Showing papers on "Theme (narrative) published in 2005"

Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow

Abstract: Nietzsche characterized the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow - a description befitting Stanley Cavell, with his longtime interest in freedom in the face of an uncertain future This interest, particularly in the role of language in freedom of the will, is fully engaged in this volume, a collection of retrospective and forward-thinking essays on performative language and on performances in which the question of freedom is the underlying concern Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by an artist like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays that explore the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life Cavell's range is broad - from Astaire to Shakespeare's soulful Cordelia He also analyzes filmic gestures that bespeak racial stereotypes, opening a key topic that runs through the book: What is the nature of praise? The theme of aesthetic judgment, viewed in the light of "passionate utterance," is everywhere evident in Cavell's effort to provoke a renaissance in American thought Critical to such a rebirth is a recognition of the centrality of the "ordinary" to American life Here Cavell, who has alluded to Thoreau throughout, takes up the quintessential American philosopher directly, and in relation to Heidegger, he also returns to his great philosophical love, Wittgenstein His collection of essays ends, appropriately enough, with an essay on collecting

Data Swapping: Variations on a Theme by Dalenius and Reiss

Abstract: Data swapping, a term introduced in 1978 by Dalenius and Reiss for a new method of statistical disclosure protection in confidential data bases, has taken on new meanings and been linked to new statistical methodologies over the intervening twenty-five years. This paper revisits the original (1982) published version of the the Dalenius-Reiss data swapping paper and then traces the developments of statistical disclosure limitation methods that can be thought of as rooted in the original concept. The emphasis here, as in the original contribution, is on both disclosure protection and the release of statistically usable data bases.

Education and society in Hong Kong and Macau : comparative perspectives on continuity and change

Abstract: Hong Kong and Macau have much in common. Yet in education, for reasons which are analysed in this book, they are very different. The over-arching theme of the book, on continuity and change, is particularly pertinent following the transition of the two societies to the post-colonial era.

Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme

Abstract: These essays comprise a set of variations on art and culture guided by the theme of the environment. The essays deal with the physical reality of the environment such as the city, the shore, the water but also with the virtual environment and the social one.

Interaction : Discovering Hidden Structure with Model and Algorithms

Abstract: The dynamics of interaction between actors making up an organized system is a complex matter where myriads of events are constantly happening within ever changing spatial and temporal contexts that determine the ultimate meaning, effect and function of each event. For the understanding of such systems quantification alone is not enough, matters of pattern and structure must be considered. It is pointed out that most of the behavioural sciences have traditionally accepted repeated patterns among their central concerns. However, tools based on relevant and adequate models and methods have been hard to find in this area and easily available standard statistical methods generally developed for different tasks therefore direct research away from structural approaches. The importance of considering not only order but also real-time when searching for hidden interaction structure is underlined and a real-time model, called the Tsystem, is advanced together with specifically created detection algorithms and commercially available software (THEME). A particular pattern type, called Tpattern, is the core of the model and its detection is based on the definition of a so called critical interval relation among series of points on a single dimension such as time. It is argued that repeated patterns of the T-pattern type are frequent at highly different levels of organization from information molecules to proteins, neurons, and human verbal and non-verbal interaction. Examples are presented of T-patterns detected in children’s interaction as well as interactions among neurons in brain tissue. References are provided to applications of T-pattern analysis within psychology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, sports science, ethology, and neuroscience. A “bird’s eye view” is thus advocated in the search for essential features exemplified by those conserved in genetic materials across all living species where even some genes may be found among practically all life forms. It is suggested that behavioural research is following a logical progression from quantitative to structural analysis somewhat similar to that leading to the discovery of the patterns on DNA molecules, the genetic code and then genetic control programs. It is pointed out that pattern detection is already producing new data for quantitative analysis, classification and diagnostics. It is finally suggested that intelligence may always presuppose interaction and interaction patterns.

Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980

Abstract: "Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980" is an introduction to some of the large themes that have recurred in art over the past several decades. Reflecting a paradigm shift occurring in the visual arts from a formalist way of teaching studio art to more diverse and open-ended concepts, this text is structured around six key themes - time, place, the body, language, identity, and spirituality. Focusing on the process of interpretation and how interpretations are constructed by many factors brought into play by the artist, the viewer, and society, this text will help students interpret art from several angles: techniques and materials; historical circumstances; aesthetic qualities; theoretical issues; and artist's ideas and intentions. Each thematic chapter also contains a profile of an artist who has devoted a substantial portion of his/her creative energies to exploring aspects of the theme under discussion.

Ground Improvement: Case Histories

Abstract: More than 50 case histories are covered in 38 comprehensive chapters Theme 1 Preloading and Vertical Drains Theme 2 Modification by Chemical Admixtures Theme 3 Physical Modification Methods including Grouting, Compaction and Drainage Theme 4 Modification by Geosynthetic and other Inclusions Theme 5 Electro-kinetic, Thermal and Explosion Based Techniques

"Taking It to the Mic": Pedagogy of June Jordan's Poetry for the People and Partnership with an Urban High School.

Abstract: many youth whom I have encountered, poetry serves as a medium to speak about their experiences in ways often not censored by structures and rules. It is revered as an aesthetic form of expression with freedom to in/ exclude elements of grammar and aspects of language. Noted in several National Council of Teachers of English publications, poetry lets students' imaginations run free while exposing them to a particular genre of writing (c.f., Somers, 1999; Michaels, 1999; Moon, 2000; Jago, 2002/1999). Accordingly, I recall classroom scenarios from my years as a high school teacher and college instructorstudents with increased interest in poetry as compared to, say, essay or term papers. How could it be that poetry makes such a difference in students' interaction with writing? What follows (along with others in this issue) is an attempt to provide some possible answers. For decades poetry has been a centerpiece of classroom curriculum and instruction. In the humanities it is commonplace to examine poetry as a genre of literature because it is deemed sophisticated, enduring, and revelatory of language use. Though usually more compact than prose, poetry makes intensive use of language and literary devices such as theme, tone, irony, and metaphor to influence its interpretation. More importantly for this paper, however, such use of language is key to the construction of poems as derived from creative differences and democratic engagement (see Rinloch, this issue). At times the relative distinction between "good" vs. "bad" poetry is set apart by criteria adhering to these devices and particular levels of intensity, craft, and precision. As I have found in my own experience as a student and later teacher in U.S. urban schools, the kinds of poetry used in many classrooms have relied heavily on the so-called "classics." With the

"Whorish Old Man" and "One (Animal) Gentleman"

Abstract: Working with a series of narratives about a family dispute told over more than thirty years by an elderly Tzotzil-speaking Indian, from Chiapas, Mexico, I consider several puzzles about the widely espoused notion of the "textual self." Here the voices of others, perhaps more than that of the speaker whose self is being constituted, are centrally incorporated into his ongoing self-reflective biographical account. Moreover, as the narrator moves toward the end of his life, his story seems to lock itself into a closed discursive universe, in which the words of salient others become the repetitive, insistent, and inescapable theme of his self-conception and presentation.

Beyond the Rural Idyll: Images, countryside change and geography

Abstract: This article contributes to the Conference theme of ‘Images in Geography’ by arguing that the effective analysis of imagery can help geographers to understand countryside change. It begins by exami...

Four renditions of doing female drag: Feminine appearing conceptual variations of a masculine theme

Abstract: Departing from many contemporary writers’ and researchers’ homogenous conceptualization of the transgendered as a gender subversive enterprise, this paper explores the conventional ways that female impersonators do gender and sexuality by donning women’s attire. Drawing upon my ethnographic experiences in a dozen different drag settings over the past eight years, I highlight the apparent differences and striking similarities of those doing female drag. By locating female impersonators within the matrices of gender and sexual performance, identity, and embodiment, a multifarious viewpoint of this activity results that better illuminates participants’ contextual motivations for undertaking what the dominant culture otherwise often defines as a stigmatized presentation of self. Out 157 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20111 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30111 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40111 Paper presented at the annual American Sociological Association meetings in Washington D.C. 2000. Gendered Sexualities, Volume 6, pages 157–180. Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0820-6 of the myriad of ways those doing female drag comes the strong impression that, while such individuals may be gender traitors of sorts, they are anything but gender anarchists.

Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society

Abstract: Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society Danny Fingeroth. New York: Continuum/London, 2004. Books about superhero comics are typically written by fans, creators, or scholars. Danny Fingeroth's work transcends the usual limitations of perspective that we find in such books because his life has encompassed all three roles. He was an eager reader as a child; he worked editorially at Marvel Comics for a couple of decades; and he has now settled into a period that combines analytic writing, editing the WriteNow magazine, and teaching at New York University. Participating in one of PCA/ACA's finest traditions, Fingeroth came with his informed insider book to the 2005 meetings at San Diego. As a long-term manager for the Spider-Man character and consultant to the 2002 blockbuster film, Fingeroth reports that he "had firsthand knowledge of what those stories meant to readers of all ages who told us in no uncertain terms what they meant to them" (174, emphasis in original). In addition to being "the caretaker of superhero icons," he "also created some brand new superheroes from scratch" (174). This background affords an unusually practical knowledge of costumes, dual identities, special powers, and requirements to differentiate between competing heroes-all compounded by the demand to create marketable products from the unstable ingredients. Influenced by the clamorous voices of fans, his knowledge of the sales charts, and recent scholarship, most of Fingeroth's thematic treatments emphasize some form of reader identification with a heroic fantasy. While this approach has been applied to comic books at least since Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Fingeroth brings elegant nuances. Chapters deal with the longer history of the superhero concept, dual identity, orphans, female superhero, angry superheroes, the superhero families, the values that underlie heroism and villainy, and the superhero tale's future. While many categories and insights are familiar to those who have read works such as Richard Reynolds' Superheroes (1992) or Gerard Jones's Killing Monsters (2002), most readers will find an original touch or a significant speculative question associated with each theme. (Fingeroth leaves many of his vexingly challenging questions for others to grapple with.) I will list some sample observations. On Gratitude. The hero of masked dual identity "doesn't want to get used to being thanked" (49). Drawing on Lenny Bruce's "Thank You, Masked Man" routine, Fingeroth suggests that the convention of the Lone Ranger escaping from the rescued community allows the purity of the deed to stand alone. The stance of selflessness is a cliche for the genre. What Fingeroth adds here is how the escape-from-thanks maneuver appeals to an audience wanting heroes who emphatically do the right thing for its own sake. The Primal Appeal of Secret Identity. The hidden identity of the superhero, when identified with by the audience, permits an enlarged fantasy about myself, the reader, as source of justice: "IF ONLY THEY (whoever your they may be) KNEW THE TRUTH (whatever that truth may be) ABOUT ME (whoever you believe yourself to he), THEY'D BE SORRY FOR THE WAY THEY TREAT ME" (60, caps and emphasis in original). Orphan Heroes. There are legions of orphans in the heroic world, a tradition that goes back to Moses, Oedipus, and Hercules. The orphan status intensifies the secret identity theme but also reflects an existentialist form of individualism. Without families, "we are all alone. We fight our own battles, make our own rules, defy those who would destroy us" (70-71). The Incredibles film of 2004, which appeared after Fingeroth's book was written, cleverly plays with this idea by showing how difficult it is for a superhero (Mr. Incredible) to be embedded in a family and work situation. Thus, the orphan with superpowers becomes the ultimate American individualist. …

Conrad in the Twenty-First Century : Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives

Abstract: Best known as the author of Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is one of the most widely taught writers in the English language. Conrad's work has taken on a new importance in the dawning of the 21st century: in the wake of September 11 many cultural commentators returned to his novel The Secret Agent to discuss the roots of terrorism, and the overarching theme of colonialism in much of his work has positioned his writing as central to not only literature scholars, but also to postcolonial and cultural studies scholars and, more recently, to scholars interested in globalization. Reading Conrad Now is a collection of original essays by leading Conrad scholars that rereads Conrad in light of his representations of post-colonialism, of empire, imperialism, and of modernism and modernity-questions that are once again relevant today. The collection is framed by an introduction by J. Hillis Miller-one of the most important literary critics today-and a concluding extensive interview with Edward Said (one of his final interviews before his death on September 25, 2003)- the most prominent postcolonial critic-addressing his lifelong fascination with Conrad. Reading Conrad Now will be essential reading for anyone seeking a contemporary introduction to this great writer, and will be of great interest to scholars working with Conrad in a variety of fields including literary studies, cultural studies, ethnic and area studies, and postcolonial studies.

Kants Begriff transzendentaler und praktischer Freiheit: Eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche Studie

Abstract: Kant writes at one point in the Critique of Pure Reason that practical freedom can be recognized "through experience, as one of the natural causes" (B 831). This claim appears to conflict with a central epistemological theme of his critical philosophy. This work responds by carefully tracing the details of the relationship between transcendental and practical freedom through all of Kant's writings (published works, lecture notes, etc.). Kant uses the term "practical freedom" in several quite different senses and draws on pre-critical theses to varying degrees. While the problematic text has long been noted, there has been no detailed study of its importance.

Fiscal Sustainability in Theory and Practice: A Handbook

Abstract: The handbook is organized around three themes: (i) basic theory and tools for everyday use, (ii) the effects of business cycles on public finance and the role of fiscal rules, and (iii) crises and their impact on fiscal sustainability The first theme is central to the book's purpose of bringing the basic theoretical literature together, along with a set of examples used to illustrate particular methods of analysis The second and third themes develop the topic of fiscal sustainability further, by extending it to topics at the forefront of policy debates in the recent past

Sociolinguistics and Social Semiotics

Abstract: The history of linguistic thinking in the twentieth century has to be seen against the background of its concerns in the preceding century with uncovering the histories and relationships of the Indo-European family of languages. It is a story of continuous change, of languages becoming differentiated over time, of connections becoming obscured, yet recoverable through the formulation of ‘laws’ of linguistic change. It is a story of a journey through time across a large part of Asia and all of Europe. Change is the theme of that journey. Against that concern with history and change, the twentieth century has focused on the system of language out of time. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is credited with being the originator of this turn. In a series of lectures given at the beginning of that century he formulated a distinction between a concern with language seen in time, a diachronic view, and language seen as a system at one moment, a synchronic view.

Focus on African Films (review)

Abstract: Francoise Pfaff, ed. Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 327 pp. Photographs. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. The introduction and fourteen chapters of Francoise Pfaff's Focus on African Films address a reader with very little exposure to or knowledge about African cinema. Many of the essays include extended film summaries and a fair amount of the contextual and historical information a newcomer to African cinema might appreciate. Most authors opt to survey several films unified by theme or approach instead of reading one or two films closely. As a result, students embarking on a discovery of African cinema in an undergraduate course will find the collection informative and accessible. The scholar of African cinema, however, may find little that is new in Pfaff s volume and may be frustrated by its limited thematic and methodological scope. Although the title of the collection promises a look at films from the entire continent, the majority of the essays in Focus on African Films adopt a much tighter focus on films from Francophone Africa. Among these, the films of Sembene Ousmane receive a disproportionately large amount of attention (seven of the volume's fourteen essays discuss Sembene's films at length). Furthermore, many of the authors included in Pfaff s book employ a very similar, and by now very familiar, critical approach. Operating from within a cultural-nationalist paradigm, contributors align themselves with, and locate the film's significance in, the filmmaker's intended and unified meaning, elucidating and celebrating the union of artistry and political commitment the African filmmaker achieves. Samba Gadjigo, for example, in an examination of Sembene's historical films, describes Sembene as "a committed artist and activist for social change" (38). Brief discussions of Emitai, Camp de Thiaroye, and Ceddo serve to illustrate how Sembene's films "combat the established dominant Hollywood tradition of historical representation" (37). Mbye Cham's survey of recent African films explains how the films, based in "the African heritage of oral traditions and memory" (50), contest official, Eurocentric historical narratives. N. Frank Ukadike reads Allah Tantou and Afrique, jet te plumerai as examples of "social documentary meant to combat the false image of Africa presented by traditional cinema" (160), and Brenda Berrian's article "Manu Dibango and Ceddo's Transatlantic Soundscape" examines how the film's "soundscape embraces the two men's Pan African vision" (153). In each analysis, the critic stands beside the filmmaker, amplifying his conscious intention through careful explication of important scenes in the film text. Kenneth W. Harrow's provocative deconstructive reading challenges this approach, contesting the claim that a filmmaker can have the last word on what his film means. …

Unreformed Bodies: Normative Anxiety and the Denial of Pleasure

Abstract: The theme of body modification has become increasingly familiar to those of us working in the interdisciplinary networks of Women's Studies, but there is still much work to be done to establish its...

Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

Abstract: A uniquely personal exploration of adoption in literature, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated Reading Adoption explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, and reveals how these representations have contributed to general perceptions of adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. Marianne Novy reads a range of authors, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, to observe how these works address the question of what makes a parent. She scrutinizes basic themes that repeat throughout, e.g., the difference between adoptive parents and children, the mirroring between adoptees and their birth parents, and the romanticization of the theme of lost family and recovered identity. Engagingly written from Novy's dual perspectives as critic and adult adoptee, the book combines the techniques of literary and feminist scholarship with memoir, shedding new light on familiar texts.

A History of South African Literature

Abstract: Christopher Heywood. A History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 296 pp. Chronology. Map. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. Christopher Heywood's A History of South African Literature feels, at least initially, like a comprehensive study of South African social and political evolution as depicted in the poetry, drama, and fiction produced by writers of South Africa's diverse language and ethnic groups from precolonial times to the present. The text is broken into two parts in which Heywood attempts to characterize literature written before the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and then to explore the literary transformations that took place afterward. But in his introduction, Heywood makes two contradictory claims that underlie his subsequent analyses and serve to effectively undermine the impact of his study: first, that South Africa can be divided into four communities (the "Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Anglo-Afrikaner, and Indian"), and second, that his book examines the merging of these communities "through bodily and literary creolisation from pre-colonial to present times"(vii) as they form one nation. Heywood's claims would seem to point to a kind of emergent societal holism. They are supported by the author's attempts throughout the text to construct South Africa as a singular nation, community, and people. He states that by treating the apartheid categorizations of "English, Afrikaans, Coloured, and black" as a "single subject," he has created a book that "overflies the colonial past" (vii). For all of his admirable efforts to present a unified South African consciousness, however, he conflates culturally constructed identities, providing the reader with an inconclusive and uneven examination of South African literature and history, beginning with the categories that he establishes in the introduction. The term "Khoisan," for instance, is a misnomer first used by Isaac Schapera in The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (1930) that conflates two distinct peoples, the Khoi and the San. Heywood's conflation of the Anglo-African and Dutch Afrikaner populations as "Anglo-Afrikaner" is similarly problematic, given the contentious and violent history that has shaped the relationship between South Africa's primary white groups. Heywood does provide an impressive cataloging of South .African literature, ranging from W. H. I. Bleek's collection of oral texts, Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864), to the fiction of contemporary writers like Barbara Trapido and Ivan Vladislavic. However, the "melting-pot" argument at the core of the study, an argument based on creolization through "genocide" and "lovemaking" (1), is seriously flawed. He offers some impressive analyses of this theme, particularly when he reads biological racial mixing as "Hamite" in Sarah Gertrude Millin's 1926 novel God's Stepchildren, as a form of protest against racial classification in Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night (1965), and ultimately as a symbol of social self-recognition in Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002). Such readings are cogent enough when examined in the context of three specific works, but in trying to read the entirety of South African culture through such a lens, Heywood omits, downplays, or outright criticizes literary achievements that do not fit his emergent Utopian model of cultural unification. For example, some texts receive lengthy summations and analyses, while others are mentioned in a few paragraphs that read more like reviews than critical scholarship. …

Safe Discussions Rather Than First Hand Encounters: Adolescents Examine Racism Through One Historical Fiction Text

Abstract: This article presents a case study class’ response to Mildred Taylor’s now classic and widely read novel, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. Through data collected during one school year, the ways urban, adolescent students use their contemporary lenses to interpret the literary theme of “confronting, overcoming and challenging racism” are discussed. The participants’ responses are organized into four reader response categories that explicate the complex and interactive interpretations developed by the children while reading the novel. In addition to providing insights about the participants’ textual understanding, pedagogical findings indicate that the book can also be used to explore the nature of racism while creating a safe space to confront and more deeply understand racism’s impact on the past as well as the students’ current reality.

Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day"

Abstract: "Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason" is a comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy. The book's guiding theme is the concept of intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge's distinction between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that "light of all our day" in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Intuitive Reason became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light radiated to illuminate Emerson's life and work, as well as the complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely "self-reliant" and "original," was deeply indebted to his transatlantic precursors. The debt is intellectual and personal. Emerson's supposed indifference to, or triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his Idealism - a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the tragic. His "art of losing" may be better understood as a tribute to the "healing power," the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered Wordsworth's principal value. The second part of this book traces Emerson's struggle - with the help of the "benignant influence" shed by that "light of all our day" - to confront and overcome personal tragedy, to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas": "Not without hope we suffer and we mourn."

Shakespeare Survey 55

Abstract: Shakespeare Survey 55, ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 410 pp. Cloth $80.00. The theme of Shakespeare Survey 55 is "King Lear and Its Afterlife," although it includes half a dozen essays on other topics as well as three surveys of Shakespeare performances in England and elsewhere and the usual "Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies." In all, this is a very attractive and useful volume in the series begun over half a century ago. Kiernan Ryan contributes the first essay, a retrospect of scholarship and criticism on King Lear for the period 1980-2000. It begins by acknowledging what is by now a well known fact, that since the 1960s King Lear has "usurped the throne securely occupied till then by Hamlet." As a result, this play has become "an exemplary site of contention between the leading schools of contemporary criticism." The main issue in the twenty-year period Ryan covers up to the present is no longer, he says, whether King Lear counseled affirmation or despair, but rather "whether the play sustained or subverted oppressive structures of power and perception in its world and our own" (2). But before discussing critics who treat that issue, he naturally focuses on the basic issue of the two-text theory, noting that the theory has not yet attained anything like universal acceptance. This essay, like the examples which follow, implicitly accept a definition of "after-life" as Janet Bottom later defines it: "The 'after-life' of any Shakespeare play is lived through a variety of media-stage performance, critical analysis, translation, and adaptation" (106). Unaccountably missing from Ryan's account, however, is Alexander Leggatt's excellent book on King Lear in performance in the Manchester University Press series, which covers major productions of the play in the period Ryan covers. The essay that follows Ryan's, one of the longest and most scholarly in the volume, considers what we might call the pre-life of Shakespeare's King Lear. Richard Knowles analyzes "How Shakespeare Knew King Leir." He notes the wide range of opinions, all of them still current, from the contention that Shakespeare knew the old play but was little influenced by it to the claim that he not only knew the play, but acted in it as a Queen's Man or later as a Chamberlain's or King's Man. He might even have acquired and used a manuscript version of King Leir, some maintain, before its publication in 1605. On the available evidence Knowles finds most of the claims unconvincing if not entirely baseless; moreover, he insists that Leir had precious little influence, if any, on other plays of Shakespeare's, such as Richard III. Instead, Knowles constructs a narrative, admittedly speculative, that reasonably explains how a nontheatrical manuscript became the copy for the 1605 publication of the play. He then concludes that, regardless of whether Shakespeare saw King Leir performed in 1594 or possibly later, he based his own version of the Lear story on the 1605 quarto of King Leir, the year in which he began his composition. William O. Scott next discusses "Contracts of Love and Affection: Lear, Old Age, and Kingship." He recognizes the common belief that kings could not or really should not dispose of the their kingdoms in the way Lear proposes, but "commoners could reduce the cares of age by giving away their property" (36), and he cites examples from the period to that effect. But there was something "legally problematic" about "trading property for promises of future service, a mixture of property law and contract law" (38). Nevertheless, it was actually done for several centuries, but the timing of the exchanges and the enforcement was crucial, as Lear unhappily discovers, when he makes a contract, he believes, to buy future love. In "Headgear as a Paralinguistic Signifier in King Lear" Andrew Gurr shows how the evidence about wearing and not-wearing of headgear repays careful study. …

Girls Creating Games: Challenging Existing Assumptions about Game Content

Abstract: In a reinforcing cycle, few females create games and fewer girls than boys play games. In this paper, we increase our understanding of what girls like about games and gaming by describing the content of 45 games that were designed and programmed by middle school girls. The findings suggest that that when given the opportunity, girls design games that challenge the current thematic trends in the gaming industry. The most prominent theme was the way they expressed and worked through fears and social issues in their stories. Most used bright, vivid colors, and their stories took place in real world settings and involved moral decisions. Few used violent feedback. Girls also used the games as spaces to play with gender role stereotypes by challenging authority figures and using humor. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate on whether games should be gender-specific or gender-neutral.