Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree, and Sir Orfeo Viewed as Eroticized Versions of the Folktales about Supernatural Wives

Two of the tales mentioned in the title are in many ways typical of the great collections of stories (The Canterbury Tales and Il Decamerone) to which they belong. What makes them conspicuous is no doubt the intensity of the erotic desire presented as the ultimate law which justifies even the most outrageous actions. The cult of eroticism is combined there with a cult of youth, which means disaster for the protagonists, who try to combine eroticism with advanced age. And yet the stories in question have roots in a very different tradition in which overt eroticism is punished and can only reassert itself in a chastened form, its transformation being due to sacrifices made by the lover to become reunited with the object of his love. A medieval example of the latter tradition is here the Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo. All of the three narratives are conspicuously connected by the motif of the enchanted tree. The Middle Ages are associated with a tendency to moralize ancient literature, the most obvious example of which is the French anonymous work Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), and its Latin version Ovidius Moralizatus by Pierre Bersuire. In the case of The Merchant’s Tale and The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree, we seem to meet with the opposite process, that is with a medieval demoralization of an essentially didactic tradition. The present article deals with the problem of how this transformation could happen and the extent of the resulting un-morality. Some use has also been made of the possible biblical parallels with the tales in question

A Kernel Test for Three-Variable Interactions

We introduce kernel nonparametric tests for Lancaster three-variable interaction and for total independence, using embeddings of signed measures into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. The resulting test statistics are straightforward to compute, and are used in powerful interaction tests, which are consistent against all alternatives for a large family of reproducing kernels. We show the Lancaster test to be sensitive to cases where two independent causes individually have weak influence on a third dependent variable, but their combined effect has a strong influence. This makes the Lancaster test especially suited to finding structure in directed graphical models, where it outperforms competing nonparametric tests in detecting such V-structures

The Discourse of Orientalism in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

It has been stated, on the basis of certain motifs in The Chronicles of Narnia, that “like many Englishmen of his era, Lewis was unconsciously but regrettably unsympathetic to things and people Middle Eastern” (Ford 363). My task in this article would be to examine the nature of this prejudice because I generally agree that we can legitimately talk about C. S. Lewis’s prejudice against Oriental cultures. The crucial problem seems to be whether this prejudice was so serious and so strong that it should in turn prejudice us, not only perhaps against what Lewis had to say about the Oriental cultures, but maybe even against this author himself. Naturally, Lewis’s “anti-Orientalism” is hardly subversive in relation to his own cultural background, but it would be hard to deny that it is subversive in relation to the currently dominant discourse of multiculturalism. The material for the discussion is provided, for the most part, by the thread of Calormen, a fantastic country (appearing only occasionally in The Chronicles of Narnia, mainly in The Horse and His Boy) that shares many characteristics with a certain stereotypical conception of the Oriental civilization. But also some other books by C. S. Lewis, notably his essays, are taken into account. Some reference is also made to the famous book by Edward Said, Orientalism.Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Regression with I-priors

The problem of estimating a parametric or nonparametric regression function in a model with normal errors is considered. For this purpose, a novel objective prior for the regression function is proposed, defined as the distribution maximizing entropy subject to a suitable constraint based on the Fisher information on the regression function. The prior is named I-prior. For the present model, it is Gaussian with covariance kernel proportional to the Fisher information, and mean chosen a priori (e.g., 0). The I-prior has the intuitively appealing property that the more information is available about a linear functional of the regression function, the larger its prior variance, and, broadly speaking, the less influential the prior is on the posterior. Unlike the Jeffreys prior, it can be used in high dimensional settings. The I-prior methodology can be used as a principled alternative to Tikhonov regularization, which suffers from well-known theoretical problems which are briefly reviewed. The regression function is assumed to lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) over a low or high dimensional covariate space, giving a high degree of generality. Analysis of some real data sets and a small-scale simulation study show competitive performance of the I-prior methodology, which is implemented in the R-package iprior

Wawel Meets Elsinore. The National and Universal Aspects of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Vision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The aim of this paper is to show the role, the possibilities and the limits of Wyspiański’s national thinking through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Of particular importance, in this context, is the role the Ghost takes in Wyspiański’s celebrated interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. By the Ghost we mean the spirit of history, the ghost of a father, the spirit of the fatherland, the voice of the ancestors, and particularly that of the Polish king Casimir the Great, as well as the Holy Ghost and the Evil Spirit because all these aspects of the Ghost belong to Wyspiański’s vision. The play in question bears witness to what the Polish poet calls “the truth of other worlds,” as well as the truth of the theatre, which Wyspiański calls the labyrinth. The poet manages to reduce, to some extent, this difficult truth to the truth of the world he cared most about, that is the present and historical reality of Poland, more specifically the city of Cracow, known as Poland’s spiritual, that is “ghostly,” and only virtual, capital. It is also remarkable that Wyspiański saw the Ghost in Hamlet in the context of other Shakespearean ghosts, apparitions and magicians, such as those that appear in Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Richard III. At the same time, Wyspiański realizes that the Ghost, with its irrationalism, offends the spirit of post-medieval times, and as such, is understandably neglected by Hamlet, who for Wyspiański, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, stands for modernity