“Trying to Blow All Life Through a Brass Trombone”: Ralph Ellison Preaches the Blues

Not only does Ralph Ellison's writing reflect his background as a musician who played European classics and Southwestern blues-based jazz, and whose fiction reflect the aesthetics of these worlds, but also his work reveals a vital connection to religion. It is O'Meally's contention that Ellison viewed the Negro spiritual and sermon, with their frequent namings of the troubles of the world, as never more than two steps from the blues—Ellsion's model and metaphor for American culture. Ellision blended the two forms in an aesthetic and philosophy of transcendence that needed both to ring true. The spiritual dimension that always underlies his project as a writer is explored and developed.     

Set this house on fire: the self-analysis of Raymond Carver

The convergence of features of Raymond Carver's short-story oeuvre and of psychoanalytic methodology suggests that Carver's writing served as the fulcrum and focus of a self-analytic experience. Within this model, his stories function as container and mirror of myriad aspects of the writer's self. Tracing the developmental arc of the contextual meanings of one motif--fire--through six stories and their ur-texts demonstrates gains comparable to certain analytic goals, including enhanced integration, accountability, and self-awareness. Over time, Carver's narratives of rage, impotence, and despair give way to a new story: of mourning, forgiveness, and the rekindling of hope.     

Do objects of different weight fall at the same time? Updating naive beliefs about free-falling objects from fictional and informational books in young children

This study examined whether children 4- and 5-years-old (N = 156) can revise a physical science misconception from different types of picture books. A realistic fiction book and informational book with identical images matched in word count and reading difficulty level were compared to a control book about plants. In the pretest and posttest, children were asked to make predictions about pairs of objects that either had the same or different weight. The pretest scores showed that many children began with the misconception that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Posttest scores revealed that children revised this misconception after reading the realistic fiction and informational picture books but not after reading the control book. These findings provide evidence that children as young as age 4 can acquire physical science knowledge from picture books and that both realistic fiction and informational books can be used effectively to expose children to science concepts.     

The New Testament gospels as Biblical rewritings

In 1993, in a discussion of fictionality and loyalty to tradition in the Gospel of Matthew, Ulrich Luz pointed out that the writer of Matthew had made substantial changes in the Jesus traditions as taken over from the Gospel of Mark and that in some cases he had even created traditions of his own. The author of Matthew thus consciously engaged in the fabrication of fiction. Nevertheless, according to Luz, throughout his narrative, he clearly expects his readers to accept the referentiality of what is related. This lack of awareness of the differences between fact and fiction places him outside the boundaries of ancient history writing. For parallels to this phenomenon, Luz points to the story of Moses in Deuteronomy and that of the patriarchs in Jubilees. These books, however, are examples of the “rewritten Bible.” This raises the question of whether, with regard to the question of referentiality, the New Testament gospels should be understood on the same presuppositions as the books normally categorized as “rewritten Bible,” and as different steps in a reception history through which the various traditions about Jesus were continually being rewritten and supplemented in accordance with changing theologies and churchly demands.     

Writer's block in a Chinese sample

To assess whether writer's block occurs in languages other than English, a Chinese language translation of Rose's Writer's Block questionnaire was administered to 98 university students in Taiwan. Analysis suggests that writer's block occurs for Chinese students, and, as in English, it is related to premature editing and to a lack of strategies for dealing with complex writing tasks.     

The power of ideas: esotericism,historicism, and the limits of discourse

This article is a response to the reviews by Giovanni Filoramo, Olav Hammer, Bernd-Christian Otto, Marco Pasi, and Michael Stausberg of Wouter J. Hanegraaff's book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. The author attempts to clarify his view of the relation between history and theory, and between intellectual history and discourse theory in particular; he provides a summary of his motivations for writing the book and of its main argument; he concludes by addressing a number of theoretical issues raised by the respondents.     

Annotations of research and clinical perspectives on cluttering since 1964

In 1964, Deso Weiss published his landmark text Cluttering, after much persuasion by Charles Van Riper to put his thoughts in writing regarding this enigmatic speech and language disorder (Van Riper, personal communication, 1992). To our knowledge, Weiss's book was the only book in English devoted entirely to cluttering. Nearly 30 years later, a second text entitled Cluttering: A Clinical Perspective was published (Myers & St. Louis, 1992). The following annotations summarize nearly all that has been written on cluttering since Weiss's classic publication in 1964.     

Balint's Influence on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Invited by the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York to lecture on my book Michael Balint: Le renouveau de l'Ecole de Budapest, Toulouse, Erès 2000, I first gave my personal and analytic motivations for writing this book. Then I stressed Balint's original contributions to analytical theory and practice: the object relation combined with the theory of instinct, the development of the infant, adolescent and even of old age, the basic fault, archaic defenses (such as ocnophilia and philobatism), as well as his idea about analytic treatment with its phases of regression and "new beginning". His style and his discretion in treatment and mainly the responsibility he recommended to the analysts seem to me very important not to forget. I have shown him as Ferenczi's heir and how he continued his work. His clinical approach and his style are evoked to alert contemporary analysts--who sometimes just know his method to train general practitioners through the Balint group--that they have been influenced unbeknown to them.     

What is a writing group? Dilemmas of the leader

A writing group can serve to reinforce literary and therapeutic goals. The model outlined here assumes a leader with literary and clinical training, including expertise in group dynamics. The group format is adapted to support exploration of the writer's main problem, the absence of the reader at the moment of writing. The group modifies the writer's "mythical" reader through member interactions with writer and writing. Giving and receiving feedback are central to the group process. The leader's dilemma in a bifocal form like this is to know when and how far to interpret group members' psychological issues. The best rule is to interpret "toward" the group (i.e., to bring up material that can be safely and readily processed there), but to be cautious about interpretation of patterns of early character formation.     

Definition and hypothesis in Plato's meno (III)

With the publication of The Social Frameworks of Knowledge? the English speaking world has at last been given a serious opportunity to approach the complex sociological thought of Georges Gurvitch. However, as the author himself admits in the Preface, this book appears ‘abstract and schematic particularly to the uninitiated’.1 The aim of this paper will be to try to relate this translated work to the main body of Gurvitch's writing and particularly to his stance in the sociology of knowledge. First I will examine the intellectual origins of his sociology of knowledge and his attitude to his predecessors in the field. Secondly I will compare his approach to the sociology of knowledge to that of P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann.     

Dave Eggers's a heartbreaking work of staggering genius: memoir as a "pain-relief device"

Dave Eggers's memoir is an important addition to the tradition of autobiography in America, and offers significant contributions to our understanding of creativity, sublimation, and the psychology of the memoir-writing process. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is really two books--an autobiographical narrative about unbearable suffering, and a book of psychoanalytic commentary on the challenges of writing a memoir about catastrophic loss and trauma. The main narrative suggests the psychological resilience it takes to contain unbearable suffering. The metanarrative renders transparent the mind of someone who is both remembering his losses and constantly reflecting upon the process of writing about them. Eggers's identification with authorship, rather than bereavement or traumatization, may have played an important role in containing his affect and his sense of self when the heartbreaking events were originally unfolding. But a price is paid when a son uses his art to construct a new identity as an author--unconscious conflicts, primitive affect, anxieties about failing, as well as guilt about succeeding--consequences often missed by readers. Heartbreaking is a palimpsest, a story about story-telling superimposed on tales of death and survival, but its messages will be missed unless all its parts are preserved when being read or studied.     

On Chomsky's Appraisal of Skinner's Verbal Behavior: A Half Century of Misunderstanding

The history of the writing of Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957), Chomsky's review (1959), and MacCorquodale's rebuttal (1970) are briefly summarized. Chomsky's recent reflections on his review are analyzed: Chomsky's refusal to acknowledge the review's errors or its aggressive tone is consistent with his polemical style but comes at a minor cost in consistency and plausibility. However, his remarks about the place of Skinner's work in science reveal misunderstandings so great that they undercut the credibility of the review substantially. The gradual growth in the influence of Skinner's book suggests that its legacy will endure.     

Henry M. Sheffer and Notational Relativity

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ‘lost’ book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book.     

Physicians and Gumshoes: Prescription for Bad Medicine, or the Man Who Didn't Like Doctors

Raymond Chandler, the creator of legendary detective Philip Marlowe and the recipient of increasing literary admiration over the past 40 years, used numerous physicians as minor characters in his novels and short stories. The presence of physicians as minor characters in Chandler's work, though unnoticed by previous critics, is illustrative both of the writer's personal antipathy towards medical doctors and larger societal forces which left medical charlatans free to open "clinics." Chandler's own chronic health problems and those of his wife Cissy may have contributed to the writer's negative attitude toward medicine and health care, though little is known of Chandler's personal interactions with physicians prior to his death in 1959.     

Peter Singer and Non-Voluntary 'Euthanasia': tripping down the slippery slope

ABSTRACT This article discusses the nature of euthanasia, and the way in which redevelopment of the concept of euthanasia in some influential recent philosophical writing has led to morally less discriminating killing/letting die/not saving being misdescribed as euthanasia. Peter Singer's defence of non-voluntary 'euthanasia'of defective infants in his influential book Practical Ethics is critically evaluated. We argue that Singer's pseudo-euthanasia arguments in Practical Ethics are unsatisfactory as approaches to determining the legitimacy of killing, and that these arguments present a total utilitarian improvement policy—not a case for non-voluntary euthanasia.     

Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before,during, and after reading

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.     

Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.     

ON LOVE AND MELANCHOLIA IN MARGUERITE DURAS'S AUTOFICTION

In the Durassian melancholic atmosphere, past and present, fantasy and reality come together as one. This paper addresses the themes of love and destruction in Marguerite Duras's life that pervade her oeuvre, allowing us to discern a melancholic structure within her autofiction. Writing down her melancholia—the impossible mourning of a loved object—Duras captures nothingness and loss—in order not to die of love. In a constant exchange with her readers, she searches for herself and delivers herself to her readers. This renewable creative process of writing enables her to engage in an ongoing experience of identity reconstruction, in a way similar to the patient in psychoanalysis re‐creating his/her life's fiction.     

The True Wilkomirski

The paper considers whether it matters that Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments is not, as he presented it, a genuine survivor account, but rather a fabrication or fiction. It matters in one way and it doesn't in another. It matters because the truth is important: both in general and with regard specifically to the Holocaust. However, that Fragments is a fiction also doesn't matter, for it can be read independently of its author's identity; can be read as being, indeed, fiction. Read thus, the book retains much of its power and quality as a narrative of what the memories of a child survivor might be. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.