Book Review: A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

For those familiar with Eavan Boland\u27s book, Object Lessons, her latest defense of the woman poet begins in well-traveled territory. A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet) reiterates her struggles to find an authentic voice in a poetic and political history that has largely excluded the voices of women. She again notes her sense of dislocation-Irish but not raised in Ireland-and recognizes the effect of such dislocation on her participation in the project called Irish poetry. She repeats her observation that poetry has traditionally been confined to the recondite, defined as war, death, and God, a definition excluding the domestic sphere in all its humanity and intensity. All of this is discernibly conventional when: Boland is concerned. The key difference between Object Lessons and A Journey, however, appears to be in her conclusions: where Object Lessons reconstructs her struggle to become a woman poet, A Journey with Two Maps seems to signal her arrival

The Minimum Wage, Decent Wages, and Time Sovereignty in the European Union

The minimum wage is a legally mandated relationship between money and time. Traditionally, studies of the minimum wage have focused on the money side of this relationship (e.g. how much do minimum wage workers earn) while ignoring its temporal aspects (e.g. how long someone has to work to receive a particular income). This is a significant oversight because it overlooks the temporal investments that minimum wage workers must make in order to achieve a specific sum of money (e.g. there is a significant temporal difference if a minimum wage worker can achieve an income above a poverty threshold by working part-time, full-time, or more than full-time). To address this oversight, we calculate the number of hours individuals and families earning the minimum wage would have to work in order to achieve the poverty-level income in the 20 European Union countries with national statutory minimum wages. Our findings show two things. One is that there are significant differences between how long minimum wage workers must work in order to achieve these income thresholds. The other is that while in some countries this amount is relatively stable over time, in others it can vary considerably

Transparency in Complex Computational Systems

Scientists depend on complex computational systems that are often ineliminably opaque, to the detriment of our ability to give scientific explanations and detect artifacts. Some philosophers have s..

Caroline Emelia Stephen

Excerpt: Caroline Emelia Stephen, born on December 8, 1834, was notable for a number of reasons. Her connections were impressive: she was the unmarried daughter of Sir James Stephen (the noted Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1836-1847), the sister of Leslie Stephen (author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), sister-in-law to Minny Thackeray Stephen and Anny Thackeray Ritchie (daughters of William Makepeace Thackeray), and aunt to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Her grandfather, also Sir James Stephen, wrote the legislation that ended slavery in England. Known as a Quaker mystic, she is credited with bringing about the revival of the Society of Friends in the latter part of the nineteenth century through writings about her conversion

Feeding a Population: Agricultural Education Priorities in Haitian History

The nation of Haiti has experienced a long history of poverty and of tests to its economic development. Among its priorities has been the establishment of an effective educational system. While educational standards remain high, the area of agricultural education—necessary for Haiti’s economy as well as nutritional subsistence—has met with unique challenges. This paper examines analyses and programming policies of the past in order to illuminate contemporary circumstances

The Tokugawa Samurai: Values & Lifestyle Transition

The Tokugawa period of Japan was a time of great prosperity but also great strife among the social classes. Of the most affected peoples of the Japanese feudal system was the samurai, who had so long been at the center of military and even political power. For hundreds of years, these highly revered peoples had lived a consistent life based off of virtues passed on through a code, and have also lived comfortable lives due to special powers that were reserved for them. However, with a lack of warfare and increasing Western influence on the political, social, and military system of Japan during the end of the Tokugawa Period, the samurai struggled to maintain significant power in their society as did they did in earlier eras. This slow decline in power that they faced, and a lessening focus on weaponry for fighting, indicated the transition that the samurai made from an elite warrior to a non-militaristic member of society . [excerpt

“Untiring Joys and Sorrows”: Yeats and the Sidhe

Excerpt: In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the “good people”—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological con- struct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that the fairies have taken the real person and left a changeling instead. Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) examines the case of Michael Cleary, who burned his relatively independent wife to death in the hopes of forcing the fairies to change her back to the acquiescent wife that he desired. Bourke finds the mythology of the fairy world so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that it blurs the lines between the literary construct and the sociological us

Moving Beyond Gender Stereotypes: Reinterpreting Female Celtic Statues from Entremont, France

In the field of archaeology, male bias has been prevalent in both theory and practice. Female Celtic statues from Entremont, France are an example of how this bias can negatively affect the study of past peoples. Male archaeologists who have excavated or studied the site of Entremont have given little attention to the female statues found on the site, despite being a unique find. The few interpretations that they did provide were sexist, and the female statues were treated as secondary to male statues, reflecting the perceived inferiority of women to men in ancient societies. This can lead to not only incomplete but also likely incorrect narratives of the lives of Celtic women from Entremont and the larger Celtic world. The goals of this paper are to address these biases, and work beyond them in order to provide a more holistic perspective on Celtic women and their roles within society

Stephen King

Stephen King, popularly known as “The King of Horror,” is one of the more prolific and successful writers of the twentieth century. Despite a reputation for writing only horror and gore, however, King has written works that do not qualify as either horror or supernatural but rather are thoughtful, intricate slices of human experience that often cause us to reflect on our own childhoods, not always with fond nostalgia. He encourages his readers to get in touch with their own memories of what being a child really means, and innocence has little to do with King\u27s version of childhood. Believing that most adults have lost touch with their imaginations and a sense of the mythic, King constantly challenges his readers to expand their concepts of memory and experience