The life style of Chinese scholars in the years of political turbulence - Examinations of Li Sichun’s Jinling Diary,Wu Mi’s Diary and Hu Shi’s Diary

After the abolishment of China’s Imperial Examination System and the founding of the Republic of China, the exterior mode of the Chinese scholars’ life, such as their academic research and ways of making a living, changed dramatically, but their real life style, including their habits, hobbies and tastes, did not show fundamental change. From the unpublished diary of an important but non-famous scholar Li Sichun of Sichuan University, with a close reference of Wu Mi’s and Hu Shi’s diary at approximately the same time, one can see that Chinese scholars kept their traditional literate life style and tastes until the 1940s. Therefore, we can make a conclusion that the social transition did not affect many scholars’ real life as profound as many present studies have claimed.     

Deviations from the known route: writing and walking in Ciaran Carson's Belfast

Considered as a whole the work of Ciaran Carson is perhaps distinguished above all by its sheer miscellaneity, but within this catholic remit of interests the city of Belfast continues to occupy a central place, manifesting itself in complex and various forms. Disclosing a dialectic of recollection and revision at its centre, Carson's work balances a desire to record everything about the city, and thereby to know Belfast in its totality, against the necessity of knowing it in terms of its provisional details and contingent multiplicity. This fundamental tension can be explored through his variations upon the theme of walking in the city, a mode of perceiving and navigating urban space that precludes any privileged position of detached objectivity in favour of active engagement in the writing and re-writing of the city-text. Moreover, I argue that whilst Carson's writing contains unusally sophisticated representations of Belfast as both labyrinth and panopticon, walking in the city also implies for him an utopian spatial politics through which resistance to state surveillance and paramilitary terror might be both imagined and effected.     

宋诗词义拾诂(下)

本文从《全宋诗》中选取若干词目,并考释其干宋时的意义。宋诗里的许多词目,表面意义普通而实际意义非常特珠,为阅读构成一定障碍,很有考释必要。这是一项大型研究宋诗语言计划其中一个课题的证验之作。     

This Is Not an Improvisation: Letitia Landon and the Slipperiness of Taxonomy

ABSTRACT

Writing in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe (1928–29) and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice (1825), the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” captured and rendered in printed words by Landon (who ventriloquizes that speech), can neither “be” nor even “represent” a work produced (“performed”) in visual art or vocal song. In her long poem Landon effectively creates a literary trompe l’oeil, an illusion that depends for its “completion” upon the reader’s implied participation in that performative act of completion. In the process, Landon’s poem reveals the fundamental incompatibility of improvisational literary production with the performative nature of improvisation.     

《白石道人诗说》伪托说考辨与南宋诗坛风气演变

《白石道人诗说》历来被认为是姜夔所作,但姜夔却在《诗说自序》中说此书得自山中＂异人＂。通过对姜夔及其友人的诗词分析,可知姜夔在淳熙丙午遇见隐士一事为真。《白石道人诗说》有可能是姜夔在他人的诗学思想影响下完成的。这与姜夔诗学思想的转变以及南宋中期诗坛风气的转变有着密切的关系。     

Cuerpo y nación a través del poema "Su cuerpo es una isla en escombros" de Domingo de Ramos

This article is devoted mainly to one poem, "Su cuerpo es una isla en escombros," by Domingo de Ramos (1960), and its relationship to the Peruvian armed conflict that lasted from 1980 to 2000. The article focuses on one incident, the Peruvian prison massacre of June 1986. As part of the analysis, poetry by Alejandro Romualdo (1926-2008) and the Andean myth of the Inkarri are also used. The article shows how Domingo de Ramos's poetry, like similar work by other Peruvian poets, participates in a long tradition that uses the body as a space to represent sociohistorical processes.     

S. Weir Mitchell’s Prose and Poetry on the American Civil War

The prose and poetry of S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) – related to the American Civil War – encompass a very significant portion of his non-medical writings. The Civil War, more than any other single event, shaped his future career as one of the founders of American neurology. Indeed, it should not be surprising how the war was also such a driving force in his non-medical writings. His novels, once widely read, now are scarcely noted. His accounts of the social, political and economic events of the Civil War are of historical interest to students of the period. Neuroscientists as a group, like others, are apt to be unfamiliar with these writings, with the possible exception of “The Case of George Dedlow.” A major purpose of this essay is to introduce readers, especially neuroscientists, to Weir Mitchell’s fictional works in which neurological cases so often appear. One appreciates more the medical aspects of his novels, written as they were by a first-hand observer. His non-medical writings, poetry and prose, are to a large extent timeless and can be appreciated by today’s readers.     

浅谈柳与中华传统文化

在中华传统文化中,“柳”具有深厚的文化内涵,与它有关的姓氏、诗词和风俗等文化蕴含着丰富的知识和有趣的故事,从而形成独具中国特色柳文化。     

Varia

No modern edition of the couplet Venena magnum fas nefasque non valent/ convertere humanam vicem is satisfactory, either in text or in interpretation. Editors print either the magnum of the codices or the miscent proposed by Garnsey and Giangrande; neither is adequate. The author recommends Haupt's conjecture maga non (Venena maga non fas nefasque, non valent/ convertere humanam vicem).