desire to question its own terms ("Modern," "Jewish," "Fiction"), albeit this questioning takes place alongside the admission that, as Mark Shechner puts it in his preface, "[e]ven in literary studies we live by branding" (viii), and, for practicality's sake if nothing else, you've got to draw the line somewhere. For editors David Brauner and Axel Stahler, this line is definitely not a hyphen: that habitual conveyor of "hybridised identity," as in the descriptors "Jewish-American" or "British-Jewish" (5), has been eschewed not only by Brauner and Stahler but also by other recent editors of comparable (though more expressly American) volumes.2 The hyphen is rejected by Shechner, too, as exclusionary, used "less to describe a literature than to fence out the unwelcome: no Dickens, no Melville, no Hemingway" (xvi). I am not sure where Dickens, Melville, or Hemingway would fit in the gap where the hyphen once stood, but it makes sense that these sequential adjectives are more neutrally descriptive than their forebears. A further reasonable step is Brauner and Stahler's division of the book into three sections, "American Jewish Fiction," "British Jewish Fiction," and "International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction." The editors explain that they intend "Jewish" to be the main adjective, to be modified by "American," "British," and so on, in order to avoid the "de facto hegemony that American Jewish literature has enjoyed within Jewish studies," and to offset the misconception that all Jewish literature must somehow be a subset of American literature (5).In this, Brauner and Stahler are certainly successful: simply the fact of covering such a rich variety of works from all over the Jewish world unsettles, if it does not utterly topple, the hegemony they notice. Surveying and summarizing a wealth of Anglophone Jewish literature, the book mostly steers clear of those authors we might expect to be at the center of such an examination, focusing instead on female writers, on works that are the product of less familiar migration patterns than the "usual" diasporic journeys, on more obscure authors and stories that will likely be unknown even to expert readers. When familiar American Jewish figures like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow do appear, they are seen from an unaccustomed angle: Aimee Pozorski, for instance, finds Roth's Patrimony to be "as much a Holocaust memoir as it is a memoir of Roth's confrontation with his father's cancer diagnosis, illness and death" (64), and she reads it alongside the anti-Semitic tradition that associates Jews with disease. Sasha Senderovich looks at the "self-orientalisation" of Soviet Jews in works by Jewish writers from the USSR like Gary Shteyngart and David Bezmozgis; while Sarah Lightman explores the questioning possibilities of the Jewish graphic novel, suggesting that "[c]omics, with their ongoing negotiation of text and image on each individual page, parallel the theme of a constantly changing sense of identity and [. . .] a fluctuating relationship with God" (121). Victoria Aarons looks at the emergence of Roth, Bellow, and Bernard Malamud as American Jewish short-story writers against "the backdrop of a radically changing American ethos" (51), movingly connecting the emergence of this hyphenated-though not, any longer, literally hyphenated-identity with that of the conflicted and, we might say, conflated clerk in Malamud's The Assistant: "I suffer for you . . . I mean you suffer for me" (51).The section on British Jewish fiction deals with works that are largely less known, but whose description and analysis here suggest that their relative obscurity is undeserved. …

Abstract: In a book meriting thorough-going elucidation, Landshut seeks to lay bare the roots of the "possible unfolding" of the problems of sociological research. His investigation takes the form of a "critique of sociology," which springs from a "confrontation with outmoded and prevailing research tendencies." Besides unearthing the original ground of the sociological problematic (Problematik), the author seeks to prove that this ground has been lost as the social sciences have developed historically, and that the "originally motivating mode of questioning" is no longer alive in "contemporary research trends" (p. 7). This critique thus rests on a definite presupposition. An "original research foundation," specifically a "factual questionability [faktische Fraglichkeit] of

Abstract: In his controversial essay, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel" (November 1989), Tom Wolfe seems baffled as to why contemporary writers have failed to see the realities of American life and instead have embraced some imported literature celebrating nihilism, absurdity, play of language, and self-reflexivity on the grounds that American life no longer deserves the word "real" since it is chaotic, fragmented, random, discontinuous, and absurd (54). He censures his contemporary postmodern writers for their rejection of the realistic narrative, their refusal to present social, cultural, and political issues of the time, as well as their tendency towards irony and cynicism. Wolfe is not alone in this critique of postmodernist excesses. A new era in the fields of music, aesthetics, film criticism, poetry, literature, and philosophy started to emerge in the mid-1980s and especially the 90s. The new movement has been referred to as neo-realism (Rebein), aesthetics of authenticity (Funk, Grob, and Huber), new sincerity (Kelly), reconstruction (Huber), or post-postmodernism (McLaughlin). The writers associated with this trend mainly react to the postmodernist "supposed nihilism, solipsism and deconstruction of values, subjects and agency" (Huber 48) and ask the question of how to write with genuine sentiment and without irony or cynicism about love, family, spirituality, war, sex, and fear (Winkler). This new sincerity movement has revived interest in sensibility, which had lost its grandeur since the mid-nineteenth century. Sentimentality, by this time, was excluded from ethics on the grounds that sentimentalism encloses one in oneself and in enjoyment; sentimentalism is "mawkish self-indulgent and actively pernicious modes of feeling" (Bell 2). On the contrary, Andrew Gibson claims that sensibility "properly designates an ethical faculty" and is different from cognition since it does not approach an object with the intention of conquering it, but is rather characterized by "a mode of openness and attentiveness" (162). He also notes that, in the twentieth century, sensibility has been revived by Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of alterity. Interestingly, Levinas in his early philosophical and ethical works, as Gibson states, is unsympathetic towards sensibility and regards it like other anti-sentimentalists as "naive," "narrow," "egoist," "ungenerous," something which does not "make its way outward" (165). Later his attitude towards sensibility undergoes a radical shift, however, and it changes from "self closure" to being open to the infinite, to being "a pre-originary susceptibility," a "pre-original involvement," and a constant "subjection to the other" (Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers 134, 147, 165). Sensibility is "the exposedness to affection," "vulnerabiliby," "susceptibility," giving without holding back, and the opposite of the subjectivity of the ego (Levinas, Otherwise than Being 62, 146). In this way, sensibility becomes the center of Levinas's ethics of alterity that revises the traditional way of regarding the Other. In an interesting comparison, Gibson has related Levinas's concept of sensibility to George Bataille's notion of "unrestricted or general economy" as opposed to "restricted economy." Accordingly, Levinasian sensibility is assumed to be a kind of "exuberance," "excess," "generosity," "expenditure without reserve," "a will to give," or "transgression," as opposed to the "practical judgment," "accumulation and production," "calculation," "reserve," "the will to withhold or retain," and "taking the side of taboo" which were enforced by the rise of bourgeois culture, modern Christianity, capital, and utility (Gibson 165-66). Although Tom Wolfe is technically remote from the contemporary writers of new realism (who have not broken their ties with the postmodern techniques) and is closer to the eighteenth-century realists, he seems to follow the same goals as the cult of "New Sincerity. …

Abstract: Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play. --Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1) [The play] is not about life as it is lived at all, but about life as it might be lived, about the thought which is not licensed, and about the abolished unconscious. --Howard Barker, Arguments (2) Howard Barker (1946-) creates a tragic world, the avowed arche and telos of which are death. However, far from being tantamount to cessation, nihilistic terminus, or the perfection of life, death comes to designate not just the unknown, but the unknowable. It thus involves a state of nonknowledge that forecloses the normative values of use and exchange, and the orders of meaning and morality. (3) As such, death in Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe features as essentially inscrutable, being at once phenomenon and nonphenomenon, which is to say, neither phenomenologically perceptible nor representable, belonging to the order of enigma, secret, and silence. (4) Barker refers to his Art of Theatre as "crucially an art of death" and, endowing it with an ontologically liminal position, locates his theatre on the bank of the river, which serves as the border between the dead and the living. (5) He declares tragedy "the labour of death" and characterizes tragic art primarily as an art that promotes the "feeling for death." (6) Resonant with Schopenhauer's attestation to the pivotal role of death in human life and thought--whereby death is "the real inspiring genius or the Muse of philosophy," without which "there would hardly have been any philosophizing"--Barker discerns death as the most fundamental subject of art and philosophy, declaring it "the subject of all philosophy and all theatre." (7) Resonant with the later Freud's postulation of death as a fundamental drive and ultimate aim of life ("life is a detour to death") (8) and Heidegger's ontological-existential consideration of death as immanent in human life, (9) Barker observes: "Tragedy's a priori--that we live only to be destroyed by life--renders the notion of wrong decisions meaningless." (10) Indeed, death constitutes a crux around which other aesthetic principles of Barker s tragic drama--prominent among which are ethical speculation, contradiction, pain, anxiety, loss, and excess--constellate. Notably for present purposes, having defined the objects of "loss" as (rational, utilitarian, commonsensical, and empirical modes of) "knowledge" and "morality," he proceeds to associate it with melancholy: "The State of Loss describes a state of lost morality, an ethical vacuum, a denial, a rebuke to order, a melancholy and a pain." (11) Relatedly, as is pervasively evident in his theoretical and dramatic works, pain is pivotal to Barker's tragic work in thematic, dynamic, and aesthetic terms. Pain, as Barker emphasizes, should be perceived as "not disorder but necessity" Barker recognizes pain as "spiritually necessary" to the "tragic sensibility," (12) which--considering its association with loss, contradiction, complexity, ethical ambiguity, and transgression--fosters "a melancholy beauty" which serves as the "whole justification for his theatre." (13) More specifically, Barker establishes a firm, yet fraught, relationship between love, pain, and beauty (though death is also intimately bound up with these three), and molds them into a tension-laden manifold. The ensuing statement confirms the point at issue, with Barker defining his Theatre of Catastrophe as "a theatre...which insists on complexity and pain, and the beauty that can only be created from the spectacle of pain. In Catastrophe... lies the possibility of reconstruction." (14) This aesthetics of loss and excess, this poetics of sacrifice, acquires further dimensions when juxtaposed with the crucial questions of nihilism, the death of God, and ontological inadequacy (that is, the poverty of existence and the paucity of possibility of human existence and experience)--questions with which Barker's characters are obsessed. …

Abstract: Acknowledging that there is no unifying conception of what may constitute an "unnatural" fictional text, element, or technique, Brian Richardson does not present an exhaustive discussion of all the developments in the field of unnatural narratology but rather exemplifies his own understanding of the category of the "unnatural," refined by a typological model of mimetic, non-mimetic, and anti-mimetic fiction and supplemented by an extensive list of "unnatural" narratives. Although unnatural narratology provides a welcome corrective to classical narratological models and corpora, challenging the applicability of existing models and expanding the horizons of postclassical narratologies, it remains a highly contested approach that arguably suffers from a lack of terminological precision, conceptual clarity, and theoretical rigor. Since limitations of space preclude the possibility of revisiting all debates and issues here, we would like to direct readers to the detailed critique by Klauk and Koppe, which the unnaturalists' response, "What Really Is Unnatural Narratology?" in Alber et al., does not actually refute, as well as to the stimulating exchange between Fludernik ("How Natural"), whose sophisticated arguments we endorse, and Alber et al. ("What Is Unnatural?"). Our response offers a partial critique of unnatural narrative theory as outlined in the Target Essay both in the sense that it is anything but comprehensive and in the sense that we have a general liking for any attempt to enrich narrative theory but are not fully convinced that unnatural narratology achieves this aim. We shall concentrate on three problematic points: the definition of the term itself; the term "anti-mimetic," employed as an alternative to "unnatural"; and the relationship between unnatural narratology and classical narratology. The term "unnatural" is used to cover so much ground that it arguably fails to function as an analytical concept. In his attempt to delimit "unnatural," Richardson pits it against nonfictional narratives, realist fictional narratives, and what he calls mimetic narratives, but the distinction between the three is unclear and often seems to collapse: "mimetic" comes to mean "realist," which in turn means modeled on nonfictional narratives (401). Let us consider the various definitions in the Target Essay: unnatural narrative theory, according to Richardson, "is the theory of fictional narratives that defy the conventions of nonfictional narrative and fiction that closely resembles nonfiction" as well as "fiction that displays its own fictionality" (385). Moreover, so-called unnatural texts are said to "play with the very conventions of mimesis" (386) and to "transcend the conventions of existing, established genres" (389). These definitions rely on two key qualities: experimentation with form and fictionality. This begs the question of whether the umbrella term "unnatural" is meant to designate all avant-garde, or experimental, fiction, or even literary innovation in general, or a more clearly delimited corpus of narratives. Furthermore, neither the wide range of adjectives that are more or less used synonymously with the central term "unnatural," such as "unnatural or postmodern" (392), "highly imaginative, experimental, anti-realistic, impossible, or parodic" (386), and "innovative, impossible, parodic, or contradictory" (387), nor the equally wide range of fictional narratives that are adduced as typical examples of "unnatural narratives" (cf. e.g., 1-2, 15-16) serves to enhance the unbiased reader's confidence in the terminological precision or conceptual clarity of the approach. The inflationary use of the term also leads to unfortunate formulations such as "unnatural narratologists" (393) and "unnatural authors" (396). A way of streamlining "unnatural" as a term could lie in limiting it to one type of narrative text or technique, separating discussions of innovative forms from "unnatural" content and positioning it against the notion of "natural narratives. …

Abstract: It is always a pleasure to read anything by Brian Richardson. Not only has he read more really weird books than I have ever read, or will, but he shores up his arguments so adroitly and writes with such a friendly eye on his reader that it makes it hard to disagree with him. But disagree I must. THE TERM ITSELF My first concern is that the term "unnatural narrative" is itself unnatural, despite Richardson's assertion that for him and his colleagues the word is "merely a narratological term" with "no extranarrative connotations" (393). And certainly he is right when he claims that they can deploy the term cleansed of any "position concerning any cultural practices, individual actions, or sexual preferences commonly designated as unnatural by society" (393). But "unnatural" is wedded to "natural," which in turn is wedded to "nature." This connotation is much harder to strip away. That the label "unnatural narratology" was prompted by Monica Fludernik's Towards a "Natural" Narratology makes it even more difficult to accept as devoid of "extranarrative connotations." Fludernik at least put "natural" in quotation marks, a cautionary move that Richardson has not made. Yet with or without quotation marks, "unnatural" misleads since what it applies to is entirely natural. In Unnatural Narrative, Richardson himself inadvertendy provided support for my point when he urged narratologists to follow the example of biologists who enthusiastically enlarge their field by including "unusual, extraordinary, or minority types": After all, biologists are excited by the discovery of new forms of life and are eager to extend or expand their models to include them, as recently happened during the exploration of geothermal rifts deep in the Pacific Ocean along the ridges of undersea volcanoes, which led to the discovery of hitherto unknown life-forms. Needless to say, no biologist tried to minimize or discredit them by saying they were merely "anti-biological" forms or demanding the discoverers admit that such entities are extremely rare. (163-64) But neither, needless to say, would any biologist call those hitherto unknown life-forms "unnatural." My case is that, just as those giant tube worms in the Pacific are an instance of the natural production of unexpected biological outliers, so the emergence of radical, antimimetic texts are instances of the natural production of unexpected narrative outliers. And just as the former process goes as far back as biology itself, so the production of strange antimimetic texts, as Richardson himself notes, goes back at least as far as "ancient Sanskrit dramas" (396). There is more than an analogy here between biology and the production of fictions. Both, I believe, share the same sequential evolutionary structure, dependent on a necessary process of variation and mutation. As Darwin showed, what we call "species" are in fact moving targets of ever-changing complexity, repeatedly throwing off variant forms, slight or extreme, that, enabled by a constant bricolage with the organic equipment they already have and the affordances available in the environment, evolve on their own or go extinct. In human beings, this flexibility increased by many orders of magnitude when we acquired the capability of abstract, symbolic thought and communication. At linguistic, social, and cultural levels, this capability has allowed us to adapt not only by maintaining a necessary order but also by creating opportunities for disorder. Disorder may be destructive, and seriously so, but it also creates possibilities and often does so out of destruction. This is our nature; it is what we do. If we are equipped with a need for order, we are also equipped with what Morse Peckham called a "rage for chaos." (1) We enjoy messing with things--especially in the comparative safety of fiction, where we have been messing with fictive worlds since we began making them. In other words, the production of strange, impossible, antimimetic new works of fiction is natural. …

Abstract: Everything mortal dies, beautiful language is easily broken. Dead words shall live and live words shall die, and only the mouths of men can decide, only what's said is said and therefore alive. (Horace, "The Art of Poetry") I always had to team to run fast, because (laughing) you'd say certain things to people you didn't know would provoke them to such an extent. You have to get in the wind. (Baraka, qtd. in Reilly 194) "Error Farce," "Air Force" (Autobiography); "raise," "race," "rays," "raze" (Raise Race Rays Raze); "wise," why s," "Y's" (Wise Why's Y's). Repeat these sequences aloud to understand the difference between what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's homonyms are on the page and what they are "in the wind." Aloud, his words bring a fusion and confusion of sound and beat and meaning. Read silently, they bring intellectual delight. The title of this essay is "'Hunting is Not Those Heads': The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist," but it could just as easily be called "Baraka Wails/Whales," because when I say Amiri Baraka wails/whales I'm talking about giant living forces in constant motion, I'm talking about music, I'm talking about hunting a white enigmatic beast, and I'm talking about something that, if it isn't handled right, can wash up on the beach and start to smell. The critic and reader of Baraka must understand that the inherent ambiguity of spoken words like/wl/ or /rs/is only a small part of the subtle word play Baraka employs to exploit the tension between the spoken and the written word. Many of Baraka's poems can be read as actions that reach far beyond the limits of the page. They are self-conscious efforts to thwart the confinement of written language and its semantic limits. Indeed, the expansive and elusive quality of the language performed and written by this "wailing" and "whaling" poet is intrinsically connected to the living man who has continually refused the certainty of staying in a single place or identity. In his 1964 essay "Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall," Baraka (then Jones) makes clear what would be a constant in his aesthetics throughout his opus--art is action, verb, hunt (Home 173-78). Art is founded in "thought" which, he states, "is more important than art" and certainly more important than artifact (173). He implies that the aesthete, the academician, is like a deist worshiping the art, the static thing, without understanding that the thing is a function of its creation by a creator. Jones writes: The artist is cursed with his artifact, which exists without and despite him.... The academic Western mind is the best example of the substitution of artifact worship for lightning awareness of the art process.... The process itself is the most important quality because it can transform and create, and its only form is possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, is only that particular quality or idea. It is, in this sense, after the fact, and is only important because it remarks on its source. (173-74) When I think of these words and the metaphor of the title "Hunting is Not Those Heads," I imagine the academy not as a deist's temple, but as a taxidermist's shop, with the scholar as the taxidermist. It is our job to handle dead things. We do taxidermy, which means we arrange skin; we try to put the appearance of life back into what was destroyed in the hunt. If we play out the metaphor further, we can assume some artists, some poets are excellent shots who leave us with an abundance of skin to shape--and others are not. Some poems seem bludgeoned on the page while others seem still to be brimming with life. The reason that we are celebrating Baraka in the new millennium is that he is a poet who not only knows how to hunt, who shoots straight to the heart, but who also understands that the poems he gives us are only glimpses of something that has already happened. …

Abstract: 1.Introduction Among the six works shortlisted for the second edition of the Goldsmiths Prize --established in 2013 to "celebrate ... creative daring ... and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form--was The Absent Therapist (2014) by a relatively little-known English novelist, poet, and creative writing teacher Will Eaves. The book's radically fragmentary form--an amalgam of 150 disconnected voices--and its brevity (just over a hundred pages) puzzled many reviewers and left them uncertain if that work should be qualified as a novel in the first place. Critics have referred to it as an "anti-novel"? a "random catalogue of twenty first century scenarios, queries, complaints and observations" (Quick 2015), an "experimental novella" (Woodhead 2014), "a book for want of a more precise term" (Lezard 2014), something in between poetry and a novel (Sweetman 2014), and a "miniature but infinite novel" (Kennard). For the purpose of this analysis--in line with the recent tendency to loosen the generic criteria for what constitutes a novel, as a result of which such works as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2005) and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) have been accepted in that accommodating category--Eaves's work is treated as an experimental novel. The aim of this article is to examine The Absent Therapist's innovative structure as well as to assert the book's polyphonic nature. The resistance of its constituent parts to fully cohere and yield a unified meaning will be considered as a characteristic feature of the subtype of experimental fiction called fragmentary writing. The Absent Therapist is divided into five chapters, each of which contains between twenty three and forty three unnumbered and untitled sections, whose length varies between a single line and two pages. The chapters, in turn, are both numbered and titled. All the titles--"The Absent Therapist", "Where Do You Get Your Tired Ears From?", "We Are Prey", "Radio Traffic", and "A Start in Life"-are passages or phrases which feature at some point in any given chapter. Each section takes the form of a monologue spoken by a different person. However, the kinds of speeches delivered by characters do not follow any pattern. Some of them read like self-contained "short short stories", others are completely incomprehensible--cryptic remarks deprived of any context or bits of overheard phone conversations. Certain sections appear to be addressed to a listening "you", whereas others resemble individual thoughts and philosophical meditations. "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification", reads the novel's epigraph from 1 Corinthians 14:10. The voices, indeed, do not seem to have much in common, in terms of social standing, education, profession, age, gender or ethnicity. The wide array of speakers includes such individuals as a literature student, a body-builder, a call-centre operator, a hat-knitter, a hotel supervisor, a police officer, a career-counsellor, an experimental psychologist, an actor, and a Jew-turned-Christian geologist. There are very few examples of individuals who could be grouped under a certain heading; the only ones that could are teachers and academics (most of them rather frustrated), loners, homosexuals, and civil rights activists. (1) The first edition's blurb classifies them, rather vaguely, as voices of "sons and lovers, wanderers, wonderers, stayers, leavers, readers and believers". Perhaps the only feature that all the speakers share is having English as their mother tongue; the vast majority of them seem to come from either Britain, the US or Australia. (2) 2. Heteroglossia The multiplicity and variety of voices contained in Eaves's novel makes it a fine example of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. In "Discourse in the Novel" (1982), Bakhtin coins this term and defines it as the novel's essential inclination to accommodate multiple and diverse languages and voices. …