Medbh McGuckian's source texts and the challenge to authorial identity in “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”

This article contends that Medbh McGuckian's “The Good Wife Taught her Daughter”, from her 2006 volume The Currach Requires No Harbours, offers an example of the poet's direct engagement with and rejection of negative commentary regarding her opaque style and incorporation of material from source texts. This article first presents a contextualising overview of the main strands of criticism of McGuckian's work. Following this, two detailed readings of this poem are offered. The first of these readings foregrounds McGuckian's challenge to the possibility of stable meaning in any linguistic act. The second reading identifies McGuckian's source texts and examines how their content and nature underline her deliberate destabilisation of identity and meaning.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.     

The technologies of distance: new migrations in Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King

This article analyses Conor O’Callaghan’s collection The Sun King as an expression of contemporary migration practices. It places the poet’s technological mobilities within larger global movements and argues that the collection reconfigures poetic versions of migration for the twenty-first century. The Sun King (2013) is located in explicitly transient spaces, while its formal innovations serve to mimeticise contemporary dislocation. In reinventing the dual demands of memory and migration in the postmodern society, The Sun King recognises and pursues alternative poetic possibilities. The article suggests that O’Callaghan’s Twitter-poem “The Pearl Works” can be read as indicative of an expansive impulse towards ephemeral online works. In particular, the article raises questions around composition, stability and memory practices in the digital era, and highlights how both migration and memory are complicated by technological innovations.     

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.     

Sources of variation in carnivore tooth-mark frequencies in a modern spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) den assemblage,Amboseli Park,Kenya

Distributions and frequencies of carnivore tooth-marks on large mammal long-bone fragments are commonly used to infer the timing of hominin and carnivore access to prey resources in archaeofaunal assemblages. The strength of these inferences, however, is limited by a broad and currently inexplicable range of tooth-mark frequencies across experimental and archaeological assemblages. Controlling for this variation first requires that the sources be identified. Several sources of variation are examined here in an analysis of tooth-marked bone recovered from a modern spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) den assemblage in Amboseli Park, Kenya. Results indicate that tooth-mark frequencies: (1) depend on fragment size, (2) vary across mammals of different size classes, (3) are highly variable across equivalent portions of different long-bone elements, and (4) on certain long-bone portions are correlated with bone density and can be depressed in archaeological assemblages subjected to density-mediated attrition. Stronger inferences based on tooth-mark frequencies will require that such variation be taken into consideration, and methods for doing so are suggested.     

Cut Mark Cluster Geometry and Equifinality in Replicated Early Stone Age Butchery

Early Stone Age cut marks created during tool‐assisted carnivory potentially offer inferences into hominin butchery behaviour and access to complete or defleshed carcasses. Actualistic butchery trials of 16 goat and cow half‐carcasses were completed by an experienced butcher with replicated Oldowan tools to investigate how the geometric organisation of cut mark clusters reflects flake versus core tool use and bulk muscle versus scrap defleshing. A cluster of cut marks is defined as a series of adjacent cut mark striations that occur at an anatomical location and are bounded by unmarked cortical surface. Tool type and butchery action were predicted to differentially mark certain long bone portions and influence cluster attributes. Moulds of 613 cut mark clusters were photographed and measured using ImageJ software (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA) for cluster area, cut mark count, median cut mark length and standard deviation of cut mark length and angle. Analysis suggests the following results: (i) cluster attributes are correlated;(ii) changes in cluster geometry are related to increasing cut mark count and length but not tool type or defleshed muscle amount; (iii) large clusters occur on large animals; and (iv) long bone midshaft portions are cut‐marked during both bulk and scrap muscle defleshing. Analysis of 179 cut mark clusters on long bone shafts of sizes 1–4 mammals from three Okote member assemblages at Koobi Fora, Kenya, shows that archaeological clusters have a similar number of marks when compared with experimental clusters but are significantly smaller, have shorter median marks and include less deviation in mark length and angle. Archaeological clusters corroborate that increasing area is positively correlated with cut mark count, median mark length and standard deviation of mark length and angle. A quantitative inferential model that links cut mark cluster geometry to tool type or the amount of muscle defleshed is not supported by these data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.     

The Zoutsteeg Three: Three New Cases of African Types of Dental Modification from Saint Martin,Dutch Caribbean

Dental modification was widely practiced in sub‐Saharan Africa as a form of cultural expression, and during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, it was regularly identified in enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas. Here, we report three new cases of African types of dental modification from the Caribbean island of Saint Martin that were recently encountered during construction activities in the Zoutsteeg area of Philipsburg, the capital of the Dutch half of the island. The artifacts associated with the burials indicate that they date to the late 17^th century, prior to the foundation of the town of Philipsburg in 1735. The dental evidence further suggests that the three individuals were born in Africa, as opposed to the Americas. This could be confirmed by tooth enamel strontium isotope measurements which yielded values that are inconsistent with an origin in the Caribbean but consistent with an origin in Africa. Unfortunately, neither the dental patterns nor the strontium isotope values allow us to determine their specific origins in Africa. However, both the methods used to modify the teeth and the isotope ratios suggest that the ‘Zoutsteeg Three’ originated in different parts of Africa. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changing patterns of carnivore modification in a landscape bone assemblage, Amboseli Park, Kenya

This study compares the landscape-scale taphonomic signal of carnivore modification to the surficial bone assemblage in Amboseli Park, Kenya as it was in 1975 and 2002–2004. Change in predator abundances over time provides a means of assessing the taphonomic signal of carnivore-mediated bone consumption and destruction under differing ecological conditions and varying levels of conspecific competition for resources. The landscape assemblage indicates taxonomic variation in the patterning of carnivore modification to ungulates of different size classes as well as within equivalent size classes. Analyses of long bone elements indicate that the differential destruction of limb ends and the strength of the correlation between limb end abundance and bone mineral density provide an indication of the intensity of carnivore modification to a faunal assemblage. The ability to infer levels of carnivore modification based on limb elements can provide faunal analysts with the tools to determine whether the taphonomic signals in the fossil record relate to carnivore modification, hominin transport of appendicular elements, or both.     

汉鼓吹铙歌第十八曲《石留》解

本文对一向认为“不可复诂”的汉鼓吹铙歌第十八曲《石留》作了新的解释,初步认定它是一首禽言诗。诗人通过两只鸟对待生活境遇的不同态度和行为的描写,批评了现实生活中那些意志薄弱,经不起考验,重利益而轻操守者;而对那些意志坚定,不为利益所动,矢志不渝者则给以了表扬。