The Play and Place of Criticism

Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others

Words about Words about Words

Originally published in 1987. In Words about Words about Words, Murray Krieger advances his ongoing dialogue with the rich diversity of contemporary literary theory and elaborates on his own position as it grows out of an opposing relation to much of current criticism. Krieger examines the kinds of ideologies and ontologies smuggled into literary theory that purports to be anti-ideological and anti-ontological. He explores the extent to which critical fashions dictate the development of theory and the reasons why particular theories exclude certain kinds of literary works in favor of others. Under such circumstances, Krieger asks, What becomes of the critic's task of evaluation? Further, what is the relation of the idea of progress to criticism and the arts, and what is the effect of these notions on cultural and intellectual institutions? He seeks an alternative to the deterministic tendencies of the new historicism in viewing the relations of literature and literary criticism to society. Progressing from broad questions to more focused critical problems and close readings, Krieger reviews the aesthetic tradition as it has evolved from Kant. He engages in debate with deconstructionist critics about the role of symbol and allegory as descriptions of ways in which poems succeed or fail in constructing their verbal universe. And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct

The Theory of Criticism

Originally published in 1976. Representing years of critical reflection, The Theory of Criticism attempts to construct a poetics of "presence." Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often dramatic, he looks at the multidimensionality of the poetic world through the lens of Western poetics. His work clearly addresses itself to post–New Critical questions: how to preserve the literary object as a thing to be perceived, valued, and enjoyed and yet to account for its presence in, and interaction with, our culture as a whole, always in danger of being dissolved into man's language-making and -forming activity in general. Our awareness of the poem as object must be modified by our awareness that it is an "intentional" object. Krieger develops his balanced vision in three parts. Part 1 defines the problem and defends the very activity of theorizing both in its own terms and in terms of the critic's function throughout the history of Western criticism. By asking at the outset whether criticism is vain or valuable, Krieger already confronts the basic tension between system and world and the need to account for both. By creating a heuristic system that examines the possibility of form, the critic serves also the world of history and thought as a whole. Part 2 pursues that history from the classical encounter with mimesis in Greek thought to the Romantic and post-Romantic elevation of consciousness as a main criterion of poetic art. Defining a "humanistic aesthetic" as it has been viewed since Aristotle, the author shows how, during and after the eighteenth century, form was opened up under the impact of a Kantian and post-Kantian view, epitomized finally by Coleridge's imagination and its consequences for recent theorists. Part 3 deals with the image of the world struggling against its enclosure within a poetic context. It expands our view of metaphor as a reflection of the dual nature of poetic language, simultaneously locked into the poem and referring to history and nature outside. Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode

Poetic Presence and Illusion

Orignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position

The Tragic Vision

Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero.

The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in County Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States

Majid Ezzati and colleagues analyze US county-level mortality data for 1961 to 1999, and find a steady increase in mortality inequality across counties between 1983 and 1999

Towards integration of environmental and health impact assessments for wild capture fishing and farmed fish with particular reference to public health and occupational health dimensions

The paper offers a review and commentary, with particular reference to the production of fish from wild capture fisheries and aquaculture, on neglected aspects of health impact assessments which are viewed by a range of international and national health bodies and development agencies as valuable and necessary project tools. Assessments sometimes include environmental health impact assessments but rarely include specific occupational health and safety impact assessments especially integrated into a wider public health assessment. This is in contrast to the extensive application of environmental impact assessments to fishing and the comparatively large body of research now generated on the public health effects of eating fish. The value of expanding and applying the broader assessments would be considerable because in 2004 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports there were 41,408,000 people in the total ‘fishing’ sector including 11,289,000 in aquaculture. The paper explores some of the complex interactions that occur with regard to fishing activities and proposes the wider adoption of health impact assessment tools in these neglected sectors through an integrated public health impact assessment tool

TIA1 Mutations in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Frontotemporal Dementia Promote Phase Separation and Alter Stress Granule Dynamics.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are age-related neurodegenerative disorders with shared genetic etiologies and overlapping clinical and pathological features. Here we studied a novel ALS/FTD family and identified the P362L mutation in the low-complexity domain (LCD) of T cell-restricted intracellular antigen-1 (TIA1). Subsequent genetic association analyses showed an increased burden of TIA1 LCD mutations in ALS patients compared to controls (p = 8.7 × 1

Diversity of Zoanthids (Anthozoa: Hexacorallia) on Hawaiian Seamounts: Description of the Hawaiian Gold Coral and Additional Zoanthids

The Hawaiian gold coral has a history of exploitation from the deep slopes and seamounts of the Hawaiian Islands as one of the precious corals commercialised in the jewellery industry. Due to its peculiar characteristic of building a scleroproteic skeleton, this zoanthid has been referred as Gerardia sp. (a junior synonym of Savalia Nardo, 1844) but never formally described or examined by taxonomists despite its commercial interest. While collection of Hawaiian gold coral is now regulated, globally seamounts habitats are increasingly threatened by a variety of anthropogenic impacts. However, impact assessment studies and conservation measures cannot be taken without consistent knowledge of the biodiversity of such environments. Recently, multiple samples of octocoral-associated zoanthids were collected from the deep slopes of the islands and seamounts of the Hawaiian Archipelago. The molecular and morphological examination of these zoanthids revealed the presence of at least five different species including the gold coral. Among these only the gold coral appeared to create its own skeleton, two other species are simply using the octocoral as substrate, and the situation is not clear for the final two species. Phylogenetically, all these species appear related to zoanthids of the genus Savalia as well as to the octocoral-associated zoanthid Corallizoanthus tsukaharai, suggesting a common ancestor to all octocoral-associated zoanthids. The diversity of zoanthids described or observed during this study is comparable to levels of diversity found in shallow water tropical coral reefs. Such unexpected species diversity is symptomatic of the lack of biological exploration and taxonomic studies of the diversity of seamount hexacorals