"The Poet of Science": how scientists read their Tennyson

Tennyson’s responses to science have been thoroughly documented and discussed, but how did scientists respond to his poetry? Through examining in detail the work of three scientists who wrote at length about Tennyson--the astronomer Norman Lockyer, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and the American geologist William North Rice--it is possible to see how Tennyson went from being respected by contemporary scientists to being feted as the Poet of Science itself after his death. As a materialist, a Spiritualist, and a Darwinian Methodist respectively, Lockyer, Lodge, and Rice had very different conceptions of how science worked and what it implied about the universe, yet each looked to Tennyson and his poetry to confirm and extend his own judgements and values.

"You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets": the literary and political hinterland of T.S. Eliot's 'Coriolan'

There has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T.S. Eliot's unfinished sequence, Coriolan (1932)—interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writing's particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. Coriolan emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot's sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot's journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engagement and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing Coriolan poems.

France and the memories of ‘others’: The case of the Harkis

Historical narratives help construct social identities, which are maintained through differentiation between in-groups and "others." In this article, we contend that Fatima Besnaci-Lancou's texts, as well as her reconciliation work—in which she enjoins Beurs and Harkis' offspring to write a new, inclusive, polyphonic narrative of the Algerian War—are an example of the positive use of textually mediated identity (re)construction. Her work suggests the possibility of implementing a moderate politics of empathetic recognition of the (often migration-related) memories of "others" so as to reinforce French national belongingness.

Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press

Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag (1940) are accounts of the authors’ educations in the 1920s. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, these works use reticent narrators to test the limits of autobiography. In each case, authorial self-presentation complicates the work’s classification in the literary marketplace: Green paradoxically extends his use of a pseudonym to autobiography and Isherwood assigns his own name to his purportedly fictional protagonist, and yet Hogarth published both as novels. The two texts and their publication histories exemplify modernist autobiography’s blurring of the lines between fiction and personal history.

Climate change: against despair

In the face of accelerating climate change and the parlous state of its politics, despair is tempting. This paper analyses two manifestations of despair about climate change related to (1) the inefficacy of personal emissions reductions, and (2) the inability to make a difference to climate change through personal emissions reductions. On the back of an analysis of despair as a loss of hope, the paper argues that the judgements grounding each form of despair are unsound. The paper concludes with consideration of the instrumental value of hope in effective agency to tackle climate change. Overall, the paper’s assessment of personal despair about climate change as philosophically unjustified provides a fresh perspective on aspects of the debate about how to frame climate change in public debate.

'The African Presence in Caribbean Literature' revisited: recovering the politics of imagined co-belonging 1930–2005

Working outward from Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s landmark 1974 essay, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” this article explores the fuller history of the idea of Africa in anglophone Caribbean critical and literary works from the 1930s to the 2000s. It demonstrates that earlier, now forgotten Caribbean critics drew on imperfect and incomplete Caribbean literary imaginings of Africa to frame a counter-colonial politics of identity. The essay also brings back into view writings by Una Marson, Victor Stafford Reid, and Derek Walcott that expressed a different politics of solidarity based on the shared experience of colonial violence. Readings of recent literary works by Charlotte Williams and Nalo Hopkinson reveal the contemporary crafting of this relation around a heightened awareness of both presence and loss, history and imagination. Importantly, this gathering of sources and perspectives allows for an appreciation of the role that a reach toward Africa has played in articulations of Caribbeanness and its complex patterning of cultural co-belonging.

Genericity of Nondegenerate Critical Points and Morse Geodesic Functionals

We consider a family of variational problems on a Hilbert manifold parameterized by an open subset of a Banach manifold, and we discuss the genericity of the nondegeneracy condition for the critical points. Using classical techniques, we prove an abstract genericity result that employs the infinite dimensional Sard-Smale theorem, along the lines of an analogous result of B. White [29]. Applications are given by proving the genericity of metrics without degenerate geodesics between fixed endpoints in general (non compact) semi-Riemannian manifolds, in orthogonally split semi-Riemannian manifolds and in globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds. We discuss the genericity property also in stationary Lorentzian manifolds.

An existence theorem for G-structure preserving affine immersions

We prove an existence result for local and global G-structure preserving affine immersions between affine manifolds. Several examples are discussed in the context of Riemannian and semi-Riemannian geometry, including the case of isometric immersions into Lie groups endowed with a left-invariant metric, and the case of isometric immersions into products of space forms.

Från traditionellt akademiskt bibliotek till modern lärmiljö : Högskolan Dalarnas bibliotek – förväntningar och resultat

I denna rapport beskrivs idéerna bakom Högskolan Dalarnas prisbelönta bibliotek i Falun. Planerings- och byggprocessen beskrivs och det färdiga resultatet utvärderas, samt de erfarenheter som har gjorts delas.

Fall 2014

Inside this Issue: Archives Kickoff for Winthrop’s Integration CommemorationGiving Thanks … Dean HerringWoodfork ScholarshipActive Friends Member List for 2015Rudy Mancke to SpeakNote From the Chair … Dr. Jane WhiteMembership Form

Summer 2014

Inside this Issue: Bob Gorman RetiresKim Wright to SpeakWhy Friends Matter … Dean HerringActive Member List & Friends Fall ElectionMembership Application

Spring 2014

Inside this Issue: Friends Board Meets Baumgarte to SpeakInaugurations… — Dean HerringA Note From the Sec.- Treas. — Dr. FaulknerMember Application

Fall 2013

Inside this Issue: Friends Board Meets Gorman on Blue SoxGiving Thanks — Dean HerringA Note From the Chair — Dr. WeaverMember Application

Summer 2013

Inside this Issue: Bela and M.H. Herlong Book Talk Success of April 8Welcome New WU President ComstockMergers, Mayhem and More — Dean HerringA Note From the Chair — Dr. WeaverMember Application