Work in the humanities by undergraduate students of Carthage College

Octavio Paz presents his sustained reflections on the poetic phenomenon and on the place of poetry in history and in our personal lives.

When I first thought about this topic I encountered many ex pressions of surprise among my better-read friends, and a number of them asked me: "Is there really much love in Thomas Mann's works, and is it really important?" The posing of this question is the direct result of three decades of criticism which has represented Mann mainly as a serious and sober novelist, and frequently also as a prosy and prolix author who "clutters up" his works with superfluous bits of erudition. HisMagicMountain bids fair to join the list of immortal works of world literature which people bring back from their summer vacations - unread. Mann is, of course, serious and sober and very North German in most of his works, and the charge of occasional verbosity and divagation can well be substantiated. Nevertheless, Mann has, in my opinion, tried to be fundamentally a humorist throughout his life and career, not in the conventional sense of the word in which Fritz Reuter, P. G. Wodehouse or Ring Lardner qualify, but as a man who at an astonishingly early age saw through his fellow humans, analyzed and defined their basic confiicts and decided to be a mediator, a prophet of the realm of the middle. The humor in Mann's works derives from his manner of looking at the human comedy, and our amusement is in direct proportion to our ability to discern a comic element in life, even in tragedy.

Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern poetry—including its proximity to popular song, hallowed objecthood, and seeming autonomy from historical determination—this revisionary theory of lyric presents a new history of modern US poetry as one sonorous practice among many clamorous others. Focusing on the mid-twentieth century, Kilbane traces the impact of new sound technologies on a diverse array of literary and musical works by Lorine Niedecker, Harry Partch, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Sterling Brown, John Wheelwright, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Russell Atkins, and Helen Adam. Kilbane shows how literary critics can look to media history to illuminate poetry's social life, and how media scholars can read poetry for insight into the cultural history of technology. In this book, the lyric poem emerges as a sensitive barometer of technological change.

In this interpretation of the Odyssey, Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings.

The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects. The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.

The genre of biography in the ancient world is interestingly diverse and permeable and deserves intensive study, bearing as it does on ideas of characterization and the individual. This volume considers both the form and the content of biography across the ancient world, and is particularly interested in the frontiers with other related genres, such as history. The papers range from the Old Testament to the Arab world, from the New Testament to the Lives of Saints, from the classic Greek and Roman biographers to less well known practitioners of the art.

In light of the potential novel applications of neurotechnologies in psychiatry and the current debate on moral bioenhancement, this book outlines the reasons why more conceptual work is needed to inform the scientific and medical community, and society at large, about the implications of moral bioenhancement before a possible, highly hypothetical at this point, broad acceptance, and potential implementation in areas such as psychiatry (e.g., treatment of psychopathy), or as a measure to prevent crime in society. The author does not negate the possibility of altering or manipulating moral behavior through technological means. Rather he argues that the scope of interventions is limited because the various options available to “enhance morality” improve, or simply manipulate, some elements of moral behavior and not the moral agent per se in the various elements constitutive of moral agency. The concept of Identity Integrity is suggested as a potential framework for a responsible use of neurotechnologies in psychiatry to avoid human beings becoming orderers and orderables of technological manipulations.

Created by the powerful Hasyisi, yet missing for centuries from its home world, the Lyre just hangs in a willow tree, waiting. Hasyih, the Heart of the Worlds, links contiguous dimensions, many worlds invisible to each other, yet accessible through doors on Hasyih, one of the keys to which is the Lyre. Now danger threatens both Hasyih and Ranuit, the only inhabited worlds in the group, and when a young girl takes the Lyre from the willow tree, a set of interlinked activities is set into motion. Moving from world to world, going into the hands of the one who needs it most at the time, the Lyre reveals its nature as not only a Key, but also as a Weapon, an Enigma, an Answer, and a resolution, affecting both Hasyih and Ranuit. And the girl Queen Yisri is the center of it all.