Personal Communications

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

accademiche [38]. Ada [45]. Adrian [45]. African [56]. Age [39, 49, 61]. Al [23]. Al-Rawi [23]. Aldous [68]. Alex [15]. Allure [46]. America [60, 66]. American [49, 69, 61, 52]. ancienne [25]. Andreas [28]. Angela [42]. Animals [16]. Ann [26]. Anna [19, 47]. Annotated [46]. Annotations [28]. Anti [37]. Anti-Copernican [37]. Antibiotic [64]. Anxiety [51]. Apocalyptic [61]. Archaeology [26]. Ark [36]. Artisan [32]. Asylum [48]. Atri [54]. Audra [65]. Australia [41]. Authorship [15]. Axelle [29].

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A Complete Bibliography of Publications in Isis, 2000{2009

We present the case for the nonempirical construction of density functional approximations for the exchange-correlation energy by the traditional method of “constraint satisfaction” without fitting to data sets, and present evidence that this approach has been successful on the first three rungs of “Jacob’s ladder” of density functional approximations [local spin-density approximation (LSD), generalized gradient approximation (GGA), and meta-GGA]. We expect that this approach will also prove successful on the fourth and fifth rungs (hyper-GGA or hybrid and generalized random-phase approximation). In particular, we argue for the theoretical and practical importance of recovering the correct uniform density limit, which many semiempirical functionals fail to do. Among the beyond-LSD functionals now available to users, we recommend the nonempirical Perdew–Burke–Ernzerhof (PBE) GGA and the nonempirical Tao–Perdew–Staroverov–Scuseria (TPSS) meta-GGA, and their one-parameter hybrids with exact exchange. TPSS improvement over PBE is dramatic for atomization energies of molecules and surface energies of solids, and small or moderate for other properties. TPSS is now or soon will be available in standard codes such as GAUSSIAN, TURBOMOLE, NWCHEM, ADF, WIEN, VASP, etc. We also discuss old and new ideas to eliminate the self-interaction error that plagues the functionals on the first three rungs of the ladder, bring up other related issues, and close with a list of “do’s and don’t’s” for software developers and users.

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Prescription for the design and selection of density functional approximations: more constraint satisfaction with fewer fits.

This work provides an analysis of the ways that new media are experienced and studied as the subjects of history, using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks. In "Always Already New", Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, "Always Already New" speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all, part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end, Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

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Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

Over the past decade literary critic and editor Jerome McGann has developed a theory of textuality based in writing and production rather than in reading and interpretation These new essays extend his investigations of the instability of the physical text McGann shows how every text enters the world under socio-historical conditions that set the stage for a ceaseless process of textual development and mutation Arguing that textuality is a matter of inscription and articulation, he explores texts as material and social phenomena, as particular kinds of acts McGann links his study to contextual and institutional studies of literary works as they are generated over time by authors, editors, typographers, book designers, marketing planners, and other publishing agents This enables him to examine issues of textual stability and instability in the arenas of textual production and reproduction Drawing on literary examples from the past two centuries--including works by Byron, Blake, Morris, Yeats, Joyce, and especially Pound--McGann applies his theory to key problems facing anyone who studies texts and textuality

The Textual Condition

Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations Jerome J. McGann presents a new, "critical" view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities."

The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

NB - VOL VII HAS THE BLURB FOR BOTH VOLS - ELSP89 This volume is the penultimate one in the Oxford English Texts Byron, described by Ian Jack as 'one of the finest editions we have of any of the Romantic poets'. It contains all the works of 1821 and 1822, including all Byron's late plays - The Two Foscari, Sardanapalus, Cair: A Mystery, (publication of which gave rise to threats of prosecution against the publisher, John Murray), and the unfinished The Deformed Transformed. As usual, the works are given with textual annotation at the foot of the page, and there is a full introdution and extensive annotation at the end of the volume.

The complete poetical works

This work initiated a major shift in literary theory and method when it was first published in 1983. Starting from a critical inquiry into certain specialised issues in the practice of editing, "A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism" gradually unfolds an argument for a general revaluation of the grounds of literary study as a whole. McGann's point of departure is the controversy he opens with the once-dominant line of traditional textual and editorial scholarships as it evolved through the fundamental work of W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Transelle. In departing from the canonical approach to the technical question of copy-text, McGann argues that theory of text must ground itself in a recovery of the entire productive and reproductive history of the text. His book proposes combining literary criticism and bibliographical scholarship with social, institutional and collaborative models of creation and production. Although focused on cases located in the past 200 years, "A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism" has had a wide-ranging influence on the scholarship of all literary periods. It is one of the seminal works of modern textual theory.

A critique of modern textual criticism

From the Publisher:
Jerome McGann has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. In this trailblazing book, McGann explores the profound implications digital media have for the core critical tasks of the humanities. Drawing on his work as editor of the acclaimed hypertext project The Rossetti Archive, he sets the foundation for a new critical practice for the digital age. Digital media, he demonstrates, can do much more than organize access to great works of literature and art. Beyond their acknowledged editorial and archival capabilities, digital media are also critical tools of unprecedented power. In McGann's practical vision, digital tools give scholars a flexible, dynamic means for interpreting expressive works -- especially those that combine text and image. Radiant Textuality demonstrates eloquently how new technologies can deepen our understanding of complex, multi-layered works of the human imagination in ways never before thought possible.

Jerome McGann

Papers

The Textual Condition

The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation

The complete poetical works

A critique of modern textual criticism

Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web