Showing papers on "Wonder published in 2006"

The power of music.

Abstract: What an odd thing it is to see an entire species—billions of people—playing with listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music.’ This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End . Curiosity brings them down to the Earth's surface to attend a concert; they listen politely and patiently, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’—while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on within them. They, themselves, as a species, lack music. Clarke likes to embody questions in fables, and the Overlords' bewilderment makes one wonder, indeed, what it is about music that gives it such peculiar power over us, a power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force. We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. This so-called ‘music,’ they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans. Yet it has no concepts, and makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no relation to the world. These, indeed, are the very issues Schopenhauer raises in The World as Will and Representation —and Schopenhauer himself was passionately musical. Music, for him, was an embodiment of pure ‘will’—but this is not a notion that goes down well in a neuroscientific age. Another passionately musical philosopher, Nietzsche, said, ‘We listen to music with our muscles.’ This, at least, is something we can see. It is evident in all of us—we tap our feet, we …

Unweaving The Rainbow

Abstract: Did Newton 'unweave the rainbow' by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins; Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution often is more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mysteries. With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a best-selling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder. This is the book Richard Dawkins was meant to write: a brilliant assessment of what science is (and isn't), a tribute to science not because it is useful but because it is uplifting.

On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context

Abstract: Let us imagine a small but significant number of European—that is, Europe-based—scholars earnestly at work on Pacific topics in scattered, isolated locations on that turbulent continent. There is a certain exoticness to that image, and a pathos with which I, at least, can identify, having myself spent many years studying the Pacific away from the Pacific. In a funny way, the very existence of a “European Society for Oceanists” mirrors the enduring image of the Pacific region as being constituted by small, scattered, isolated islands—despite Epeli Hau‘ofa’s best efforts (Hau‘ofa 1993). In my imagination these Europe-based scholars are surrounded by colleagues examining national and domestic issues, European Union developments, nato politics, events in the transition states of the former Soviet Union, peacekeeping and reconstruction in the Balkans, the resurgence of right-wing political parties, or, as the occasion may call for, the legacy of philosophers like Karl Popper and the challenges of housing in the twentyfirst century. Some of their colleagues probably work on European aid policy in Africa or European trade with Asia and North America. It would make sense, since those are all pressing and relevant concerns in their national and regional contexts. But I wonder how Europeans studying the Pacific stay motivated? How they feel justified in studying distant islands, when so many things are happening at home and closer to home that demand their attention and command research funds? I wonder how their colleagues view their research and whether they accord it an equality of knowledge?

Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality

Abstract: The attempt to identify the emotional sources of religion goes back to antiquity. In an exploration that bridges science and spirituality, Robert C. Fuller makes the convincing case that a sense of wonder is a principal source of humanity's belief in the existence of an unseen order of life. Like no other emotion, Fuller argues, wonder prompts us to pause, admire, and open our hearts and minds. With a voice that seamlessly blends the scientific and the contemplative, Fuller defines wonder in keeping with the tradition of Socrates - as an emotion related to curiosity and awe that stimulates engagement with the immediate physical world. He draws on the natural and social sciences to explain how wonder can, at the same time, elicit belief in the existence of a more-than-physical reality. Chapters examining emotions in evolutionary biology and the importance of wonder in human cognitive development alternate with chapters on John Muir, William James, and Rachel Carson, whom Fuller identifies as "exemplars of wonder." The writings and lives of these individuals express a functional side of emotion: that the very survival of life on earth today may depend on the empathy, compassion, and care that are aroused by a sense of wonder. Forging new pathways between the social sciences, philosophy, belief, and cultural history, "Wonder" deepens our understanding of the complex sources of personal spirituality and fulfillment.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

Abstract: Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual. In this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers was understood in the 18th Century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic. The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, "A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders" offers a captivating view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.

Reading wonder woman's body: Mythologies of gender and nation

Abstract: during the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of comics (the 1940s) and continue to the present day constitute a rich arena for exploring cultural meanings about America as a nation and the mythologies of national identity pervasive during specific historical moments. Traditionally a popular cultural venue marketed primarily to children, how do comic books reflect and create particular imaginaries of nationhood? Through all kinds of commodities besides the comic book itself (posters, T-shirts, action figures, dolls, lunch boxes, children’s games, costumes, refrigerator magnets, journals, coffee mugs, etc.) the comic book superhero, Wonder Woman, remains ‘‘instantly recognizable’’ in

The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy

Abstract: @fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Introduction 1 Part I: Critique 1. Critique, Hypercriticism, Deconstruction 2. The Sober Absolute 3. Critique, Authentic Biographism, and Ethical Judgment 4. Towards an Ethics of "Auseinandersetzung" 5. More than a Difference in Style Part II: Theory 6. Under the Heading of Theory 7. Comparatively Theoretical 8. Theatrum Theoreticum Part III: Philosophy 9. Something like an Archaeology 10. Thinking Within Thought 11. Saving the Honor of Thinking 12. A Stupid Passion 13. Aporetic Experience 14. Thinking, Without Wonder @toc4:Notes 000 Index 000

Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History

Abstract: "Windows on Nature" includes forty of the museum's finest dioramas, depicting animals and birds from around the world. The text includes fascinating information about how the dioramas were created and who made them. It covers exploration, documentation, specimen hunting, taxidermy, landscape painting, and the craft of diorama-making. Following is an excerpt from the book's foreword by Ellen V. Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History: Which is your favorite display at the American Museum of Natural History? Perhaps you remember the Alaskan brown bear towering over you when you were a child. Or the mountain gorilla, so humanlike, in its lush Congo home...These extraordinary exhibits inspire us with awe, admiration, even affection. Perhaps nothing embodies the spirit and mission of the museum so completely as these painstakingly created, lifelike habitat displays. They set out to educate us about nature and science, and to engender feelings of wonder in - and stewardship of - the natural world. And they succeed brilliantly. They reverberate with the vision, passion, and expertise of their creators who pioneered and perfected the art and technology of diorama making, each of whom strove to serve science, bringing glorious nature to the public in ways never seen before or since. The dioramas are, in a sense, "windows on nature." They precisely depict a specific location, complete with its indigenous flora and wildlife. Animals are showcased with keen attention to their anatomy, behavior, social groupings, and biomechanics. But their real power is in the hearts and minds of those who view them and thereby enter the natural world.

Children as Mystics, Activists, Sages, and Holy Fools: Understanding the Spirituality of Children and Its Significance for Clinical Work

Abstract: And so, having identified some of the issues that make spirituality a complex matter to discuss, I will now dare to discuss it! Eugene Peterson (2003, p. 30) from his perspective within Christian spirituality notes that the current usefulness of term spirituality is not in its precision but rather in the way it names something indefinable yet quite recognizable: “transcendence vaguely intermingled with intimacy.” Peterson and other participants in the current conversation concerning to what exactly spirituality refers agree on at least this one feature: it concerns everyday lives, material reality, and close relationships, at the same time that it concerns some depth dimension of reality that transcends all of these. David Hay and Rebecca Nye, British researchers at Nottingham (UK) University Children's Spirituality Project, study six- and ten- year old children in primary schools, presenting them with photographs of what they call “existential situations”—a child crying, a person observing sunlight breaking through clouds—in order to stimulate reflection from children about spiritual issues that the researchers believe are not necessarily religious in content. Their subsequent analysis of these interviews (primarily with Muslim and Christian children) defines children's spirituality as “relational consciousness,” exhibited in four dimensions: between self and God or some horizon of transcendence; between self and other people; between self and world; and last, children's consciousness of relationship with themselves (Hay & Nye, 1998; Hay, 2000). I will expand on some further nuances of what spirituality means, but for now, I take Hay's very simple statement that relational consciousness is the core of children's spirituality as a good working definition when we keep in mind that the four dimensions of relationships named by Hay (God/Mystery/Transcendence, others, world, and self) point us to spirituality as concerned with the deepest levels of human experiencing, the places of ultimacy, value, and deepest meaning in and for our lives. What exactly does it mean to speak of spirituality defined as relational consciousness? As is the case with art, the language of spirituality is an attempt to give expression to something that defies or resists language. The image of the child as Mystic comes to mind, as that term connotes one who possesses an awareness of things that are intangible, cannot really be spoken of with clarity, and yet are experienced as real. For years, persons working with children in various clinical settings have noted the preponderance of stories in which children articulate some sense of awareness or of connection to a reality not contained within the realm of their immediate sensory world or within themselves. This transcendence has been variously called a “big dream, “the numinous,” an experience of mystery, or simply a child's awareness of some power beyond himself or herself. One ten year old child I interviewed who attended a Sufi school in California spoke of an early childhood experience of her awareness upon looking out upon the ocean's horizon, of a “big out there” existence that she felt small in comparison to, and yet connected with, nevertheless. Mystic children have a spirituality strongly marked by such experiences, which may often be dismissed by adults as simply the products of overactive childhood imaginations. As I attempt to flesh out Hay and Nye's notion of children's spirituality as relational consciousness, then, I discover five elements within this notion crucial to my working understanding of children's spirituality that, taken alongside the four images described above, offer a kind of phenomenology of children's spirituality. (These may well apply to an understanding of adult spirituality too, but I am restricting my focus to children for purposes of this discussion.) First, children's spirituality is based in experience. It is not primarily words about a phenomenon that mark spirituality, but the experience itself. Second, there is some sense of heightened awareness involved, a level of attention to the experience, a sense of “being in touch” with something big or important or ultimate. Hay (2000) chooses the word “consciousness,” as in relational consciousness to speak of what I am calling heightened awareness. Of course the problem with both terms is that they may give a cognitive-sounding tone to something that may or may not involve rational cognition. The third feature I will name here concerns the particular kind of experience and awareness had by children. Children, along with adults offering retrospective reports of childhood experiences, refer to their awareness of an encounter with transcendence or mystery, awe, and wonder. Descriptions in fact generally point to an experience of a horizon or a presence that cannot be reduced to rational cognition or even to the language attempting to express it. Spirituality refers to creative, imaginative dimensions of human selfhood, and while it can and must be reflected upon directly through language, certain “alternative languages” such as art, music, drama, and dreams also come to the foreground in expressing the ineffable. Fourth, spirituality positions persons in relation to these encounters: it is about relationships. It concerns one's sense of relatedness to self, to others, to those “centers of value and power” (Fowler, 1981) that shape meanings in the lives of persons. And last, children's spirituality involves reflective symbolization, or the ability to have a perspective upon and make meaning of the relationships and experiences featured in the child's awareness. However, these capacities relate more to the cognitive-rational dimension of spiritual experience and as such may appear quite different than they do in adult spirituality. One final comment about definitions: there is a tendency in the literature of children's religious and spiritual lives, to put forward a particular construction of childhood and of their spiritual experience as normative—namely, the picture of the child as innocence, and of childhood spirituality as principally about some ethereal and otherworldly but positive sense of awe and wonder. I have written elsewhere (Mercer, 2003) about some of the sources of these spiritualities, as found in Jung and Freud's constructions of childhood. Many of these perspectives sound very middle class, perhaps very “Anglo” in tone. While children's spirituality certainly may include those things, there is also a “shadow side” to spirituality that is a large part of the lived reality of many children, and that is at least some small part of the experience of every child. Children across various ages and cultures experience some version of “monster fear,” for example, and must deal with an inner world and perhaps an external environment as well, populated by frightening powerful creatures. The shadow side of children's spiritual experience concerns chaos and struggle, resistance, fear, evil, and suffering. For children suffering the effects of poverty, relational deprivation, violence, or serious illness, encounters with mystery and ultimacy may relate more to being on the edge of survival than to the brightness and light often imaged in the language of awe and wonder. Sometimes the relational consciousness of a child's spirituality comes through in their struggle amidst seriously dysfunctional relationships in a family, or struggling efforts to find adequate mirroring in the eyes of a parent addicted to chemicals. When we are attempting to learn about or understand the spiritual lives of children, then, we need to listen not only for angel's footsteps but also for the ways children wrestle with demons (figurative and existentially encountered).

Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613

Abstract: Contents: Preface Introduction: Wonder, rhetoric and travel The truth of travel writing Wonder texts Inventing and elocuting wonder Composing and acting wonder Epilogue References Select index.

Canadian literature in English

Abstract: References and Abbreviations 9 Introductory Note to Volume Two 11 Part Four: Fiction 9. Laying the Foundations 15 10. Establishing a Tradition of Fiction 37 11. Creating Fictional Worlds of Wonder 62 Twenty Years After 91 Polemical Conclusion 121 Appendix (2006): A Note on 'Postmodernism', Jargon, etc. 139 Further Reading 143 Index 191

A European Perspective on Language as Liminality

Abstract: The quotations above illustrate the argument of the first part of my chapter. The chapter as a whole is going to take a now widely accepted position, to modify it by referring to the diversity within languages as well as across languages, and, in the second part, to consider its implica­tions for language policies in Europe. However, we should not progress without noting the extensions of the concept ‘liminal’ implied by the Latin definitions. Not only may we be crossing the threshold to someone’s dwelling and home, but we may also be making a new beginning. Crossing thresholds can take us into private and protected space, and it can involve us in repudiation as well as entry, starting again as well as continuing. It is small wonder that the ‘year abroad’ for language undergraduates is seen both as a threatening and a liberating experience (Coleman, 1996; Johnston et al. 2004).

Listening to the spontaneous music-making of preschool children in play: Living a pedagogy of wonder

Abstract: Title of Dissertation: LISTENING TO THE SPONTANEOUS MUSIC-MAKING OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN IN PLAY: LIVING A PEDAGOGY OF WONDER Judith K. Kierstead, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Francine H. Hultgren Department of Education Policy and Leadership University of Maryland College Park This study sings with joy the wonder of preschool children spontaneously being music-makers in play. Through hermeneutic phenomenological methodology provided by van Manen (2003), voices of Heidegger (1962, being-with), Levin (1989, listening), Ihde (1976, music-language), Casey (1993, place), Merleau-Ponty (1962, the body), Levinas (1987, “we”), Arendt (1959, new beginnings), and Steiner (1984, 1985a,b; 1998, human development, freedom) support the work. The study asks: What is the lived experience of preschool children spontaneously making music in play? In Waldorf preschools, forty-six children in three age-differentiated classes are observed and tape-recorded in a pre-study; observations of twenty-four children in a mixed-age class and, during outdoor playtime, an additional twenty-four children from a similar class are observed and recorded in note-taking during a year-long study. Significant themes of will-ing, be-ing, and time-in-place emerge. Freedom to move about in play with peers is essential to music-making that spontaneously expresses Life-lived-in-the-moment. The phenomena of this study – the songs, chants, and other sound-shapes – are the being of children, who are not bound by time or by space. In this study, musical form includes a sung-tryptich, a communal-collage, call-response, a transforming chant, and language that sings and stretches into many, varied soundshapes. The wonder of life shines through. Teaching music of early childhood is being one’s self a music-maker in beingwith children. This teaching is preparing a place of beauty, order, and caring, where a rhythmic framework of fineand living-arts experiences extends the letting-learn, and where the children move about, playing freely with materials that nurture the imagination, indoors and out daily, rain or shine. Teaching is moving through richly developed integrated-circles (songs, poems, and verses, with gestures), worthy of the children’s imitation. Teaching is telling tales from the heart, planting seeds of wisdom. Teaching is “reading the children” then creating soft edges in moving-with-one’s-ownsinging from one activity to another. This is a Pedagogy of Wonder that respects the child’s will, enriches the child’s Being, lets-be the spontaneous music-making of preschool children in play, nourishing that music-making by being-with the child musically. Listening to the spontaneous music-making of preschool children in play offers a new beginning. LISTENING TO THE SPONTANEOUS MUSIC-MAKING OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN IN PLAY: LIVING A PEDAGOGY OF WONDER

Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart

Abstract: All these years later I can still see it clearly. It was an unforgettable sight. We had taken the old heart and we needed to move damn fast to fill that huge hole with a new heart. No wonder they were frightened of us then. No wonder they thought we were out of our minds. Adrian Kantrowitz

From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fear, Awe and Wonder in International Politics

Abstract: Key events in international politics, such as terrorist attacks, can be characterised as sublime: our minds clash with phenomena that supersede our cognitive abilities, triggering a range of powerful emotions, such as pain, fear and awe. Encounters with the sublime allow us an important glimpse into the contingent and often manipulative nature of representation. For centuries, philosophers have sought to learn from these experiences, but in political practice the ensuing insights are all too quickly suppressed and forgotten. The prevailing tendency is to react to the elements of fear and awe by reimposing control and order. We emphasise an alternative reaction to the sublime, one that explores new moral and political opportunities in the face of disorientation. But we also stress that we do not need to be dislocated by dramatic events to begin to wonder about the world. Moving from the sublime to the subliminal, we explore how it is possible to acquire the same type of insight into questions of representation and contingency by engaging more everyday practices of politics.

Curiosity as the Thief of Wonder An Essay on Heidegger's Critique of the Ordinary Conception of Time

Abstract: What is the connection between curiosity and the ordinary conception of time? This essay offers a reading of Heidegger's account of wonder and curiosity found in Basic Questions of Philosophy (1937-8) and attempts to show its continuity with the discussion of the now-centered ordinary conception of time in Being and Time (1927). Heidegger refutes the claim that one can still say that philosophy begins in wonder in an age that no longer understands what wonder means due to modern Da-sein's obsession with the new (curiosity). Since wonder is no longer a viable philosophical attunement, Heidegger outlines in Contributions to Philosophy (1936) a new attunement, a new key for philosophy: terror.

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist

Abstract: "I'm an evolutionary biologist and a Christian," states Stanford professor Joan Roughgarden at the outset of her groundbreaking new book, "Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist". From that perspective, she offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible. Perhaps only someone with Roughgarden's unique academic standing could examine so well controversial issues such as the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, or the potential flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution. Certainly Roughgarden is uniquely suited to reference both the minutiae of scientific processes and the implication of biblical verses. Whether the topic is mutation rates and lizards or the hidden meanings behind St. Paul's letters, "Evolution and Christian Faith" distils complex arguments into everyday understanding. Roughgarden has scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony. The result is an accessible and intelligent context for seeing a Christian vision of the world that embraces science. In the ongoing debates over creationism and evolution, "Evolution and Christian Faith" will be seen as a work of major significance, written for contemporary readers who wonder how - or if - they can embrace scientific advances while maintaining their traditional values.

Wonder and the Religious Sensibility: A Study in Religion and Emotion

Abstract: A few years ago Mark Taylor edited a volume assessing Critical Terms for Religious Studies. In the volume’s second essay, William LaFleur notes that, twenty years ago, mysticism would have been considered a core term for the study of religion. Yet twenty years ago the body rarely surfaced as a critical concept for understanding religion. Now, however, the situation is reversed: “research into psychedelics, the brain, and the chemical components of health and happiness has been impressive. . . . The leverage on our minds exerted by our DNA and what has been called the ‘selfish’ gene cannot be denied. Studies that reject or ignore such data now seem out-of-date.” Although mysticism has hardly receded as a prime topic of religious investigation, it is true that new questions are being asked about it and that new critical terms structure those investigations. Among these terms are concepts drawn from the study of the body—its genetic predispositions, its neurochemical functions, and its emotional programs. This article examines how one aspect of “the body”—its emotional programs—might be used as an organizing construct in religious studies. More specifically, I hope to show how experiences of wonder exert “leverage” on our perception and cognition in ways that encourage the development of a distinctively religious posture toward life. It is also my hope that the “psychology of wonder” will contribute to recent inquiries into the relationship between religion and the emotions. Ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion in terms of the feeling of absolute dependence, scholars have argued about the emotional foundations of a religious orientation to life. Many historical and theoretical studies have explored the relationship between religion and such specific emotions as anger, fear, bliss, love, mourning, and ha-

Topicality And Conceptual Blending: Titus Andronicus and The Case of William Hacket

Abstract: In this essay, which combines historicism and cognitive criticism, I identify a previously unnoticed topical allusion in Titus Andronicus; the allusion then serves as my illustrative case-study in a cognitive account of topicality. As a historicist, I present evidence suggesting the probable topical intentions and reception of two passages from Titus. As a cognitivist, I analyze my account in terms of conceptual blending theory. We stand to gain, I argue, by understanding topical identifications wherever they may emerge-in an author's mind, an actor's, or those of audiences and/or later critics-as conceptual blends.Critics of literature and the other arts commonly understand "topicality" as a kind of meaning that presumes an interpreter's familiarity with particular, publicly reported events or controversies, to which an imaginative work alludes more or less implicitly. I should like to suggest that for historicist critics concerned with topical interpretation, conceptual blending theory offers at least two major advantages.First, cognitivism entails a pragmatic approach to semantics, uninhibited either by the old-fashioned assumption that authorial intention alone defines true meaning, or by its contrary extreme, the post-structuralist position that authorship is a mere fiction (to which some historicist criticism has been excessively prone). The value of cognitive theory for critics who embrace historicist insights, but who seek a plausible account of the author's role in the production of meaning(s), has already been emphasized, notably by Mary Thomas Crane (2001, 34-35 passim); Crane's work has contributed, along with that of other recent critics, to the project of developing a cognitive historicist criticism (Spolsky 2003, 162-68; Richardson and Steen 2002, 5; Richardson 2004, 23-25, with references). Cognitive historicist critics admit the contingency of literary reception upon indefinitely variable conditions, and the multiplicity of possible responses to a text, yet they do not conclude from this that authorial intentions are of no concern to audiences or to critics. Audiences can make informed hypotheses as to an author's probable intentions. Critics, by studying and analyzing historical records with attention to cultural and individual circumstances of cognition, may infer a work's probable reception(s) in the minds of a given audience.Second, conceptual blending theory draws our attention particularly to the metaphoricity of topical identities, and hence to their capacity for aesthetic novelty, which literary critics in general have neglected. The theory of blends emphasizes the innovative aspect of all cognitive activity, in so far as it involves acts of metaphorical identification. It can, I believe, help us to reintegrate the study of topical allusion within a poetics that respects the values of creativity, novelty and wonder as central to literary interest.Topical Allusion and Conceptual BlendingBlending theory was developed by Mark Turner; it has been described and advanced, most recently, by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) and Patrick Colm Hogan (2003). ' In a conceptual blend, "two or more inputs or input spaces . . . project some properties to a blended space," producing "an emergent structure that results from the combination" (Hogan 2003, 10708). Blending is often exemplified in explicit metaphorical statements of identity, such as "Juliet is the sun" (91, 100). Here a simple linguistic identification with the logical structure A=B, representing the emergence of a blend in the mind/brain of a speaker or author, in turn prompts the hearer's or reader's mind/brain to conceptualize a blend of its own, finding appropriate "matches" in memory and building "correspondences" to construct the blended space. According to chief proponents of the theory, the blends emergent in such projections are not mere associative permutations of discrete elements accessed from memory, but are, rather, essentially novel "imaginative achievements" (Fauconnier and Turner 2002, 19). …

Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940-2000

Abstract: Foreword: Still Searching for Eden at the End of the Oregon Trail by William CrononPrefacePrologue: A Time to RememberI. Postwar Promise1. The Great Hope for the New Order2. Into the Brave New WorldII. Making Agriculture Modern3. Bringing Perfection to the Fields4. The Wonder World of PesticidesIII. Industrial Forestry Management5. Planning and Technical Efficiency in the Forests6. Intensive Forestry and Citizen ActivismIV. Of Rivers and Land7. Richard Neuberger's Conservation Politics8. Tom McCall and the Struggle for the Willamette9. Ecologies of Sprawl: The Land-Use NexusEpilogue: The Special PlaceNotesBibliographyIndex

Finding the Right Kind of Awe and Wonder: The Metaphysical Potential of Religion to Ground an Environmental Ethic

Abstract: This paper argues that an anthropocentric fallacy permeates thinking within both technological and ecological approaches to environmentalism. In consequence, sustainable development is an incoherent concept through the weakness of its anthropocentric ethical grounding. Using the Judaeo-Christian tradition as an example, this paper examines the degree to which religion can be an alternative means of grounding an environmental ethic outside anthropocentrism. It concludes that, though religion can also be corrupted by anthropocentrism, insights gained through theology ought not to be wholly dismissed.

The metaphorical collecting of curiosities in early modern France and Germany

Abstract: This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, curiosity and wonder from the 16th to the 18th century.

Varieties of Minimalist Semantics

Abstract: Cappelen and Lepore (C&L) view themselves as embattled defenders of the Free Republic of Semantics from the attacks of its enemies, mostly in the form of pragmatic incursions. They withdraw to a limited territory, and defend it with reason, humor, and other less noble weapons. The enemies are everywhere. This way of posing the debates is often humorous and helps make the book easy to read. It also often leads the authors to caricaturize and to trivialize many of the problems, arguments and positions held by the different parties. Here is a curious pair of facts. C&L think that the vast majority of philosophers and linguists who have written on the matter are contextualists. Francis Recanati (2004), an admitted and unapologetic contextualist, thinks that most philosophers and linguists are literal ists. One might wonder if the terms of the debate are distorting rather than clarifying things. We not only wonder it, we think it.

Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier's Painted Prince

Abstract: William Dampier, buccaneer turned natural scientist, modelled himself on Sir Francis Drake in his narrative of the twelve-year sequence of voyages (1679-1691) that took him "cleer rownd the globe."1 Drake brought back a fortune in gold and spices, but all that Dampier had to show for his circumnavigation was, as he says in an annotation to the account of those travels in the British Library manuscript Sloane 3236, "this Journal and my painted prince" (fol. 232v). Published by James Knapton as A New Voyage Round the World (1697), that journal-reworked, amplified,2 and reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions ( 19:426-33)-took Dampier into the circle of the Royal Society (Gill 231-32, 237-39). Financial exigency on his return to England in September 1691 had, however, forced him to relinquish all claims to his "painted prince," Jeoly, a tattooed native of the Spice Islands.Despite his efforts to construct himself as scientific observer in A New Voyage, it was Dampier's reputation as a buccaneer and his association with Jeoly that were uppermost in John Evelyn's mind when they met at a dinner party in August 1698: "I din'd at Mr. Pepys, where was Cap: Dampier, who had ben a famous Buccaneere, brought hither the painted Prince Jolo, printed a Relation of his very strange adventures, which was very extrordinary, & his observations very profitable" (De Beer 295). Evelyn had previously nominated both Dampier and Jeoly as worthy of commemoration in medallion effigy in his Numismata (1697): Dampier "and the rest of the Buccaneers" in the category of "Great Travellers" and "the painted Prince Giolo, lately shew'd in Public" as the last in a long list of "Men of Name or Merit for something Extrordinary and Conspicuous" (263, 268).Recent research has uncovered some of Dampier's activities between the time of his return to England and the publication of A New Voyage (Baer), but the last days of Jeoly, who died probably in 1692, remain something of a mystery. The solving of that mystery is the ultimate concern of this essay. Its more immediate aim is to examine the multiple narrative constructions of Jeolyby Dampier, by his London exhibitors, by Thomas Hyde, and by John Pointer-as a case study of the shifting meaning(s) of curiosity and wonder, and their contingent values, in the early modern period.The medieval sense of "curiosity" as that "morally excessive and suspect interest in observing the world, seeking novel experiences, or acquiring knowledge for its own sake" (Zacher 4) began to be contested in the first half of the seventeenth century, when curiosity began its rehabilitation as impetus to the pursuit of useful knowledge (Harrison 279-82). By the early 1700s some of its opprobrium had been transferred to "wonder" as the handmaid of gawking ignorance rather than stimulus to scientific enquiry (Daston and Park 321-28, 348-50). Curiosity had also become more or less synonymous with consumerism for seventeenth-century amassers of the collections of imported objects and local artefacts-zoological, botanical, ethnological, mineral-known as "cabinets of curiosities" (Daston and Park 310).What was the point of this objectified assemblage of curiosity? John Pointer, sometime chaplain of Merton College, Oxford, prefaced his fourvolume catalogue to the cabinet that he left to St John's College,3 the Musceum Pointerianum (ca. 1740), with a defence of charges by "some of the Ignorant & Illiterate Part of Mankind (that only look upon the Out-sides of Things without examining their real & intrinsic Value)" that they were purely for show and sensation (Gunther 455). Individually, Pointer argued, curiosities might have medicinal properties. Taken as a whole, they offered a microcosm of God's creation: "they lead us to the Great Author of Nature, & not only serve to puzzle the Philosopher, but also to admonish (if not convince) the Atheist" (456-57).Dampier justifies the broad scope of his undertaking in similar terms in the Preface to A Voyage to New Holland, the narrative of his 1699-1702 expedition to Terra Australis Incognita, sponsored by the Admiralty in the name of exploration: "the Things themselves in the Discovery of which I have been imployed, are most worthy of our diligentest Search and Inquiry; being the various and wonderful Works of God in different Parts of the World" (1xvii). …

'A thing ridiculous'? Chemical medicines and the prolongation of human life in seventeenth-century England

Abstract: Sir Francis Bacon explored as a medical question the issue of how human life spans might be returned to the near-thousand years enjoyed by Adam and the Patriarchs. Extended old age seemed feasible: reports told of people living well into their centenary. Meanwhile, New World natives were said to live for several hundred years. The boundaries of old age in the seventeenth century were inconclusive, and the hope that life could be prolonged for decades beyond the allotted eighty years was a serious question. In 1633, one doctor observed that to “attaine to 100 is no wonder, having my selfe knowne some of both sexes”, but responding to the claims of Paracelsians asked, “is it not a thing ridiculous, now in these later times, to extend the life of man-kinde to 1000, 900, or at the least to 600 yeeres?” Comparing the reception of information extrapolated from Biblical sources, stories from distant lands, and the growing divide between philosophical and medico-scientific approaches, this paper looks at how “facts” about human longevity were received and employed by scholars and doctors during the course of the seventeenth century, and the emergence of a more “respectable” empirical chemistry from under the shade of alchemy.