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The social sciences have recently exhibited renewed interest in ethnography while traditional anthropology has been struggling with the challenges of postmodernism. This paper considers the theoretical implications of the potential convergence of these strands, with particular reference to the ethnography of organizations. Postmodernism is seen to affect ethnography by problematizing the processes of description, reference, and the establishment of authority in ethnographic texts. It offers, rather than a "scientific" model, a "literary" model of such texts in which description is an active construction rather than a neutral recording of the other's world. Ostensive reference becomes displaced by evocation, the single authorial voice by the "heteroglossia" of many contributing voices. Unfortunately, there is a tendency for the processes of interpretation to be abandoned to a free play of unlimited signification in which any and all meanings are possible, which jettisons rigor and with it critical acerbity. This paper argues for the development of deconstructive ethnography grounded in the work of Jacques Derrida. This ethnographic praxis would demystify social and organizational actions by revealing their inevitable and ever-present internal contradictions without resorting to an externally contrived theoretical or moral standard. It would realize its emancipatory potential through "self-deconstruction."

On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Karelia only 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.

Stanley Fish's rhetorical deconstructive project "Against Theory" (see, eg, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, 1980), which favors authorial intention & community consensus over textual indeterminacy & critical subjectivism, is exposed as an unfair weapon against would-be adversaries. The politically leftist movement of critical legal studies (CLS), which had originally tried to realign the US legal system's notion of interpretation through deconstruction, ended by disenfranchising traditional liberal ideas. With his academic origins in literary modernism, Fish brought Richard Rorty's pragmatism into the nihilist CLS circle. After review of the against theory argument, Fish's purely rhetorical victories over liberal legal theorists Ronald Dworkin & Owen Fiss are discussed. Finally, a critique of the against theory argument points to essential assumptions of the deconstructionist, Fish's fundamentally ahistorical position, epistemological notions on beliefs as internalized theories, & his inescapable rightist conclusions. J. Sadler

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been 'reading' streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were 'reflected' in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volumeThe Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade afterThe Victorian City'sfirst publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714-80) was the first major Lithuanian poet and an outstanding figure in Lithuanian letters for all time. Born in a small village in East Prussia (Lithuania Minor), he spent most of his life as the Lutheran pastor of another such place, a parish called Tolminkiemis. Accounts of his life testify that he preached eloquently to his parishioners in both German and Lithuanian, made musical instruments — a clavichord and a piano — and played them, fought with the neighboring estate over parish lands, and corresponded with fellow ministers on various friendly matters, including the writing of Lithuanian poetry. When Donelaitis died, his literary legacy consisted of several fables and the rural epic Metai (The Seasons), written probably between 1765 and 1775, but not published until 1818. Metai stands as a milestone of Lithuanian literature. It was the first extensive poetic text (2,969 lines of hexameters) in that language and a work of intrinsic quality and lasting influence. Donelaitis' achievement has been increasingly recognized in recent decades, not only in Lithuania but abroad. His stature appears all the more remarkable against the background of pioneering efforts to establish Lithuanian as a literary language by members of the Protestant clergy in Lithuania Minor and by some western Lithuanian country gentry during the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sudden emergence of his epic talent, seemingly without adequate support from the cultural milieu of his own or any previous time in Lithuanian tradition, has produced an aura of mystery around Donelaitis, attracting poets, scholars, and hero worshipers alike.

Abstract Sylvia Plath'sThe Bell Jar(1963/1980) has become one of the classic 20th-century stories of female adolescence. Feminist critics have analyzed this tale of madness and self-destruction primarily in terms of gender conflicts. From a specifically lesbian feminist perspective, this article presents a "stressed read-ing"1 ofThe Bell Jar, arguing that it is not in the first place the operations of gender ideology, but rather the contradictions of female (hetero)sexuality that play a determining part. The resulting conflicts are shown to operate on the novel's narrative as well as discursive levels. The discussion centers on the two most striking features in which sexual ambivalences surface in the text: the relationship between the narrator and her protagonist and the figure of theDoppelgänger. Behind the mask of the female adolescent, it is argued, the configuration of a truly transgressive,2 lesbian sex/textuality can be discerned.(Literary criticism; gay and lesbian studies)

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

Only three out of her 36 short stories are available in English (two translated by the writer herself), and yet Simin Daneshvar (b. 1921) is Iran's first woman novelist and one of the country's most significant fiction writers. Daneshvar has published Savooshoon (the most popular Iranian novel), three collections of short stories, ten translations, and a memoir about her late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Having retired from her teaching position at Tehran University, she lives in Iran and is now working on her second novel, The Wandering Island.Daneshvar's literary work is a celebration of the feminine—her taste for life and love, her art of endurance and strength. While most of her female characters manage to survive, none reveals such stamina or resilience as the narrator of Jalal's Sunset. Confronted with the unexpected death of a husband, a colleague, and a collaborator, Daneshvar in this text portrays a real survivor.

The first substantial study of the Arabic autobiography, Franz Rosenthal's "Die arabische Autobiographie" appeared in 1937 and has yet to be superseded. Rosenthal mentions most of the autobiographies well known to historians and literary scholars of the Middle East, including al-Ghazāli's (d. 505/1111) spiritual biography,al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl,Usāmah ibn Munqidh's (d. 584/1188)Kitāb al-i'tibār,famous for its humorous anecdotes about the behavior of the Crusader Franks, Ibn Khaldūn's (d. 809/1406) autobiography, included at the end of his voluminous historyKitāb al-'ibarand since published separately, al-Suyūṭī's (d. 911/1505)al-Taḥadduth bi-ni'mati 'Llāh,and a number of others. The first autobiographical text known in Arabic is ascribed to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-'Ibādī (d. 260/873), the famous translator of Greek scientific works. It is included in the biographical dictionary of Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'ah (d. 668/1270) and described as "Treatise on the Trials and Tribulations which Befell Him"(risālah fīmā aṣābahū min al-miḥan wa 'sh-shadā'id).

A SPEECH OF BARERE (1788)
Bertrand Barère of Vieuzac (1755-1841), one of the members of the committee of public safety, tried to embark on a literary career before the Revolution, and from 1782 he wrote several discourses and eulogies, which brought him a certain degree of local renown. As a result he was elected member of the Academy of the Floral Games at Toulouse in 1788. His entrance discourse seems to have caused a certain sensation, if not a scandal, and we have some remarks written at the time, but the text itself was considered to be lost. I have found a dictated copy of the discourse at the municipal library in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, and I reproduce it here with this brief comment. It is interesting because it illuminates aspects of Barère's theory of history and his ideas about philosophy. It reveals the last formative stage in the intellectual development of Barère in the period before the Revolution.
Koichi YAMAZUKI.

In this article I propose to undertake a semiotic analysis of a novel by a contemporary Czech underground writer, Ludvík Vaculík's Morčata (The Guinea Pigs). A semiotic reading of the relation between the semantic and formal levels of the text is particularly rewarding because this novel combines features of several genres ranging from children's literature to the realistic novel and the surrealistic novel. This study is intended as a contribution to the analysis of the multileveled novel in general.The Guinea Pigs is a unique modern blend reminiscent of the Latin American current of magic realism that we find in the works of Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Marquez. It is a highly experimental novel in which the author has reached the peak of his literary efforts thus far and includes himself in the tradition of the absurd, showing traces of dadaism and elements of surrealism and continuing the introspective existentialist line of Dostoevskii and Kafka, refreshed with a light touch of humor and an unpretentiously naive point of view reminiscent of Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk.

During the last two decades the interests of scholars of early drama and of urban historians have found common ground in the study of urban celebration and ceremonial. For the student of early drama the beginnings of this interest coincided with a redefinition of the area and nature of the study of early drama, a shift in emphasis from the textual and literary problems of the few extant dramatic texts to the circumstances and conditions of their performance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M. Salter's revealing study of the production of Chester's Whitsun plays, this movement gained impetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of the development of English stagecraft between 1300 and 1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959, which illustrated the interdependence of a range of ostensibly disparate activities, such as plays, royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s an iconoclastic challenge to traditional theories about the staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H. Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and from the resulting controversies was born a new initiative, the Records of Early English Drama, whose avowed purpose is 'to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642'. That series is still ongoing and already constitutes a major primary resource of regional documentary transcripts for all interested in early dramatic and quasidramatic activity, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected diversity and frequency of dramatic activity throughout England.

The role of literature (fictional and non-fictional) and its reflection on the reading process of Soviet Germans is closely connected with Soviet German history up to the present situation. Principally, two reasons are responsible for this: 1) the lack of a satisfying German language competence and of a general interest by the Germans and 2) many problems with the distribution of German language literature. This includes fictional and non-fictional texts. Another result on the basis of 21 in-depth interviews with Soviet German emigrants and of the analysis of the Soviet German press reveals that there exists only very little interest in the Soviet German literature. The Soviet German press, first of all the weekly "Neues Leben", functions as a forum of Soviet German questions dealing with Soviet German history, culture and literature. For many Soviet Germans, "Neues Leben" is the only German language source they read. In reading more literature from East and West Germany the interest in German language literature could raise. Closer connections of Soviet German writers to their readers could increase the interest in reading Soviet German literature and in using the German language.

In bulletins from Britain and Ireland since 1969, Glengormley, like dozens of other place-names in Northern Ireland, has come to signify a site where more violence has occurred: another shooting, bombing, riot. In the context of a politics so grim that it never allows cultural productions the luxury of mere introspection, Mahon's surreal figure of earnest and extravagantly self-tormented intellectuals becomes a vivid image of victims of Irish political violence. Given that the "Troubles" (as the violence is known) in the North of Ireland have lasted for a quarter of a century, and that they are the current manifestation of a history of violent opposition to colonial oppression in Ireland, Irish writing, more than any other from Western Europe, seems to support Fredric Jameson's controversial opinion that postcolonial literatures, whatever else their effect, also function in the final instance as national allegories. In his brilliant and deeply committed discussions of a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and genres, David Lloyd implicitly accepts the notion that Irish literature works as national allegory, but he does not leave unquestioned the terms upon which this relation between text and nation is negotiated. In readings of texts ranging from Irish nineteenth-century street ballads to Samuel Beckett's first work in French, he meticulously delineates the overlapping of the political and the poetic in Irish writing. He wants his readers to be clear about whose interests are being served and whose are being ignored when the political realities underlying Irish literary production are obscured. For Lloyd, Irish political reality is the result of the island's, or at least the Republic of Ireland's, postcoloniality; one claim implicit in the title of the collection is that while this postcoloniality, given the particular divisions marking Irish politics and culture, is anomalous, from the viewpoint of the diasporan intellectual this very anomaly can be a useful challenge to accepted models of postcolonial history. Lloyd's essays contribute to, and critique, debates in Ireland on viable versions of postcolonial identity; they do so by raising issues that reach beyond the matter of Ireland. In particular they encourage diasporan intellectuals to examine more rigorously the nation-state's function as clearinghouse of ideologies of community.

The early 1960s marked a period of intellectual and literary ferment in Taiwan. The East-West Controversy, which had its roots in the debate that took place in the middle of the last century regarding the continued validity of the Chinese tradition in the face of western military and economic superiority and in the controversy regarding westernization as the road to modernization in the 1930s, had broken out afresh. Creative writers, musicians and painters were experimenting with new forms and new techniques. As early as 1954 the writers of modern Chinese poetry had started the search for a more contemporary expression of their art form; and modern poetry societies, each with its own philosophy on how modernization should take place, had come into being. Writers of fiction who up till then had been almost exclusively concerned with the Sino-Japanese War; the mainland before the communist takeover in 1949, or the various aspects of the struggle against communism, were moving away from this kind of "propaganda-motivated writing" towards the production of "pure literature." However, there were few modern Chinese creative writers of stature on whom either the poet or fiction writer could model himself. This was because of the ban imposed by the government in Taiwan on the works of writers prior to 1949 due to the association of many of them with communism or with ideologies unacceptable to the authorities. This meant that they had to seek for inspiration in the works of western writers which could be found in translation or in pirated versions of the original texts in the major cities of Taiwan. The traditionalists viewed this growing trend with alarm as did those writers who were closely associated with the Kuomintang. The latter had formed themselves during the early 1950s into three writers' associations, the China Association of Literature and Art, the Chinese Youth Writers' Association, and the Taiwan Women Writers' Association.