Showing papers on "nobody published in 2006"

The parallax view

Abstract: The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat--a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics--including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.

The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

Abstract: Philosophy in the late seventeenth century was a dangerous business. No careerist could afford to know the reclusive philosopher known as the 'atheist Jew', Baruch de Spinoza. Yet the wildly ambitious young genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz became obsessed with Spinoza's writings, wrote him clandestine letters, and ultimately called on Spinoza in person at his home in The Hague. Both men were at the centre of the intense religious, political and personal battles that gave birth to the modern age. One was a hermit with many friends; the other, a socialite no one trusted. One believed in a God whom almost nobody thought divine; the other defended a God in whom he probably did not believe. Their characters and ways of life defined their philosophies. In this exquisitely written philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy, Matthew Stewart dramatises a titanic clash of beliefs that still continues today. 'A sprightly and enlightening biography ...this is an exhilaratingly epic canvas. Stewart's writing has huge panache ...It is philosophy exuberantly rooted in history, grabbing you by the lapels and making sure that you know why you are being dragged round the backstreets of The Hague and up the front of the Leineschloss in Hanover. You will not regret the visits.' Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'The Guardian' 'Gripping ...the best current untechnical introduction to the lives and philosophies of the two men. Stewart does it in very agreeable prose, and what he says rests on a sound bottom of historical and philosophical scholarship, so lightly worn that one is not conscious of the skill that has gone into making the epoch and its seminal ideas accessible. The result is a thoroughly good book, hard to put down for anyone interested in the great story of the Western intellectual tradition.' A. C. Grayling, 'Literary Review' 'A compelling adventure' Nicholas Fearn, 'The Independent' ' ...superbly elegant and intelligent prose.' Edward Skidelsky, 'The Saturday Telegraph' Matthew Stewart received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University. He sold his management consulting firm so as to devote his time to other thoughts. He lives in New York.

The Insanity of Place / The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry

Abstract: 1. Musings about Madness 2. The Insanity of Place 3. A Failure to Communicate? On the Reception of Foucault's Histoire de la Folie by Anglo-American Historians 4. Madmen and their Keepers: Roy Porter and the History of Psychiatry 5. The Mad-Doctor and his Craft 6. Museums of Madness Revisited 7. Blinded by Biology 8. "Nobody's Fault": Mental Health Policy in Modern America 9. Psychiatry and Social Control in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 10. Psychiatric Therapeutics and the Historian 11. "A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure": Sexual Surgery for Psychosis in Three Nineteenth-Century Societies 12. Focal Sepsis and Psychosis: The Career of Thomas Chivers Graves, B.Sc., M.D., F.C.R.S., M.R.C.V.S. (1883-1964)

Has Game Theory Been Refuted

Abstract: The answer in a nutshell is: Yes, five years ago, but nobody has noticed. Nobody noticed because the majority of social scientists subscribe to one of the following views: (1) the ‘anomalous’ behaviour observed in standard prisoner’s dilemma or ultimatum game experiments has refuted standard game theory a long time ago; (2) game theory is flexible enough to accommodate any observed choices by ‘refining’ players’ preferences; or (3) it is just a piece of pure mathematics (a tautology). None of these views is correct. This paper defends the view that GT as commonly understood is not a tautology, that it suffers from important (albeit very recently discovered) empirical anomalies, and that it is not flexible enough to accommodate all the anomalies in its theoretical framework. It also discusses the experiments that finally refuted game theory, and concludes trying to explain why it took so long for experimental game theorists to design experiments that could adequately test the theory.

Abnormal, the "New Normal," and Destabilizing Discourses of Rights

Abstract: A boy was taken from his elementary school in handcuffs after his classmates turned him in for drawing pictures of weapons. The 11-year-old fifth grader was not charged with a crime in the Wednesday incident. His name is not being released to protect him, school officials said. “There were some drawings that were confiscated by the teacher,” Oldsmar Elementary School Principal David Schmitt said. “The children were in no danger at all. It involved no real weapons.” Still, Schmitt refused to discuss details of the boy’s case. “All I can tell you is it was a threat . . . against students,” he said. “Nobody in particular, but students in general. . . . We just need to get it through kids’ heads that there are certain things you don’t say and there are certain things you don’t draw,” he said. The boy was handcuffed by school police for his safety, according to Pinellas County School District spokesman Ron Stone. “That’s normal procedure in a situation like this,” Stone said. “The primary concern was to make sure we get appropriate services for the child.” —Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2001

"The South Got Something to Say": Atlanta's Dirty South and the Southernization of Hip-Hop America

Abstract: By the summer of 1995, the Atlanta-based rap group OutKast had watched their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, achieve platinum sales of over one million. This feat earned them an award for "Best New Group" from The Source magazine and an invitation to attend the hip-hop publication's second annual awards show in New York City. Goodie Mob, another Atlanta group, joined them on the trip up north. As Big Gipp, a member of Goodie Mob, remembered, their reception from the New York audience was less than favorable: "When Big Boi and Dre [of OutKast] got out there at those Source Awards, everybody was like, 'boooo, boooo, boooo.' I remember it was just OutKast and the four Goodie Mob members and I was like, man.... Don't nobody even give a fuck about us folk." Leaving the Source Awards that night, OutKast and Goodie Mob swore to each other to "show all them motherfuckers" that "one day they're gonna have to fuck with us." (1) Over the next decade, OutKast, Goodie Mob, and other southern rappers followed through on their intentions, moving to the forefront of America's hip-hop culture industry. In 2004 OutKast won six Grammys, including an "Album of the Year" award, for their multi-platinum fifth effort, Speakerboxxx/The Lave Below. On that night, no one in the star-studded Los Angeles audience doubted that, as OutKast had yelled back at the booing crowd nine years before, "the South got something to say." (2) What the South had to say reveals much about the making and marketing of regional and racial identity in modern America. Most explicitly, the rise of Atlanta's "Dirty South" rap music industry shows the readiness of some African Americans in the post-civil rights era not only to embrace their southernness but to sell it as well. Throughout the 1990s, industry leaders and southern tappers promoted the Dirty South as a new type of rap music. A blending of older rap styles with southern music, accents, and themes, Dirty South rap was also a bold statement from rappers who felt estranged from Atlanta's economic and social progress and excluded by their southernness from competing in a rap-music market dominated by New York and Los Angeles. By the end of the 1990s, however, their unique coupling of regional and racial identity had earned them increased attention from listeners and critics alike and a reputation as innovators of a fresh, new sound and style in hip-hop culture. The next wave of southern rappers built on this emergent appeal but in the process changed the meaning of the Dirty South. Leaving behind the more troubling aspects of their regional identity, southern rappers after 2000 preferred to promote the Dirty South as a loosely defined, inclusive concept and a lucrative set of attractive commodities. Thus, by the time OutKast accepted their Grammys in 2004, the Dirty South was not only a banner under which a wide variety of southern rappers now congregated. It was also a culture industry that had "southernized" what cultural critic Nelson George has termed the multibillion dollar business of "hip-hop America." (3) The importance of Atlanta's Dirty South industry can only be understood by placing it in the wider context of rap music in America. During the 1970s and 1980s, the everyday problems of life in urban black ghettos contributed to the subject matter and complex politics of American rap. Though some critics dismissed rap's portrayals of racial identity as juvenile laudations of violence, sexism, and greed, the cultural message of "East Coast" New York rappers and "West Coast" California rappers registered with young blacks and voyeuristic whites across America, creating for the first time a profitable mass market for rap. During the 1980s and early 1990s, record sales by New York rappers Run-DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and Los Angeles-Bay Area "gangsta" rappers N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur went into the millions. Political conservatives, family groups, minority-rights groups, and older African Americans reacted strongly against the raw sexuality and violence depicted in urban rap lyrics. …

Justifying the Arts: Drama and Intercultural Education

Abstract: For teachers of arts subjects, questions about justification can be tiresome in the same way that contemporary aestheticians may feel fatigue about defining art. Providing justification can feel more like an exercise in rhetoric than theoretical enquiry, induced more by political necessity than intellectual challenge. If the value of the arts is not self-evident, it is difficult to advance arguments to convince those who have no knowledge or affinity with them. Not that many educationists admit to falling into the latter category. As Eisner has said, nobody wants to be seen as a philistine. Yet to those with a deep commitment to the value of the arts in education and wider society, the arts are rarely thought to be taken as seriously as they should be. This paper will describe five approaches to the question of justifying the arts before examining the specific case of drama and intercultural education.

Introduction to the Special Issue on “ICT in Everyday Life: Home and Personal Environments”

Abstract: Although nobody can pinpoint exactly the date when the first computer entered the home, it is safe to say that the current diffusion cycle can be traced back to the early 1980s. The first 10 to 15 ...

Shakespeare and youth culture

Abstract: Nobody Outcrazies Ophelia!: Reducing, Translating, and Referencing Shakespeare for Youth Smells Like Teen Shakespirit, or The Shakespearean Films of Julia Stiles Are You Shakesperienced? Rock and Roll and the Production of Shakespeare Big Willie Style: Hip Hop and Being Down with the Bard "Adolescence, Thy Name is Ophelia": The Ophelia-ization of the Contemporary Teenage Girl This Bard's for You

Re-Conceptualizing Intimacy and Distance in Instructional Models.

Abstract: The idea that distance education lacks intimacy and is therefore inferior is based on an embedded metaphor that sustains a restricted and limiting mental model of ideal instruction. The authors analyze alternative conceptualizations of intimacy, space, and place as factors in the development of effective instructional models. They predict that the traditional instructional model will be increasingly problematic in the face of new and emerging technologies. After a review of a range of factors that will influence the eventual consolidation of new instructional models for higher education, the authors advocate a blending of metaphors and models that will place higher education practitioners in postures of greater flexibility to exploit as yet unidentified opportunities and challenges. “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice . “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!” --Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass Our daily discourse is predicated on the use of metaphors embedded so deeply in our consciousness that frequently we are scarcely aware of the extent to which they influence our mental models and attitudes (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Professional discourse and discipline-specific discourse tend to adopt a nucleus of core metaphors in a conceptual network that guides and shapes the mental model that drives professional interchange and inquiry (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). Mental models derived from conceptual networks may be said to open avenues of inquiry and establish parameters beyond which inquiry may not venture. When the conceptual network is rich with associative possibility, it may be said to have the salutary effect of broadening and deepening inquiry; the conceptual network may also limit inquiry and practice to the set of known associations.

Diatom biogeography and water babies: the search for meaning among the protists

Abstract: “But there are no such things as water-babies.” “How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there was none. And no one has a right to say no water-babies exist till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever will do, you know that?” (Kingsley, 1863)

Knowability and possible epistemic oddities

Abstract: Our world is non-omniscient. Nobody knows all truths, and nobody ever will. Does it follow that there are unknowable truths? Frederic Fitch (1963) ‘proved’ the affirmative. In short, if some truth is unknown, then that it is unknown is itself unknowable; hence, given non-omniscience, there is some unknowable truth. Verificationists, who tie truth to verifiability, are committed to the so-called knowability rule (henceforth, KP).1 Let K be the epistemic operator it is known by someone at some time that . . . , and ♦ the aletheic it is possible that. . . .KP is the following rule.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Abstract: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Martin Amis Alfred A. Knopf, 2002 As a boy, Joseph Stalin gave himself the nickname "Koba," after the hero in a popular novel took from the rich and gave to the poor. To this was later added "the Dread" - an appellation given in memory of Ivan the Terrible, "a recreational hands-on torturer," who was also called "Ivan the Dread," and to whom Amis says Stalin looked for inspiration during Stalin's Terror in the late 1930s. This book's title Koba the Dread is thus unusual and provocative, in itself capturing much about Stalin, the subject of the essay. That is fitting, because the book as a whole - part intellectual memoir, part essay, part historical chronicle - is itself strikingly unusual. Told in the first person almost as though Amis had himself experienced the events he describes, the book manages to present horror on a personal, visceral level. And horror is indeed what it describes as it recounts the years of Lenin and Stalin, and the personalities who inhabited them. From beginning to end, the essay reflects the highly literate background into which Martin Amis was raised. Even the best-read reader will often be sent scrambling for the dictionary. Combined with this background is his close personal connection both with the Communist Left and with a revulsion against Communism. Martin is the son of Kingsley Amis - a twentieth century literary figure of some prominence, as readers of this Journal will no doubt recall - who was active in the Communist Party from 1941 to 1956 and then, as did so many others, became an ardent anti-Communist. Robert Conquest, who has written the definitive histories of so much of the Soviet era, is Martin's best friend. The sub-title about "laughter and the twenty million" refers to the fact that people remain inclined not to take too seriously the atrocities of the Stalin era, which stands in stark contrast to their marrow-deep revulsion toward the crimes of Hitler. "Everybody knows [or thinks he knows] of the 6 million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the 6 million of the Terror Famine." The reference to the Terror Famine is to the deliberately-enforced famine of 1932-3, although this reference to six million is odd because elsewhere Amis says it was eleven million who starved to death. The disparity in perception Amis speaks of is the double standard applied to Nazism and Communism that continues to color the world's perception of twentieth century history to this day. It's a moderately short book, and deserves a reading from cover to cover. Although it doesn't do it justice to mention just a few points, it will be worthwhile to illustrate how informative and often bizzare the features Amis tells about are: 1. When Stalin spoke at Bolshevik meetings, he was there to signal when the applause should end. But when a tribute to Stalin was made at a meeting at which he was not himself present, no one dared to stop clapping before the others. The result was, of course, ludicrous. Amis cites Solzhenitsyn as the source for a story about one meeting at which a local factory director was the first man to stop applauding. He "was arrested the next day and given ten years on another charge." 2. We see how timeless the patterns of servility can be. In the fifth century A.D., the members of the Roman Senate chanted to the emperor "Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses," repeated eight time; then "God gave you to us! …

Parallel worlds : the science of alternative universes and our future in the cosmos

Abstract: From the bestselling author of "Physics of the Impossible", Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" takes us to the frontiers of scientific knowledge to explain the extraordinary nature - and future - of our universe. Imagine a future where we are not alone - where our universe is just one of countless parallel worlds, some strangely familiar, some almost unimaginable. And that, when planet earth finally runs down to a cold, dark wasteland, we will be able to escape into these new worlds and start again. Michio Kaku's thrilling guide to the galaxy shows us how it could happen sooner than we think - and the future for intelligent life is one of endless possibilities. "This book is absolutely impossible to put down ...if and when we do find out what the universe is, and how it was created, it's going to be absolutely mind-blowing". ("Independent on Sunday"). "One of the gurus of modern physics". ("Financial Times"). "An exhilarating read ...nobody who reads this book can be anything less than amazed by the possibilities it presents". ("Scotland on Sunday"). "The journey he takes the reader on is so picturesque and the conclusions so startling that you are gripped". ("Sunday Telegraph"). Michio Kaku is a leading theoretical physicist and one of the founders of string theory, widely regarded as the strongest candidate for the 'theory of everything'. He is also one of the most gifted popularizers of science of his generation. His books published by Penguin include "Parallel Worlds", "The Physics of the Future" and "The Physics of the Impossible". He holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, where he has taught for over twenty-five years.

Nobody knows where the blues come from : lyrics and history

Abstract: Although the aesthetic appeal of blues music has always been its major asset, the lyrical content of the songs, sometimes overlooked, is at least equally to be credited for its staying power. Eight critiques, resulting from years of research, make up this volume. In all, the focus rests on the historical dimensions of the lyrics with the intention of setting the record straight or creating a record where none existed. Together, this collection presents African American popular music as a self-contained cultural domain and as a form of oral history which continues to be a permanent source of enlightenment shining light on several dark comers of official history.

Humboldt's mexican texts and landscapes*

Abstract: Notwithstanding the extreme care which I bestowed in verifying the results, I have no doubt of having committed many [plusieurs] very serious errors, which will be pointed out in proportion as my work shall excite the inhabitants of New Spain to study the state of their country. --Alexander von Humboldt, 1811 The bicentennial of Alexander von Humboldt's year-long sojourn in Mexico, from March 1803 to March 1804, provides the stimulus to analyze his role in the relationship between long-term landscape transformation and the cultural bias that continues to be such a central orthodoxy in modern economic development (Sluyter 1999). That orthodoxy, the "Pristine Myth" in William Denevan's (1992) terms, maintains that the precolonial landscapes of the Americas were undeveloped and, therefore, that non-Westerners are unproductive and economic development must equate to cultural westernization (Sluyter 2001). James Blaut (1993) coined a slightly different term to label that same orthodoxy: the "myth of emptiness," which dictates that development must diffuse from the West to the non-Wests. Despite this article's historical focus on Humboldt's visit to late colonial Mexico, the following analysis directly concerns present-day economic development (Sluyter 2002). Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has already cast Humboldt in a central role in that phenomenon. She concluded that Humboldt reinvigorated the colonial pristine myth on the eve of the independence of many of the Latin American republics. His characterization of the Americas as "primordial nature" turned a colonial belief into a modern scientific fact: "Even the label 'New Continent' is revived, as if three centuries of European colonization had never happened or made a difference. What held for Columbus held again for Humboldt: the state of primal nature is brought into being as a state in relation to the prospect of transformative intervention from Europe" (Pratt 1992, 126-127). That conclusion derives from textual analysis of Humboldt's writings in the context of his influence on the modern sciences as well as on the political elite and foreign investors in the Latin American republics that became independent from Spain over the three decades following his 1799-1804 expedition (Miranda 1962, 106-107, 205-210; Livingstone 1992, 133-138; Pratt 1992, 111-113, 175-182; Florescano 1994, 203-204; Mendoza Vargas and Bernal 2003). Although the work of Pratt and others such as Edward Said (1979) spawned a boom in textual analysis of scientific travel literature that generally confirmed and elaborated her conclusions, she has also had critics. The most meaningless offer the cliche that because Humboldt was, like everybody, a product of his time he cannot be held to the moral standards of ours. They thereby misrepresent Pratt's goal, which is to understand, not to judge, Humboldt's role in a process that has so greatly transformed the world precisely because he was not only a product of his time but also a major "producer" of his time--and ours. The more meaningful critiques reanalyze his texts using alternative assumptions and thereby come to somewhat different conclusions about his role in that process (Sachs 2003). Yet, irrespective of the conclusions of such textual analyses, they alone will never resolve Humboldt's role in the (post)colonial reinvigoration of the pristine myth because they verge on idealism (Sluyter 1997). Nobody, not even someone of Humboldt's stature, can impose an idea about a place on a place simply by writing about that place. Even accepting Pratt's conclusion that Humboldt's writings were centrally involved in the modern reinvigoration of the colonial idea that the precolonial landscapes of Latin America were pristine, he based those texts in part on preexisting texts and on his observations of landscapes. All of those texts--the ones on which Humboldt drew, as well as those he wrote--partially derived from the colonial transformation of those landscapes and subsequently became involved in their further transformation. …

Winnicott on the Surprises of the Self

Abstract: No investigation of the "messy self" would be complete without consideration of psychoanalytic thought, which has done so much to turn our attention to our surprising, com plicated, largely hidden insides. All the great psychoanalytic thinkers have their own contributions to make to the study of the self, but there is one who, I believe, has more to contribute than any other: Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and analyst who made psychoanalysis more flexible than it had been in the hands of Freud and Klein, a humanistic art of personal interpre tation rather than a would-be science, and who invented key concepts such as that of the "transitional object" and the "facili tating environment" that are at the heart of analytic practice today. Unlike Freud, Donald Winnicott is not a cultural icon, read in Great Books courses, revered and reviled.1 Unlike Jacques Lacan, he is not an intellectual cult figure, with a band of zealous disci ples and an impenetrable jargon.There is no school ofWinnicott, there are no courses in his methods. All this is as he wished it. Nobody was more skeptical of cults and the rigidity they induced. All his life he was obsessed with the freedom of the

No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog

Abstract: Tired of filling up your blog with boring posts? Take the next step and get inspired to create something unique. Author Margaret Mason shows you the way with this fun collection of inspirational ideas for your blog. Nobody Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog is a unique idea-book for bloggers seeking fun, creative inspiration. Margaret gives writers the prompts they need to describe, imagine, investigate and generate clever posts. Sample ideas include: Writing a serial novel Conducting unnecessary experiments Creating your autobiography Public eavesdropping And much, much more

Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers: Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: In 1741 William Hogarth completed another of his popular depictions of contemporary London. Like most of Hogarth's pictures, The Enraged Musician (Fig. 1) had a double aim: to show Londoners what was new about their way of life and simultaneously to reveal, in this novel scene, the timeless essence of human character. In this particular picture he focused, above all, on two female figures who were both new and old, individual and universal. One was the milkmaid, an upright girl of youthful vitality who retained the pastoral innocence of the country; the other was the ballad singer, a worn-out streetperson in rags with a bawling baby on her arm.1 The picture hinges on an opposition between these women: the one rural, the other urban, the one clean, the other dirty, the one virginal, the other fallen. The healthy girl cries her trade; the raddled mother sings "The Lady's Fall," an old ballad given new and personal force by its appropriateness to her present circumstances as an unmarried parent.The ballad of the "The Lady's Fall" was, like the women in the picture, an instance of what London did to the country incomer. Archaic in its diction, traditional in its form, it was a song without a known author that spoke from a former time and from a rustic context, circulating orally in villages, taverns, and fairs. It was as recently as 1711 that Joseph Addison had caused a stir by treating the readers of The Spectator to a detailed appreciation of two similarly rural ballads, "Chevy Chase" and "The Two Children in the Wood," commending them, and the popular tradition from which they came, for their "majestic simplicity."2 In the city, though, such ballads appeared in a different context: produced on coarse paper by the thousand, they were not just sung from memory in the convivial setting of cottage fireside, but were also sold in the mean streets as the cheap goods of destitute beggars. "The Lady's Fall," for instance, was a London hit in the 1730s, when Cluer Dicey, the main publisher of cheap broadsides, issued it from his warehouse in Bow Church Yard. As usual, Hogarth was right in tune with the times: the old ballad was, when he painted his picture, a pop song on the city streets.But it was not just a song. In The Enraged Musician, the ballad is both a sound-the ragged woman is singing it-and a commodity-a tatty piece of paper she is hawking to passers-by. As a sound, it belongs to one of the traditional English genres that together drown out the art of the foreign violinist. His music is genteel, aimed at the indoor life of drawing room and salon; they are rough, popular, the sounds of the laboring classes whose habitat is outdoors on the street. Thus Hogarth makes a visual critique along patriotic and class-based lines-attacking the preference of the urban nouveau riche for the effete arts of Europe over traditional English forms of expression. Yet he is also doing something more complex and interesting, as an examination of the words of "The Lady's Fall" makes clear.The ballad begins with a drama that has been enacted countless times in patriarchal cultures that fetishize female "honour":And it ends in tragic fashion with the death of all concerned:The ballad's conclusion is sentimental as well as moral: the deaths of mother and child make them pathetic figures while that of the father allows poetic justice to occur. But it is also tidy: nobody survives to embarrass the social order that has no place for single mothers and bastard children. In Hogarth's picture, however, a fallen woman has survived and so has her child-survived only to beg on the streets by ballad singing. Hogarth's singer openly trades on her plight, hoping to gain a few more pennies by associating herself with the pathetic lady of the old song. Yet while the lady has died of guilt, the ballad singer hopes to profit by her fall. In The Enraged Musician, the ballad is not, then, simply a hearty vernacular music opposed to effeminate foreign music, but is a traditional genre, medieval and rural in origin, transformed into a cheap and desperate commercial ploy. …

Raymond Queneau and the Early Oulipo

Abstract: Founded in 1960, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle can congratulate itself, should that suit its mood, upon forty-five years of uninterrupted activity. Or four and a half thousand years, since the Oulipo habitually counts its decades as millennia. (1) Even measured by a more secular calendar, the Oulipo has certainly shattered the record of longevity for literary groups, leaving Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Lettrism, Situationism, and so forth behind like so many sleek but abashed hares bested by the tortoise. What may be more astonishing still is the Oulipo's record of civility. No excommunications here, no ritual immolations, no spectacular autos-da-fe, no gore-drenched seppukus. Indeed, its rules provide that nobody, once elected, can quit the Oulipo--and even after their death, its members are not excused from the group. From the original ten Oulipians, the group has grown to include thirty-five, and, thus reinforced, its activity continues unabated today, in the very same spirit of vigorous, collaborative interrogation that animated its beginnings. As intriguing and as vibrant as I feel the current activities of the Oulipo to be, I have recently been drawn toward those beginnings, rereading the Oulipo's foundational documents and first texts, and discovering in those halcyon days a wealth of interesting detail. In particular, Jacques Bens's book, Oulipo 1960-1963, in which are collected the minutes from the monthly meetings of the group in those early years, offers a font of Oulipian arcana, both greater and lesser. As the group moves from its first title, "Seminaire de Litterature Experi-mentale" to "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," and from the acronym "OLiPo" to "OuLiPo," one learns many important things, such as the fact that Raymond Queneau was bitterly disappointed by the size of the menhirs at Carnac when he finally laid eyes upon them in person, or that the contemporary crisis in off-track betting in France might be explained by the fact that trainers read Baudelaire aloud to racehorses (B 56, 230). One may revisit certain classic moments and savor them at leisure, like that epiphany when the fundamental vocation of the group became apparent, leading its members to agree upon this definition: "OuLiPiens: Rats qui ont a construire le labyrinthe dont ils se proposent de sortir" (B 43). One of the issues that I have found to be most engaging is the question of Raymond Queneau's role in those early Oulipian years. It should be recalled that the Oulipo was first conceived (if not yet birthed) during a ten-day colloquium devoted to the work of Queneau at Cerisy-la-Salle in September, 1960. Moreover, it is generally understood that Queneau co-founded the group with his friend Francois Le Lionnais. I have claimed that repeatedly (1, 176, 183), as have a variety of other academics, for instance Marc Lapprand (9) and Peter Consenstein (16), as if it were a fact beyond dispute. The Oulipo says as much in the current iteration of its website, (2) where the Oulipian Herve Le Tellier, in his biographical sketch of Queneau, writes: "Raymond Queneau est l'un des co-fondateurs de l'Oulipo, avec Francois Le Lionnais." Upon close examination and further scrutiny, however, things may be a bit more complicated than that. On the same website, for example, Le Tellier describes Francois Le Lionnais as the "Fondateur et premier president de l'Oulipo," suggesting further that "il fut a l'initiative de la fondation de l'Ouvroir, en 1960," with no mention of Queneau. If one leaps backwards over the decades--or rather the millennia--to the Oulipo's third official meeting, on January 13, 1961, one finds that Queneau himself was very much in agreement with the latter interpretation of events. There, the minutes record that Queneau took the floor at the outset of the meeting in order to emphasize and enter into the record two concerns that he felt to be of primordial importance: Raymond Queneau demande alors immediatement la parole pour regretter qu'on ait omis de signaler, au cours des deux precedents comptes rendus: a) que l'OLiPo a ete fonde sur l'initiative de Francois Le Lionnais; b) que le titre Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle a ete propose par Albert-Marie Schmidt. …

Contemporary Spheres for the Teaching Education: Freire's Principles.

Abstract: Freire's cogitation on Information Technology (IT), resources for education have been known since the decade of the 50s. And now, within the current context, this analysis outlines the literacy problem as an issue of gnosis and anthropology while existing in a virtual dimension. Based on research/experiences that also were carried out in Brazil, it can be noted that the literacy that is being discussed includes the skill in handling a mouse, selecting, dragging, cutting, pasting, CTRL C+CTRL V, writing a text and searching the internet, but although it seems "obvious", public education policy has not given sufficient thought nor assumed a pedagogical position on these issues. This discussed cogitation considers contributions of the Freire pedagogy, in the attempt to attain, through this type of literacy, the unprecedented accomplishment of something viable–that what teachers realize as unprecedented, due to the fact that nobody has accomplished it before, however viable, because all of the conditions to make it happen are there, including a critical preparation of the educators. Within the internet context, the proposal implies a digital writing and reading ability that is based on communication and dialogue skills and, as fundamental strategies for reading the world, the real/virtual world, the knowledge of the daily speech, of writing and reading within a multi-diversification of digitally generated texts.

The art of public speaking for engineers

Abstract: The art of public speaking for engineers is described in this paper. A couple of points are there for presentation skill. First, practice is more essential. However, almost nobody can present a seminar, lecture, or talk without mistake. Thus, the mistakes can be based on poor understanding or bad spelling but not laziness of lack of preparation. Therefore, familiarity with the research itself, background, results, and most importantly, with the presentation order and material is important. The second point in the same vein is that perfection is neither sought nor required. But an honest attempt at a good job is highly appreciated. Finally, when presenting, lighten up and enjoy the chance to interact with the peers and sonic of the famous names heard before. A conference is a meeting place of ideas and knowledge that offers both ideas and attention, but it also takes away new ideas and a newfound confidence in the work

From Discretion to Fictional Law

Abstract: Illegal migrants receive really mixed messages; they stay here and work, and they do the jobs that nobody else wants to do, and they do what their employers tell them to do so that their employee records will make them appear legal. So all of these people are looking the other way, even though their employers know that they are undocumented. This creates a sense amongst illegal migrants that maybe they are sort of legal. So on the one hand, people are afraid all the time because they are illegal; on the other hand, it’s hard not to get this mixed message. There is real injustice in the way that the system plays out, because it works in an arbitrary and sometimes really targeted way, and people can sense that injustice. — lawyer interviewed in Nashville TN, 2005

Mary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastrophe

Abstract: The premiere of the two‐act comedy Nobody at Drury Lane on November 29, 1794 was an unmitigated disaster for Mary “Perdita” Robinson. She miscalculated the impact of a satire on female gamesters on the upper‐class Whig establishment. The comedy was damned in advance: aristocrats sent their servants to “do up Nobody,” and the farce closed after three performances; ending Robinson’s career as a Drury Lane playwright. This essay examines Robinson’s theatrical catastrophe within its historical context: the upper‐class suppression of Nobody reveals a great deal about social and political anxieties during the revolutionary era. Robinson’s upper‐class contemporaries apparently assumed that her satire on female gambling was an attack on the moral legitimacy of the Foxite Whig elite. By subjecting the play to preemptive damnation, however, they suppressed a good‐natured satire on upper‐class manners in which an aristocratic female gamester is rehabilitated by a virtuous, philanthropical City banker. The alliance o...

Bennett's the History Boys: Unnoticed Ironies Lead to Critical Neglect

Abstract: Any one, or a combination of the following, may be the reason why Alan Bennett's play The History Boys (2004) has received virtually no serious attention to date from academic critics: it's an unusual hybrid; it's middlebrow; its politics are dubious; it's hard to label; it has attractive surfaces but no depth; it's not sure about what it wants to say; and why should a seventy-year-old playwright make a breakthrough to genuine accomplishment? (Of course, these are only surmises based on some probabilities: no one has reason to write about why s/he has not written about the play.) The disparity between the effusive praise from newspaper and periodical critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and its neglect in the academy, is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but it is an interesting one nonetheless. Without any insinuation that this alone validates claims to genuine merit as dramatic literature, we might, purely observationally, note that the play won the Tony, the Drama Desk, the Olivier, the Outer Critics' Circle, and the London Critics' Circle awards for best play (Jury 13; "Royal Performance").Excessive modesty on Bennett's part does not help his case with those critics who feel, legitimately enough, that it is their job to dig deep beneath surfaces. About his first play, Forty Years On (1967), a play set within a boys school, Bennett has written, "I listen to the BBC Critics. They all say it is very funny, but what it is about, what I am trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't" (Writing Home 416). The general judgment of reviewers and literary journalists is that The History Boys (2004) is funny, endearing, and meaningfully serious, and that, indeed, this second play set in a boys school does have a message or messages. This time Bennett has made no move to dissuade critics from the idea of 'message'; that is to say, no dissuasion outside the text of the play itself. The idea of reviewers generally, and, it seems, of most audiences, is that the message lies in an unequivocal endorsement of all save one or two of the ideas, teaching methods, attitudes, and sympathies of Hector, the charismatic teacher operating within a liberal humanist tradition. While this view of the play is not outlandish or hopelessly naive, it does, despite the critics' beneficent intentions, deny the play much of its irony, nuance, dialectical force, and ideational density and compression.Whatever the ultimate merit of The History Boys as a piece of dramatic literature, it has a much more complex and ironic structure than has been commented on to date, and it is, in fact, the skillfully embedded ironies that give the play a weight and depth that do indeed make it a respectable contribution to serious theater. The play's deep ironic structure not only saves it, unquestionably, from didacticism and sentimentality, but also, in my contention, makes it ideationally challenging and intellectually humorous. Failure to apprehend the full depth and extent of the irony within the play causes a significant depreciation of its worth as dramatic literature. If the irony goes unrecognized, the play then seems only to make the totally unsurprising point that substance and integrity are to be preferred to superficiality and expediency, and that there is no problem in distinguishing the genuine from the counterfeit. Critical neglect seems almost justified if, in fact, the play's intellectual content is as thin and dubious as all that.The History Boys, a play full of performances of various kinds, is, in fact, a play about performance(s), including a bit of self-reflexivity as Bennett encourages us to interrogate his own performance in the writing of the play. People who begin to contemplate the meaning of this play sooner or later come to realize that it cannot simply be an endorsement of all that Hector seems to represent. At this point, though, they may meet, at least temporarily, a quandary. Assured critical judgments about any element of the play may seem at first to be in doubt because of questions about slippery and ambiguous perspectives and the extent of ironic dimensions. …