Tom Stoppard’s Big Picture: The Chaos that is Our World

Abstract

Issues arising from discussions regarding the ‘two cultures’ of science and art are many and varied. Tom Stoppard’s very active utilization of science in many of his plays has resulted in his work — especially the quantum mechanics-informed Hapgood and the chaotics-informed Arcadia — being held up as paradigmatic of one science/art position or another. Often, critical approaches to these plays involve a checklist of scientific facts, implying that the goal of such art is to serve as a delivery device for scientific breakthroughs. While plays, novels, and movies of various sorts may have such goals in mind, Stoppard’s plays do not comfortably fill that agenda, critical arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither do Stoppard’s plays show particular interest in engaging any debate about the superiority of one ‘culture’ over the other. In his two ‘science plays’ in particular, what Stoppard offers is an enrichment of both science and art through metaphorical intertwinings that suggest experience is best served when both camps collaborate. The bigger picture that results argues an overlap in epistemology, namely revealing the uncanny similarity in which artist and scientist approach the material that is our universe.     

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.     

Science and the Fate of the Human Soul in Tom Wolfe

Abstract

This article investigates Tom Wolfe's assessment of the age-old debate between nature and nurture, the Cartesian mind–body problem, and the tensions between science, politics, and morality that result from the human struggle to explain what the components of a human being are. I begin with Wolfe's own study of what evolution and neuroscience tell us about the “Human Beast.” Wolfe is not certain that evolution tells the whole story of how human beings came to be who and what they are in the twenty-first century. Evolution got us to the point of speech but Wolfe is persuaded that at that point, evolution ended and speech took over. Speech, according to Wolfe, made the development of reason and ingenuity and the creation of culture possible. And it is culture, the shared set of human behavior, knowledge, and beliefs, manners, and mores, and, above all for Wolfe, status, which then informs human motivation and actions. Wolfe is open to the idea that neuroscience might eventually be able to explain every detail of how and why the human brain functions as it does but he is skeptical that it will be able to explain away completely the idea that each of us is an individual, striving for honor and success within our status sphere.     

Tyrtaeus and the Civilian Poet of the Crimean War

Recent scholarship has delved into the impact of newspaper press upon Crimean War poetry and highlighted the challenges of war representation facing non-combatant poets. The Crimean conflict (1854–56), this essay will show, was not only a ‘media war’ but also a ‘literary’ one, during which mid-Victorian commentators and poets consciously reworked an array of established traditions of war poetry, especially those of Tyrtaeus, the Greek martial poet of the seventh century, to negotiate the duties and artistic endeavours of the civilian poet. Tracing the construction of a ‘Tyrtaean’ tradition from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), it explores how a Romantic reworking of Tyrtaeus’ war songs served as a precedent for the civilian poets of the Crimean conflict, and how newspaper reports of the suffering of soldiers intensified a widespread scepticism of the civilian’s knowledge and bodily experience of war, which in turn instigated a reconfiguration of the ‘Tyrtaean’ poet. It argues that whilst the poetic efforts of Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Alfred Tennyson to refashion the figure of the civilian manifest Crimean War poets’ anxiety about their non-combatant status and the use of poetry, they evacuated the ‘Tyrtaean mode’, a poetic mode intended to arouse people’s patriotic sentiment and exhort them to military action, forging a new image of war poet within their work marked by the civilian’s detachment from the spectacle of war and critical engagement with distant suffering.     

霍邱县三桥古墓葬

霍邱县三桥古墓葬均为中小型墓,分为土坑墓、砖室墓两种,清理古墓葬21座,出土各类器物计160余件。这次发掘对研究西汉古墓葬分布规律和丧葬习俗有重要意义。     

‘Shrouded in Some Mystery’: The Governor General's Invitation and the 1983 Grenada Intervention

On 25 October 1983 the United States, supported by several Caribbean states, intervened militarily in the commonwealth Caribbean island of Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury followed the implosion of the Marxist-Leninist People's Revolutionary Government and execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several colleagues. This article examines the alleged request for external assistance made by the Grenadian governor general, Sir Paul Scoon. It will examine the discrepancies between Scoon's memoir account of the episode and the official record to reveal that Scoon made no such request. The origins of the request emerged from discussions between Caribbean and US officials and it was brought to fruition by the Barbadian prime minister, Tom Adams.     

When Druid went to jail: returned migrants,Irish prisoners,and Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming

Irish playwright Tom Murphy became Writer-in-Association with Druid Theatre of Galway, Ireland, in September 1983. The partnership began with Druid's production of Murphy's Famine (1968) in February 1984, and was followed by a lunchtime production of On the Outside (written in 1959 with Murphy's friend Noel O'Donoghue). Druid premiered Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985) in December 1985 and Conversations on a Homecoming in April 1985. Druid toured Conversations locally, nationally, and internationally for two and a half years. In February 1987, Druid presented the play at three Irish prisons. This article attempts to reveal how the prison audiences related to a play about a returned migrant; and to discover what prompted the professional company to perform in Irish prisons.     

‘Her – she,this woman,me’: the representation of subjectivity in Tom Murphy's Alice Trilogy

In this essay, I will discuss Murphy's exploration of the (un)bearable nature of an existence characterised by loss, and by longing, in his recent play sequence Alice Trilogy (2005). Positing the explicitly dualised characterisation in the first and third of these plays as a reflection of, and natural progression from, earlier dramaturgic representations of duality, I will examine Murphy's overt rendering of subjectivity, in Alice Trilogy, focusing upon the ways in which such theatrical duality explicates the silences which pervade the Purgatorial affective no-man's-land – or ‘in-betweenness’ – of mind, body, and soul.     

Nairn's England and the progressive dilemma: reappraising Tom Nairn on English nationalism

In British political and intellectual circles, there is a longstanding disagreement between those envisaging an opportunity for the development of a radical English patriotism and those resistant to the idea of a progressive English imaginary. Despite their antithetical quality, both divergent frameworks were explored in the work of Scottish nationalist and New Left intellectual Tom Nairn, long before mainstream social science preoccupied itself with the ‘English Question’. Notwithstanding his later espousal of Englishness as a contribution to democratic renewal, Nairn's earlier notion of an inherently regressive nationalism remains the dominant frame for many intellectuals and politicians confronted by the challenges of increasingly politicised English identities. Whilst he has been only one of a number of thinkers and writers who have informed and contested political thinking on this question in the UK, the influence of his early work upon liberal and left circles has been underestimated, an oversight that this article addresses.