Abstract: In this paper, I build on writings in psychology and philosophy to offer an ecological description of jazz improvisation grounded in the analogy of navigation through a complex environment. I begin by contrasting this approach with the computational description of improvisation as an algorithm of input, processing, and output. I continue with the ecological description itself. This description reframes many aspects of improvisation, including the "referent" (Pressing, 1984, 1988, 1998), the nature of improvisational skill, and the problem of temporal coordination between soloist and ensemble. Stylistically, I focus on straight-ahead, tonal jazz, the first style most students learn, which is foundational to much current jazz practice. The ecological description could be adapted to other styles. To bring the description to life, I offer evidence from an exploratory study of improvisational errors.Because I offer something less than a falsifiable "theory," I posit this paper's central premise instead as a "description," which is primarily intended to encourage a shift in researchers' perspective. The result, I hope, is a picture of improvisational cognition that is richer, more complex, and harder to pin down-an opening, rather than a closing. Balancing this, I conclude with some predictions of the ecological description that could be tested empirically.The Computational View of ImprovisationThe computational view of improvisation stems from early theories of cognitive science that were inspired by the artificial intelligence research of the 1950s-60s. These theories take computerized information processing as a model for human cognition, so that "sensory information received from the external world is perceived, translated into a syntactic code of meaningful symbols, and processed according to a systematic set of rules," and "body movements" are "mere outcomes" of these processes (Maes, Leman, Palmer, & Wanderley, 2014, p. 1). In its strictest form, this view is now largely "obsolete," as more recent research has revealed myriad links between perception and action, including in the realm of music performance (p. 2). But theories of improvisational psychology remain grounded in the computational view.Pressing (1984) was the first to develop a computational theory of jazz improvisation (p. 353; cf. Pressing, 1988, pp. 130-132, 1998). In Pressing's formulation, improvisation depends on two large-scale parameters. First, there is the "referent": "an underlying formal scheme or guiding image specific to a given piece" (1984, p. 346; cf. 1988, p. 153; 1998, pp. 52-53). Second, there is the soloist's long-term memory, for "objects," like "motives, scales, and arpeggios," and for "processes," techniques of combining and developing objects (1984, p. 355; cf. 1988, pp. 161, 166; 1998, pp. 53-54). Given a referent and a sufficient memory store, the act of improvisation proceeds as a self-sustaining cycle through three stages, input, processing, and output (1988, pp. 152-166). The soloist's previous actions, along with the referent, constitute the input. To "process" the next action, the soloist continues, develops, or alters one or more of the input's features (1984, pp. 350, 353; 1988, p. 157). At some point, the action determined by the soloist's processing crosses a cognitive Rubicon and becomes irrecoverable "output." The soloist then acts "without further sensory or central intervention," though there remains limited scope for local "fine tuning" until the action is complete (1984, p. 355; 1988, p. 153). This action, as output, in turn becomes the input for the next action, and the cycle resets.Johnson-Laird (2002) presents a different computational model. Whereas Pressing's improviser relies on a memory store of prelearned objects and processes, Johnson-Laird's has memorized no objects, instead relying on memorized rules of melodic construction within a chord progression (pp. 422, 430). The algorithm focuses on choosing notes appropriate for the harmonic context and placing them in an effective contour and rhythm. …

Abstract: Robins offers an ambitious argument grounded in contemporary theoretical models to account for the nature and purpose of the frequently remarked diversity of voices and of types of narrative in CA. He works from the inside out, starting with "Apollonius of Tyre." Gower's setting of the romance within a moralized frame invokes "dramatically opposed strategies of reading" (p. 158), one represented throughout the poem by Amans and the other by Genius. Romance, he claims (citing Bakhtin) is the mode of random narrative contingency, and of unseen external forces as opposed to individual agency; but Genius, in his focus on the conclusion of the tale, invokes an opposing "temporality of moral necessity" (here Robins cites Ricoeur) according to which "internal moral disposition will determine the outcome of external events" (p. 161). Amans believes he lives in the first mode, subject to the arbitrary whims of his lady, while Genius unsuccessfully attempts to resee his life in exemplary and moral terms. Genius' very attempt is paradoxical, for exemplary instruction is itself an "external force," the efficacy of which depends upon a pre-existing internal disposition. This "paradox of exemplarity" is illustrated in Amans' assertion that the lesson of "Apollonius" does not apply to him. Throughout the poem he repeatedly rejects the analogical reasoning of the exempla, and Genius is unable to overcome his objection. This "interrogation of the grounds of exemplarity" is the "theorem" of the poem (p. 165), and Gower pursues his exploration by opposing different kinds of tales and different ways of reading. A precedent for his procedure can be found in the Nicomachean Ethics, which invokes "competing patterns of how behavior might be understood," by "internal ordering of the soul" or by the "external gifts of Fortune" (p. 167). Gower deals with this philosophical issue in literary terms, by experimenting with different kinds of narrative, culminating in "Apollonius of Tyre." This tale also contains in its recognition scene a model for the conclusion of CA. As Thaise attempts to reason with her father, external promptings fail, but the internal predisposition that stems from their natural blood relationship works to bring about Apollonius' transformation. The scene keeps the dynamic between external and internal in clear focus, but Robins rejects Olsson's recent argument on the efficacy both of Thaise's words and of Genius' teaching. This last exemplum is ineffectual for Amans, who is brought to his senses only by the forced recognition of his old age. At this point Amans does move from one model of self-definition to another, from the external evaluation (his lack of success) to the internal (he is no longer capable of being "amans"). But it is not a simple matter of choosing one narrative mode over the other. Amans is caught between the two, neither of which is adequate to his case, and in casting off the "romance" view, he does not commit himself to the "exemplary," for it is "unresponsive to lived experience" (p. 175). He is thus "finally positioned as a subject who has to adjudicate between the competing narrative modes that constitute his ability to think about himself" (ibid.). The reader, Robins argues, is put in the same position as Amans, beginning with the Prologue of the poem, which in its invocation of exemplum, chronicle, and complaint, serves "to bring the readers to an admission that their own predicament of making sense of the world is bound up in competing narrative understandings of temporality" (p. 177). The subject-position that is created for the reader is "not equivalent to a romantic notion of a fully autonomous interior self, for reflection is seen as participation in discursive modes shared by society and preceding the individual. And yet this situation differs from the postmodern, decentered subject for which the self is an illusion created by language, for Gower dearly holds to the belief in an interiority from which to choose between, or at least to feel and endure, competing narrative options. The ground upon which to order one's thoughts, desires, and actions, is constituted rather by an activity of first-person enunciation" (p. 178). At the end of the poem, Amans/Gower resumes both his proper name and his personal history as a writer. "Able now to review and give shape to the experience of having read his own life through and against available narrative patterns, the character/narrator recognizes that he occupies an individual position of ethical responsiveness, and his readers are spurred to realize that they too can articulate their course of engagement with various models of self-conception" (ibid.). In conclusion, Robins asserts, "Gower is not primarily concerned to represent the subjectivity of a character, but rather to provoke the subjectivity of the reader, to create the conditions whereby a reader can come to understand the site he or she occupies at the intersection of incommensurable modes of narrative self-conception. The "Tale of Apollonius," bearing the pattern of ancient romance into the fourteenth-century culture of exemplarity, becomes one of the told Gower strategically manipulates for implementing that purpose, a purpose which, however, can only be a gambit for Gower, for he knows that he cannot guarantee the success of his strategy of provocation no matter how earnestly he wishes to secure it" (pp. 180-81). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1]

Abstract: The origin of this essay is a sense of disappointment at what had seemed to me at first one of the most interesting of recent developments in literary studies. I mean here the reemergence, on a critical scene dominated since the alleged death of "high theory" by historicism, of a self-conscious formalism, a "new formalism" to borrow the term employed by Marjorie Levinson in her 2007 PMLA review—"What Is New Formalism?"—which looks back to the March 2000 issue of MLQ — Reading for Form —and which anticipates the topics of some of the most recent meetings of the English Institute: "Form" (2013), "Medium" (2014), and "Figure" (2015). If, despite its having unsettled some critical commonplaces, and despite its having given rise to some interesting metacritical work, this reemergence of formalism (or this emergence of "new formalism") has been disappointing, the reason is that, while the ascendancy of the old formalisms—of the Yale School (minus the antiformalist Harold Bloom), or of the New Critics (expanded to include Rene Wellek and Austin Warren), or even of Aristotle—tended to coincide with an increased attention to or anxiety around the question of literature as such, the rise of the new formalism has not. It has, rather, affirmed some older formalist methodology once denigrated for its apolitical or ahistorical leanings all the while insisting on this methodology's real political or historical significance. I am thinking, for example, of the flourishing Adorno industry, and there is the somewhat different rehabilitation of Clement Greenberg in the criticism of visual art. Or, the new formalism has sought to innovate through the application to literature of ever more ingenious metaphors drawn from other fields—so the literary work is no longer an "organism" but a "machine" or a "network"; literary form is not "static" but "dynamic," "processual." The tendency of formalism to move in this direction was already noted by Fredric Jameson in 1972, in The Prison House of Language , where he writes that, with structuralism, "we find ourselves ultimately before the conclusion that the attempt to see the literary work as a linguistic system is in reality the application of a metaphor ." And it was noted a year later by Paul de Man in "Semiology and Rhetoric," where, having discussed the prevailing model of literature as "a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside," de Man concludes that "metaphors are more tenacious than facts." In any event, the new formalism has done nothing to answer the question: what is literature? As far as I can tell, it has not even tried. And if it did try, it would fail. It would fail because it begins with a set of assumptions about its object, and about its relation to its object, that are more than two hundred years out of date—two hundred twenty-seven years out of date, to be exact. For it was the publication in 1790 of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment that demonstrated, once and for all, the impossibility of deriving a theory of the art object from a reflection on that object's formal properties. Somewhat counterintuitively, this impossibility is what Kant's discussion of "mere form" (in the sense that a judgment of taste, according to Kant, is "pure" when it is a judgment of the "mere form" of a thing) should help us to understand. And it should help us to see the limitations not only of the new formalism, which I shall stop discussing presently, but also of any formalist critical practice that attempts to move from the formal properties of its object to a characterization of that object as literature or as art.

Abstract: Reading Boris Mironov's assessment of the role of workers in the 1917 revolution immediately swept me back to the 1970s, when an entire cohort of historians of Russia engaged with a broader community of historians of labor to reassess the prevailing view of Russian workers as "dark masses" (from the right) or "red masses" (from the left) Seeking to replace condescension with respect for individuals as well as for sources, we social historians sought to interrogate these generalizations, whether from the right or the left, whether about "irrational" peasant-workers or monolithic working-class armies (1) In bringing these methods to the study of the 1917 revolution, this cohort--whether looking at workers, peasants, soldiers, or sailors--contributed to a new consensus that dispelled theories of revolution based on assumptions of conspiracies (German or Masonic) or coups d'etats If in our early writing, we confronted these interpretations each time we presented our evidence, after a while these old views of conspiracies aided by idiotic social forces became so discredited that we no longer needed to engage with them Now the argument of "cannon fodder" is back, challenging a 30-plus-year consensus about the nature of the Russian working class in 1917 "Class theory" has remained important to me and this broad cohort of scholars as a heuristic tool for analyzing the phenomena of revolution and worker experience The work of E P Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others led us to seek to disentangle "class," to search for divisions as much as commonalities (2) Demographic data--especially from censuses and other forms of social surveys--were necessary but not sufficient to draw conclusions Mironov acknowledges as much when he recognizes that "the proletariat was also distinct from other groups in terms of its multilayered social structure" (354) Their political views could be varied But he rejects the distinction among "vanguard," "intelligent," and "socialist-minded" workers and the mass of backward, patriarchal, alcoholic, thieving workers Even the "vanguard" was insufficiently advanced to act politically without mentors from the intelligentsia, he says For Mironov, the primary attribute of "workers" is their low level of literacy (drawn from census aggregates), which meant they were unable to think critically or analytically Thus he considers "workers" to be a mass of deplorables who did not really understand what they were supporting But let's take "multiple structure" a little more seriously The more closely we look at work experience, the more we see many sources of difference and distinction It is now well established for European, US, and Russian historiography that artisanal workers--laboring in small shops, possessing high levels of skills, proud of their ability to control their own working conditions--were the leaders of the earliest trade unions and other formsoflabororganization (3) Contrary to Marx, the more complex organization of large factories did not predispose workers there to imagine parallel forms of labor organization For labor historians, "skill" has become an important analytical tool However imprecisely we can distinguish among "skilled," "semiskilled," and "unskilled," labor historians have shown how workers who share these attributes react to economic and political challenges in similar ways, precisely because the nature of their work shapes the way they see their world (4) Certain types of trades were more conducive to drinking on the job: one cannot track alcoholism along a straight line from "backwards" to "politically aware" (5) Gender (a category of analysis that came late to labor history and that troubles Mironov not at all) and generation complicate these divisions and our ability to generalize about structure Many skilled male workers refused to believe that women could acquire skills at all The different social roles of men and women also led them to different forms of activism, not neatly measurable in trade union membership statistics or arrest records …

Abstract: This article addresses the follower-centric examination of the social construction of prophetic leadership roles. The central questions are: In what ways can key follower figures potentially exert independent agency and influence within the charismatic relationship?; What role might they play in the establishment and maintenance of the social construction of prophetic leadership roles? To these ends, the article assesses the existing research in the area, lifts out relevant elements (such as the Swedish historian of religion Bengt Sundkler's distinction between leader, nucleus, and mass); and finally develops two original concepts: "first followers" and "follower-power". The latter of these is described through seven functional roles, each with a corresponding power-type: "finders" (point-power), "devoters" (devotional power), "promoters" (storytelling power), "managers" (organizational power), "intermediaries" (intermediary power), "innovators" (creative power), and "supporters" (support-power). These concepts are then developed through the examination of existing sources (i.e. the Bible, historical material, etc.) and ultimately, the conclusion is drawn that, while the concepts seem to fit their purpose, too little research has been done in this area to make definitive remarks. (Less)

Abstract: The Negro in the United States who writes books, plays, music, poetry; who dances, sings, paints, acts or performs, designs or creates in any way; who is a critic or a student of history - all of these are today faced with a great racial dilemma. The very fact that we stand on the threshold of more democracy and freedom has posed a cultural problem of a very complex nature. Put in the simplest terms, the problem is this: As Negroes of Afro-American descent, and as writers, artists, creative individuals, whose culture do we develop and uphold - an Afro-American culture or an Anglo-American culture? (Cruse, "Cultural" 49) One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet"; meaning subconsciously "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible. (Hughes 175) Harold Cruse's provocative question about African-Americans' choosing to develop and embrace Afro-American or Anglo-American culture initiated what came to be known as the Cruse-Redding controversy of 1958-59. Writing in an era of entrenched assimilationism, Cruse dared to proclaim the specificity of African-American culture. "The American Negro," he contended, "cannot be understood culturally unless [s/]he is seen as a member of a detached ethnic bloc of people of African descent reared for three hundred years in the unmotherly bosom of Western civilization" ("Cultural" 49). Reckless "integration," according to his diagnosis, had landed the African-American in a "cultural desert: the deracinating despair zone "between two opposing racial and cultural identities - the Afro-American and Anglo-American" (52). Cruse's quest was not for a naive "return to the source." For even as he established connections between Africa and African-America - for instance, the nascent wave of political decolonization in the former, signaled by the Ghanian independence of 1957, and the budding nationalism in the latter - he emphasized the "Americaness" of the distinctive African-American culture that needed affirmation and invigoration. If culture is the "soul of a race, nation, people or nationality," he argued, the African-American soul had "lost its power of communication," stunted, as it were, by "Caucasian idolatry in the arts, abandonment of true identity, and immature, childlike mimicry of white aesthetics" (53, 56). Since he believed the future to be especially bleak for African-American dominance in U.S. politics or economics, he recommended a profound "cultural rehabilitation and refurbishing" as the only precondition for a proper assessment of problems and strategies and therefore for a "firm grip" on African-American "destiny" (66). When Cruse published "An Afro-American's Cultural Views," the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 was just four years old. Its effects were yet to be fully absorbed, much less subjected to the kind of useful scrutiny only a critical distance could allow. International fame was emerging for Martin Luther Kin& Jr., the Civil Rights apostle who kept the embers of hope alive with integrationist fuel, and for a while, there seemed to be a consensus - if we see "consensus" as an agreement among those who have the wherewithal to make themselves heard - that "cultural integration," as King had crafted the elegant proclamation a year earlier, was the "promised land" of African-America (qtd. in Cruse, "Cultural" 60-61). Under these circumstances, the responses to Cruse's essay were predictable. One of the most cited is Saunders Redding's "Negro Writing in America," an address given at the First Congress of Negro Writers, organized by the American Society of African Culture in 1959. …

Abstract: Contents: Series Preface. Preface. Part I: Case Studies and Reactions. Introduction to Case 1. Case 1: "What Is Religious?" Reader Reactions to Jed and Kathy's Disagreement. Reactions to "What Is Religious?" Reader Reactions to "What Is Religious?" Summary and Additional Questions. Introduction to Case 2. Case 2: "What Does It Mean to 'Teach' Something?" Reader Reactions to the Instructional Dispute. Reactions to "What Does It Mean to 'Teach' Something?" Reader Reactions to "What Does It Mean to 'Teach' Something?" Summary and Additional Questions. Introduction to Case 3. Case 3: "How Can Religion Be Public in a Pluralistic Society?" Reader Reactions to Public Expression of Religious Ideas. Reactions to "How Can Religion Be Public in a Pluralistic Society?" Reader Reactions to "How Can Religion Be Public in a Pluralistic Society?" Summary and Additional Questions. Introduction to Case 4. Case 4: "What Is Our Foundation for Community?" Reader Reactions to the Idea of Community. Reactions to "What Is Our Foundation for Community?" Reader Reactions to "What Is Our Foundation for Community?" Summary and Additional Questions. Introduction to Case 5. Case 5: "Do Convictions Divide?" Reader Reactions to Strong Student Religious Expression. Reactions to "Do Convictions Divide?" Reader Reactions to "Do Convictions Divide?" Summary and Additional Questions. Part II: Public Arguments. A "Secular View": Religion Kept Separate From the Public Arena. A"Religious View": Religious Perspectives Acknowledged Publicly. A "Personal Pluralistic View": Secular and Religious Worldviews Made Personal. Part III: A Final Argument, and Some Suggestions and Resources for Further Reflection. Religion and Teaching: An Abbreviated View. Exercises for Further Reflection. Conclusion.

Abstract: Most creative intellectual activity is directed toward abstracting some universal aspect ("truth") from human experience. This is true whether the intellectual activity is in the domain of "arts," "literature," or "science." A liberal arts education brings an appreciation for the universality of intellectual activity and the realization that what we do in "science" differs not so greatly from our colleagues' endeavors in the humanities. We are both in pursuit of the same thing-"universal truth," although the form of that "truth" differs. Great art abstracts as an image "truth" in human experience or the world around us. Great literature abstracts "truth" in human experience into a narrative of human activity. Great poetry minimizes that narrative to artful language. Great music abstracts "truth" in human activity in many ways, e.g., psychological drama in the case of opera (Verdi, Othello; Schoenberg, Erwartung; Bartok, Bluebeard's Castle) or, in the case of abstract music, evokes the human experience through "association," much as abstract art.

Abstract: IntroductionIt is generally believed that the culture acts correspondingly upon the generation and effect of the texts. In western society one worships and conforms strictly to the expressions of real-attitude ideas or their explicit and coherent flow-out, while Chinese prefer indirect or roundabout ways of speech in communication in that the hierarchical order and complex relations are hereby attached far more importance to (Y oung, 1994, p.120). Although they have studied this issue from several different perspectives, many scholars argue that there ought to be some unique reasons to be found out for the interpretation of cultural role in the production of second language composition. The paper serves as a tentative trial to search those reasons related to cross-cultural factors by means of inter-structural linguistics, which offers a new approach to draw attention to.Deviations in Composition across BordersThe cross-cultural negative transference caused by the cross-cultural factors may be systematically represented in the following dimensions showing that it is important to find solutions in this light.Morphological StrifePhonetic alphabet is employed by the English-native speakers, while hieroglyphics is adopted in Chinese. The English word-formation processes mainly covering three types: derivation, compounding and conversion, when in operation affixes and word bases often serve as their basis and the positions of their component parts in question can't be altered randomly; for Chinese their major technique is none other than compounding whose workouts are mostly made up of radical or monosyllabic morphemes as a great majority usually positioned flexibly leading to the casual change of the finally acquired meanings. For example, "Zhengdou (struggle)", "Douzheng (conflict)", or the like. Another case as such involves plurality. Even English major students of higher grades in China normally don't bear in mind the singular or plural forms of the nouns in use. When forming English nouns, they tend to follow the stereotypes encountered in their mother tongue.Pragmatic SuppositionIt hereby refers to the inference of the uses of English expressions by extending the pragmatic meanings of their corresponding ones in Chinese as seen in inappropriate collocations of words, cultural misjudgment of lexical connotations, etc.. As to the former, the different collocations of the Chinese character "da (beat)" ought to be assigned to the various specified in English. Thus "da dianhua" is equivalent to "call up a phone"; "da shui", to "fetch water"; "da pai"; to "play cards"; "da maoyi", to "knit a sweater", and so on. As to the latter, the Chinese "dragon" serves as an innuendo to royal power, which is a substitute for "dignity, prestige and authority", whereas in English it simply symbolizes "evil influence". Or, "Zhangshang Mingzhu (the pearl on one's palm)" becomes "apple of one's eye", and "Huijin Rutu(waste money as if it were as cheap as soil)" becomes "spend money like water".Syntactic DiversityThe extent to which the Chinese grammatical practice exerts influence on that of English represented in cross-cultural composition covers too much, and the mistakes made thus are amazingly alike. Although the two adhere to the syntactic pattern 'S+V+O' strictly on the surface, quite a lot of syntactic differences in typology such as word order, or basic construction, which make the students' English grammar appear more like that of their native language often lead to some striking errors: the inversion of tenses or aspects, improper choice of predicates, lack of subjects, and paratactic or running-river sentences in composition. Briefly they may be classified into two major types, namely omission of morphological markers and redundant expressions, with former usually embodied by the absence of connectives beyond clauses or inflectional labels attached to predicates and the missing subjects, and the latter by redundancy in 'there + be' or confused sentence order. …

Abstract: The Common Core State Standards for writing in grades 6-8, 9-10, and 11-12 all begin with the mandate that students "write arguments focused on discipline-specific content" (Common Core State Standards). Celebrating the Common Core's emphasis on "argument literacy," Gerald Graffhas commented that "argument" provides a crucial bridge between K-12 and college curricula. Graff, who defends the "intellectual merits" of the Common Core, suggests that the standards "serve an important teaching function by defining and clarifying mysteries about college-level work." Mike Schmoker and Graffcontend that argument is not only "the center of education" but also the "essence of thought" and the "heart of inquiry, innovation and problem solving." According to George Hillocks Jr., argument is "the kind of writing the Common Core State Standards put first" because it "is at the heart of critical thinking and academic discourse" (Teaching xvii).Educational standards, along with the standardized tests to which they are linked, traditionally have valued superficial engagement with the formal features of writing and sometimes have ignored the content and contexts involved in the writing process. Within the field of English education, however, some have been optimistic that the Common Core State Standards will lead to more content and context-driven writing in the classroom. Michael W. Smith et al. have praised the Common Core for encouraging students to write "convincing arguments about issues that matter" and for rejecting "the formulaic writing and thinking rewarded by so many current standards and standards-based assessments" (45). But the celebration of "argument literacy" in the Common Core may be tempered when one looks more closely at how the Common Core document actually defines "argument." The Common Core's explanation of the "special place of argument," which cites Graff's work, and the student exemplars of writing found in the Common Core appendix reflect fundamentally different views of what "argument" means.In this article, I will address the gap between the disparate visions of "argument" that emerge within the Common Core. The presentation of "argument," as it appears in the student work the Common Core document lauds, may not resist formulaic writing or diverge from past standards to the degree that champions of the Common Core would like to believe.Competing Definitions of "Argument": Social and StructuralGeorge E. Newell et al. distinguish between a "cognitive" or "social" view of argument and a "structural" understanding of argument. The structural perspective tends to be derived from the application of Stephen J. Toulmin's model, which encompasses "the identification of a thesis (also called a claim), supportive evidence (empirical or experiential), and assessment of warrants connecting the thesis, evidence, and situation constituting an argument" (Newell 274-75). Proposing that "the validity of arguments depends upon certain features of their form," Toulmin uses the principles of mathematical logic to study argumentation:If one thinks of logic as an extension of psychology or sociology, the notion of logical form becomes impenetrably obscure-indeed, it can be explained only in terms of more mysterious notions, being accounted for as a structure of relations between psychic entities or social behaviour-patterns. The mathematical approach to logic has always appeared to overcome this particular obscurity, since mathematicians have long studied pattern and shape. (40)While Toulmin's structural approach to argument rejects as "obscure" and "mysterious" attempts to understand argument as a social or psychological activity, alternative definitions of argument have embraced a social and cognitive perspective. When defined more broadly as a "social" and "cognitive" event, "argument" constitutes "the exploration and advancement of knowledge" (Newell et al. 287). David Bartholomae's notion that college students must locate themselves in a particular discourse and participate in "projects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise" corresponds to the social view (144). …

Abstract: The following consideration of a few autobiographical texts by Goethe in terms of the "spatial turn" argues for the importance of the loss of self and personal identity in spatialized aesthetic experiences and the reconstitution of that identity not in individual becoming-the self-referential processing of the spatial environment-but by analogy to the constitution of external space, especially, but not only, urban public spaces. The representation of observed and lived space in the texts I shall read joins anachronisms and contradictions, present and past, high and low, self and other, in a form of symbolization made expressly for the condensation of spatial experience. This symbolic form, an aspect of what Goethe calls Mystifikation, turns from the self to its environment in order to create a sense of worldliness that makes society, history, and political life into objects of spatial experience. It also translates this worldliness back into the subject-self, creating parallels between the coming-to-self of the person and the self-constitution of the community and polity, particularly in Goethe's Italian journeys but also back home in Frankfurt, in a way that challenges the intact and sovereign subject of Bildung.1As the prevalent narrative on Goethe's Italienische Reise runs, the work is a sort of Bildungsroman grounded in a "Schule des Sehens," a "school of seeing" that educates the protagonist-narrator-author himself, as the note of 14 March, 1788, affirms: "In Rom hab' ich mich selbst zuerst gefunden, ich bin zuerst ubereinstimmend mit mir selbst glucklich und vernunftig geworden"2 ("In Rome I first found myself, for the first time I achieved inner harmony and became happy and rational").3 If "the journey's true purpose" is indeed "the subject's fundamental self-fashioning" in the encounter with an unchanging landscape,4 two things about this experience are remarkable because they challenge the autonomy of self-making. First of all, in Rome, Goethe finds himself in an urban space otherwise marked by constant interaction with others and by chaos even at the times of greatest presence. His own incarnate selfhood seems mimicked by the urban environment, the firecrackers, cannonades, and bells celebrating Easter that immediately follow his reflection on self-discovery: "So eben steht der Herr Christus mit entsetzlichem Larm auf" (FA 1.15:570; "The Lord Christ is rising with a fearful noise," CW 6:428.). Second, the coincidence of these two moments in space and time presents Rome not as an aesthetic idyll but as the locus of a contrast: a failure of this self-in this text an object to be known, possessed, and enjoyed by select others-to occupy a space that is instead dominated by vulgar distractions that parody the earnest becoming of the poet. How is it then that the author-narrator "Goethe" can claim to abstract himself from these spaces as the subject of Bildung?Another mode of understanding the Italienische Reise proposes instead that there are two narratives present here: a model of visual disorientation and the linear developmental narrative. Andrew Piper claims that Goethe's Italian journey is the embrace of "a new form of vertiginous or torsional seeing," learning "what it meant to posit a fundamental turn at the basis of life, . . . a new sense of both medial and ocular disorientation" in which Italy "serves as a rotatory supplement to the aspirational figures of Dichtung und Wahrheit."5 The turns of Italy versus the linear structure of the biography of the striving artist-the "egology" of each supposes a self refracted through multiple lenses by analogy with Goethe's own theories of vision.6 In each case, however, space is referred to an observing center, an ego preoccupied with its own involutions and evolution. In this appealing ego-centric model, space turns around visuality-Goethe as "Augenmensch"-and ultimately on privacy, as a self as observer remains constant even if composed of entoptic refractions and reflections. …

Abstract: The history of "displaced persons" (or DPs) is one of the major historical context of the postwar period. On the European continent, it lasts throughout the second half of the 1940s in the territory occupied by Germany, Austria and Italy. From our point of view, the study of the problem has a very strong historiographical focus, which is associated with a number of national studies. Therefore, this article is dedicated to one of the main problems, which are common to all national historiography: the problem of publishing the "displaced persons". The study is based on analysis of visual journalism (publicism) as a historical source on the history of ordinary life DPs. The main source is regarded magazine "DiPiniada" (like Homer's "Iliad"), which V. Ellis (poet) and V. Odinokov (artist), published in a DPs camp Pasing-Munich. On the pages of the satirical magazine in 1946-1947 addressed many current topics of ordinary life of displaced persons. In general, "DiPiniada" is an important visual historical source. On the basis of press of displaced persons, ex-DiPi memories, the author makes two main conclusions. Firstly, "Dipiniada" magazine tells the story of ordinary life in the camps DiPi both artistic "language" (composition, shape, color solutions), and contextual "language" (behavior, manner of communication, conflict). Secondly, the satirical nature of the publication is the reason for its historical authenticity, because humor is possible only in conditions of a familiar image. It is noted that the investigation has prospects both in methodological and in the objective aspects.

Abstract: Theoretical computer science discusses foundational issues about computations. It asks and answers questions such as "What is a computation?", "What is computable?", "What is efficiently computable?","What is information?", "What is random?", "What is an algorithm?", etc. We will present many of the major themes and theorems with the basic language of category theory. Surprisingly, many interesting theorems and concepts of theoretical computer science are easy consequences of functoriality and composition when you look at the right categories and functors connecting them.