Lost and Found? A Parable of the Architect (Male) and the Academic (Female)

The following text captures an interview, conducted over three evenings, between a practicing architect (male) and an architecture academic (female and feminist). This is a conversation between two long-standing friends who did their Part 3 professional exam together more than twenty-five years ago. Since then, they have taken different career paths and lived lives at different paces and in different places. Every so often they meet over coffee to laugh and argue about architecture, bemoan failures, and share successes.

The academic initiated the interview in order to hear an honest and open account of the career experience of a male architect. She hoped that their longstanding friendship would lead to less guarded responses. The answers to the questions were always going to be personally challenging to the interviewer and possibly to their friendship. The interview is a form of ethnographic study: a structured, qualitative process within a long term, immersed context. But when ‘the immersed context’ is a much-valued friendship, it is a precarious action. Nevertheless, for the future of gendered relationships both protagonists accepted the risks.

Surprised by Syntax: Reading the Latinity of Paradise Lost

Stanley Fish in his monumental study argued that the reader of Paradise Lost is “surprised by sin” as he or she in the course of engaging with the text falls, like Adam and Eve, into sin and error and is brought up short. Through a “programme of reader harassment” the experience of the fall is re-enacted in the process of reading, wherein lies the poem’s meaning. And reader response criticism was born. But if for Fish the twentieth-century reader is “surprised by sin,” might not the twenty-first century reader, an all too frequently Latinless reader, be surprised by syntax, a syntax which despite of (or maybe because of) its inherent Latinity and associated linguistic alterity functions as a seductively attractive other? The reader, like Eve, is indeed surprised: enchanted, bemused, seduced by the abundant classicism, by the formal Latinate rhetoric achieved by a Miltonic unison of “Voice and Verse” and also by the language of a Satanic tempter who is—in the pejorative sense of the Latin adjective bilinguis—“double-tongued, deceitful, treacherous.” It is hardly an accident that this adjective (with which Milton qualifies hellish betrayal in his Latin gunpowder epic) was typically applied to the forked tongue of a serpent. This study argues that key to the success of the double-tongued Miltonic serpens bilinguis, is his use and abuse of Latinate language and rhetoric. It posits the possible case that this is mirrored in the linguistic methodology of the poeta bilinguis, the geminus Miltonus? For if, like Eve, the twenty-first century reader of Paradise Lost is surprised by syntax, by the Miltonic use and the Satanic abuse of a Latinate voice, might not he or she also be surprised by the text’s bilingual speaking voice?

L'Asse Tripartito Italia-Germania- Giappone e la Cina

Germany, Italy and Japan were engaged in China from the turn of the 20th century to WWII. However, they formed an anti-Chinese alliance only at the final stage of their presence there, when Japan assumed an undisputed role of leader in the region. Despite its alliance with the Axis powers, Japan never implemented racial laws against the Jews in China. All of them took part in the Boxer Upraising suppression and received as a consequence extraterritorial rights and concessions. Moreover, Japan won the war against China in 1895 and transformed itself from a tributary country of China into an imperialistic power. It took possession of Taiwan and in the 1930s established a puppet government in Manchuria.Germany followed different route obtaining as indemnity for the murders of two missionaries the control of the Shandong province, which was later expanded thanks to the anti-Boxer coalition's victory. However, Germany lost all possessions when China entered WWI. The issue of Shandong was finally resolved at the Conference for Disarmament hold in Washington in 1921-2. Japan failed to gain ex-Germany territories. Finally, Italy arrived in the Far East at the turn of the century but was not very interested in the oriental colonialism to the same extent it was interested in Africa. Tianjin was its only concession in China, and it took almost a decade before a subvention to arrive from the Italian government for its development.In the 1920s and 1930s Germany and Italy engaged in successful diplomatic, commercial and military relationships with China. In fact, both were considered China's partners thanks to their experts at the service of the Chinese government. On the other hand, Japan position was opposite to them, because of its plans of aggression towards China which was to be transformed into “the natural extension” of the mainland. In 1935 Italy declared war on Ethiopia and abandoned the seat at the League of Nations. China interpreted the Italian aggression as the endorsement of Japan's politics towards China in Manchuria, and the relations between the two countries were broken off. After that Italy supported Wang Jingwei's puppet government during the Japanese occupation of China. Germany followed the same path in 1937, when it was evident that the Japanese were playing the leading role in the region, and decided to ally with Wang Jingwei too. Both Italy and Germany decided also to recognise the Manzhuguo and established diplomatic relations, definitively turning their backs on the old Chinese ally.The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis sealed the alliance among the three countries, and it confirmed Japan as the leading power in the region. Nevertheless Japan did not apply the racial law against the Jews in China.