Journal articles on the topic 'Modern classic kids books'

This paper seeks to situate Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s Natural History in the context of the development of early modern English science. While Holland’s Pliny has traditionally been studied in terms of the early modern reception of the Classics, the establishment of an English rhetoric of translation and the development of English prose, this paper focuses on the discursive and paratextual strategies at work in Holland’s rendering of the botanical and medical books of Pliny’s Natural History. Drawing on and broadening Genette’s definition of paratexts as liminary spaces of authorial—or translatorial—control and self-fashioning, the paper explores the complexities of Holland’s self-defined translation project as the “divulging” of Pliny’s medical and botanical knowledge to a broadened readership. Whereas the prefaces to both volumes of the Natural History rely on the rhetoric of utilitas, or usefulness, to span the spectrum of potential readers, from schoolchildren and “inferior readers” to Humanist scholars and physicians, a closer analysis of the marginal annotations in books XIX to XXVII of the Natural History shows Holland integrating the Continental tradition of learned commentary denouncing the factual, interpretive, and methodological errors in Pliny’s treatise. It is argued that the resulting tension between text and paratext, and between Holland’s prefaces and other kinds of liminary material, ultimately reflects changing attitudes towards ancient science, and the very nature of scientific knowledge in early modern England.

In today’s racially charged, post-election atmosphere it has become more important than ever to recognize and root out subversive and persistent forms of racism, especially racism geared toward society’s most impressionable members: children. In the book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, Philip Nel discusses in five chapters various ways that classic and modern children’s literature continues to perpetuate white supremacy. While not denying that children’s media has made great strides toward promoting a more diverse view, Nel insists and supports the idea that there is “legacy racism” promoted by classic children’s literature.

This research discusses daily reckoning of the Qibla with rubu’ mujayyab. A special discussion about the shadows of the Qibla using rubu’ mujayyab also does not yet exist in the classic books that examine rubu’ mujayyab. The discussion only reaches the determination of the Qibla direction. The study employs library research that is descriptive comparative.The results of the study show first, that the daily qibla method of reckoning with rubu’ mujayyab can be categorized as classic reckoning because it uses data and calculating devices which are classified as classic tools. However, the theory and system of calculation is based on the modern astronomical formula using rubu’ mujayyab. The shadow calculation of this Qibla does not use the place longitude and the equation of time, so the result of the calculation is istiwa’ time. Secondly, the accuracy of the shadows of Qibla with rubu’ mujayyab when compared to contemporary reckoning methods using ephemeris data and scientific calculators shows a difference of 1-4 minutes.

<p><em>This paper reviews the position of the Quran as al-Muhaymin toward the other religious scriptures. Specifically, the study focuses on Q.S. al-Mâidah [5]: 48, which explicitly contains the word “al-muhaymin”. That word in the mentioned surah triggers the polemics among mufassir and starts the discussion on its relation with the authenticity of the other previous holy books. Some relate the books’ authenticity with naskh and taḥ</em><em>rîf that leads to the claim of falsification within those books. By interpreting the word “al-muhaymin”, the author attempts to objectively re-comprehend the bond between the Quran and the previous holy books. By tracing the classic and modern tafsîr books, the author assumes that the Quran is the continuation of other books revealed by Allah in advance. The connection of the Quran and the previous books is as the sharia revealed by Allah to people with the similar universal principles. In this case, God and the principles within those books are the same, yet, it is formulated by the law which is dissimilar in the context. Both the Quran and the previous holy books have the same purpose that is to assure people’s safety and happiness.</em></p>

The article is devoted to the problem of genre-style modifications of modern Ukrainian documentary literature on Euromaidan (2013−2014) and armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine (2014−2020). An example of the book “Chronicle of Eyewitnesses: Nine Months of Ukrainian Resistance” (2014, the author of the project — O. Zabuzhko, compiler — T. Teren) explores the content and form of the collective chronicle (eyewitnesses chronicle) genre. It is noted that the posts of 150 authors, placed on various Internet resources and selected for the book, are structured according to the logic of the development of the classic plot. The texts present a diverse range of images of Euromaidan participants. The description of the events is expressed by original artistic means and vivid emotions. Collection of essays «Point Zero» by Artem Cech represents the narrative of a writer who participated in the ATO in 2015−2016. It is a “self-portrait of the artist”, in which the author makes an objective analysis of his subjective war experience. Both books are a kind of objective artistic and emotional document of the era.

An unorthodox classic. The esthetics of a book in Andrzej Heidrich’s worksGraphic design in Poland after World War II has not been completely explored so far. This article de­scribes the state of graphic design during the Polish People’s Republic period as well as presents the life and work of Andrzej Heidrich — one of the leading designers of that time. It shows his artistic versatility, which manifests itself in designing such varied works as books, banknotes, bookplates, postage stamps, identity papers and more. The main purpose of this article is to present one of Heidrich’s work aspects — the book design. The conclusions show that Heidrich is the advocateof clas­sic solutions, developed by former printing masters. However, he attempts to modify some elements, making them modern and original.

Da'wah on the basis of inviting humans back to their original nature, accepts the oneness and divinity of Allah SWT. This task is not only mandated for the Prophets and Apostles, but is mandated for humanity who have believed in Him. The stories translated in Surat al-Kahf with the preachers of non-Prophets and Apostles, are the best examples of devotees who support the exploration of preaching that need to be explored by instructions, lessons and substantive messages to be spoken and practiced at this time. This limits the research studies on the verses on the four stories in Surat al-Kahf which contain the essence of the fiqh of da'wah, and does not discuss the details of the stories because this has been extensively studied and discussed in classic or modern commentary books.

By indicating general problems of the studies of defterology in contemporary Ottoman studies, this paper aims at elaborating the principles of postclassical defterology, which is connected with the transition period of the Ottoman Empire. By presenting the existing scientific achievements and focusing on the very procedure of making inventories, the paper defines the access framework for the study of Ottoman inventory books – the defters. Postclassical defterology is defined through the process of fiscal transformation and specific parameters that characterize the existing historiographical research. The case study of defters for the Smederevo sanjak from 1741 is used to illustrate the classic model of postclassical methodology. Special attention was focused on the issue of credibility which burdens the modern approach to defterology. The problem of fictitious archive material is isolated as the dominant paradigm of all further socio-economic studies of postclassical defterology.

One of the founders of modern ecology, environmental science, ecological engineering and economics, H.T. Odum, passed away on 11 September 2002 in Gainesville, Florida, from cancer at the age of 78. He died less than a month after the death of his older brother and long-time collaborator, Eugene P. Odum. The two brothers published the classic ecological textbook of the early 1950s (Odum 1953; H.T. Odum's role was not credited until an acknowledgement page in the 3rd edition, published in 1971), one of the first modern holistic views of ecology, ecosystems and human impacts. Among numerous other prizes and awards, they jointly won the Crafoord Prize in 1987, equivalent to a Nobel Prize in ecology, and the Prize of the Institut de la Vie in Paris in 1976. Howard Odum produced 15 books, nearly 300 articles and was chairman for nearly 100 doctoral dissertations of which 75 were during his tenure at the University of Florida from 1970. His students are leaders in many fields of environmental science. His ashes were scattered in the Howard T. Odum Memorial Cypress Swamp, a cypress dome near the University of Florida campus that he donated to the University for research purposes.

Harm de Blij was one of the most influential scholars in the field of geography. Few modern geographers have accomplished more to advance a public appreciation for the field. He was known primarily for his work in geopolitics, regional geography, and environmental geography, and he published well over 100 articles and books on these subjects. He was also known for his love of fine wine. In 1983, de Blij published Wine: A Geographic Appreciation, a groundbreaking book and bestseller, which, in part, set the stage for the study of the geography of wine and viticulture. This paper examines de Blij’s 1983 tome, including a brief examination of the political, economic, and cultural elements of wine geography followed by a focused discussion of the book’s influence on the physical geography of viticulture. Ultimately, this paper considers the impact and legacy of Wine: A Geographic Appreciation, a classic in physical geography, as the subfield of wine geography continues to develop.

Abstract: Education is possibly to have people attain the perfection of life both in their relationship with God, fellow human beings and nature. A well relationship is only possible if people have a balance between their orientation in the world and in the hereafter. Therefore, in order to achieve the aforementioned objective, they should have adequate religious education and general equally through educational institutions. One of the Islamic educational institutions is a dormitory or boarding school where students (Islamic pupils) learn to improve the Islamic religion. Education on Islamic educational institutions also aims to establish a generation of believers-Muslim virtuous, health, broad-minded, and social, rise intelligent scholars who have equal devotions and thought, as well as establish nationalism of Indonesian citizen who have a faithful and pious to Allah Almighty. In general, Islamic educational institutions are classified into three categories: a) traditional pesantren (Salaf), which still retains the traditional teaching methods and teaching materials with classic books (yellow book), b) modern pesantren (khalaf), which seeks to fully integrate the classical and the current school and university system, and 3) semi salaf and khalaf Islamic schools who defend the teaching of classical Islamic books, as well as open public educational institutions (formal or non-formal education).

Modern age has provided great opportunities in all domains of people's lives, but it has also generated unexpected obstacles; one of which is a negative change in the concept of beauty in society. The new emerging tendency of people to appear like a supermodel in social media and to draw the interest of others by adding beauty filters not only sends an ambiguous message about beauty, but also produces a false claim of appearance where teenagers like to 'fake it.' Beauty has always been the contentious subject in most fictional works and specially in fairy tales. Classic fairy tales portray their heroine as a beautiful being, a picture-perfect substance. They are celebrated not for their confidence or bravery, but for their outward appearance, clothing and jewels. Thus, every girl child has a fantasy of finding a Fairy God Mother who can turn her into a stunning, attractive princess and only then, they can meet their prince charming and happily ever after. But things are not the same, they don’t have God Mother or they don’t want to remain as a beautiful angel, rather, they want to be ordinary with full of courage and confidence to fight back to any evil. They don’t need any prince charming to fight for her rather they want to fight for their own. This paper will study the contrast between the classical and modern story of Cinderella in Children Literature and also explore how the concept of beauty is changing in the modern books and fairy tales.

In the article «Genre dominants of Belorussian documentary: A. Adamovich’s and S. Alexievich’s experience» the author analyzes the concept of «documentary», «document» and «fact» in different scholars. The research deals with the process of formation of Belorussian national artistic-documentary proseon the basis of the works of Belorussian authors A. Adamovich «The Blockade book» (co-authored with D. Granin), «Out of the Fire» (co-authored with J. Bryl’ and V. Kolesnyk) and S. Alexievich «The Unwomanly Face of War…». The author reveals historical and ideological connections between these books, in which human voices are composed into a single complete whole, possessing a certain set of genre properties that manifest themselves both at the content and form levels.The focus is on distinguishing innovative features of the genre compared to «classic» documentary of the first half of the 19th century.The researcher views main peculiarities of the narrative, the author’s position while presenting eyewitness accounts, which may bе either objective or subjective. Composition, topic of the work and author’s foundation of the chosen structure are described. In the article there isthe investigation of the history of documentary genre, the reasons for its transformation and the specifics of modern «choir of voices» interpretation. The author of the article also refers to the ambiguous reception of S. Alexievich work by modern Ukrainian writers J. Andruhovich, J. Vynnychuk and O. Zabuzhko.

Prof. Dr. Ing. Gheorghe Maria from University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPBuc.), Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering is a valuable scientist in Romania, being the successor and continuer of the Romanian school of (bio)chemical reactors and reaction engineering, but also the creator of novel courses in the (bio)chemical engineer curricula at UPBuc. His research interests include a wide range of classic but also modern border fields, namely (bio)chemical reactors, kinetic modelling, bioinformatics, chemical reactors risk analysis, modelling dynamics of cell metabolic processes, of gene regulatory circuits, and of controlled drug release. Following the large number of international cooperations (20), its scientific productivity is impressive, including over 230 papers in ISI journals and intl. Conferences, 11 ISBN books (RO,USA), 5 teaching books (UPBuc., RO), and 6 ISBN book chapters abroad. Their practical realizations include the design and putting into operation of an industrial plant in Romania (at Petrochemical works /Refinery Brazi-Ploiesti, Romania, PWBP,1985), of a lab-scale pilot plant in Switzerland (Paul Scherer Inst., 1992-1998), or a safety-based optimization of a semi-batch (SBR) reactor (at CIBA-Novartis, Basel, 1994-1996). Based on these multiple contributions, it can be stated that Prof. Maria has had a significant impact on the science and the practice of Chemical and Biochemical Reaction Engineering in Romania and world-wide, his publications being well cited (Hirsch index 20, I10 index 49, more than 1400 citations). In 2019 he joined (unanimously by votes) the Romanian Academy. as a correspondent member.

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital is a classic that has long outlived the conjuncture in American capitalism that it described. In a deep and scholarly way, its authors exposed the deep structure of that capitalism, which determined the dynamics of the system and therefore those "surface" phenomena of unemployment and poverty—symptoms not of any functional malaise in capitalism (the "market failures" beloved by academic economists), but of the very way in which modern capitalism works. The authors of the book may therefore be forgiven for providing only the lightest sketch of the ideas and theories they used in their analysis. In this essay, I try to uncover some of those ideas and theories to show how they represent a shift from the analysis in Sweezy's earlier work the Theory of Capitalist Development, and how the two books are linked to the ideas of Karl Marx in a way that can only be understood through the work of Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl. Baran and Sweezy knew and admired Kalecki and Steindl and, as I will try to show, continued what might be called Marx's "project" very much in their spirit.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The emergence of various interpretations of the legacy of Volodymyr Shynkaruk is caused not only by the texts of the classic of modern Ukrainian philosopher and facts from the histo-ry of philosophical thought development in Ukraine in the second half of the 20th century, but also by the struggle of various narratives that already exist or are offered by philosophers to tell about the fate of philosophy in Kyiv in Soviet and post-Soviet times. The discussion about the identity of Volodymyr Shynkaruk's philosophy arose in the late 1990s and early 2000s in connection with the publication by V.H. Tabachkovskyi of a number of articles and chapters in books devoted to the interpretation of the figure of V. Shynkaruk as the founder of the Kyiv anthropological school. Vitalii Tabachkovskyi tried to substantiate and reveal a cer-tain narrative about the Kyiv Philosophical School as the central mainstream in the philo-sophical sixties, as well as a narrative about the phenomenon of philosophical sixties as a kind of manifestation of liberalism and dissidence regarding the official ideology and philos-ophy. Many distortions of the true meaning of the texts of Kyiv philosophers occurred through reading them not in their own context and meanings, but through guessing what similar philosophical concepts are in world thought. Vitalii Tabachkovskyi's method of anal-ogies and his attempts to look at Volodymyr Shynkaruk's work through the prism of analo-gies with modern trends develop in his book and many articles. Despite the desire to posi-tively accept Vitalii Tabachkovskyi's reasoning about Volodymyr Shynkaruk's philosophical views, we cannot do this, as his reflections at certain points obviously contradict Volodymyr Shynkaruk's texts.

In African studies the potential for collaboration between students of history and those of material culture or art has long been recognized. On the one hand, items of material culture, both ancient and modern, can shed light on aspects of the past which remain obscure in written and oral sources; on the other, in order to see a material culture (or parts of it) in perspective, we need to study the historical background of the area concerned. The contribution of material culture to historical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa has received considerable attention; but the same can hardly be said of the use of historical sources in understanding material culture.This does not mean that such sources have been neglected. Most of them certainly were in the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods, but things have improved. In many recent books, articles, and exhibitions devoted to Africa's material culture, considerable use has been made of the writings and engravings of early European visitors. Scholars are delighted if they can discover old records of anything resembling the objects that are today found either in museums or still in use in Africa. Indeed, it has become almost obligatory to search old books for textual and visual material. No historian can object to this interest in early sources. Yet looking at what has been published recently, one wonders whether we have nearly reached the end of the road. The same classic travelers' accounts are cited again and again (even the same passages!), and it is beginning to look as if this source of information will soon run dry. What, if anything, remains to be done?

Wonders in Italian Renaissance Cookery As early as the 1st century C.E., food writers and cooks were devising illusions and theatrical presentations using food and culinary formulas. Roman gourmet Apicius' famous dish "Anchovies without Anchovies" and his utterance that "no one will know what he is eating" are (literally) classic examples of such "culinary wonders." In recent memory, illustrious chefs like Escoffier at the Savoy in London (who recreated a naval tragedy using poached chicken escalopes) and Abe Lebewohl of the Second Avenue Deli in New York City (who built a replica of the World Trade Center Twin Towers using chopped chicken livers) have made truly extraordinary--if not tasteful--contributions in this field of culinary arts. Such artifice and conceits found what was perhaps their greatest expression during the Italian Renaissance when the author of the "first modern cookery book," Maestro Martino of Como, documented a series of mirabilia gulae or "wonders of culinary indulgence," including a roast peacock that appears to be alive and spews fire and fishes that appear to swim in a suspended gelatin aquarium. A survey of his and his contemporaries' recipes reveals that the wholly new genre of culinary writing emerged together with the many other "secret books" of the Italian Renaissance, including miscellanea by famous Renaissance figures like Luca Pacioli.

The article is devoted to modern comics, which are considered as a kind of “laboratory” for experiments in the field of visual narratives, focusing on the construction and dynamics of their spatial-temporal continuum. The entire perceptual “space” of comics is significative (Fresnault-Derruelle); all elements of this space constitute the narrative. It is not only about the “space” of a book or a magazine; contemporary comics are intensely exploring new media, a key feature of which is interactivity. The article examines both the “classic” way of presenting visual material (comics in the form of book, “codex”), and the web-comics, which are similar to scrolls in their form, and have a new (compared to books) potential for interactivity. The article provides a systema­tic comparison of the ways of chronotope organizing in comics and screen arts (cinema, video art, media projects, etc.), and draws an analogy between the behavioral models of a comic book reader and a gamer going through the plot of a video game. One of the main theses of the article is the following: even though there are significant differences between the formats of comic books and web comics, there is a basic commonality in the nature of their impact on the rea­der. The images on the pages of comics and the spacings between them create an illusion of time through the mechanism of “closure” (S. McCloud). Therefore, the real interaction between space and time is pos­sible only with an active participation of the viewers who add their corporeality to this equation, matching it with the visual and textual register. In this way, in the process of the “assembling” perception of co­mics, the corporeal and the intellectual merge.

One of the unsolved problems for the historical and philosophical thought of Ukraine is the lack of reflection on the phenomenon of Ukrainian neo-Thomism. Today, there has not been reconstructed the history of this trend, which had been actively developing in the interwar Western Ukraine since the time of socio-ethical letters by Andrei Sheptytsky in the early XX century, gained new connotations in the diaspora from 1940s to 1990s and acquired new forms in Roman Catholic thought in Ukraine at the beginning of the XXI century. Moreover, a comprehensive historical and philosophical assessment of the achievements and shortcomings of Ukrainian neo-Thomism at different stages of its development has not been made. Meanwhile, Ukrainian neo-Thomism is experiencing a crisis, which it is trying to overcome by translating controversial works devoted mainly to the history of moral theology. The main feature of the proposed works is the oscillation between the need to recognize the presence of a person’s spiritual-intellectual and moral-volitional intuitions and the reluctance to recognize it openly, because it would be contrary to the very principles of Thomism. Modern Ukrainian neo-Thomism inherits this contradiction, and therefore the choice of classic books for translation reflects the dialectic of the struggle of different tendencies, which objectively cannot contribute to the legitimization of neo-Thomism in the Ukrainian philosophical discourse. Especially significant in this regard was the translation of the book by the classic of Polish neo-Thomism Mieczysław Krąmpiec “Why evil?”, because this monograph shows the contradiction of neo-Thomistic thought in the key issues about the possibility of person’s moral intuition, moral responsibility and dignity. The very refusal of Krąmpiec to recognize the existence of a person’s spiritual-intellectual and moral-volitional intuitions, despite all the prerequisites for such recognition, leads the monograph Why evil? to failure and to inability to answer the question stated in the title of the monograph. All this justifies that in the time of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis moral theology and social doctrine moved to neo-Augustinianism, which unequivocally recognizes that the person has spiritual-intellectual and moral-volitional intuitions.

The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, funded by Lord Weidenfeld and by New College, The Queen's College, and St Anne's College in Oxford, is awarded annually. It is judged by a panel of three Oxford acadamics and/or translators, plus a guest judge from the wider literary world. The 2007 shortlist consisted of modern novels from France, Austria, and Norway; the selected poems of a contemporary German poet; three volumes of the writings of a Swiss dramatist, essayist, and story-writer; and a parallel-text version of Dante. The field of eligible books published during 2006 had of course been far larger, and was also wider-ranging, for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is for Englishings of prose fiction, poetry, and drama from living European languages. I have been a judge for the last four years now, and each time, when faced with the pile of eighty-odd entries, the multiple source languages (a few known to me, most not), the gamut of genres – from crime fiction and chick lit through Dumas (say) to Tolstoy and the poetry of Rilke or Kaplinski; not to mention the variety of translation challenges and ways of meeting them, from the exfoliation of a much-translated classic to the acute responsibility of introducing a writer for the first time, from the fairly straightforward demands of genre fiction to the peculiar meld of liberty and rigour required by the translation of poetry – each time, when faced with all this, I have asked: How on earth do you set about it? How can such incommensurables be compared?

<p><span>Periodisasi perawi mulai dikaji sejak abad ke 2 H. untuk keperluan penelitian sanad Hadits dan kritik perawi. Buku-buku indeks periodik paling awal telah terbit di awal abad ke 3 H. Penentuan periodik saat itu masih sangat asumtif dan subjektif dari setiap penulis, belum ada kajian metodologis yang menjadi patokan umum. Embrio teoritis paling awal baru muncul sejak abad ke 7 H oleh Ibn Shalah, yang kemudian menjadi teori utuh pada abad ke 9 H oleh Ibn Hajar. Dalam penelitian ini, originalitas teori Ibn Hajar dalam <em>Taqrib at-Tahdzib</em> ini menjadi konsep klasik dalam periodisasi perawi. Kajian setelah abad itu belum menunjukkan pengembangan yang signifikan, hingga abad ke 15 H saat ini. sehingga pengembangan teori dari konsep klasik oleh Abu Ibrahim berupa tabulasi periodik kemudian menjadi konsep modern. Melalui studi komparasi dan korelasi, peneliti menemukan titik perbedaan dan superioritas kedua konsep tersebut. Konsep klasik adalah hasil analisis data historis, biografi, data pribadi dan data pertemuan perawi yang dirumuskan berdasarkan 6 indikator ke dalam bentuk Buku Indeks Periodik. Sementara konsep modern adalah hasil kalkulasi matematis dari 6 indikator ke dalam bentuk Tabulasi Periodik. Keunggulan konsep klasik adalah kekuatan data historis yang valid, sehingga indeks periodik menjadi prioritas data dalam penetuan periode perawi tertentu. Sementara keunggulan konsep modern terletak pada pendekatan matematis, yang memungkinkan tabulasi menjadi perangkat penentuan periode perawi yang tidak ditemukan data periodiknya sama sekali. </span></p><p>[<strong><span>Periodization of Hadith Narrators: Comparative and Correlation Studies of the Classical and Modern <em>Thabaqat al-Ruwat</em> Concepts</span></strong><span>. The study of the Periodization of Rawi germinated in the 2nd century of Hijriyah, for research on Hadith sanad and Rawi criticism. The earliest periodic index books were published in the early 3rd century of Hijriyah. The earliest theoretical embryos appeared only in the 7th century of Hijriyah by Ibn Salah, which later became a complete theory in the 9th century of Hijriyah by Ibn Hajar. The originality of Ibn Hajar's theory in Taqrib at-Tahdzib became a classical concept in the periodization of Rawi. Studies after that century have not shown significant development, until the 15th century of Hijriyah. The development of the classical concept by Abu Ibrahim, in the form of periodic tabulations, is regarded as a modern concept. Through comparative and correlation studies, we have managed to find a point of difference and superiority between the two concepts. The classic concept is the result of analysis of historical data, biographies, Rawis’ data, and data of their encounters, which are formulated based on 6 indicators into the form of a Periodic Index Book. Meanwhile, the modern concept is the result of mathematical calculations from 6 indicators into the form of Periodic Tabulations. The advantage of the classical concept is the strength of valid historical data, so that the periodic index is the priority of the data in determining the Rawi certain periods. Meanwhile, the advantage of the modern concept is in the mathematical approach, which allows tabulation to be a tool for determining the period of Rawi whose periodic data can’t be found.</span>]</p>

AbstractThe purpose of the present study is the understanding of Gentili's position on the law of the sea as expressed in his classic De iure belli (Hanoviae 1598). The key constitutive elements turn out to be: 1) the idea of the sea as 'res communis' to all mankind, which amounts to the concept of 'freedom of the sea'; 2) 'jurisdiction' of the coastal state on the adjacent sea, even on the high seas, in order to police crime and prevent/punish piracy. As such these two key elements, if taken in isolation, are rooted in the civil law tradition, but their true meaning can only be captured by placing them in the intellectual framework of which they constitute an integral part. Firstly, the epistemic structure of discourse hinges on the new science of natural jurisprudence, as applied to the subject of 'ius gentium bellicum'; secondly, the constituent theoretical languages emanate from a distinctive combination of civil law, scholastic-theological and humanist traditions. This procedure enables us to highlight the strikingly original and distinctly modern traits of Gentili's perspective on the law of the sea, which emerges as a corollary of his project of international/global order. A project that is based on the crucial notion of 'respublica magna' of mankind, a notion encompassing the two notions of 'freedom' and 'jurisdiction' that constitute and define the legal regime of the sea.The Stoic humanist notion of universal human society as 'corpus unum' implies, first of all, 'freedom of intercourse', or 'ius communicationis', to start from 'free passage' and 'freedom of commerce'. It is in the context of his argument about these basic freedoms that Gentili is finally led to discuss the subject of the 'law of the sea'. But, not only the concept of 'res communis', or 'freedom of use', but also the concept of 'jurisdiction', or 'protection', are strictly related to the same foundational concept of 'respublica magna'. This is a crucial characteristic of Gentili's approach to world order that is proved by reference to two cardinal points of his new 'cosmopolitan justice': 1) the 'international right to punish', as exemplified by the legitimacy of the wars of 'humanitarian intervention' and of the wars in support of the 'common law of mankind'; 2) the 'occupation of vacant land', which again underlines the relevance of the principle of 'jurisdiction' by striking a balance between the principle of 'free use' of nature and the 'jurisdiction' of the local ruler.Such a reconstruction definitely rejects the traditional image of Gentili as a supporter of 'maritime protectionism', on the ground of his Advocatio Hispanica published posthumously in 1613 and containing his pleadings as Spanish advocate before the Court of Admiralty. The guiding assumption here is that the book is strictly of a forensic character and as such devoid of any coherent theoretical substance. To the contrary, in his De iure belli, far from anticipating the English position in favour of 'mare clausum', Gentili tends to anticipate the essentials of Grotius' position, especially at the level of the ethic of the 'modern cosmopolis' and the related theme of colonial empire. On this very plane of discourse, Gentili's thinking transcends the so-called battle of the books and emerges as especially significant in illuminating the wider and deeper intellectual currents that contributed to the development of what were to become basic standard positions of modern international theory.

Life of any living thing starts with the breath and ends with breathlessness. Health is defined as a state of equilibrium of normal functions of Dosha, Dhatu, and Agni with body, mind and soul. Health has not given importance until someone becomes sick. Due to intake of improper diet, lack of exercise, stress, & global warming, pollution the health status of an individual is decreasing day by day & they are getting easily prone to infectious disease. It comes with significant challenges & creating a burden over medical & health care system. Ayurveda is an ancient science which has already described such communicable disease with their causes, mode of transmission, prevention as well as treatment. Charak has explained about Janapadodhwansa & its four reasons(Air, water, time, and region). Sushruta has already mentioned Aupsargikarogas that are infectious diseases. By adopting Ayurvedic measures such as following proper Dincharaya, Rutucharya, Sadvritta, Panchakarma, Shaman Cikitsa & Rasayana, both physical and mental health, can be maintained. The main aim of this paper is to highlight the airborne disease mentioned in Ayurveda. This review has been done by compiling information from classic Ayurvedic texts – Charak Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, and Astanga Hirdaya. Apart from this, modern books, journals & websites on preventive & social medicine were also searched for this study. After extensive search, specific causative factors, pathology, symptoms & various treatment regime has been narrated in scattered form by our Ancient Acharyas. The different Ayurvedic Samhitas serves as a source of getting knowledge about the airborne disease and ways to prevent it and cure it. By using these basic principles in this ancient science in a rational way, we can avoid & overcome many clinical conditions described in contemporary science which has its self-limitations in treatment modalities.

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have, I would admit, a most unlikely case study for use in a business ethics classroom. The story of Eichmann is already some sixty years old, and his activities in his career as a Nazi were far beyond the pale of even the most egregious cases found in the typical business ethics case books. No doubt, there is some truth to the fact that introducing Eichmann’s story into an applied ethics class would inevitably depict an unseemly analogy between the practices of latter day corporations and the bureaucracy of the Nazi era. My argument here, though, is that the story of Adolf Eichmann, as depicted in Hannah Arendt’s well-known Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers a philosophically cogent account of judgment and ethical decision-making that future business managers and employees would do well to heed. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally a series of press accounts for New Yorker magazine, deserves consideration alongside the Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and other classic ethics texts in a business ethics syllabus. This is not to say that Arendt’s work is uncontroversial; there are serious questions to be raised about both her depiction of Eichmann and her conclusions about “the banality of evil.” Nevertheless, her account of ethics, which, with its account of ethical duties and its case study of Eichmann’s character, shows both its Aristotelian and Kantian influences, is a warning to readers who would conflate morality with state laws and their duties with the needs of superiors. In short, I argue that, despite her well-known critique of modern large scale economies and her general avoidance of discussions of post-industrial corporations, Arendt may be a business ethicist of the first order.

Introduction: In Unani system of medicine, blood is regarded as mixture of akhlat (humours) i.e. dam (Sanguine), balgham (phlegm), safra (yellow bile) and sawda (black bile). Normal blood consists of “akhlate latifa (plasma)” and “kaseefa (corpuscles)”. Normal blood is one in which all humours are in normal proportion in terms of quantity and quality and specific to each individual. It is normal in colour, free from bad odour and moderate in viscosity. Morbid blood develops due to impurities /disease in the blood which ultimately alter its quantity and quality. If we co relate these abnormalities with modern concept then all bleeding disorders and coagulopathy fall under “Riqqate dam” (low viscosity of blood); all the thromboembolic disorders; polycythaemia, leukaemia and anaemia fall under “Ghilzate dam”(hyperviscosity of blood), while septicaemia, bacterial diseases can be correlated with “ufunat” (infections). Methods: The classic and relevant books of Unani and conventional medicine were studied. The databases utilized for obtaining information, are scientific research publications from indexed journals available through Google Scholar, PubMed and Science Direct. Results and Conclusion: Blood purifying drugs cause necessary changes and maintain the viscosity of the blood by their moderate heat; cold; dry and wet properties. These drugs are alterative and bring the quality and quantity of blood in equilibrium. Strengthen the defensive mechanism and eliminate toxins via sweat, urine, faeces etc. These drugs are digestive, tonic to stomach and liver and boost the immune system. In the line of the above conceptual framework few experimental models are being suggested i.e. effect of drugs on blood constituents, coagulation parameters, anemia, leukaemia, polycythaemia, thrombocytopenia and infections. This preliminary study may serve as a tool for the screening of blood purifier drugs in various blood disorders. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.18(2) 2019 p.312-321

Study of the history of particular libraries is the important trend of modern domestic and foreign research works, since it contributes to the solution of not only scientific, but also local history and education tasks. Due to the lack of complex research studies on the history of library of the “Society for Mutual Assistance of Salesmen in Tomsk”, this article for the first time considers in detail the activities of library for all twenty years — from its establishment to closure. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the history of the Society’s library, including its structure, collections, functioning and future destiny.The author collected the data from a wide range of historical sources: the Charter and reports of the Society for the entire period of its existence, anniversary historical essays summarizing the results of 10—20 years of its activity, the printed catalogue of the library, the pre-revolutionary magazine “Bibliotekar” [Librarian]. Information contained in one of them is confirmed directly or indirectly in the other. All this makes it possible to characterize the source base as sufficiently complete and representative.The principles of historicism, objectivity and consistency formed the methodological basis of the research. The article uses the methods of comparative analysis, statistical, chronological and source studies.The article reveals the dependence of the amount of allocations for the library on the financing of other activities of the Society. For the first time, the author compiled the rating of writers among the library’s users, which was headed by both classic writers and authors who are almost forgotten today. The article reconstructs the repertoire of periodicals that were available in the collections.The obtained results reveal the close interrelation and interdependence of all indicators of the library’s activity, including the time of its operation, the amount of financing, the number of users, visits, titles of books and periodicals. This study expands the idea of public initiative in the arrangement of libraries in pre-revolutionary Siberia, the demand for these cultural institutions among the lower strata of Siberian society and their reader’s preferences.

This paper discusses surah Āli ‘Imrān [3]: 85 that is believed is not the abrogator of surah al-Baqarah [2]: 62. Surah al-Baqarah [2]: 62 is an inclusive ayah that informs the evidence of acknowledgement of the al-Qur’an upon the safety of adherents of religions. All ayahs of the al-Qur’an are the selected revelations that are operative in its nature. In the case of contradiction, they should be contextually understood based on their socio-historical background, as it is stated in its criteria that the abrogation is only enforced upon ayahs on law, and not for informative ayahs (ikhbāriyyah). This research employs a research method mapping the pros and the cons of interpretation using qualitative analysis. In collecting data, this research applies library research of the commentary books from classic to modern-contemporary periods as primary sources with socio-historical approaches. It also incorporates uṣūl fiqh and hermeneutics theories to analyse the text. This research finds out that Islam which is prescribed to the prophet Muhammad cannot abrogate the existence of pre-Islamic religions. The abrogation of religions is conflicted with the reality of the continuity of the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation. Islam is a religion of all prophets, and Islam that is prescribed to the prophet Muhammad is a continuation and a complementary to the legacies from previous religions. The idea of abrogating religions means to ignore part of the rules of an abrogation theory itself. Surah al-Baqarah [2]: 106 is not a base for the abrogation of previous religions. This ayah suggests a supposition, not a necessity of the abrogation.[Artikel ini mendiskusikan surat Āli ‘Imrān [3]: 85 yang diyakini sebagai ayat yang tidak me-nasakh surat al-Baqarah [2]: 62. Surah al-Baqarah [2]: 62 adalah ayat inklusif yang menginformasikan bukti pengakuan dari al-Qur’an atas keselamatan penganut agama-agama. Semua ayat al-Qur ’an adalah wahyu yang dipilih yang beroperasi sesuai sifatnya. Dalam kasus kontradiksi, mereka harus dipahami secara kontekstual berdasarkan latar belakang sosio-historisnya, seperti yang dinyatakan dalam kriterianya bahwa abrogasi (nasakh) hanya diberlakukan pada ayat-ayat hukum, dan bukan untuk ayat-ayat informatif (ikhbāriyyah). Penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian pemetaan pro dan kontra penafsiran dengan menggunakan analisis kualitatif. Dalam mengumpulkan data, ia menggunakan penelitian kepustakaan dari beberapa kitab tafsir dari masa klasik hingga periode modern kontemporer, sebagai sumber utama dengan pendekatan sosio-historis. Ini juga menggabungkan teori ushul fiqh dan hermeneutika untuk menganalisis teks. Penelitian ini menemukan bahwa Islam yang diwahyukan kepada Nabi Muhammad tidak dapat me-nasakh/membatalkan keberadaan agama pra-Islam. Pembatalan agama bertentangan dengan realitas kontinuitas wahyu Nabi Muhammad SAW. Islam adalah agama semua nabi, dan Islam yang diturunkan kepada Nabi Muhammad adalah kelanjutan dan pelengkap warisan dari agama-agama sebelumnya. Gagasan untuk membatalkan agama berarti mengabaikan sebagian dari aturan dari teori abrogasi/nasakh itu sendiri. Surah al-Baqarah [2]: 106 bukanlah dasar untuk pembatalan agama- agama sebelumnya. Ia menunjukkan sebuah dugaan, bukan keniscayaan pembatalan.]

<p class="06IsiAbstrak">Kitab <em>Ta’lim al-Muta’alim</em> yang dikarang oleh shaykh al-Zarnuji merupakan kitab klasik yang berisikan adab atau etika belajar dan mengajar antara guru dengan murid. Kitab ini cukup terkenal di Nusantara khususnya Indonesia, karena ia banyak dipelejari bahkan dijadikan rujukan di pondok-pondok pesantren sama ada yang klasik mahupun moden hingga ke hari ini. Hadis-hadis yang terdapat dalam kitab ini dirujuk dari pelbagai kitab sumber hadis. Namun sumber rujukan bagi kitab <em>Ta’lim al-Muta’allim</em> belum diterokai secara sistematik. Justeru kajian ini menerokai serta menganalisis sumber rujukan yang terdapat dalam kitab tersebut. Metodologi kajian ini adalah kualitatif melalui kaedah kepustakaan dan reka bentuk analisis kandungan kitab <em>Ta’lim al-Muta’allim</em>. Berdasarkan analisis yang dilakukan terhadap 40 hadis dan 108 riwayat, didapati 23 kitab yang diguna pakai oleh Shaykh al-Zarnuji dalam karyanya <em>Ta’lim al-Muta’allim</em> mulai dari kitab-kitab yang berisikan hadis-hadis <em>Sahih</em> sampailah kitab yang mengandungi hadis <em>Da’if</em> dan <em>Mawdu’</em>. Oleh itu, analisis tematik ini amat penting dilakukan agar dapat dikenal pasti kitab sumber hadis yang digunakan oleh Shaykh al-Zarnuji dalam karyanya <em>Ta’lim al-Muta’allim</em>.</p><p class="06IsiAbstrak">[<strong><span>Analysis of Hadith References Used in The Book <em>Ta'lim Al-Muta'allim</em> by Shaykh al-Zarnuji</span></strong><span>. The book of Ta'lim al-Muta'allim written by shaykh al-Zarnuji is a classic book which contains manners or ethics of learning and teaching between the teachers and students. This book is well-known in the archipelago, especially in Indonesia since it has been studied a lot and has even been used as a reference in Islamic boarding schools as well as classical and modern ones nowadays. The hadiths contained in this book are referred from various sources of hadith. However, the source of reference for the book of Ta'lim al-Muta'allim has not been recorded systematically. In fact, this study explores and analyzes the reference sources contained in the book. The methodology of this study is qualitative through literary principles and design forms of analysis of the content of the book Ta'lim al-Muta'allim. Based on the analysis carried out on 40 hadiths and 108 narrations, it was found that 23 books used by Shaykh al-Zarnuji in his Ta'lim al-Muta'allim started from books containing Sahih hadiths until the book containing the hadiths of Da ' if and Mawdu '. Therefore, this thematic analysis is very important to ensure that the source book of the hadiths used by Shaykh al-Zarnuji can be identified in his work Ta'lim al-Muta'allim.</span>]</p>

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

This book, originally published in 1962, has now become a classic on the historyof modemTurkish political thought, whose beginning is usually traced back to theT-t period (1836-1878), the most turbulent and crucial period of modemTurkish history. Serif Mardin, the famous Turkish historian and political scientist,is like a household name to those interested in modern Ottoman and Turkishintellectual history. In his numerous books and articles, which followed thepublication of the present work, Mardin took the herculean task of unearthing theparameters of modem Turkish thought with an almost solitary conscience. It issimply impossible to have a discussion about Islam and Turkish society, socialchange, modernization or secularization without referring to Mardin’s work,which is woven around a string of ideas, concepts and analytical tools, all of whichenable him to see the realities of Turkey and the modem Islamic world both fromwithin and from without. His more recent Relwon and Social change in Twkey:’ c irhe of&aYuzaman Said Nuni (New York: SUNY Press, 1989),w hich is thesingle most important book written in English on Said Nursi, the founder of theNurcu movement in Turkey, is the result of the same set of principles Mardin hasadopted throughout his career: diligent scholarship, resistance to fads, and willingnessto understand before passing any judgements on his subject.The present work under review touches upon the most sensitive and crucialperiod of modem Turkish history, viz., the end of the Ottoman era and the establishmentof the modem Turkish Republic. Mardin’s exclusive emphasis is on theTanzirnat period, and the figures that laid the intellectual foundations of it. Thesignificance of this period can hardly be overemphasized, not only for Turkish historybut also for the rest of the Islamic world. It was in this period that a wholegeneration of ottoman intellectuals, from right to left, was faced with the historictask of confronting modem western civilization in the profoundest sense of theterm, and their successes and failures set the agenda for the modem intellectualhistory of Turkey for decades to follow. Their troublesome journey was shaped bythe historical setting, in which they came to terms with such questions as modernism,secularism, westernization, nationalism, Islam, society, science, tradition,and a host of other issues that continue to haunt the minds of the Islamic worldtoday. Their trial, however, was linked to the rest of the members of the Islamicworld in ways, as the present work under review shows, more important than isusually thought, and this issue, namely the place of ottoman intellectual historywithin the larger context of modem klamic thought, has not been resolved. In this ...

Problem Statement and Purpose. The problem scientific and research laboratory of geography and soil conservation of the black soil zone (PSCL‑4 ONU) was opened at the Geology and Geography Faculty of Odessa University half a century ago, in 1971. The main task of the research laboratory resided in conducting soil researches in the steppe zone of the south of Ukraine in connection with the commencement of irrigation programs there, soil and land mapping to streamline their use. The aimof this article is to highlight the major milestones of the half-century history of the research laboratory, as well as outline achievements and research activities during this period.Data & Methods. Documents and materials on the history of formation and development of the PSCL‑4, documents and materials on the research activitiesduring 50 years, as well as the other author’s publications from the previous years. To highlight the half-century history of the PSCL a classic geographical and historical-and-research approaches has been applied, which combines the principlesof historical and analytical assessment of both: historical milestones and obtained achievements.Results. Starting from 1971 the soil sciences expedition of the PSCL4 conducted a large-scale(1:10000 and 1:25000) survey and mapping of soils of collective and state farms in the south of Ukraine, Russian Federation, North and Central Kazakhstanin the area of more than 6 mln. ha. PSCL4 staff has been studying the impact of waters of different irrigational quality on the chemical composition of the southern Ukrainian soils, as well as properties and productivity of these soils. There has beenestablished genetic nature and negative direction of a number of processes in the black soil under irrigation, there also have been justified and introduced into practice different measures to protect and increase fertility of soils under irrigation and drainage. In 2003 there have been commenced research and mapping of soils and soil cover on Zmiiny island. The studies of modern landscapes and soil-geochemical environments and processes on the estuary coasts in the Northwestern part of theBlack Sea region as well as city`s soil, are considered additionally in the research within recent years. Bearing in mind problems and topics the PSCL4 addressed during its long-term scientific and research activities there has been developed ascientific school – “Soil Formation Processes in Black Soils of the Steppe Zone.” Over half a century the department schooled 14 candidates and 3 doctors of sciences, published more books, scientific articles, scientific and practical recommendations, and training manuals.

Abstract The subject of unification is as vibrant as national movement even after 58 years of a fractured verdict. More than to achieve a physical conjugation it was an attempt for cultural fusion. The aspiration for linguistic unification was a part of the national discourse. The movement, which began with mystic originations, later on turned out to become communal. Political changes during 1799 A.D. and 1857 A.D. changed the fortunes of Mysore state and ultimately led to its disintegration and became the reason for this movement. The concept of unification is akin to the spirit of nationalism, against the background of colonial regime assigning parts of land to different administrative units without taking into consideration the historical or cultural aspects of that place. Kannadigas marooned in multi lingual states experient an orphaned situation got aroused with the turn of nineteenth century. The problem precipitated by the company was diluted by British when they introduced English education. Though the positive aspect like emergence of middle class is pragmatic, rise of communalism on the other hand is not idealistic. This research paper is designed to examine the polarization of castes during unification movement of Mysore State (Presently called as State of Karnataka, since 1973, which was termed Mysore when integrated) which came into being in 1956 A.D. Most of the previous studies concentrate on two aspects viz ideological discourse and organizational strategies adopted to gain Unification. The course of the unifi cation movement and role of Congress party dominates such studies while some of them concentrate on the leaders of the movement. Other studies are ethnographical in nature. ‘Community Dominance and Political Modernisation: The Lingayats’ written by Shankaragouda Hanamantagouda Patil is a classic example. Mention may be made here of an recent attempt by Harish Ramaswamy in his ‘Karnataka Government and Politics’ which has covered almost all aspects of emergence of Karnataka as a state but communal politics during unification movement has found no place. ‘Rethinking State Politics in India: Regions within Regions’ is an edited book by Ashutosh Kumar which has articles on ‘Castes and Politics of Marginality’ where a reference is made to caste associations and identity politics of Lingayats, but the area of study is neighboring Maharashtra and not Karnataka. Though it contains two articles on Karnataka its subject matter doesn’t pertain to this topic. One more important effort is by ‘Imagining Unimaginable Communities: Political and Social Discourse in Modern Karnataka’ where the author Raghavendra Rao thinks Karnataka and India as two unimaginable communities and discuss primarily the founding moments of negotiation between the discourses of Indian nationalism and Kannada linguistic nationalism. It is more an intellectual history and throws light on nationalism in a colonial context. Mostly studies concentrate on either the course or the leaders of the movement. Invariably congress as an organization finds place in all studies. But the blemish of such studies is a lesser concentration on activities of major socio cultural groups. The role of socio cultural groups assumes importance because of the milieu at the beginning of 20th century which annunciated a wave of social changes in the state. It is a known fact that the movement for linguistic state was successful in bringing a political integration of five separate sub regions but failed to unite people culturally. This concept of unification which is akin to the spirit of nationalism got expressed at the regional level in the sense of respect for once own culture, language and people. In case of Karnataka this expression had political overtones too which is expressed by some who fought for it (Srinivas & Narayan, 1946 ). Most of the early leaders of unification movement (and for that matter even movement for independence too can be cited here) belonged to one particular caste, and with passing of time has led to the notion of domination of that caste over the movement. This paper tries to give justice in a limited way by giving legitimate and adequate recognition for those castes which deserves it and do away with misconceptions. Two concepts political modernization and social mobility are used. The later derives its existence from the former in this case. The data used here is primarily gained from news papers and secondary sources like books and interviews given by participants. No hypothesis is tested nor any theory is developed in this attempt but historical materials are examined in the light of modernity. The key problem discussed here is emergence of communal politics and the role of social groups in unification. Biases of regionalism, caste and class have been overcome by rational thinking.

Background. The article is devoted to the piano work of the outstanding composer, pianist and teacher Mao-Shuen Chen (born 1936), his contribution to the art of music and education in Taiwan. Music education received in Taiwan, and then – in European countries, allowed Mao-Shuen Chen to significantly develop and modernize his native national art. His methodical works, textbooks and collections of exercises for piano became the basis of his own method of teaching, which the musician has long successfully used in public and private music schools in Taiwan. An important role in Mao-Shuen Chen’s unique pedagogical system is also played by his piano works, especially sonatinas. The sonatinas of Mao-Shuen Chen act as a kind of link between school-level compositions and opuses of the highest pianistic complexity. They are collected in three notebooks, each of the next of which represents a higher degree of pianistic complexity. Sonatina makes it possible, in a simpler and more compact-scale presentation, to prepare students for mastering a more complex genre – the sonata. Mastering the sonata form for members of the Taiwanese musical tradition is a particularly difficult task, due to differences in European musical thinking, within which the sonata originated, and the peculiarities of national music, which is usually the focus of composers. However, the genre of sonatina in the works of Mao-Shuen Chen and its role in the development of sonata thinking of Taiwanese students have not been studied to date. Objectives and methodology. The purpose of this research is to reveal the peculiarities of the interpretation of the genre of sonatina in the piano work of Mao-Shuen Chen, its role in the pedagogical system of the Taiwanese musician and its artistic and pedagogical value. In this connection the characteristic of the pianistic level of complexity of the works under consideration is given, their technical and artistic difficulties are revealed. For this, various methods of research were applied: genre-style, intonational analyses, systematization, musical-aesthetic and interpretological approaches. Results. Thanks to a well-organized educational system of methodological works, books, musical anthologies and audio recordings, Mao-Shuen Chen was able to build his own pedagogical approagh and introduce his teaching methods to many young musicians striving to acquire a high professional level as a performer and a teacher. In this system of mastering piano professionalism, thirty-five sonatinas by Mao-Shuen Chen, created from 1980 to 2015, occupy an important place. Sonatinas are very useful in preparing piano students to study more complex compositions written in sonata form. All sonatinas are dominated by the flavor of Taiwanese folk music. So, at the heart of Sonatinas Nos. 1–5, 7, 11, 17, 21 is the pentatonic scale of the mode “shan”, which can be expanded with additional steps. The exceptions are Sonatina No. 6, written using the atonal writing technique, and Sonatina No. 8, which is based on the Western European tonal system. Considering the rhythmic organization as the basis of music, the composer demonstrates in his sonatinas various versions of the musical meter and rhythm – complex and variable metering, syncope, polyrhythm, etc. He arranges these elements in his sonatinas from simple to complex. Mao-Shuen Chen pays great attention to polyrhythmic combinations 3: 2, 4: 3, 4: 6 and, considering them important for mastering the educational didactic. They can be considered the same instructive material as rhythmic exercises or etudes. For example, Sonatinas Nos. 3–6 are based on polyrhythm 3: 2, 2: 3, Sonatinas Nos. 7–8 – on combinations 3: 4 and 4: 3. It is no coincidence, that they also published in the composer’s educational methodological manual – the collection “Piano School and Piano Exercises 3: 4, 4: 3” (1990). The final Sonatinas (Nos. 32–34) by Mao-Shuen Chen require a high degree of pianistic mastership from the performer. They present works that combine complex elements of the Taiwanese national musical language and contemporary Western composer writing. The intonational and dynamic richness, variety of rhythmic patterns, irregular meters, extraordinary line drawing indicate that these works can rightfully be considered one of the brightest examples of the modern repertoire and can be widely represented on the concert stage. Conclusions. Mao-Shuen Chen made significant contributions to Taiwanese musical culture, especially in the areas of composition and music education. Among the many genres of his work, piano music occupies the most significant place. Having devoted many years to teaching in the higher musical institutions of Taiwan, Mao-Shuen Chen has developed a coherent system of teaching materials from the level of musical elementary school to higher education, with a focus on the practice of solfeggio and fundamental professional disciplines. The composer devoted a significant part of his attention to works of the sonata form – sonatinas and sonatas. In this regard, he can be compared with the Western European classic, the “patriarch of the piano” M. Clementi, who created a harmonious system of progressive mastery of pianistic skill. In all of his works, Mao-Shuen Chen represents his aspiration for the model of Western musical education, carefully preserving the Taiwanese national cultural tradition. He creates compositions with a typical Western structure, which should be performed on a Western musical instrument, but they clearly reflect the ChineseTaiwanese national flavor. Since the piano sonatas of Mao-Shuen Chen present high demands on performers due to their large volume, considerable virtuosity and the complexity of the rhythmic organization of texture, their mastering is possible only after passing through the simpler opuses of the Taiwanese composer.

The cognitive specificity of social pedagogy is its interest in the issues related to social conditionings of human development and, respectively, the specific social conditionings of the upbringing process. The notion has been developed in various directions since the very beginning of the discipline, yet the most clearly visible area seems to be the functioning of individuals, families and broader environment. Simultaneously, it is possible to observe that the issues have been entangled in certain socio-political conditions, the knowledge of which is substantial for the reconstruction and identification of the research heritage of social pedagogy. All these interrelationships allowed to distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. Contemporarily, it is a discipline with descent scientific achievements which marks out and indicates new perspectives both in the field of educational practice and the theory of social activity. Social pedagogy, similarly to other areas (subdisciplines) of pedagogy, deals with the notion of upbringing in a certain aspect – in a certain problem inclination. It specializes in social and environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. It is the thread of the social context of upbringing what proves to be the crucial, basic and fundamental determinant of upbringing and, thus, decisive factor for human development. This notion was always present in the general pedagogical thought however, its organized and rationalized character surfaced only when the social pedagogy was distinguished as a separate, systematic area of pedagogy. It occurred in Poland only at the beginning of the 19th century. From the very beginning the creators and precursors of this subdiscipline pointed out its relatively wide range. It has been the notion of individual – social conditionings of human development, yet, social pedagogists were interested in human at every stage of their lives i.e. childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Another area of interest were the issues related to family as the most important “place” of human development and, in this respect, the issues connected with institutions undertaking various activities: help, care, support and animation. Finally, the scope of interest included issues related to the environment as the place where the upbringing process is supposed to realize and realizes. Since the very beginning of social pedagogy these have been the prominent threads for exploration. At the same time it ought to be stated that these threads have always been interwoven with various social-political conditions both with regards to their interpretation as well as possible and planned educational practice. Therefore social pedagogy and its findings must be always “read” in the context of social-political conditions which accompanied the creation of a given thought or realization of some educational practice. As these conditions have constantly been undergoing certain transformations one may clearly distinguish particular stages of development of social pedagogy. The stages reflect various approaches to exploring and describing the above-mentioned areas of this discipline. Following the assumptions regarding the chronology of social pedagogy development and the three distinguished stages of development, it seems worthwhile to study how the issues related to an individual, family and environment were shaped at these stages. The first stage when the social psychology was arising was mainly the time of Helena Radlińska’s activities as well as less popular and already forgotten Polish pedagogists – precursors of this discipline such as: Anna Chmielewska, Irena Jurgielewiczowa, Zofia Gulińska or Maria Korytowska. In that period social pedagogists mainly dealt with individuals, families and the functioning of environments in the context of educational activities aimed at arousing national identity and consciousness. However, their work did no focus on indicating the layers of threats and deficits in functioning of individuals, social groups or families but on the possibilities to stimulate their development and cultural life. Therefore social pedagogy of those times was not as strongly related to social work as it currently is but dealt mainly with educational work. The classic example of such approach in the research carried out in the social pedagogy of that time may be the early works by Helena Radlińska who undertook the narrow field of cultural-educational work targeted to all categories of people. The works described such issues as the organization of libraries, organizing extra-school education (H. Orsza, 1922, H. Orsza-Radlińska, 1925). It ought to be stated that this kind of work was regarded as public and educational work, whereas currently it exists under the name of social work. Frequently quoted works related to the issues of arising social pedagogy were also the works by Eustachy Nowicki e.g. “Extra-school education and its social-educational role in the contemporary Polish life” from 1923 or the works by Stefania Sempołowska, Jerzy Grodecki or Jadwiga Dziubińska. Such an approach and tendencies are clearly visible in a book from 1913 (a book which has been regarded by some pedagogists as the first synthetic presentation of social pedagogy). It is a group work entitled “Educational work – its tasks, methods and organization” (T. Bobrowski, Z. Daszyńska-Golińska, J. Dziubińska, Z. Gargasa, M. Heilperna, Z. Kruszewska, L. Krzywicki, M. Orsetti, H. Orsza, St. Posner, M. Stępkowski, T. Szydłowski, Wł. Weychert-Szymanowska, 1913). The problem of indicated and undertaken research areas and hence, the topics of works realized by the social pedagogists of that times changed immediately after regaining independence and before World War II. It was the time when the area of social pedagogists interests started to include the issues of social inequality, poverty and, subsequently, the possibility of helping (with regards to the practical character of social pedagogy). The research works undertaken by social pedagogists were clearly of diagnostic, practical and praxeological character. They were aimed at seeking the causes of these phenomena with simultaneous identification and exploration of certain environmental factors as their sources. A classic example of such a paper – created before the war – under the editorial management of H. Radlińska was the work entitled “Social causes of school successes and failures” from 1937 (H. Radlińska, 1937). Well known are also the pre-war works written by the students of H. Radlińska which revealed diagnostic character such as: “The harm of a child” by Maria Korytowska (1937) or “A child of Polish countryside” edited by M. Librachowa and published in Warsaw in 1934 (M. Librachowa, 1934). Worthwhile are also the works by Czesław Wroczyński from 1935 entitled “Care of an unmarried mother and struggle against abandoning infants in Warsaw” or the research papers by E. Hryniewicz, J. Ryngmanowa and J. Czarnecka which touched upon the problem of neglected urban and rural families and the situation of an urban and rural child – frequently an orphaned child. As it may be inferred, the issues of poverty, inefficient families, single-parent families remain current and valid also after the World War II. These phenomena where nothing but an outcome of various war events and became the main point of interest for researchers. Example works created in the circle of social pedagogists and dealing with these issues may be two books written in the closest scientific environment of Helena Radlińska – with her immense editorial impact. They are “Orphanage – scope and compensation” (H. Radlińska, J. Wojtyniak, 1964) and “Foster families in Łódź” (A. Majewska, 1948), both published immediately after the war. Following the chronological approach I adopted, the next years mark the beginning of a relative stagnation in the research undertaken in the field of social pedagogy. Especially the 50’s – the years of notably strong political indoctrination and the Marxist ideological offensive which involved building the so called socialist educational society – by definition free from socio-educational problems in public life. The creation and conduction of research in this period was also hindered due to organizational and institutional reasons. The effect of the mentioned policy was also the liquidation of the majority of social sciences including research facilities – institutes, departments and units. An interesting and characteristic description of the situation may be the statement given by Professor J. Auletner who described the period from the perspective of development of social policy and said that: “During the Stalinist years scientific cultivation of social policy was factually forbidden”. During the period of real socialism it becomes truly difficult to explore the science of social policy. The name became mainly the synonym of the current activity of the state and a manifestation of struggles aimed at maintaining the existing status quo. The state authorities clearly wanted to subdue the science of social activities of the state […]. During the real socialism neither the freedom for scientific criticism of the reality nor the freedom of research in the field of social sciences existed. It was impossible (yet deliberated) to carry out a review of poverty and other drastic social issues” (J. Auletner, 2000). The situation changes at the beginning of the 60’s (which marks the second stage of development of social pedagogy) when certain socio-political transformations – on the one hand abandoning the limitation of the Stalinist period (1953 – the death of Stalin and political thaw), on the other – reinforcement of the idea of socialist education in social sciences lead to resuming environmental research. It was simultaneously the period of revival of Polish social pedagogy with regards to its institutional dimension as well as its ideological self-determination (M. Cichosz, 2006, 2014). The issues of individuals, families and environments was at that time explored with regards to the functioning of educational environments and in the context of exploring the environmental conditionings of the upbringing process. Typical examples here may be the research by Helena Izdebska entitled “The functioning of a family and childcare tasks” (H. Izdebska, 1967) and “The causes of conflicts in a family” (H. Izdebska, 1975) or research conducted by Anna Przecławska on adolescents and their participation in culture: “Book, youth and cultural transformations” (A. Przecławska, 1967) or e.g. “Cultural diversity of adolescents against upbringing problems” (A. Przecławska, 1976). A very frequent notion undertaken at that time and remaining within the scope of the indicated areas were the issues connected with organization and use of free time. This may be observed through research by T. Wujek: “Homework and active leisure of a student” (T. Wujek, 1969). Another frequently explored area was the problem of looking after children mainly in the papers by Albin Kelm or Marian Balcerek. It is worthwhile that the research on individuals, families or environments were carried out as part of the current pedagogical concepts of that time like: parallel education, permanent education, lifelong learning or the education of adults, whereas, the places indicated as the areas of human social functioning in which the environmental education took place were: family, school, housing estate, workplace, social associations. It may be inferred that from a certain (ideological) perspective at that time we witnessed a kind of modeling of social reality as, on the one hand particular areas were diagnosed, on the other – a desired (expected) model was built (designed) (with respect to the pragmatic function of practical pedagogy). A group work entitled “Upbringing and environment” edited by B. Passini and T. Pilch (B. Passini, T. Pilch, 1979) published in 1979 was a perfect illustration of these research areas. It ought to be stated that in those years a certain model of social diagnosis proper for undertaken social-pedagogical research was reinforced (M. Deptuła, 2005). Example paper could be the work by I. Lepalczyk and J. Badura entitled: “Elements of pedagogical diagnostics” (I. Lepalczyk, J. Badura, 1987). Finally, the social turning point in the 80’s and 90’s brought new approaches to the research on individuals, families and environments which may be considered as the beginning of the third stage of the development of social pedagogy. Breaking off the idea of socialist education meant abandoning the specific approach to research on the educational environment previously carried out within a holistic system of socio-educational influences (A. Przecławska, w. Theiss, 1995). The issues which dominated in the 90’s and still dominate in social pedagogy with regards to the functioning of individuals, families and local environments have been the issues connected with social welfare and security as well as education of adults. Research papers related to such approach may be the work by Józefa Brągiel: “Upbringing in a single-parent family” from 1990; the work edited by Zofia Brańka “The subjects of care and upbringing” from 2002 or a previous paper written in 1998 by the same author in collaboration with Mirosław Szymański “Aggression and violence in modern world” published in 1999 as well as the work by Danuta Marzec “Childcare at the time of social transformations” from 1999 or numerous works by St. Kawula, A. Janke. Also a growing interest in social welfare and social work is visible in the papers by J. Brągiel and P. Sikora “Social work, multiplicity of perspectives, family – multiculturalism – education” from 2004, E. Kanwicz and A. Olubiński: “Social activity in social welfare at the threshold of 21st century” from 2004 or numerous works on this topic created by the circles gathered around the Social Pedagogy Faculty in Łódź under the management of E. Marynowicz-Hetka. Current researchers also undertake the issues related to childhood (B. Smolińska-Theiss, 2014, B. Matyjas, 2014) and the conditionings of the lives of seniors (A. Baranowska, E. Kościńska, 2013). Ultimately, among the presented, yet not exclusive, research areas related to particular activities undertaken in human life environment (individuals, families) and fulfilled within the field of caregiving, social welfare, adult education, socio-cultural animation or health education one may distinguish the following notions:  the functioning of extra-school education institutions, most frequently caregiving or providing help such as: orphanage, residential home, dormitory, community centre but also facilities aimed at animating culture like youth cultural centres, cultural centres, clubs etc.,  the functioning of school, the realization of its functions (especially educational care), fulfilling and conditioning roles of student/teacher, the functioning of peer groups, collaboration with other institutions,  the functioning (social conditionings) of family including various forms of families e.g. full families, single-parent families, separated families, families at risk (unemployment) and their functioning in the context of other institutions e.g. school,  social pathologies, the issues of violence and aggression, youth subcultures,  participation in culture, leisure time, the role of media,  the functioning of the seniors – animation of activities in this field,  various dimensions of social welfare, support, providing help, the conditionings of functioning of such jobs as the social welfare worker, culture animator, voluntary work. It might be concluded that the issues connected with individuals, families and environment have been the centre of interest of social pedagogy since the very beginning of this discipline. These were the planes on which social pedagogists most often identified and described social life – from the perspective of human participation. On the course of describing the lives of individuals, families and broader educational environments social pedagogists figured out and elaborated on particular methods and ways of diagnosing social life. Is it possible to determine any regularities or tendencies in this respect? Unquestionably, at the initial stage of existence of this discipline, aimed at stimulating national consciousness and subsequent popularization of cultural achievements through certain activities – social and educational work, social pedagogists built certain models of these undertakings which were focused on stimulating particular social activity and conscious participation in social life. The issues concerning social diagnosis, though not as significant as during other stages, served these purposes and hence were, to a certain extent, ideologically engaged. The situation changed significantly before and shortly after the World War II. Facing particular conditions of social life – increase in many unfavourable phenomena, social pedagogists attempted to diagnose and describe them. It seems to have been the period of clear shaping and consolidation of the accepted model of empirical research in this respect. The model was widely accepted as dominating and has been developed in Polish social pedagogy during the second and subsequent stages of developing of this discipline. Practical and praxeological character of social pedagogy became the main direction of this development. Consequently, social diagnosis realized and undertaken with regard to social pedagogy was associated with the idea of a holistic system of education and extra-school educational influences and related educational environments. Therefore, the more and more clearly emphasized goal of environmental research – forecasting, was associated with the idea of building holistic, uniform educational impacts. After the systemic transformation which occurred in Poland in the 90’s, i.e. the third stage of social pedagogy development, abandoning the previous ideological solutions, environmental research including diagnosis was reassociated with social life problems mainly regarding social welfare and security. Individuals, families and environment have been and still seem to be the subject of research in the field of social pedagogy in Poland. These research areas are structurally bound with its acquired paradigm – of a science describing transformations of social life and formulating a directive of practical conduct regarding these transformations. A question arouses about the development of social pedagogy as the one which charts the direction of transformations of practices within the undertaken research areas. If it may be considered as such, then it would be worthwhile to enquire about the directions of the accepted theoretical acknowledgments. On the one hand we may observe a relatively long tradition of specifically elaborated and developed concepts, on the other – there are still new challenges ahead. Observing the previous and current development of Polish social pedagogy it may be inferred that its achievements are not overextensive with regards to the described and acquired theoretical deliberations. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, it has generated certain, specific theoretical solutions attempting to describe and explain particular areas of social reality. Especially noteworthy is the first period of the existence of this discipline, the period of such social pedagogists like i.a. J.W. Dawid, A. Szycówna, I. Moszczeńska or Helena Radlińska. The variety of the reflections with typically philosophical background undertaken in their works (e.g. E. Abramowski) is stunning. Equally involving is the second stage of development of social pedagogy i.e. shortly after the World War II, when Polish social pedagogy did not fully break with the heritage of previous philosophical reflections (A. Kamiński, R. Wroczyński) yet was developed in the Marxist current. A question arouses whether the area of education and the projects of its functioning of that time were also specific with regards to theory (it seems to be the problem of the whole Socialist pedagogy realised in Poland at that time). The following years of development of this discipline, especially at the turn of 80’s and 90’s was the period of various social ideas existing in social pedagogy – the influences of various concepts and theories in this field. The extent to which they were creatively adapted and included in the current of specific interpretations still requires detailed analysis, yet remains clearly visible. Another important area is the field of confronting the theories with the existing and undertaken solutions in the world pedagogy. A. Radziewicz-Winnicki refers to the views of the representatives of European and world social thought: P. Bourdieu, U. Beck, J. Baudrillard, Z. Bauman and M. Foucault, and tries to identify possible connections and relationships between these ideas and social pedagogy: “the ideas undertaken by the mentioned sociologists undoubtedly account for a significant source of inspiration for practical reflection within social pedagogy. Therefore, it is worthwhile to suggest certain propositions of their application in the field of the mentioned subdiscipline of pedagogy” (Radziewicz-Winnicki 2008). The contemporary social pedagogy in Poland constantly faces numerous challenges. W. Theiss analysed the contemporary social pedagogy with regards to its deficiencies but also the challenges imposed by globalisation and wrote: “Modern social pedagogy focuses mainly on the narrow empirical research and narrow practical activity and neglects research in the field of theory functioning separately from the realms of the global (or globalising) world or pays insufficient attention to these problems. It leads to a certain self-marginalisation of our discipline which leaves us beyond the current of main socio-educational problems of modern times. In this respect, it seems worthwhile and necessary to carry out intensive conceptual and research work focused on e.g. the following issues:  metatheory of social pedagogy and its relationship with modern trends in social sciences;  the concepts of human and the world, the concepts of the hierarchy of values;  the theory of upbringing, the theory of socialization, the theory of educational environment;  a conceptual key of the modern reality; new terms and new meanings of classical concepts;  socio-educational activities with direct and indirect macro range e.g. balanced development and its programmes, global school, intercultural education, inclusive education, professional education of emigrants”. Considering the currently undertaken research in this field and the accepted theoretical perspectives it is possible to indicate specific and elaborated concepts. They fluctuate around structural spheres of social pedagogy on the axis: human – environment – environmental transformations. It accounts for an ontological sphere of the acknowledged concepts and theories. Below, I am enumerating the concepts which are most commonly discussed in social pedagogy with regards to the acquired and accepted model. Currently discussed theoretical perspectives (contexts) in social pedagogy and the concepts within. I. The context of social personal relationships  social participation, social presence;  social communication, interaction;  reciprocity. II. The context of social activities (the organization of environment)  institutionalisation;  modernization;  urbanization. III. The context of environment  space;  place;  locality. The socially conditioned process of human development is a process which constantly undergoes transformations. The pedagogical description of this process ought to include these transformations also at the stage of formulating directives of practical activities – the educational practice. It is a big challenge for social pedagogy to simultaneously do not undergo limitations imposed by current social policy and response to real social needs. It has been and remains a very important task for social pedagogy.

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vaginas because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no homogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

The internet now provides many prime resources for the study of Horace which make life considerably easier for the student and scholar of the poet, such as reliable and searchable online Latin texts, bibliographies, and prose and verse translations of all kinds, as well as access to a wide range of modern and classic Horatian scholarship via digital versions of older works, Google Books, and journal databases such as JSTOR and Project MUSE (for subscribing institutions), not to mention increasing numbers of monographs available via subscription to publishers' own websites. These resources are growing continually and repay regular monitoring. But most Horatian scholarship is still to be found in printed form: here I give a brief survey of the most useful books for effective orientation in the modern study of Horace.

Louis Markos holds a BA in English and History from Colgate University and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He is a Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities and teaches courses on British Romantic and Victorian Poetry and Prose, the Greek and Roman Classics, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. He is the author of twenty books, including The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes, Ancient Voices: An Insider’s Look at Classical Greece, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis, Apologetics for the Twenty First Century, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World, Atheism on Trial, and The Dreaming Stone and In the Shadow of Troy, children’s novels in which his kids become part of Greek Mythology and the Iliad and Odyssey. He has produced two lecture series on C. S. Lewis and literary theory with The Teaching Company/Great Courses, published 300 book chapters, essays, and reviews, given well over 300 public lectures in some two dozen states as well as Rome, Oxford, and British Columbia, and had his adaptations of The Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, The Helen of Euripides, and The Electra of Sophocles performed off-Broadway. He is committed to the concept of the Professor as Public Educator and believes that knowledge must not be walled up in the Academy but must be disseminated to all who have ears to hear. Visit his amazon author page at amazon.com/author/louismarkos In this interview he responds to questions about his latest book!

<p>This paper seeks to photograph the thinking of moral education of children today in the perspective of Islam, the term children nowadays in Indonesian better known as Kids Zaman Now. Kids Zaman Now is actually a joke as well as satire refers to the "weird" or unnatural behavior of children today. moral education is a set of basic moral principles and virtues of attitudes and temperaments that must be owned and made habit by the child from the beginner until he became a mukallaf, ready to wade through the sea of life. In the modern era, the problems that arise are physical and psychological problems. Physical problems lead to human conditioning as the object of all science and technology products.</p><p>This research is library research. This research collects text data. In this case the author held the collection of books, articles, internet data and journals that have relevance to the subject of the study author.</p><div> </div>

If love is a many-splendoured thing, then many of its splendours can be seen on toy shelves occupied by recent playthings such as Luv Buds, Love and Kisses, First Love, My Puppy Loves Me and Love-A-Lot Bear. As the meaning of childhood has changed, particularly over the last 150 years (Postman), toys have become a major means of demonstrating and defining love between generations, between genders and between humans and commodities. The widespread availability of commodities, all increasingly finetuned in their prescribed meanings under a regime of rampant advertising, has been a key factor in this development, which reached an apex in the final quarter of the last century. Major toy companies grew dramatically (Stern and Schoenhaus), details of toy-play became more intricately spelt out for children (Kline), and advertising leapt into bold new fronts, not the least being 30-minute toy advertisements masquerading as children’s television programs (Kunkel). Hand in hand with these developments came more sensual elaboration of characters and themes (Kline and Pentecost), in line with general moves towards “commodity aesthetics” (Haug). Selling not just toys but warm fuzzy feelings, toy companies took up slogans such as those surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids: “A special kind of love” and “Come open your arms to a Cabbage Patch Kid” (Blyskal; Jacob, Rodenhauser and Markert). Care Bears made similar claims, each in the set distinguished by heightened sensuality and segmenting the tasks previously performed by the simpler teddy bear. Thus, while semanticists and sociologists grapple with the meaning of the word “love” and the shifting nature of the concept, modern-day toy manufacturers have utilised a number of pertinent notions to underpin their marketing efforts. Such is the importance of marketing that even the basic design of toys can be a marketer’s initiative, giving rise to toys structured specifically around love themes. This is significant because mass marketed toys act as powerful media, transmitting messages, offering interpretations and interacting with other toys and commodities, particularly in terms of communicating the appeals and joys of consumerism on which their existence so heavily relies. Modern toys are not only surrounded by massive advertising and other related texts which leave little to the child’s imagination but, due to their “collaboration” with other commodities in cross-marketing ventures, are prominently positioned to advertise themselves and each other. Messages promoting mass marketed toys are interwoven into the presentation of each toy, its advertising package and other promotional media, including books, films, mall appearances and miniaturisation in children’s packaged fast-food meals. Such schemes highlight the sensuality and appeals of the toys and their themes. Of course children – and their parents – may create oppositional meanings from those intended. The messages are not closed and not always accepted wholesale or unquestioningly, but toys, like other media, often privilege particular readings favourable to the marketplace, as Ann du Cille has pointed out in relation to race and I have noted in relation to gender. Love fits snugly into the repertoire of appeals and joys, taking several different forms, determined mostly by each toy’s target audience and marketing profile. Four of the main variations on the love theme in toys are: Representational love Substitutional love Obligatory love Romantic love I will focus on closely linked representational and substitutional love. A toy that draws on straightforward representational love for its appeal to a parent or carer is typically marketed to suggest that toys are material proof of love, important links in a chain of bonding. At its most crass, the suggestion is that one can prove one’s love for a child by showering her or him with toys, though usually claims are more sophisticated, implying issues of quality and toy genre. In 1993 toy company Mattel was marketing its Disney toys as coming with the special offer of a book. An advertisement in the Australian women’s magazine New Idea spoke of the “magic” of Disney toys and how they would “enchant your child” but made even grander claims of the accompanying book: “It’s valued at $9.95…but you can’t put a price on the bond between you and your child when you read one of these Disney classic tales together.” The pressures of modern-day life are such that parents sometimes feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time with their children or do not know how to play with them or have little interest in doing so, in which case substitutional love can be a strong marketing claim to parents by toys. Among the major features of modern toys and their part in the relationship between parents and children, Brian Sutton-Smith pinpointed a contradiction (115, 127). Parents give their children toys to bond with them but also to simultaneously facilitate separation: “I give you this toy for you to play with…but now go away and play with it by yourself.” Toys not only serve the contradiction but also may offer reconciliation, pitching at a niche seeking substitutional love. Mattel was explicit about this with its promotion of the Heart Family, a set of dolls that on one hand stressed the importance of the traditional nuclear family while, on the other, offered carers a chance to opt out of the burdens of such rigid family organization (Langer). In a booklet entitled “Dear Mum and Dad, will you give me five minutes of your time?” distributed in Australia, Mattel claimed that major research had found that parents did not spend enough time with children and that children felt sad and angry about this. But there was a solution at hand: the purchase of the Heart Family, which incidentally came with an enormous range of accessories, each capable of chipping away at parental guilt though perhaps never quite assuaging it, for there always seemed to be one more accessory on the way. Most notable of these was the large, elegant, two-storeyed dollhouse, Loving Home. The dolls, their dollhouse, musical nursery, playground and umpteen other accessories were, it was insinuated by the Mattel booklet, a way of purchasing “values we all believe in. Sharing. Caring. Loving. Togetherness”. It seemed that the range of commodities could stand in for parents. More recently, Fisher-Price, now part of the Mattel group, has brought out a similar toy line, Loving Family, which hints even more strongly at links between family security and material possessions. Among Loving Family’s accessories are a multi-room family house with attached stable, a beach house, country home, townhouse, beauty salon and much more. While we cannot be sure that these suggested links and parental guilt in the absence of multiple toy gifts take root, toy companies, market analysts, toy advertising agencies and psychiatrists have noted trends that suggest they generally do. They have noted the impact on toy sales thought to be associated with “the high number of children with guilt-ridden working mothers, or from broken homes where parents are trying to buy their offspring’s affections” (McKee). Sometimes parents are keen to ensure the love and affection of playmates for their children. Toy companies also offer this type of substitutional love. Knickerbocker says of its wares: “Toys that love you back,” while among Galoob’s dolls is Mandi, My Favorite Friend. But what a gloomy picture of human companionship is painted by Phebe Bears’ slogan: “When there’s no one else to trust.” Space permits only the briefest comments on either obligatory love or romantic love; the key factor here is that both are strongly gendered. Boys need not concern themselves with either variety but girls’ toys abound which play a socialising role in respect to each. Toys contributing to a concept of love as obligation train girls for a motherhood role that ensures they will be emotionally as well as physically equipped. Kenner doll Baby Needs Me is only one of many such toys. The box of Baby Chris gift set claims the doll “needs your love and care” while Hush Little Baby “responds to your loving care” and “loves to be fed”. Matchbox’s Chubbles is claimed to “live on love”. If the weight of these obligations seems daunting to a girl, the Barbie doll genre offers her a carrot, suggesting that girls grow into women who are the recipients of love from men. A closer look reveals narcissism is surely the strongest type of love promoted by Barbie, but that is not explicit. Barbies such as Dream Date Barbie, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the numerous Barbie brides – even though Barbie is claimed to have never married – promote a straightforward and romanticised view of heterosexual relationships. In conclusion, each toy makes its own grab for attention, often promising love or one of its components, but usually working within a framework of short-term gratification, infatuation, obsession, the yearn to possess and elicitation of guilt – mostly unhealthy ingredients for relationships. While it may be hard to decide what love is, most would agree that, if it ideally has some sense of community responsibility and reciprocity about it, then the definitions offered by these toys fall short of the mark. Works Cited Blyskal, Jeff and Marie. “Media Doll – Born in a Cabbage Patch and Reared by a PR Man” The Quill, 73, November 1985: 32. du Cille, Ann. “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference” Differences 6(1) Spring 1994: 46-68. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics: Ideology and Culture. New York: International General, 1987. Jacob, James E., Paul Rodenhauser and Ronald J. Markert. “The Benign Exploitation of Human Emotions: Adult Women and the Marketing of Cabbage Patch Kids” Journal of American Culture 10, Fall 1987: 61-71. Kline, Stephen, and Debra Pentecost, “The Characterization of Play: Marketing Children’s Toys” Play and Culture, 3(3), 1990: 235-255. Kline, Stephen, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. London: Verso, 1993. Kunkel, Dale. “From a Raised Eyebrow to a Turned Back: The FCC and Children’s Product-Related Programming” Journal of Communication 38(4) Autumn 1988: 90-108. Langer, Beryl. “Commoditoys: Marketing Childhood” Arena no. 87, 1989: 29-37. McKee, Victoria. “All Stressed Out and Ready to Play” The Times (London), 19 December 1990: 17. Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Dell, 1982. Stern, Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schoenhaus. Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990. Sutton-Smith, Brian. Toys As Culture. New York: Garden Press, 1986. Varney, Wendy. “The Briar Around the Strawberry Patch: Toys, Women and Food” Women’s Studies International Forum no. 19, June 1996: 267-276. Varney, Wendy. “Of Men and Machines: Images of Masculinity in the Toybox” Feminist Studies 28(1) Spring 2002: 153-174. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Love in Toytown" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/loveintotytown.php>. APA Style Varney, W., (2002, Nov 20). Love in Toytown. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/loveintotytown.html

Yolen, Jane. How do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? Illus. Mark Teague. New York: Scholastic, 2012. Print. If you have ever set foot in the children’s section of a public library or bookstore, you will likely recognize the dinosaur on the cover of this book. Yolen, a much-lauded author who has also penned science fiction and fantasy, has over 300 children’s books to her name and is the author of How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? and many others in the wildly successful How Do Dinosaurs… franchise created by bestselling author Jane Yolen and illustrator Mark Teague. The familiar classic dinosaur characters from Yolen and Teague’s books try their hands at baking and eating cookies while learning some ‘cookie etiquette’ along the way. While Yolen’s prose is fun and lively, in general the images of the dinosaurs have been ‘re-purposed’ from other titles in the series save for the addition of a cookie here and there. The book is also marketed as a scratch-and-sniff and according to the Scholastic web site, includes 3 cookie recipes. Sadly the 5 scratch-and-sniff scents have almost no scent at all, even in a brand new copy with minimal scratching, and there are only 2 recipes included. If your young readers are excited about the scratch-and-sniff potential they will be sorely disappointed. The recipes look easy enough and will be fun for kids to assist with in the kitchen but you will require dinosaur-shaped cookie cutters (not included) to get the full effect. There is no denying, however, the uniqueness of Mark Teague’s illustrations as well as his award-winning talent. The dinosaurs are realistic-enough looking to get slightly older kids’ attention but friendly enough for the younger set. The sturdy board-book binding, smaller size and aesthetic design make for an attractive book but the displeasure in the quality of the scratch-and-sniff and the general feeling of ‘I’ve seen this somewhere before’ is reason enough to bypass this title. Not Recommended: 1 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Debbie FeisstDebbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. 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Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.