Showing papers on "Theme (narrative) published in 1971"

Counter-Free Automata

Abstract: A particular class of finite-state automata, christened by the authors "counter-free," is shown here to behave like a good actor: it can drape itself so thoroughly in the notational guise and embed itself so deeply in the conceptual character of several quite different approaches to automata theory that on the surface it is hard to believe that all these roles are being assumed by the same class.This is one of the reasons it has been chosen for study here. The authors write that they "became impressed with the richness of its mathematical complexity" and that "a sure sign of gold is when profound mathematical theory interacts with problems that arise independently. And indeed it is noteworthy that the class of automata we shall discuss was defined more or less explicitly by several people working from very different directions and using very different concepts. The remarkable happening was that these definitions could not be recognized as equivalent until algebraic tools of analysis were brought to the field in the works of Schutzenberger and in the works of Krohn and Rhodes."The theme of the monograph is the utility and equivalence of these different definitions of counter-free automata. Its organization follows the plan of taking up, one by one, each of a number of different conceptualizations: the historically important "nerve net" approach; the algebraic approach, in which automata are treated as semigroups; the "classical" theory based on state transition diagrams; the "linguistic" approach based on the concept of regular expressions; and the "behavioral" descriptions using symbolic logic. In each of these conceptual areas, the class of automata under study is found in a new guise. Each time it appears as yet another special case. The authors' burden is to show that all these definitions are in fact equivalent.Care has been taken so that this research monograph can be used as a self-sufficient text. Notations have been defined carefully and always in the context of the discussion. Most of the chapters end with a substantial number of exercises. It is self-contained in that all concepts are defined, and all theorems used are, with one exception, either fully proved or safely left as exercises for the student.

The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution

Abstract: When James Tobin and I agreed on the subject of this lecture last spring, it appeared to be a highly topical subject that would command widespread interest among the membership of this Association. Unfortunately, as so often happens with forward planning for acadenlic purposes, others have also been alert to topicality, and have undermined our forward planning by getting in earlier with their version of the theme. Thus Milton Friedman himself gave a widely publicized lecture on "The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory" last September in London, which lecture has recently been published by the Institute ol Economic Affairs, [4]; Karl Brunner has recently circulated a typically scholarly paper on "The 'Monetarist Revolution' In Monetary Theory" [1]; and undoubtedly many others have been writing and publishing on the same subject. My treatment of this beginningto-be-well-worn theme today will, I hope, still retain some novelty, inasmuch as I shall be primarily concerned, not with the scientific issues in dispute in the monetarist counter-revolution against the Keynesian revolution, but with the social and intellectual conditions that make a revolution or counter-revolution possible in our profession. This lecture is therefore an excursion--amateurish, I must confessinto the economics and sociology of intellectual change. As is well known from the field of economic history, the concept of revolution is difficult to transfer from its origins in politics to other fields of social science. Its essence is unexpected speed of change, and this requires a judgment of speed in the context of a longer perspective of historical change, the choice of which is likely to be debatable in the extreme. Leaving the judgmental issue aside for the moment, one could characterize the history of our subject in terms of a series of "revolutions," very broadly defined, as follows. Economics as we know it began with what might be called the "Smithian Revolution" against the established body of doctrines generically described as "mercantilism," a revolution which changed ideas on the nature and sources of the wealth of nations and the policies required to promote the growth of what we now call "affluence." The Ricardian revolution turned the attention of economists from concern with national wealth and its growth to the distribution of income among social classes and the interactions of growth and income distribution. The marginalist revolution of the 1870's essentially introduced a new and superior analytical technology for dealing with Ricardo's distribution problem, in the process gradually depriving Ricardian economics of its social content; hence, the results of that revolution have been described as neo-Ricardian or more commonly neoclassical economics. Contemporary economics is based on this development and on at least four dis-

The object of morality

Abstract: The Object of Morality is the title of a book I wrote a good many years ago shortly before I deviated irreversibly into university administration (often an intellectually terminal condition). I do not want to plug that book; nevertheless, it may not be completely irrelevant to say something of what it was about and take a rather rapid trot over its theme.

The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels

Abstract: Alistair Duckworth argues that the controversial "Mansfield Park" is fundamental to an appreciation of Jane Austen's fiction. Viewing this novel as the basis for a thematic unity in her work - a unity residing in her concept of the "estate" and of its proper "improvement" - he provides a fresh and convincing account of the novelist's values and of her artistic response to the contemporary forces that threatened them. For Jane Austen, Duckworth explains, the estate is emblematic of an entire moral and social heritage, and improvement, or the manner in which an individual relates to his estate, has crucial bearing on the state and direction of society. By tracing the theme of the estate and its proper improvement through the major novels, Duckworth demonstrates how committed Jane Austen was to the traditional values of a Christian humanist culture, yet how aware she was of the fragility of a society uninformed by responsible individual behaviour.

Foundations of a planned economy, 1926-1929

Abstract: These volumes have been written jointly by E.H.Carr and R.W.Davies and deal with economic affairs. The central theme is the replacement of the guided market economy of NEP by direct planning, first predominantly in financial, and later also in physical, terms.

An organizational analysis of collectivities

Abstract: T ABLE 1 presents a typology of collectivities. In Chart 1, these same types are arranged in a cross-classification that specifies their defining properties. I can commend this classification, not on the grounds of its being complete or formally elegant, but, instead, as having grown from work on diverse problems, as being quite general in conception, and as correlating well with important variables. The analytic scheme that underlies this typology has developed with use. I want to characterize that scheme more fully than was possible in its earlier stages. Then I will consider two further questions: How is this type of classification related to other ways of looking at collectivities; what, in general, is the range of its power to order observations? I begin by reporting illustrative correlations in order to establish the desirability of undertaking the theoretical explication contained in this paper. We can get to these illustrative correlations by using the lowercase letters in the second column of Table 1. The first illustration will use the letter "a" which appears beside "individuated heteronomy" and certain other types and the letter "b" which appears beside "commensalism" and "simple centralism." Child et al. (1958) have analyzed folk tales from a sample of 54 primitive societies, giving each society a score on the degree to which the theme of "need achievement" is present in these stories, (They follow McClelland and his associates (1953: 110-114) in defining need achievement as a need to succeed in "competition with a standard of excellence.") McClelland (1961:66) shows that there is a positive relationship (p-< .02) between these societies' scores on need achievement and the presence in them of full-time entrepreneurs. I had had occasion to classify 26 of the same societies according to the typology given in Table 1. For reasons reported later in this paper, I decided to see whether there was any relationship between this classification and the societies' scores on need achievement. As Chart 2 indicates, there is such a relationship. The types of society indexed in Table 1 by the letter "a" are more likely than others to have a high score. The value of chi square for this comparison is 12.32. (Chi-square was computed by the maximum likelihood method: df=2, p=<.Ol, C= .57.) Now compare the types of collectivities bearing the letter "c" with those indexed by "d." These notations guide us to the results in Chart 3. Slater and Slater (1965) coded 90 primitive societies for signs of male narcissism and then performed a centroid factor analysis on the resulting indices. They believe that their first factor (the first of two) is representative of the whole pattern of narcissism contained in their indices. The principal ingredients of this factor are indices of boasting and personal display. I had coded 38 of their 90 societies for another purpose, using the categories in Table 1.

The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions

Abstract: OBSERVERS OF THE SO-CALLED "COUNTER CULTURE" have tended to portray this phenomenon as a new and isolated event. Theodore Roszak, as well as numerous music and art historians, have come to view the "counter culture" as a new reaction to technical expertise and the embourgeoisment of growing segments of the American people.2 This position, it would appear, is basically indicative of the intellectual "blind men and the elephant" couplet, where a social fact or event is examined apart from other structural phenomena. Instead, it is our contention that the "counter culture" or Abbie Hoffman's "Woodstock Nation" is an emergent reality or a product of all that came before, sui generis. More simply, the "counter culture" can best be conceptualized as part of a long historical-intellectual progression beginning with the "Garden of Eden" image of man. The theme of man removed from the state of nature has recurred throughout Judeo-Christian-Greco thought. Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Calvin, and nearly all social philosophers and metaphysicians have chosen to idealize an existence prior to primordial man when all was well, and life was simple and free of the "social nausea" ascribed to us by the existentialists. Socrates urged the young to adopt an ascetic style of life. This sentiment was repeated by early Catholic theologians, particularly Francis of Assisi. The European Romanticists, in the wake of Rousseau, lauded the "noble savage." In North America, James Fenimore Cooper exhibited a preoccupation with the hero of the wilderness. The transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau and Emerson, deified the man behind the plow. The force of these arguments led to some action. For example, the writings of such German Romanticists as Joseph von Eichendorff and Nikolaus Lenau produced the Wandervoigeln, a movement

A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance: Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

Abstract: The theme of isolation and estrangement in existential writings which reached a peak of popularity with readers in the 1950's and 1960's through a revival of interest in Kafka's work and in the fiction and plays of Sartre, Camus, and Ionesco (to this list might be added a reassessment at that time of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche) has been traced largely in the productions of these European writers. Latter-day examinations of the existential dilemma of modern man incline toward identifying it in such diverse American writers as T. S. Eliot, Auden, Hemingway, and in European writers not usually regarded as members of the tradition, such as Joyce, Greene, Orwell, and Huxley. A work to receive all but the scantiest attention is Horace McCoy's 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? With the exception of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), McCoy's novel is indisputably the best example of absurdist existentialism in American fiction.' Dismissed in America essentially as a "penny dreadful" at its first apearance, it nevertheless found, as did West's works, popularity among a small band of French existentialists who recognized its beauty and power. My study attempts to reveal its literary merit as a minor masterpiece of absurdist fiction. In fact, it anticipates Sartre's La Nausee (1938) and Camus' L'Etranger (1942) as an existential parable. It is not unlikely that both Frenchmen knew the novel, and that their fictions-in content and style-were influenced by it. McCoy's hero is not unlike Meursault in many respects, and his heroine uncannily presages Roquentin's intense disgust for life.

Modernism and History

Abstract: poems, they persistently explore the problem of whether aristocracy is a matter of birth or personal attributes; deciding, inevitably, on the latter, they proceed to consider what personal qualities and experiences make a natural gentleman (and "born lover"), someone possessed of "the gentle heart." Throughout the Renaissance, the issue was to be reopened in poetry, drama, and theoretical dialogues of all sorts, with advice and assistance being proferred from all sides to those attempting to make good without an aristocratic background. To be sure, there also was a "blood-will-tell" or "you-can't-keep-a-trueborn-prince-under-a-bushel" tradition, but it merely stated the converse, that aristocrats did have true nobility, never that the quality was restricted to them. In the novel, which was to be the bourgeois literary form par excellence, the theme remained a central statement. Ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, the same assertions about class and the individual that expressed the aspirations of a bourgeoisie rising against the aristocracy now serve to consolidate and preserve its power against incursions by the proletariat. Although only one element in the system of bourgeois ideology, these ideas reinforce the claim to dominance of the ruling class. The notion that certain people, whatever their class origin, have the personal qualities necessary to success, and that such success is actually attainable, simultaneously justifies retention of a hierarchy and places blame on the individual for failing I6 This grotesquerie occurs in the Literary Guild account of K.B. Gilden's Between the Hills and the Sea (New York, 1971). Even in describing a novel about trade union struggles, it appears that blurb-writers are unable to acknowledge that its protagonists are members of the working class. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Thu, 26 May 2016 05:47:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 190 NEW LITERARY HISTORY to rise in it. Once the bourgeoisie is in control, even the strongest anti-aristocratic statements in bourgeois literature become an instrument of domination and a weapon of reaction in the class struggle.17

Mark Twain : the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995

Irony as a Key to Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Abstract: AMES WELDON JOHNSON S ONLY NOVEL, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (I9I2), has frequently been lauded for its objective presentation of Negro manners in various parts of the country, from rural Georgia to New York City. While this recognition of the novel's sociological importance is merited, it has tended to draw attention from the artistic elements of the work; those critics who admire the novel often do so for the wrong reasons. For example, the highly respected black critic Sterling A. Brown states that the novel is important because it is "the first to deal with Negro life on several levels, from the folk to the sophisticated," but goes on to say that it is "rather more a chart of Negro life than a novel."' While Hugh M. Gloster praises Johnson's restrained handling of racial questions, he treats the novel as if it were little more than a frank commentary on racial relations offered by a Negro who has dropped the mask usually worn before whites.2 Only Robert A. Bone has pointed out one of the most notable features of the work, its ironic tone.3 The Autobiography is not so much a panoramic novel presenting race relations throughout America as it is a deeply ironic character study of a marginal man who narrates the story of his own life without fully realizing the significance of what he tells his readers. It is the irony of The Autobiography which sets it apart from a number of novels which deal with a similar theme, for it belongs to a class of novels which was by no means new in I9I2. The general theme of the tragic mulatto who fits into neither culture had been employed by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin (I852), William Wells Brown in Clotel; or, the Pres-

II.—The Rock-Hewn and Other Medieval Churches of Tigré Province, Ethiopia

Abstract: More than twenty years ago this Society published a paper of mine entitled The Christian Antiquities of Northern Ethiopia . My present paper takes up the same theme again, describes much new material which has since come to light, and draws some new and better-founded conclusions.

Isolation and Caritas: Polar Themes in Melville's The Confidence-Man

Abstract: The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.

Variations on a Theme

Abstract: *Mrs, Pierobonis was formerly District worker of the Cyclades County, Greece, She is currontly engaged in voluntary work, OT by Paganini ! -The name is David N Drucker, Lecturer at the Swansea School of Social Policy and Administration, who wrote an article entitled &dquo;Putting One’s Foot Through It&dquo;, inviting further comment. This article was originally published in the 1969 issue of the School’s Bulletin. I took it up and carried it further for the same journal. Then, Mr. Drucker’s article was reprinted in International Social Work, Vol. Xlil Na. 4, 1970.

"Drum Taps" and Battle-Pieces: The Blossom of War

Abstract: every significant historical event of the Civil War. Walt Whitman's "Drum Taps" lacks even one poem whose subject is historical fact. Battle-Pieces follows the chronology of history from John Brown's raid through Lee's appearance in the Capitol. In "Drum Taps," however, time is measured by the sequence in which the poet has recast and reordered personal memories. Melville makes use of the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, The Rebellion Record, contemporary painting and numerous other materials for sources of theme and metaphor. Whitman's poems make no allusion to any world beyond the poet's experiences. Battle-Pieces is given a formal order by deliberate pairings of related poems. "The Conflict of Convictions" is the twin of "A Canticle," "The March into Virginia" the pair of "On the Slain Collegians," and "Apathy and Enthusiasm" the mate to "The Fall of Richmond." The movement of "Drum Taps" is simply from one poem to its successor. Melville consciously employs a group of recurring symbols in order to relate one poem to another. Compared to Melville's Dome, bird, river and meteor, Whitman has only his drum tap, and even this serves more as a metrical device than a unifying symbol. In an attempt to make BattlePieces both public and ceremonial, Melville uses a wide variety of traditional poetic forms. Ballad, elegy, psalm, verse epitaph and monologue are all represented in an equally wide variety of meters. Not concerned with public statement, Whitman avoids the more public of poetic forms and writes of national cataclysm in organic free verse that personalizes the

The Realities and Technological Trends of China'S Heavy and Chemical Industries

Abstract: The theme of my discourse is "trends and technological levels of China's heavy and chemical industries," and I propose to discuss, in short, the present capabilities of China's major industries — or, in other words, their overall level, including the technological one.

Hawthorne's Imagination and the Structure of "The Custom-House"

Abstract: AAV HILE "THE CUSTOM-HouSE" was valued for many years chiefly for the celebrated passage in which Hawthorne describes the "neutral territory"1 of his deserted parlor, generally received as the standard text on his conception of the imagination, recent criticism has defended the whole of the lengthy preface as a suitable "introductory" to The Scarlet Letter. The sketch has, however, found few to champion it as a piece in its own right even among its most perceptive readers. Frank MacShane's disparaging remarks in this respect are characteristic: "The essay lacks uniformity of tone and cohesiveness" and it "has no dramatic evolution."2 Dan McCall's favorable verdict on "The Design of Hawthorne's 'The Custom House'" remains a minority report: "What gives Hawthorne's autobiographical essay its own great tension and its aptness as an introduction to The Scarlet Letter is this sense that the validations of the community have given way and that the individual by himself cannot adequately make meaning out of experience."3 I hope to show how Hawthorne's concern with the workings of his imagination provides "The Custom-House" with an admirably well-wrought and expressive form; furthermore, it is in the design of the essay as a whole (and not merely the passage on the deserted parlor) that Hawthorne offers his most complete dramatization of his own experience of the creative process. If this consonance of theme and structure has not been readily apparent, that is because Hawthorne's approach, for reasons which this essay seeks to unfold, is gradual; he moves inward as it were through a series of concentric circles, from setting to character to author, until he stands