In the Footsteps of the Absent Father: The Protagonist as a Writing Subject in the Work of Ronit Matalon

The article addresses the literary development of the young female protagonist in Ronit Matalon’s early writing, and the character’s relationship with her absent father. Despite the prevalence of this theme, little research has been dedicated to the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work and its influence on the daughter’s decision to become a writer. The article examines this theme in Matalon’s young adult novel, A Story that Begins with a Snake’s Funeral (1989). My main argument here is that the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work is central to the construction of the daughter’s ’decision to write‘, and points to the issue of inter-generational accountability, in which the daughter is entitled to an inheritance from her father despite her critical view of him. As I will show in my reading of the novel, the fictional representation of this relationship bears an autobiographical imprint, particularly in light of Matalon’s choice to quote her father, Felix Matalon, and to lend his voice to the father figure in her writing. As part of the exploration of this theme, which consists of both fictional and autobiographical aspects, I suggest that the heroine’s efforts to place her absent father in the context of her life and to cope with his absence through her writing point to Matalon’s own efforts to deal with her father’s legacy by writing about him and giving him a place in the Israeli literary canon, while maintaining a critical attitude towards him.

ON ARISTOTLE'S PERI HERMENEIAS 16A1–18: THE CASE OF AN ANONYMOUS ARMENIAN COMMENTARY

The anonymous Armenian commentary was transmitted together with the Armenian translation of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias (sixth century or earlier). It was composed in the Hellenizing style and commonly associated with the figure of David the Invincible, a philosopher of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria. This article presents a general structural analysis of the commentary followed by a comparative study and translation of its first chapter. It argues that the commentary was indeed written in the tradition of late antique Greek commentaries but was probably not associated with late Neoplatonism. The Armenian commentary shares many common features with Ammonius’ commentary, but also departs from it on many crucial aspects. From a philosophical standpoint, it has much more in common with Boethius’ and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentaries than with those of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria, thus suggesting an early writing date.

The Genesis of the Local Alphabets of Archaic Greece

This chapter stresses the importance of the series of letters people actually learnt and taught in the different 'local scripts', together with the series of letter names they learnt by heart. The physical manifestation of this tradition is in abecedaria. The differences between these local alphabets can be explained by three types of reform that took place while the alphabet spread, viz. the adding, reinterpreting, or abolishing of letters. Attention to chronology allows quite precise 'predictions' about the otherwise hidden first years of the alphabet in Greece. Some common views will therefore have to be given up, for instance that the three islands, Thera, Melos, and Crete, which use a particularly archaic type of alphabet, are therefore plausible candidates for particularly early writing. The takeover of the alphabet was a single event, but we will very likely never be able to specify either where or when precisely it took place.

Impressions

In 1901, fingerprinting was first implemented by Scotland Yard for the purposes of criminal identification, usurping Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric system of body measurements in the process. Recording identity in the imprint left by a body’s digits allowed for the identification of individuals on a mass scale, ‘fixing’ their identity with apparently incontrovertible certainty. But in this chapter it will be argued that the fingerprint also served as an example of a much more enigmatic and ‘impressionistic’ identity. Gathering together the most noticeable and telling features of how fingerprints were first thought of as a means of identification, lines of comparison are then drawn with two other discourses which have a similarly impressionistic basis: firstly the early writing of Sigmund Freud and, secondly, the Literary Impressionism of Joseph Conrad. Focusing especially closely on Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) the chapter argues that while the eponymous ‘Jim’ remains obscure even by the novel’s conclusion, the identity of the narrator, Marlow, is made apparent throughout the narration: Marlow essentially smears his prints all over the text. In lifting prints, analysing traces, and reading impressions fingerprinting, psychoanalysis and Literary Impressionism read identity in the signs made during its contact with the external world—signs which had to subsequently be enhanced, analysed and represented by authoritative experts who could make such identity visible.

Teaching as Altered Knowledge: Rethinking the Teaching Practice with Michel De Certeau

Michel De Certeau’s scholars have rarely explored the pedagogical potential of the French thinker’s thought. This paper aims at reconstructing the question of the teaching practice in De Certeau’s works and, building on such reconstruction, it proposes a possible ‘heterological’ comprehension of teaching. Moving from an early writing dealing specifically with the teacher’s identity, the paper shows how the famous dyad of strategies and tactics exposed in The practice of everyday life can be usefully applied to teaching and studying and helps further elaborate the question of teaching. From this analysis, the teacher will emerge as the owner of a strategic knowledge that, if he wants to teach, needs to be altered by the uncanny and tactical presence of the student. Teaching will finally be shown as the practice of alteration of knowledge operated by the other of such knowledge, namely, the student. In such alteration of knowledge lies the potential of a heterological comprehension of teaching.