The style of the present: Karel Teige on constructivism and poetism

In this essay the Czech avant-gardist Karel Teige's dual program of Constructivism/Poetism is interrogated in the context of his own claim that architectural historicism was degraded by the rupture into a duality of structure and ornament. This inability to escape the terms of his own critique is shown to be the result of Teige's articulation of avant-garde culture as the embodiment of the historical identity or style of the present. (c) 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved

A Model of Creation? Scott, Sidney and Du Bartas

The copyright for this article belongs jointly to the Sidney Journal and to the author, and the Sidney Journal is willing to make the essay accessible via an institutional repository.William Scott’s translation from Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine, which follows Scott's treatise in the surviving manuscript, is an essential counterpart to the Model of Poesy. As well as being a practical demonstration of Scott’s technical principles, the translation provides the most immediate and enriching literary context for the Model’s arguments about the purpose of poetry. Shared images of making (e.g. gestation, architecture and agriculture) that describe the creation of poems in the Model and the creation of the world in Du Bartas evoke the analogy between the poetic maker and divine Maker, which Sidney had explored in the Defence. Yet the Model’s more positive assessment of the role of human reason in poetic composition contrasts with Du Bartas’ insistence on the poet’s dependence on prior creative acts. So how alike for Scott are composing a poem and creating the world? How far is a Model of Poesy also a Model of Creation? By pursuing interpretative questions like these, the Du Bartas translation emerges as a key resource for assessing how Scott wrote the Model, what makes his arguments distinctive, and how he assimilated insights from contemporary writers, especially Sidney’s account of the poet as maker

On the D-structure position of negative sentence adverbials in French

The author evaluates aspects of recent work by Pollock (1989), Belletti (1990) and Zanuttini (1991), in particular one fundamental assumption made there about the syntax of negative clauses in French. While accepting Pollock's claim that the clitic ne is generated as the X0 head of its own phrasal projection, the author rejects the claim (first made by Pollock (1989: 418) and subsequently endorsed by Belletti (1990: 30) and Zanuttini (1991: 35)) that pas is an Xmax phrasal category base-generated as the specifier of ne, i.e., in the specifier position within NegP. The author offers a three-sided argument against such an analysis, invoking: (a) a significant generalisation regarding the specifier position within functional projections; (b) the relationship between elements like pas and indefinite direct objects in clauses containing a transitive verb; and (c) the syntax of adverbials in general. The author goes on to consider Obenauer's (1983; 1984) work on `quantification at a distance' and Battye's (1989; 1991) work on `nominal quantification'. He argues for a unified account of negative sentence adverbials in French and posits accordingly that pas is generated in a lower position in clause structure, either adjoined to VP or as the head N of a determiner-less direct object indefinite DP

The Natural History of The Silkewormes and their Flies

Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.Images published with permission of The British Library Board (434.f.10), the Huntington Library and Proquest. Further reproduction is prohibited.This study examines the overlap between natural philosophy and humanist imitation in two works by Thomas Moffet: his reference work Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalum Theatrum (written c.1589) and his poem The Silkewormes, and their Flies (1599). Both works draw extensively on contemporary and classical authors in order to create intertextual collages that look backwards towards the natural unity found in the Garden of Eden. This leads me to argue that The Silkewormes’ compositional style shares more in common with Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur Du Bartas's Sepmaine (1578, 1584) than with Virgilian didactic poetry. I consider throughout Elizabethan notions of authority, composition and originality, and conclude that Silkewormes merits critical attention for its skilful synthesis of diverse material in creating a work appropriate for Mary Herbert and her household at Wilton.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Are textbook references to Darwin close to extinction?

The textbooks used to teach GCE A-level biology 30 years ago tended to concentrate on traditional zoology and botany, with just a passing reference to evolution. As biology established itself as a new discipline, books (and syllabuses) began to take an integrated approach, and evolution became an important theme that helped students to appreciate the interrelationships between plants and animals, cells and molecules, biochemistry and physiology, systematics and genetics, and ecology and behaviour. With the modularisation of modern specifications this theme has all but disappeared from textbooks and a detailed discussion of Darwin and the evidence for evolution has been replaced by perfunctory references to variation and selection and, in some cases, politically correct acknowledgements of creationism