Recalling All the Olympians: W. B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things,” On the Boiler and the Agenda of National Rebirth

While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’ . . . would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernit

The Shortest Way to Modernity Is via the Margins: J.H. Prynne’s Later Poetry

In the essay an attempt is made to investigate the processes of construction and reconstruction of meaning in the later books of the Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne. It has been argued that his poetry disturbs the act of meaning-making in a ceaseless experimental reconnection of words taken from multifarious discourses, ranging from economics to theology. Yet, what appears striking in this poetry is the fact that these lyrics take their force from figurative meaning with which the words are endowed in the process of a poem’s unfolding. Prynne appears to compose his lyrics by juxtaposing words that in themselves (or sometimes in small clusters) do yield a meaning but together exude an aura of unintelligibility. We may see this process as aiming at the destruction of what might be posited as the centre of signification of the modern language by constantly dispersing the meaning to the fringes of understanding. The poems force the reader to look to the margins of their meaning in the sense that the signification of the entire lyric is an unstable composite of figurative meanings of this lyric’s individual words and phrases. To approach this poetry a need arises to read along the lines of what is here termed “fleeting assertion”; it is not that Prynne’s poems debar centre in favour of, for instance, Derridean freeplay but rather that they seek to ever attempt to erect a centre through the influx from the margins of signification. Therefore they call for strong interpretive assertions without which they veer close to an absurdity of incomprehension; however, those assertions must always be geared to accepting disparate significatory influxes. Indeed, interpretation becomes a desperate chase after “seeing anew” with language but, at the same time, a chase that must a priori come to terms with the fact that this new vision will forever remain in the making

Poland in Times of Great War and Second Independence 1914–1939

The present book “Poland – History, Culture and Society. Selected Readings” is the third edition of a collection of academic texts written with the intention to accompany the module by providing incoming students with teaching materials that will assist them in their studies of the course module and encourage further search for relevant information and data. The papers collected in the book have been authored by academic teachers from the University of Łódź, specialists in such fields as history, geography, literature, sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, and political science. Each author presents one chapter related to a topic included in the module or extending its contents. The book contains the extensive bibliography

History of Poland during the Middle Ages

The present book “Poland – History, Culture and Society. Selected Readings” is the third edition of a collection of academic texts written with the intention to accompany the module by providing incoming students with teaching materials that will assist them in their studies of the course module and encourage further search for relevant information and data. The papers collected in the book have been authored by academic teachers from the University of Łódź, specialists in such fields as history, geography, literature, sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, and political science. Each author presents one chapter related to a topic included in the module or extending its contents. The book contains the extensive bibliography

The symbolic dimension of the city : the presence of a dragon in the urban space of Krakow

Praca porusza problematykę symbolicznego wymiaru miasta tworzonego z podsystemu urbanistycznego i społecznego. Miasto i jego krajobraz są tu rozumiane jako system znaków funkcjonujący w dwóch odrębnych, zależnych od siebie porządkach rzeczywistości: porządku materialnym i porządku wyobrażeniowym. W pracy stawiane są pytania o rolę symbolu we współczesnym procesie tworzenia specyfiki miejsca; jest tu też mowa o tożsamości miejsca, o nadawaniu miejscu cech swojskości, o społecznej potrzebie dostrzegania symbolu. Jako przykład do rozważań na temat symbolicznego wymiaru miasta wybrano obecność smoka - stwora zrodzonego w ludzkiej wyobraźni - w przestrzeni miejskiej Krakowa. Kraków jest miastem historycznym, dawną stolicą Polski, jest miastem bogatym w zróżnicowane kapitały symboliczne. Symbolem Krakowa jest smok; smok jest obecny w legendzie o powstaniu miasta, jest też powszechnie obecny w materialnej przestrzeni Krakowa. Jest częścią tożsamości miasta.The paper deals with the issues of the symbolic dimension of a city created from the urban and social subsystems. The city and its landscape are understood here as a system of signs functioning in two distinct orders of reality, yet still dependent on each other, i.e. the material order and the imaginary one. In the paper, we ask questions about the role of the symbol in the contemporary process of creating the specificity of a place. We also speak about the identity of a place, about endowing a place with features of familiarity, about the social need to recognise the symbol. The presence of a dragon, a creature born in the human imagination, in the urban space of Krakow was chosen as an example of the symbolic dimension of the city. Krakow is a historic city, the former capital of Poland, a city rich in diverse symbolic capitals. The dragon is a symbol of Krakow. It is present in the legend about the city’s origins, and is also commonly present in the material space of Krakow. It is part of the city’s identity

Using parametric set constraints for locating errors in CLP programs

This paper introduces a framework of parametric descriptive directional types for constraint logic programming (CLP). It proposes a method for locating type errors in CLP programs and presents a prototype debugging tool. The main technique used is checking correctness of programs w.r.t. type specifications. The approach is based on a generalization of known methods for proving correctness of logic programs to the case of parametric specifications. Set-constraint techniques are used for formulating and checking verification conditions for (parametric) polymorphic type specifications. The specifications are expressed in a parametric extension of the formalism of term grammars. The soundness of the method is proved and the prototype debugging tool supporting the proposed approach is illustrated on examples. The paper is a substantial extension of the previous work by the same authors concerning monomorphic directional types.Comment: 64 pages, To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programmin

Shingle 2.0: generalising self-consistent and automated domain discretisation for multi-scale geophysical models

The approaches taken to describe and develop spatial discretisations of the domains required for geophysical simulation models are commonly ad hoc, model or application specific and under-documented. This is particularly acute for simulation models that are flexible in their use of multi-scale, anisotropic, fully unstructured meshes where a relatively large number of heterogeneous parameters are required to constrain their full description. As a consequence, it can be difficult to reproduce simulations, ensure a provenance in model data handling and initialisation, and a challenge to conduct model intercomparisons rigorously. This paper takes a novel approach to spatial discretisation, considering it much like a numerical simulation model problem of its own. It introduces a generalised, extensible, self-documenting approach to carefully describe, and necessarily fully, the constraints over the heterogeneous parameter space that determine how a domain is spatially discretised. This additionally provides a method to accurately record these constraints, using high-level natural language based abstractions, that enables full accounts of provenance, sharing and distribution. Together with this description, a generalised consistent approach to unstructured mesh generation for geophysical models is developed, that is automated, robust and repeatable, quick-to-draft, rigorously verified and consistent to the source data throughout. This interprets the description above to execute a self-consistent spatial discretisation process, which is automatically validated to expected discrete characteristics and metrics.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted for publication and under revie