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While there are refined creations, vulgarised Zimdancehall has been a subject of academic, political and cultural concern. It is widely disparaged as abominable and culturally subversive music. How...

While there are many refined musical productions, Zimdancehall is epitomised by the use of explicit vulgar lyrics. This article attempts to make sense of vulgarity in the musical genre against the ...

In Chinese political discourse, “positive energy” (zheng nengliang) is a popular expression that has embodied mainstream political ideology in China since 2012. This term has also become prominent on Douyin, a prominent Chinese short-video platform. By June 2018, over 500 Chinese governmental accounts on Douyin had promoted positive energy in videos, and the content was viewed over 1.6 billion times. Douyin even created a separate trending section, Positive Energy, for videos that promoted the dominant state ideology. This study argues that the Positive Energy feature on Douyin is significant. The Chinese government has accused and even permanently shut down several digital platforms for spreading “vulgarity” as the antithesis of positive energy. Using the app walkthrough method and a content analysis of over 800 videos collected from the Positive Energy section of Douyin, this study explores how Douyin promotes the Chinese state’s political agenda by promoting a new form of playful patriotism online.

Laughter can provoke both cultural catharsis and sociopolitical critique. However, in an era of Trumpism, laughter has become troubled by vulgar rhetoric of shrugging off comic possibilities insofa...

This article presents original user-based research concerning a Mexican European Diaspora's use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) for making racial and classed distinctions through the course of sharing and viewing content on their networked profiles. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework is used to address the ways in which SNSs usage fosters social capital, exclusion and displays of prejudice and discrimination. We also found useful the analysis of racial distinctions based on participants' references to physical attributes. To illustrate the use of racial and classed distinctions, we specifically consider the use of Facebook and also of A Small World (ASW), an exclusive SNS, regarded as one of few designed for use by 'the wealthy' [Ruiz, 2008. "Five Social Networking Sites for the Wealthy." Forbes. Accessed June 11, 2010. http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/02/social-networks-vip-tech-personal-cx_nr_0502style.html]. We analyse the term 'naco', a pejorative Mexican term commonly used to refer to vulgarity or inferiority amongst Mexican European and privileged diaspora with strong racial, classed and gendered connotations. The empirical material for this study is based on ethnographic research. Through the analysis of displayed images and text as well as well questionnaires and interviews we found tacit or explicit exclusion, discrimination and segregation through close-knit SNS networks engaged in by our participants, a Mexican privileged European diaspora.

The Left usually dismisses charity as demeaning intervention into the lives of oppressed classes, an obfuscation through which exploitation is legitimated. Few arguments by Marx and Engels are as deeply ingrained in Marxism as their statements on charity. This can be traced back to Marxism’s common roots with liberalism. Marketization, religious reform, and liberal political economy undermined traditional conceptions of poverty and relief, which upheld interdependence between God, the rich, and the poor as sacrosanct. Marxism thus inherited an unshakable suspicion of heartfelt poverty alleviation, whereas today’s liberalism has moved beyond its classical vulgarity to invigorate charity with a new spirit. Exploring Lucien Goldmann’s take on Blaise Pascal and the ongoing reformulation of caritas within Christianity, this essay contends that a radically different conception of charity is possible and that charitable love is a battleground between conservative, liberal, and emancipatory understandings of reli...

Faced with repression and reform, humor has become tactical for public school teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, engaged in a decades-old movement that after 2006 involved intensified street- and school-based pedagogies. This piece explores how humor adds to a political project via mocking names, images, and dictates of elite leaders to bring a here and now to what is taken as inaccessible in the teachers’ political lives. Humor forms part of an (e)sc(h)atology in which critical practices are part eschatological, a call for definite transformation, and part scatological, embodied vulgarity. La parte chusca (the funny part), its (e)sc(h)atological contribution, angles toward critical literacies in Oaxaca and beyond.

In the concluding Maps of Meaning, Peter Jackson offers a provocation that continues to resonate in contemporary debates around cultural geography, such as affect and emotion, identity and differen...

We investigate the ways in which celebrity identity myths are created, shaped, interpreted and utilised by media, celebrities and consumers. Two working-class female celebrities, Cheryl Cole and Katie Price, provide our focus, and we draw on an analysis of articles in the popular press, celebrity autobiographies and qualitative data collected with 16- to 18-year-olds. We find that class-infused celebrity identity myths (‘celebrity chav’) are constructed in terms of glamour, allure and charisma but also vulgarity, repulsion and ordinariness. Young consumers interpret these myths based on judgements of taste, morality, connection and worthiness and utilise them in order to support the identity goals of distinction, affirmation, belonging and enhancement.

This essay makes a case for ridicule as a vehicle for humoring rhetorical judgments. With an eye to the “ugly,” the “laughable,” and the “distorted” as longstanding topoi for defying conventional appeals and wrongheaded standards, I build on contemporary interest in the politics of comedy by providing a provisional map of some of the tensions that emerge out of ridiculous appeals in public discourse. The general orientation is toward comic forms that seem to evidence the civic virtue in vulgarity. Specifically, this essay considers how ridicule bends the rules of rhetorical judgment in the formation (or reaffirmation) of cultural values. Stephen Colbert's stunt in establishing a political action committee is put forth as an example of how particularly comic judgments test the grounds of what tends to pass for acceptable political speech. In addition, broader economies of ridicule are engaged in order to consider some of our current politics of offense, the importance of occasionally disidentifying with so...

Entertainment is a key cultural category. Yet the definition of entertainment can differ depending upon whom one asks. This article maps out understandings of entertainment in three key areas. Within industrial discourses, entertainment is defined by a commercial business model. Within evaluative discourses used by consumers and critics, it is understood through an aesthetic system that privileges emotional engagement, story, speed and vulgarity. Within academia, entertainment has not been a key organizing concept within the humanities, despite the fact that it is one of the central categories used by producers and consumers of culture. It has been important within psychology, where entertainment is understood in a solipsistic sense as being anything that an individual finds entertaining. Synthesizing these approaches, the authors propose a cross-sectoral definition of entertainment as ‘audience-centred commercial culture’.

During the 1920s and 1930s, it was believed that an Australian physical ‘type’ had developed under the bright antipodean skies, superior in size and appearance to its English counterpart. When Australians visited the metropole, therefore, locals and visitors alike claimed that they could be identified by sight alone. This article explores the notion of Australian physical distinctiveness, examining the body as a site for the construction and performance of Australian identities in interwar London. I argue that the imagined pre-eminence of Australian bodies became a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, yet could simultaneously connote mental vacancy, vulgarity or even racial otherness. In consequence, the metropole often became a site of physical transformation and re-definition, in which antipodeans sought to improve their chances of assimilation by disavowing the Australianness of their bodies.

This article focuses on the lived experience of whiteness in self-identified white women from the middle classes in the Southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis and their attempts to reclaim and embody sexualities in which pleasure is as much the property of the feminine as the masculine. This forces them to tread a treacherous line between vulgarity and chastity as they strive for a ‘modern’ female sexual identity which not only explicitly challenges patriarchy but also creates the possibility of weakening regimes of white dominance. Highlighting the heterogeneous nature of whiteness in the South of Brazil allows a critique of academic assumptions about the nature of race and racism in Brazil and the construction of theoretical arguments about the radical potential for change to regimes of both gendered and racial dominance that spring from an anthropologically understood ‘mimicry’ of white Brazilian male heterosexuality.

This article discusses the influence of contemporary criticism upon the works of the Brontes. Accusations of provincialism and vulgarity published in reviews of the Bronte works prompted written responses from Charlotte. Her responses, focusing upon the geographically located attacks, strengthened the concept of the north of England in the national imagination. This north–south socio-geographic divide, prominent in novels such as Wuthering Heights and Shirley , was evident in criticism of their works and in Charlotte's reactions to that criticism. This article assesses this interplay between the critics, the Brontes and the north.

The Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart has frequently been called a “Gogolian” writer, usually in an attempt to explain the pedigree of his grotesque humour. This article focuses on Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), which is a modern-day rewriting of Gogol'’s tale “Portret” [“The Portrait”]. A close analysis of Shteyngart’s text and comparison to its Gogolian model reveals a complex relation that is not necessarily centered on Gogol'’s humour. In his rewriting of “The Portrait,” Shteyngart emphasizes the inherent venality and vulgarity of Gogol'’s characters, who turn into grotesque caricatures of their prototypes. In doing so, he seems to “Gogolize” Gogol'’s tale by adding some of the absurd humour that critics have found to be lacking in “The Portrait.” By making a painting the focus of their stories, both Gogol' and Shteyngart engage in a self-reflective comment about art and the role of the creative artist. Similar to the cliched hack-paintings of Gogol'’s painter Chartko...

The classical joking relationship has fascinated anthropologists for decades, especially in relation to African societies. The existence of joking relationships in Aboriginal Australia has also been noted in ethnographies, but rarely described in a way that acknowledges that kinship-mediated humour can actually be creative and funny. Kinship is obviously central to an understanding of these relationships, but the institutions that engender joking relationships have (surprisingly) rarely been discussed in detail for any Australian Aboriginal group. Taking the Bininj Kunwok and Dalabon-speaking peoples of western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory as a case study, I seek to demonstrate a generalisation that, in this part of Australia, joking relationships index the absence of actual affinity. The pretentious bluster, vulgarity and teasing of joking relationships ironically echo appropriate ways of behaving with actual affines. Whereas respect and avoidance are the hallmarks of interaction between actual ...

Achille Mbembe's contributions to postcolonial and cultural studies have generated a considerable interest for over a decade. While his innovative work has been the subject of instructive but brief critical responses, his interventions have rarely been the attentive focus of an essay-long study devoted to a close reading of the local idioms of power, which his work insightfully explores. My article aims to rectify this lacuna in the critical literature by focusing on the aesthetics of vulgarity and the authority's production of violence in postcolonial sites, which Mbembe studies. The thematic concentration of this close reading is double: First, I delineate the theoretical propositions and ethnographic components of Mbembe's comparative postcolonial approach that I find particularly suggestive for the exegesis of the postcolonial authorization of simulacral representation and its formalization of mighty, monumental power. Second, I develop Mbembe's study of the grammar of power and propose a conceptual f...

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.)Thanks to Anthony Van Dyck, we all have a clear picture of Charles I: grave, dignified, every inch the proper monarch, and a good family man. It is an image that goes beyond the visual, given support in contemporary comments on the king, most influentially in Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson: 'The face of the court was much changed in the change of the king, for King Charles was temperate and chaste and serious, so that the fools and bawds, mimics and catamites of the former court grew out of fashion.'1 If even someone so deeply hostile to Charles on political and religious grounds could write approvingly of his moral uprightness, it must be incontrovertible. Clarendon, too - not afraid to criticise the king's indecisiveness, lack of enterprise and meanness ('he paused too long in giving') - praises his strict temperance and abhorrence of debauchery: '. . . he could never endure any light or profane word with what sharpness of wit soever it was covered: and though he was well pleased and delighted with reading verses made upon any occasion, no man durst bring before him any thing that was profane or unclean'.2 More than three hundred and fifty years later, this reserved, formal, humourless figure still dominates our view of the king, barely qualified by the wild and absurd romanticism of his voyage to Spain with Buckingham in 1623, and his sexual passion for his wife. The idea that he might be at all indecorous seems to be unthinkable even to his most severe critics. Despite substantial and admirable studies of the creation of Charles's image both during his lifetime through masques, visual representation, pamphlet literature and poetry, and after his death through, above all, Eikon Basilike, there has been a marked reluctance to examine how the public image relates to the private man. Hutchinson's description of him as 'temperate and chaste and serious' remains essentially unchallenged.There can be no doubt concerning his detestation of drunkenness; it is well attested, not only by commentators but by event. Given his tendency to confer benefits on all of Buckingham's friends and relations, for example, his refusal to continue the Duke's brother Kit Villiers (created Earl of Anglesey by James VI and I) in a court post, on the grounds that 'he would have no drunkards of his Chamber', is doubly significant.3 Charles's desire for privacy and formality in the conduct of court life is similarly incontestable, even though his imposition of new rules did little to reduce duelling, gambling and drinking among the unrulier members of the court, and though sexual misconduct was hidden behind the curtains (sometimes literally) rather than disappearing altogether. The evidence for the king's dislike of 'unclean' language or wit is much less clear. It depends, of course, on what may be defined as 'unclean', but I think we can infer from Clarendon's description that it encompassed sexual innuendo and vulgarity, not just gross obscenity and blasphemy. While it is rare for Charles to use coarse vocabulary in his writing, in his most private letters it is not wholly absent. In 1624 during the French marriage negotiations Viscount Kensington (later Earl of Holland) received a furious letter from the Prince addressing him as 'Captaine Cokescombe', and declaring that he 'would not caire a fart for [the] frendshippe' of the 'Monsers' were it not for his respect for 'Madam' (Henrietta Maria).4 In early 1625, picking up on his father's apparently affectionate term for Buckingham's wife, mother and sister, he wrote to 'Steenie' that James hoped 'that your comming merrilie hither with the Counts [cunts] in your cumpanie to be his Nurses will make him a hole man again'.5 Just prior to Charles's marriage, Walter Montagu reported from court to the Earl of Carlisle in Paris that 'I haue made him in loue with euery hare in Madames head and swares she shall haue no more powder till he powder her and blow her up himselfe' (a sentence that has been cut from the letter as printed in the Hardwicke State Papers in 1778). …

Film was the most notable expression of the Israeli mood during the decade between 1967 and 1977 which was characterized by “euphoric” and quasi‐capitalist freedom, which found its implementation in what can be termed “vulgar poetics”. The formal characteristics of this poetics of vulgarity, matching the characteristics of euphoric consciousness, were excess and lack of inhibition or subtlety. This is manifested in the thematic reduction of the films’ subjects and in their dishonesty in their excessive portrayal of action in war, sexual license and ethnic stereotypes, and in their blunt disregard for style and artistic restraint. These characteristics are detected in the three main film genres that evolved during this period: war films, “Personal” films and “Burekas” films (comedies focused on inter‐ethnic relations), with particular focus on the films of Uri Zohar.

When the first book-length study of Australian children’s rhymes, Cinderella Dressed in Yella, was published in 1969, it was greeted with excited interest. Here was a collection that carefully documented the everyday chants and verbal lore of the playground, and took the activities of children seriously. Such an approach resonated among an Australian population increasingly aware of the origins and existence of a rich national folklore, and open to progressive educational ideas that recognised the contemporary culture of childhood. Cinderella was an important book of its time, running to several printings and a minor censorship scandal about children’s ‘vulgarity’, with a revised edition published in 1978.

This article uncovers the complex and tangled intertextual relationship between the 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses and the many competing narratives about barmaids at the turn of the century. For some, barmaids were ambiguous sexual personae who characterized a modern and freer age. For others, barmaids were in acute moral peril, in need of rescue and salvation. While 'Sirens' has often been read as a chapter more preoccupied with style than with politics, it seems that Joyce was intimately engaged with intensely political debates over the role of women in the public sphere. Through satirizing contemporary moral unease surrounding the figure of the barmaid, Joyce covertly attacks those moral reformers who would also successfully censor his own work.

Henry Luce's Life magazine had an early brush with controversy in 1937 with the publication of a voyeuristic feature titled "How to Undress." This paper undertakes a qualitative analysis of this and other instances of nudity in the first year of Life to understand the institutional and cultural contest in which "How to Undress" emerged. It also addresses the questions of how this deature (and nudity more broadly) fit into photojournalism and what these images and responses to them suggest about ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality Life's nudity was not merely a frivolous distration from the serious news of the day, as some commentators have suggested. Instead, it often communicates serious messages about women's proper role in society and about distintions between Americans and people from other cultures. Every week hundreds of human beings-some of them news-- worthy-reveal their exhibitionist traits by showing off before a camera-sometimes with appalling results. SHOWBOOK will save a half page or so in the back of the book for the silliest of these self-exposures. Henry R. Luce, A Prospectus for a New Magazine1 Life will show us the Man-of-the-Week ... his body clothed and, if possible, nude. Henry R. Luce, Life Prospectus2 The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible3 American news photography reached a new level of popularity and credibility in the 1930s with the rise of documentary photography and large-format photographic magazines, especially Life. As journalism historian Michael Carlebach has noted, photojournalism came of age in this period, moving from tabloid sensationalism to serious coverage of news and social issues.4 Previously, news photography was clearly subordinate to the printed word with its practitioners almost always working anonymously and getting little respect from reporters and editors. With advances in photographic and printing technologies, however, the journalistic uses of photography expanded and its status improved. When Life began publication in 1936, it was the first magazine in which photographs played the starring role, supported by captions and short articles. Life also made stars out of several of its top photographers, especially Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt, who were pioneers of the photographic essay. Despite Life's reputation for quality coverage of news and social issues, it also offered a lot of sensationalism and controversy. A frequently cited example of the frivolous side of Life is the 1937 feature "How to Undress for Your Husband," which contained a strip-tease in the guise of advice for married women. Journalism historians have used "How to Undress" to suggest that Life, despite its superb photographic essays, displayed a vulgarity that precluded its being taken completely seriously as journalism.5 Similarly, photojournalism historians have cited "How to Undress" as an example of the medium's continuing problem with sensationalism.6 In the broader context of cultural history, James Guimond analyzed the feature as an instance of Life's careful "cheesecake protocol" that edited out overt displays of eroticism, while it allowed certain voyeuristic images of women that fit into its family magazine image.7 According to Life insiders Robert T. Elson and Loudon Wainwright, "How to Undress" was a crude but successful effort to boost circulation.8 The editor of Life's fiftieth anniversary retrospective criticized the magazine's early editors, who "veered into vulgarity" by publishing the piece.9 Given the wide range of scholars and others who have commented on "How to Undress," it is surprising that little research has been done on these types of images in 1930s photojournalism?10 The purpose of this article is to explore nudity in the first year of Life to better understand: the institutional and cultural context in which "How to Undress" emerged; how this feature (and nudity more broadly) fit into photojournalism; and what these images and responses to them suggest about ideologies of gender, race, and sexuality. …

The motley gloss of book covers on street stands is offensive to the eye of a Russian intellectual, be he "liberal" or "patriot." Every true writer, critic, and literary scholar considers it his duty to vent his ire periodically on criminal reading matter. This turbid flow of whodunits and thrillers, it is claimed, is precisely what has eroded the foundations of great Russian literature, sweeping the ordinary reader away from the home continent into a boundless sea of vulgarity. That is, people who a dozen years or so ago feverishly devoured Bulgakov, Platonov, Rybakov, Aksenov, and others suddenly, after a taste of the semiliterate Dotsenko with his Madman [Beshennyi], are opting for bloody thrillers.

Heedless, irreverent, unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots-the last refinement of the farmer's cowhides-wearing linen dickeys over hickory shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice ... the decade of the [eighteen] seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good sense.

Given the author's reputation, there might seem to be something perverse about delivering a paper on Rabelais at a colloquium devoted to the theme of childhood in literature. He is, after all, an author about whom generations of parents have traditionally issued their offspring the direst warnings. Generally thought of nowadays, particularly by those who have never read him, as the very epitome of vulgarity and coarseness, he was criticized even in his own day for his ability to disturb and distract young minds. Nicolas Bourbon, delightfully characterized by Lucien Febvre as an 'abondant diseur de Riens', wrote in the 1530s a short piece entitled In Rabellum, in which he takes Rabelais to task for leading young minds astray and for writing filth likely to corrupt their 'upright youth'. He calls on our author to stop writing the sort of book impressionable young men might want to waste their time reading and let them grow up instead innocent and untainted, pure in heart and mind. Nor was this censoriousness merely confined to pedants: the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, condemned Pantagruel in 1533, and in 1543 made a point of putting both Pantagruel and Gargantua on its index of forbidden books. An honour of sorts in those dark days, but one which Rabelais might have preferred to forgo. It is, of course, now quite common to see him as a moralist and philosopher, but such a favourable judgement would have astonished many of his readers down the ages. The otherwise perceptive La Bruyere famously declared him to be an enigma, 'incomprehensible' and 'inexplicable', and 'un monstrueux assemblage d'une morale fine et ingenieuse et d 'une sale corruption' . Even Voltaire seems to have found him a bit too shocking for comfort, as have thousands of nameless guardians of youthful morals.

In a recent article, ‘Marxism and Radical Democracy’,1 Femia argues that Marxism is incompatible with radical democracy. In so doing he specifically reiterates2 a now common claim that the notion of scientific socialism defended by Marx and Engels and prevalent in the Second International is anti‐democratic. This claim has not only been made by critics of Marxism.3 It has been a major criticism of classical Marxism within the Western Marxist tradition, in particular” in the work of the Frankfurt School.4 It is one of the main reasons why the classical Marxism of Engels and the Second International has been rejected as positivist and vulgar: no modern sophisticated Marxist admits to either positivism or vulgarity. In this paper I examine and reject Femia's arguments for the claim that the notion of scientific socialism is undemocratic. I argue that the orthodox view of Marxism as a scientific theory is compatible with democracy, and indeed encourages a democratic understanding of socialism. A thoroughly vu...

Humor appreciation for captioned cartoons was studied as a function of cartoon category and eight predictor variables: complexity, difficulty, fit, depth, visual humor, artwork, vulgarity, and originality. Preference and funniness proved to be virtually identical as criterion variables and were combined as appreciation for further analysis. A nonmetric factor analysis of appreciation ratings yielded four dimensions: (a) Sexual, (b) Incongruity, (c) Social Issues, and (d) Marriage-Family. Sexual and Marriage-Family were the most appreciated categories, Social Issues the least appreciated. Fit and originality were the only predictor variables with significant relationships to appreciation independent of the category effect. Cartoons judged to have the most originality and the best fit between drawing and caption were most appreciated. The results suggest that the kinds of cognitive processes involved in cartoon-humor appreciation are very similar to those involved in environmental preference.

ONE of the more curious aspects of most critical responses ,to Beckett's work is the surprising simplicity of their analysis of the relationship between Beckett's early criticism and subsequent fiction. Critic after critic has testified to the value of Beckett's' critical writings as a guide to the preoccupations of his own novels and plays, and yet inspection reveals that a radicaland quite fascinating dichotomy separates the assumptions of these two phases of Beckett's writing. As Beckett observed in one of his many reviewsof the 1930s. 'Analysis of what a man is not may conduce to an understanding of what he is',1 and an awareness of the ways in which Beckett's literary work departs from the assumptions of his early criticism seems crucial to an understanding of his response to the limits 'of language and perception. Far from unambiguously anticipating the primary concerns of his later work, Beckett's early criticism 'advocates literary ideals that his later works successivelytranSgress with· ever more dazzling ingenuity. ' Beckett's Proust. of 1931, is usually singled out as the best guide to the preoccupations of Beckett's fiction, and no passage has been judged more germane to an understanding of Beckett than the' assertion that the only fertile research for the artist is 'excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent', so that the artist is 'active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extra-' circumferential phenomena, drawn in to the core of the eddy'.2 Beckett contrasts this centripetal impulse with the 'centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation' (p. 66) associated with friendship. One of the many distractions from the 'core of the eddy', friendship appears to be an inauthentic social convention as nefarious to apprehension of essential truth as the literary conventions that Beckett, like Proust, scornfully denouncesas ' "the miserable statement of line and surface" " and as 'the grotesque fallacy of a realistic art' and 'the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations' (p. 76).

THOMAS Crofton Croker (1798-1854) gained a modicum of fame through his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,' one of the earliest collections of British folktales.2 The previous year, 1824, his Researches in the South of Ireland earned the respect of antiquaries, 3 but his third book, in 1829, Legends of the Lakes; or, Sayings and Doings at Killarney: Chiefly from the Manuscripts of R. Adolophus Lynch, Esq. achieved neither the popularity of the former nor the scientific approval of the latter. Recent critics pointing to the commonplace quality of the lore, but most of all to the novelistic apparatus of a fictional tour of the Lakes through which the lore is revealed, have largely ignored the book. The characters who appear in it are historical, well-known to nineteenth-century visitors to the lakes, and frequently mentioned in local guidebooks and histories. Croker invented the excursions, though they are to the usual sites, and joined them to local legends for a tour which would leave even a modern tourist breathless. Irish critics, sensitive to the use of dialect and to comic protrayals of Irish peasantry, have accused Croker of an indifference typical of the 'Ascendancy' who ruled the country. Alienated by the book's personal and eccentric nature-the first edition is filled with 'newly-created' sketches to which the narrator calls our attention, as well as with musical notation and a 'preface' which appears at the end of the work readers have overlooked its concern with the nature of belief and interpretation in folklore. Many of Croker's contemporaries were offended by his disregard for what they assumed to be an incompatibility between the sublimity of the Killarney landscape and the vulgarity of market-place and peasant cabin. John Wilson Croker, a distant relative and Crofton Croker's superior in the Admiralty, expressed this reservation in a personal letter

Liberal education seems to be making another comeback these days, although there seems to be less agreement than ever on just what it is. Herein are some thoughts that, while adding little to specifying what it is, may help in clarifying discussions about it. Education as originally conceived by the Greeks was the making of men, not the training of men to make things [2]. It was a training for leisure, not for a livelihood-the first and fairest thing that the best of men could have [12]. The Greeks used the word liberal to describe the conduct appropriate to a free citizen. They regarded liberal education as the culture of the free citizen in contrast to the uncultured vulgarity of the unfree, of the slave. Whereas the primary meaning of "free" was "not a slave," the Socratic principle of self-control transferred the contrast between freedom and slavery to the inner moral world. It implied a new freedom: a spiritual freedom from the irrational drives of the baser self [5, 6, 7]. Following the ancient tradition, liberal education has often meant nothing more definitive than the ideal and liberating education suitable for free men-as contrasted with men who are enslaved or otherwise preoccupied with earning a living. Although the ideal is widely esteemed, two millenia of accumulating knowledge have not helped us to agree on a prescription. While the ancient topics may offer useful suggestions to us today, the quintessence of liberal education to us is its

It is probable that no painting except the Stuart Washington occupies so special a place in the American album of folk effigies as Whistler's portrait of his Mother. The odd fact is, however, that few know it from direct experience, for the painting is now a rather obscure bauble in the vast hoard of the Louvre. Most have made its acquaintance through some devotional form, corrupted by the same forces of vulgarity that have condemned Rembrandt's great Syndics to stoic suffocation on the inner lid of a cigar box or that made Goya's splendid nude Maya a wanton to each who used the postage stamp an admiring government once printed in her honor. Such image as exists is therefore some kind of distortion of the original object, derived from reproductions (more or less bad), reduced in size, and devoid of material character.

The 1936 International Exhibition, now being held at Pittsburgh, is, perhaps, a more difficult show to characterize than many preceding ones, although it is a smaller one than usual not only including fewer nations, but a decidedly smaller roster of paintings. The difficulty of characterization lies in the fact that it does not present any striking novelty or any harbinger of new movements in the world of art. There is nothing to puzzle or to offend the innocent onlooker, nothing to evoke violent disparagement or great laudation. This pronouncement does not imply that mediocrity is the prevailing note, for it is a good show of remarkably well sustained quality, but it will not meet with approval from those amateurs d'art who feel that art must be “caviar to the general” so that the chief end and aim of an exhibition is to bewilder and shock the public. Yet those of us who have suffered deeply and often from the raucous vulgarity and inept craftsmanship of much of our contemporary propaganda art realize th...