Authorizing a tradition: Theory, criticism and (self-) canonization in French Caribbean writing

As critics have noted, Antillean literature has developed in tandem with a strong (self-) critical and theoretical body of work. The various attempts to theorize Antillean identity (négritude, antillanité, créolité) have been controversial and divisive, and the literary scene has been characterized as explosive, incestuous and self-referential. Yet writers aligned with, or opposed to, a given theory often have superior visibility. Meanwhile writers who claim to operate outside the boundaries of theory, such as Maryse Condé, are often canny theoretical operators who, from prestigious academic or cultural positions, manipulate readers’ responses and their own self-image through criticism. While recent polemics have helped to raise the critical stock of the islands generally, they have particularly enhanced the cultural capital of Chamoiseau and Condé, whose literary antagonism is in fact mutually sustaining. Both writers, through a strong awareness of (and contribution to) the critical field in which their work is read, position themselves as canonical authors.

'Neo-Latin Writing in the British Isles'

This chapter seeks to identify cultural and generic trends and authorial methodologies that may serve to unify or to differentiate between the histories of neo-Latin literature in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It considers ways in which Latin served to bridge horizontal spaces (both physical and metaphorical) between four British regions, between neo-Latin writers in Britain and their continental predecessors and peers, and between Latin and the respective vernacular(s). It also examines vertical spaces (both chronological and cultural) between the neo-Latin and the classical Latin text, and between the linear demarcations of ‘early modern’, ‘Augustan’ and ‘Romantic’. An assessment of links between nationhood and the neo-Latin text as evinced by anthologies, antiquarian and quasi-historical writing, is followed by examples of generic continuity and metamorphosis in the British neo-Latin pastoral, ode and epigram. The concluding sections offer two generic case-studies (neo-Latin epic and didactic) both of which, it is argued, engendered the birth of specifically British versions of the mock-heroic and mock-didactic.

All lads together? Racism, masculinity and multicultural/anti-racist strategies in a primary school

This article examines the articulation of racism and masculinity as manifest amongst infant children in a multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school. Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic study of the school, it will highlight some of the inherent problems of multicultural/anti-racist strategies which are not sufficiently grounded in an understanding of racism and how iti complexly interrelates with other systems of inequality, in this case gender. The article will show how many of the racist incidents and processes evident amongst the infant children can only be understood within the context of their expressions of masculinity. With this as a starting point, the article will go on to outline and assess one particular strategy of the school to try and engage older African/Caribbean boys through sports and particularly football. It will be shown how, as a result of this 'multicultural/anti-racist' strategy, a distinct masculine ethos has been created within the school which, ironically, provides a strong context for racist incidents to flourish. The article will conclude by arguing for a more complex and context-specific understanding of racism and will reiterate the concerns of a number of black feminist writers of the early 1980s that strategies to combat racism can only be successful alongside strategies addressing all forms of subordination.

This is Not a Photo Opportunity: Verbal/Visual Struggle in Francophone Travel Narratives

This article explores the ethics and aesthetics of representing travel and intercultural encounter in textual and photographic forms. Taking as its starting point two textual accounts of journeys in the course of which photographic narratives were also produced, the article explores the possibilities and limitations of textuality and visuality and thus considers the implications of, or new opportunities afforded by, reading – and ultimately publishing – these narratives as iconotexts. Focusing on Pierre Loti's L'Inde (sans les Anglais) (1901) and Ella Maillart's Oasis interdites (1937), the article also offers an alternative perspective on writers whose work is commonly associated with an imperialist or exoticist discourse, with cliché and one-dimensionality. As such, it aims to replace the monolithic, orientalist vision often attributed to these writers with ambiguity, ethical hesitation and a plurality of perspectives. Using these examples as a springboard, the article seeks to argue that verbal/visual mobility in narratives representing mobility contributes to resisting static, monolithic perceptions of other cultures. Using the work of British graffiti artist Banksy as a foil for exploring photography as cultural commodification and art as commodity, the article also seeks to engage with current debates in Humanities research on ekphrasis and iconotextuality and on the problematics of representing other cultures within an ethical and/or humanist frame.

The 'Unhomely' White Women of Antillean Writing

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly inflected by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers (Condé, Placoly, Confiant, Chamoiseau). In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha’s ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history.

Berryman, Sexton and the Possibilities of Poetic Language

This paper examines a select number of poems by Middle Generation poets John Berryman and Anne Sexton in relation to questions of death, silence and the task that literature sets itself as understood in key works by Blanchot, Heidegger, and Levinas. Rather than recourse to the overtrodden critical path of confessional interpretations of their work, this paper connects Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969) and two Sexton poems (‘Oh’ and ‘The Silence’) to the philosophical determinations of what it is language can say and what demands literature makes of the writer prepared to risk their own being in answer to its call. Central issues such as suicide and the originating silence of the work of art are intricately interwoven with Berryman’s and Sexton’s work. Leaving aside their biographies, and by approaching suicide as a philosophical problem with which their poetry wrestles, a restructured approach to their work becomes available. The impulse to suicide and the mental processes involved in considering and committing the act are instincts and responses located within an individual’s own psychology. For these writers particularly such issues are sited within a philosophical debate about language, what it can and cannot represent. If poetry articulates language’s argument about its own capability, it is the ideal forum for philosophical confrontations with the possibilities of existence as represented by the grave decision to take one’s own life. © The Author 2013.

Obfuscation: The Hidden Malware

A cyberwar exists between malware writers and antimalware researchers. At this war's heart rages a weapons race that originated in the 80s with the first computer virus. Obfuscation is one of the latest strategies to camouflage the telltale signs of malware, undermine antimalware software, and thwart malware analysis. Malware writers use packers, polymorphic techniques, and metamorphic techniques to evade intrusion detection systems. The need exists for new antimalware approaches that focus on what malware is doing rather than how it's doing it.

Uses of expertise:Sources, quotes, and voice in the reporting of genetics in the news

Science journalists call upon experts for background and for clarification and comment on scientific findings. This paper examines how science writers choose and use experts, and it focuses on several cases of reporting about genetics and behavior. Our research included two sources of data: interviews with 15 science reporters and three print media samples of coverage of genetics and behavior - alcoholism (between 1980-1995), homosexuality (in 1993 and 1995), and mental illness (between 1970-1995). Science reporters seek relevant and specific experts for nearly every story. Good sources are knowledgeable, are connected to prestigious institutions, are direct and articulate and don't overqualify statements, and they return phone calls. The mean number of experts quoted was 2.8 per story, differing for alcoholism (3.5), homosexuality (2.8), and mental illness (2.6). Researchers and scientists predominated among experts quoted. Quotes were used to provide context, give legitimization, as explication, to provide a kind of balance, and to outline implications. For the homosexuality sample, a significantly greater percentage of activists and advocates were quoted (21 percent compared with 5 percent and 1 percent in other samples, X <0.0001). "Lay" quotes for alcoholism and mental illness were minimal. Except for homosexuality, whose advocates are organized, those "affected" do not have a voice in genetics news stories.

Through the lens of the hospital magazine - Downshire and Holywell psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s

An exploration of the pages of two psychiatric hospital magazines, Speedwell from Holywell Hospital, Antrim, and The Sketch from Downshire Hospital, Downpatrick, reveals the activity filled lives of patients and staff during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of great change in mental health care. It was also a time of political turbulence in Northern Ireland. With large in-patient populations, both hospitals had a range of occupational and sporting activities available to patients and staff. The magazines formed part of the effort to promote the ethos of a therapeutic community. While hospital magazines may be viewed as one aspect of an institutional system that allowed people to cut themselves from the wider society, they also provided opportunities for budding writers to express their views on life in a hospital from the service user perspective. As such they offer some valuable insights into the lives of psychiatric patients.

Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival”

Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine:'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine is inspired by the ongoing critical fascination with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the burgeoning recognition of its centrality to the Romantic age. Though the magazine itself was published continuously for well over a century and a half, this volume concentrates specifically on those years when William Blackwood was at the helm, beginning with his founding of the magazine in 1817 and closing with his death in 1834. These were the years when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1832, Blackwood's reigned as 'an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters.' The magazine placed itself at the centre of the emerging mass media, commented decisively on all the major political and cultural issues that shaped the Romantic movement, and published some of the leading writers of the day, including Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Galt, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

'This much-needed volume reminds us not only why Blackwood's was the most influential periodical publication of the time, but also how its writers, writings, and critical agendas continue to shape so many of the scholarly concerns of Romantic studies in the twenty-first century.' - Charles Mahoney, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
'A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own': A Passage to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; R.Morrison & D.S.Roberts
PART I: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS
Beginning Blackwood's: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile; P.Flynn
John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood's: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press; T.Richardson
From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood's and the London Magazine; D.Higgins
Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines; R.Morrison
Selling Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1834; D.Finkelstein
PART II: BLACKWOOD'S CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Blackwood's 'Personalities'; T.Mole
Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the 'Blackwood's School' of Criticism; N.Mason
Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity; D.Stewart
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh; W.Christie
The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817-1841; D.Kelly
Prosing Poetry: Blackwood's and Generic Transposition, 1820-1840; J.Camlot
PART III: BLACKWOOD'S FICTIONS
Blackwood's and the Boundaries of the Short Story; T.Killick
The Edinburgh of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg's Fiction; G.Hughes
'The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine'; M.Schoenfield
PART IV: BLACKWOOD'S AT HOME
John Wilson and Regency Authorship; R.Cronin
John Wilson and Sport; J.Strachan
William Maginn and the Blackwood's 'Preface' of 1826; D.E.Latané, Jr.
All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans's Edinburgh Noctes; N.Sweet
PART V: BLACKWOOD'S ABROAD
Imagining India in Early Blackwood's; D.S.Roberts
Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood's, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad; A.Jarrells
Selected Bibliography
Index

ROBERT MORRISON is Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His book, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He has edited writings by Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and John Polidori.
DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (2000), and major critical editions of Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama; the latter was cited as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition by the MLA. He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone's novel The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for the Early Irish Fiction series.

The Musical Body: Devising a choreo-musical interpretation for the work Tierkreis (1974-75) by Karlheinz Stockhausen

In this chapter the authors explore a practice-led approach to understanding the role of the body in music performance.

Many writers have discussed the body in music performance, in improvised music, as well as in electronic music. In this chapter the authors offer new modalities of reflection on the musical body in the interpretation of existing contemporary repertoire. Specifically, the authors discuss a re-interpretation of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's musical work 'Tierkreis'. Through the development of a specifically physical approach to the performance, the authors investigate the intrinsic relationship between the body and the music and point to an under-explored modality, which is not a musical choreography, but a choreography that is shaped through the musical body itself. It is a modality in which music itself propels forward choreographic ideas, the body becoming the driving force behind musical interpretation. The authors' thinking is influenced by Susan Kozel’s understanding of performance as an ecosystem (Kozel 2007) and framed within a subjective account of musical embodiment.

By merging theory with praxis the authors offer a deeper understanding of the role of the body in music performance and consider how such contributions might lead to new and exciting interpretive frameworks for existing musical repertoires.

Knowledge, innovation and emulation in the evolutionary thought of Bernard Mandeville

Of the early modern writers on the division of labour, Bernard Mandeville alone extended it to all aspects of human activity and emphasised its role in a cumulative process of evolution in which each generation modified and built on what had been achieved by earlier generations. This required exploration of the mechanisms through which new knowledge was developed as well as the means by which knowledge was transmitted between the generations. The present article examines Mandeville’s treatment of these mechanisms and explores their theoretical origins. It examines Mandeville’s understanding of the role of the division of labour in facilitating discovery and learning and the role of education and imitation in transmitting social knowledge. It shows that, for Mandeville, innovators were people of ordinary capacity who were alert to the opportunities and challenges of their environment. As a result of specialisation, they possessed tacit knowledge which was actualised in what they did rather than in theoretical propositions. Mandeville’s evolutionary thought influenced subsequent writers on political economy and evolutionary social thinkers. It may also have had some influence on Charles Darwin, though it is not, in itself, Darwinian. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

Fabricating Economic Development

This paper is concerned with the institutions of Irish economics; it is structured around two arguments each of which links to the thesis presented in Garvin’s Preventing the future (2004). Overall it will be demonstrated that Irish economics was shaped by intellectual trends experienced within economic thought globally as well as the social considerations that were peculiar to Ireland. The evidence presented indicates that firstly while Economic Development mattered to the Irish economy it did not matter for the reasons that most writers have suggested it did. It is argued for instance that much of the literature, regardless of academic discipline, presents the publication of Economic Development in 1958 as analogous to a “big bang” event in the creation of modern Ireland. However, such a “big bang” perspective misrepresents the sophistication of economic debates prior to Whitaker’s report as well as distorting the interpretation of subsequent developments. The paper secondly, by drawing on the contents of contemporary academic journals, reappraises Irish economic thinking before and after the publication of Economic Development. It is argued that an economically “liberal” approach to Keynesianism, such as that favoured by TK Whitaker and George O’Brien, lost out in the 1960s to a more interventionist approach: only later did a more liberal approach to macroeconomic policy triumph. The rival approaches to academic economics were in turn linked to wider debates on the influence of religious authorities on Irish higher education. Academic economists were particularly concerned with preserving their intellectual independence and how a shift to planning would keep decisions on resource allocation out of the reach of conservative political and religious leaders.