Article

Peter Porter: The Metropolitan Voice

June 2006
Critical Survey 18(1):109-122

DOI:10.3167/001115706780810654

Authors:

At the beginning of the 1960s, what might be called the Significance of Being a Gentleman was on three occasions drawn to my attention, all of them connected with the Department of English at Reading University. The first such occasion occurred on a warm afternoon in May 1961. There was to be a seminar on the novels of Walter Scott, led by an Oxford don who had agreed to read us a paper based on a forthcoming book of his. The don arrived, permitted himself an incurious stare at the twelve or so of us who were present, produced the typescript of his book, read from it for what seemed an eternity and then, as the shadows outside lengthened and his audience blinked awake, reluctantly agreed to answer questions. I made some mild objection to his ranking Kenilworth alongside The Charterhouse of Parma. Scott's novel was good, but it surely wasn't on a level with Stendhal's masterpiece? He raised a languid hand. 'The test of a gentleman', he said, 'is his ability to enjoy Scott.'

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Article

Control into infinitival relatives

June 2018

James DOUGLAS

This paper focuses on a novel English construction involving control and infinitival relatives. Examples such as this is John’s book to read have a head noun (book) modified by an infinitival relative clause (to read) and a prenominal possessor (John’s). I argue that there is a control relation between the prenominal possessor and the PRO subject of the infinitival relative. I show that this ... [Show full abstract] control relation bears the structural hallmarks of obligatory control whilst at the same time permitting PRO to be interpreted as arbitrary. I discuss these empirical facts in the context of a syntactic, Agree-based theory of control.

Chapter

Prologue: What is History? — Now

January 2002

Richard J. Evans

‘What is History?’, asked E.H. Carr in 1961. In the course of his Trevelyan lectures, delivered in Cambridge, broadcast on BBC radio, and printed in a book that has since sold over a quarter of a million copies worldwide, Carr sought to answer this question in a number of ways. He began by making a distinction between history and chronicle. History was an attempt to understand and interpret the ... [Show full abstract] past, to explain the causes and origins of things in intelligible terms. Chronicle, on the other hand, was the mere cataloguing of events without any attempt to make connections between them. The chronicler was content to show that one thing followed another; the historian had to demonstrate that one thing caused another. Of course, Carr conceded, establishing that something happened was an important part of the historian’s work. It was the foundation on which everything else rested. But the really important part of the historian’s work lay in the edifice of explanation and interpretation which was erected on this foundation.1

Chapter

The Social Production of Technical Work

January 1986

Peter Whalley

This book’s initial interest in engineers stemmed from a conjunction of two concerns, each deriving from a separate tradition of intellectual discourse. On the one hand engineers have received attention as bearers of a special kind of knowledge, knowledge critical to production in high-technology industries. A knowledge expected to generate a crisis of organisation and legitimation in ... [Show full abstract] profit-oriented busienss, as control over the dominant force of production — now no longer capital or labour, but knowledge — fell into the hands of technical experts.

Chapter

Social Institutions, Norms, and Practices

January 2001

We submit a model of social institutions which binds together the two central components of institutions, a) a “behavioral” system of social practices as repeated patterns of collective intentional actions and b) the normative Üeberbau consisting of a task-right system which on the one hand is influenced and in basic cases even induced by the “underlying” practices and on the other hand serves to ... [Show full abstract] stabilize them. An explicit and relatively simple connection in terms of sanctions is drawn between actions which are obligatory or permitted by special positions on the one hand and the “ordinary” course of actions which occurs in social practices within an institution on the other hand. Obligations and rights are not simply bound to actions, but to systems of actions given in the form of systems of social practices. This adds an essential component which has been neglected in formal treatments so far. The inclusion of social practices yields a rich structure in which the emergence and maintenance of of norms can be tackled in a realistic way.

Poster

Full-text available

Does sexual intelligence exist? Do we need another intelligence construct?

March 2016

Wojciech Oronowicz-Jaśkowiak

In his new book ‘Sexual Intelligence’, Marty Klein states that the sexual intelligence is composed of, among others, the ability to create and maintain desire in a situation that is less than perfect or not comfortable for the partners. The aim of this paper is to compare the sexual intelligence with other intelligence constructs, such as social intelligence and emotional intelligence. On one ... [Show full abstract] hand, the sexual intelligence seems to be similar to social intelligence, but on the other hand, the sexual intelligence may be more useful than the social intelligence to predict social interactions of sexual nature. The sexual intelligence might be connected with the emotional intelligence. It has been proven that emotional intelligence is connected with the quality of close relationships and that may also be the case for the sexual intelligence. Sexual intelligence seems to be another psychological construct created to describe the human intelligence, but further research is needed to prove that it differs from social or emotional intelligence.

Article

Bodies and voices: Post modernity and poetry in the work of Kirmen Uribe

January 2008

Jon Kortazar

Kirmen Uribe's Bitartean heldu eskutik (2001)/ Mientras tanto dame la mono /(Meanwhile Hold My Hand) heralded a revolution among young Basque poets, a quiet revolution which opted for a new poetic diction. Uribe moved away from avant-garde poetics to experimentation with differing poetic voices and styles, reflecting some of the worries of the contemporary world like emigration, or the ... [Show full abstract] point-of-view of 'the other', without abandoning universal poetic leitmotivs such as death and the future. The article tries to explain both the success and the reception of the book, within the context of its leitmotivs and poetic diction, while pointing out its original elements.

Chapter

The 41: A Novel of Social Criticism [1906]

January 2003

Eduardo Castrejón

The author of this book, counting on the public’s good will, handed over to this publishing house his first attempt at the genre of the novel; and the house is publishing it for the reasons set out below.

Chapter

Improvement in Text-Dependent Mispronunciation Detection for English Learners

November 2017 · Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

This paper put forth two novel approaches to effectively improve the performance of mispronunciations detection in English learners speech. On one hand, a distance measure called Kullback–Leibler Divergence (KLD) between Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is introduced to optimize the probability space of a posteriori probability; On the other hand, back end processing of normalization based on the ... [Show full abstract] variants of speakers is introduced to improve the performance of the system. Experiments on a database of 6360 syllables pronounced by 50 speakers with varied pronunciation proficiency indicate the promising effects of these methods by decreasing the FRR from 58 to 44 % at 20 % FAR.

Chapter

On the variable nature of head final effects in German and English: An interface account

November 2016

Roland Hinterhölzl

The paper investigates head final effects (HF-effects) in German and English and argues that the syntactic configuration that underlies them gives rise to three different types of violations in the interfaces. It is shown that HF-effects are either morphological or prosodic in nature. A diagnostics – morphological versus syntactic displacement – is established that allows to connect HF-effects to ... [Show full abstract] their relevant interface conditions. The prosodic conditions on word order are then argued to be twofold: they involve a condition on heavy constituents, on the one hand, and a condition on the mapping of syntactic constituents onto prosodic constituents respecting the Strict Layer Hypothesis, on the other hand. Finally, I argue that a pure syntactic condition, like the Final-over-Final Constraint proposed by Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts (2007 and 2014) is inedaquate to account for the variable nature of HF-effects.

Article

Elias in the Footsteps of Hobbes?

January 2012

It is not uncommon for links to be drawn between the work of Norbert Elias and that of a slightly earlier German sociologist, Max Weber, to whom Elias owes a great deal. In this paper we go back much further and explore some similarities between, on the one hand, Elias’s work on the connection between the development of the state and the development of constraints on individual behaviour, which ... [Show full abstract] he refers to as a civilising process, and, on the other hand, the seventeenth century work of the English political thinker Thomas Hobbes on the connection between the development of sovereignty and the development of more disciplined subjects. We also seek to source these similarities in the two thinkers’ common debt to the early modern intersection between neo–Epicureanism and neo–Stoicism. None of the similarities we discuss are straightforward or certain – Elias rarely mentions Hobbes in his published work – so we make a point of highlighting differences between them as well as similarities, which is to stress the question mark in our title.

Chapter

Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations

October 2009

Andrew Bennett

This chapter focuses on the ignorance of others that can be found in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which are considered to be two of the most fully achieved and most commonly discussed English novels from the mid-nineteenth century. It grounds the discussion on an observation on the self-evident fact that one knows others through the ‘subtler movements of ... [Show full abstract] the body’. The chapter reveals that this strategy can be found in these two novels, in which ‘realism’ may be said to be indirectly related to the modern documentary at certain important points. It also aims to identify the different ways hands serve as signifiers of personhood, and studies what this might tell about the saving knowledge of others.

Chapter

The History of Mr. Polly

January 1979

J. R. Hammond

Today, seventy years after its original publication, The History of Mr. Polly has achieved the status of a classic. It has taken its place alongside The Pickwick Papers and The Diary of a Nobody as one of those quintessential works which serve to delineate the English character. It is also universally accepted as being among the handful of novels which are destined to carry its author’s name ... [Show full abstract] forward to posterity, and many critics regard it as Wells’s finest single work.