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"Williams, Travis D"
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Shakespeare up close : reading early modern texts
\"This landmark collection of newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars offers expert close readings of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. The book is an intervention into current critical methodology as well as an invaluable tool for all students of the literature of the period, exemplifying the possibilities of close reading in the hands of a range of gifted practitioners. Chapters cover a range of key texts from Shakespeare and other major writers of the period such as Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Marvell and Milton.\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
Ethos by the Numbers: Henry IV, Part One
Beyond its origins in children's art, \"paint by numbers\" ushers in negative connotations: an art object that results from limiting the artist's work to the application of colors alone-subjects, forms, and colors having been decided in advance-would seem to have little status as art at all. [...]Falstaff's numerical sequence is a metonymy for his characteristically illimitable speech and identity. [...]even if the audience is positioned with Hal, the dialogue does not demand that we summarily dismiss Falstaff's claims, even though he is evidently aware of his own lies. [...]numbers here have an emotional richness that is both cause and effect of their local capacity for order-even the order of otherwise disordered things, like Falstaff's chaotic personality. In these moments, the pair exists for the benefit of Hal's own self-characterization, and numbers prime the audience to accept Hal at his word, as in the retelling of the Gad's Hill episode.2 Ethical interpretation of Hal's encounter with Francis depends on distinguishing a \"joke on\" someone from a \"joke with\" someone.
Journal Article
Unspeakable Creation: Writing in Paradise Lost and Early Modern Mathematics
A moment at the beginning of book 12 of Paradise Lost emphasizes the precarity of the reader's sight, in all its forms, as the primary mode of engaging with the poem. Addressing Adam, Michael remediates the delivery of his lesson in eschatology. Michael's remediation is an example of accommodation, both a theological theory of how God makes himself and his works even slightly understandable to created beings, and the rhetorical and poetic devices employed by poets in mimicry of the deity's accommodation. Critical attention to accommodation in Paradise Lost tends to approach it from the theological side: theological accommodation is necessary but it fails in its goal, and fallen humanity is at fault. A prominent theme of the poem's accommodative moments are the scribal activity of God and his agents in creating and engaging with the universe. Theology generally characterizes accommodation as an act of translation: God translates himself through metaphor from the unknowable realm of his existence into an essentially other realm comprehensible to fallen minds.
Journal Article
Mathematical Enargeia
This article proposes and explicates a rhetorical model for the function of notational writing in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European mathematics. Drawing on enargeia’s requirement that both author and reader contribute to the full realization of a text, mathematical enargeia enables the transformation of images of mathematical imagination resulting from an encounter with mathematical writing into further written acts of mathematical creation. Mathematical enargeia provides readers with an ability to understand a text as if they created it themselves. Within the period’s dominant reading of classical geometry as a synthetic presentation that suppressed, hid, or obscured analytic mathematical reality, notational mathematics found favor as a rhetorically unmediated expression of mathematical truth. Consequently, mathematical enargeia creates an operational and presentational link between mathematics’ past and its future.
Journal Article
The Dialogue of Early Modern Mathematical Subjectivity
Mid-sixteenth-century dialogues by Robert Recorde teach basic mathematics and allow a reader partially to construct and inhabit a mathematical identity—a subject position—appropriate to advanced work in mathematics through reorganization of the reader’s mind directed by an engagement with, absorption of, and finally independence from the instructing dialogues. This essay explains the mechanism used by the dialogues to accomplish this, and shows that Recorde’s deployments of eloquence, the ethos of the active life, and pedagogical conveniences conflict with mathematical rigor, almost resulting in the collapse of the project. The conclusion considers ways in which the mathematical reader may still benefit from Recorde’s efforts despite the indecorous intrusion of his personal difficulties into the dialogues.
Journal Article
Mathematical Enargeia: The Rhetoric of Early Modern Mathematical Notation
This article proposes and explicates a rhetorical model for the function of notational writing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European mathematics. Drawing on enargeia's requirement that both author and reader contribute to the full realization of a text, mathematical enargeia enables the transformation of images of mathematical imagination resulting from an encounter with mathematical writing into further written acts of mathematical creation. Mathematical enargeia provides readers with an ability to understand a text as if they created it themselves. Within the period's dominant reading of classical geometry as a synthetic presentation that suppressed, hid, or obscured analytic mathematical reality, notational mathematics found favor as a rhetorically unmediated expression of mathematical truth. Consequently, mathematical enargeia creates an operational and presentational link between mathematics' past and its future.
Journal Article
Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others
Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others by Stephen Booth is reviewed.
Book Review
Playing dirty: Sexuality and waste in early modern comedy
Will Stockton University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011, xxvi+182pp., paper$22.50, ISBN: 978-0816666072, cloth $ 67.50, ISBN: 978-0816674596 In this excellent and provocative book, Will Stockton presents a challenge to the tone, structure, method, and periodization of the paradigm-shift-with-case-studies model of historicist scholarship that has prevailed for the last two decades in early modern literary studies. [...] the bed trick that substitutes Helen for Diana turns Bertram's sodomy into procreative, married sex, during which more than one ring is fingered by the parties involved.
Book Review
Investigating the genetic architecture of noncognitive skills using GWAS-by-subtraction
Little is known about the genetic architecture of traits affecting educational attainment other than cognitive ability. We used genomic structural equation modeling and prior genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of educational attainment (
n
= 1,131,881) and cognitive test performance (
n
= 257,841) to estimate SNP associations with educational attainment variation that is independent of cognitive ability. We identified 157 genome-wide-significant loci and a polygenic architecture accounting for 57% of genetic variance in educational attainment. Noncognitive genetics were enriched in the same brain tissues and cell types as cognitive performance, but showed different associations with gray-matter brain volumes. Noncognitive genetics were further distinguished by associations with personality traits, less risky behavior and increased risk for certain psychiatric disorders. For socioeconomic success and longevity, noncognitive and cognitive-performance genetics demonstrated associations of similar magnitude. By conducting a GWAS of a phenotype that was not directly measured, we offer a view of genetic architecture of noncognitive skills influencing educational success.
Genomic structural equation modeling of genome-wide association data for educational attainment and cognitive test performance is used to estimate the genetic component of variation in educational attainment that is independent of cognitive ability. The study finds that noncognitive skills account for 57% of genetic variation in educational attainment.
Journal Article