Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1995 Vol. 17 No. 1

Books by Faculty

Compulsive Beauty, by Hal Foster (history of art), an October Book from The MIT Press, 1993, is a theoretical and textual study of surrealism. Foster says in the preface: "In 1916 Andre Breton was an assistant in a neuro-psychiatric clinic at Saint-Dizier. There he tended a soldier who believed that the war was a fake, with the wounded made up cosmetically and the dead on loan from medical schools. The soldier intrigued the young Breton: here was a figure shocked into another reality that was also somehow a critique of this reality. But Breton never developed the implications of this origin story of surrealism, and the usual accounts of the movement do not mention it. For these accounts present surrealism as Breton wanted it to be seen, as a movement of love, and liberation, and this story speaks rather of traumatic shock, deadly desire, compulsive repetition. My essay is an attempt to see surrealism from this other side, in a way that might comprehend such a crazy scene."

Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (Cambridge University Press, 1994), by Rebecca Harris-Warrick (music) and Carol G. Marsh, reproduces the entire manuscript of this short comic mascarade and provides a comprehensive study of the work itself. The ballet is important because it is the only work from the court of Louis XIV to have survived complete in all its components -- choreography, music, and text -- because it uses a previously unknown dance notation system, because it provides a concrete model of how dance was integrated into the musical theatre, and because it indicates how ballets -- or even operas -- were staged.

Religious Reflections on the Human Body, edited by Jane Marie Law (Asian studies) and published by Indiana University Press (1995), "is the culmination of a two-year project which brought together fifteen scholars from ten universities in five different countries [and seven different disciplines] to reflect upon the central concern of the human body and how it has been constructed, deconstructed, cultivated, imagined, represented, despised, adored and adorned, transposed onto geographies, and transformed in ritual by different religious traditions."

The End of the Republican Era (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), by Theodore J. Lowi (government), is a study of the role of ideology in American politics. The book's title is built on two deliberate ambiguities: "End" refers both to the anticipated demise of the Republican coalition (Lowi argues that all ideologies are eventually self-defeating) and to its objectives. And "Republican" refers both to the party and the coalition of contradictory ideological forces dominant in the American agenda for the last quarter-century and to the era of more than 200 years in which America experimented with democracy and constitutionalism. Never completely secure, the Republican era is in particular danger today.

John McMurry and Robert C. Fay (both of chemistry) believe that scientists should be able to explain their subject to anyone who wants to learn. They have paid great attention to the writing of their introductory text, Chemistry (Prentice Hall, 1995), as well as to the problems, examples, and highlighting of key words.

Under the Feet of Jesus (A Button Book, 1995), by Helena Maria Viramontes (English), is novel about Estrella, a girl about to cross over the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the vast fields of California that feed its people. Gradually Estrella learns about love, how to listen to her own inner voice, and how to value life and her own power to defy a system that would keep her down.

Videotape

"I Can Do That!": Hans Bethe's First 60 Years at Cornell was produced for the Department of Physics by the Office of Communication Strategies and Rose Films, Inc. Bethe came to Cornell in 1935 as acting assistant professor in a provincial though ambitious physics department. A member of the community ever since, he has been a crucial part of the department's emergence as one of the worldÕs leading centers of physics research and education.

Born in Strasbourg and educated at the University of Munich, Bethe left Germany at age twenty-seven and worked with Enrico Fermi. Already at Cornell before World War II, Bethe published his famous reviews of nuclear physics and his paper on energy production in stars, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1967. During the war he was a key figure at Los Alamos as head of the theoretical physics division. His 1947 calculation of the Lamb shift paved the way for the revolution in quantum electrodynamics, in which Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson played central roles at Cornell.

Bethe has trained and inspired many young physicists, has advised several U.S. presidents, has been a strong advocate of nuclear-arms control and responsible uses of science, and is still productive in all his endeavors.

The video, which contains historical footage from Los Alamos as well as archival photographs, can be purchased for $29.95 (payable to Cornell University; includes shipping) from Cornell University, Resource Center, #7 BTP, Ithaca, NY 14850.