Journal articles on the topic 'Coptic school'

This article explores the changing iconography of martyrdom in Coptic religious icons in recent decades, with particular emphasis on the years that followed the 2011 Tahrir revolution and its role in articulating a more contentious version of Coptic identity vis-à-vis the Muslim majority in Egypt. The authors analyse the iconographical and iconological symbolism of the work of leading artists belonging to the so-called neo-Coptic school, focusing specifically on Victor Fakhoury’s icon of The Martyrs of Maspero and the interaction between Christian and Pharaonic imagery in his ‘New Martyrs’ series. The article argues that the presence of Pharaonic imagery in icons that portray episodes of collective martyrdom is designed to make the martyrs appear as true Egyptians. This portrayal, in turn, reinforces the so-called ‘sons of Egypt’ narrative – the suggestion that Copts are the direct descendants of ancient Egyptians and that they have a strong claim to Egyptian-ness. As such, these icons reflect an increasingly explicit attempt by the Coptic community to frame its identity in opposition to the Muslim majority and, in the process, to contest the content and meaning of Egyptian nationalism during a (failed) democratization process.

At the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on 18 September2012, Professor Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity fromHarvard Divinity School, presented a papyrus fragment with Coptic text,known as The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. This document includes very problematicsentence: „Jesus said to them: My wife…”. Prof. King maintains inher article that the papyrus comes from the 4th century and contains Coptictranslation of a gospel, possibly written in Greek in the second century,although there is no consensus among the experts on this matter.This article engages in the debate on The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and firstincludes the description of the manuscript and its datation, then provides theCoptic text with its translation and in finally the comparison is made of theGospel with the selected verses from another Coptic document: The Gospelof Thomas. The article shows, that The Gospel of Jesus’Wife is a modernforgery, written on a scrap of ancient papyrus and that most of words andexpressions, used in this document, comes from The Gospel of Thomas.

Dr Bishay was born on 25 August 1936 in Sohag, Egypt, the first of six children of Coptic Christian parents from Upper Egypt. After an illustrious school career he moved to the capital to study medicine at the University of Cairo, obtaining his MB ChB in 1958. He worked as a general practitioner in various Egyptian military hospitals for the next four years and obtained his Diploma in General Medicine in 1964. He continued to work in military hospitals for two further years as a physician.

In his Life of Plotinus (16), Porphyry makes reference to certain gnostic ‘revelations’ under the names of ‘Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos and many others of this kind’ which were circulated in Plotinus' school and refuted by Plotinus and his students, including Porphyry himself. Porphyry claims to have made ‘several refutations against the book of Zoroaster’ while Amelius apparently wrote some ‘forty volumes against the book of Zostrianos’. The surprising discovery of Coptic gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi Library under the specific names of Allogenes (Nag Hammadi Codex XI.3) and Zostrianos (VIII.1) and the close relation of these texts to The Three Steles of Seth (VII.5) and Marsanes (x) has led to the general consensus that we now possess some of the actual texts mentioned by Porphyry.

Despite decades of research, it remains surprisingly difficult to identify the origins of the works preserved in the hoard of Coptic manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Even as unearthed “Gnostic” gospels continue to make headlines, many academics repent intoning these old, fiery heretics, and some have even called for an all-out dispensation of the term “Gnosticism.”2 Yet a felicitous piece of external evidence seems to offer a more stable foundation for identifying the date and sectarian provenance of several of the most difficult works discovered at Nag Hammadi, the so-called “Platonizing” treatises of the “Sethian school” of Gnosticism.3 Porphyry, the top pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (third century C.E.), remarks that, there were in his [Plotinus's] time Christians of many kinds, and especially certain heretics who based their teachings on the ancient philosophy. They were followers of Adelphius and Aculinus, who possessed a lot of writings by Alexander the Libyan, Philocomus, Demostratus and Lydus, and also brandished apocalyptic works of Zoroaster, Zostrianus, Nicotheus, Allogenes, Messus and others of that kind.4

Censorship decisions on cinematic works in Egypt have been characterized by their inconsistency due to the intentional lack of definition of what would constitute a threat to politics, religion and morality. Such fluidity has forced filmmakers to practise self-censorship and deterred them from tackling Coptic problems for fear of igniting sectarianism, as censorship would claim. This article shows the role of public opinion during the period of political instability and aspiration for freedom after the 25 January 2011 Egyptian Revolution in facilitating the approval of the controversial script of Amr Salama’s Excuse My French (2014), which deals with the issue of discrimination against minority Copts in public schools, after five rejections by the censors.

The first step in combating speech and language disorders, is checking if specific language development steps from infancy and toddlerhood have been done. Students from families with financial difficulties, that lack early childhood cognitive development, tend to be less skilled in reading or writing. To avoid school dropout, we focused on identifying these issues when a child starts school and apply a ten week program. This program has two components, one for teachers and the other for students. The main goal is to identify if certain early development milestones have been met, memory and atention development and phonology conscience. The program has proved it’s eficacity even during the corona virus pandemic

Ahmed Fahmy, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1861 and died in Golders Green, London, in 1933, was the most celebrated convert from Islam to Christianity in the history of the American Presbyterian mission in Egypt. American Presbyterians had started work in Egypt in 1854 and soon developed the largest Protestant mission in the country. They opened schools, hospitals, and orphanages; sponsored the development of Arabic Christian publishing and Bible distribution; and with local Egyptians organized evangelical work in towns and villages from Alexandria to Aswan. In an age when Anglo-American Protestant missions were expanding across the globe, they conceived of their mission as a universal one and sought to draw Copts and Muslims alike toward their reformed (that is, Protestant) creed. In the long run, American efforts led to the creation of an Egyptian Evangelical church (Kanisa injiliyya misriyya) even while stimulating a kind of “counter-reformation” within Coptic Orthodoxy along with new forms of social outreach among Muslim activists and nationalists.

The study focused on students with liminal intellect integrated in the mainstream school and was based on adapting the teaching-learning-recovery methods to the students` developmental particularities. It started from the premise that students’ cognitive Rehabilitation process would be improved through cognitive stimulation programs based on the storytelling method. The storytelling as a therapeutic method accompanied a set of exercises for cognitive stimulation influenced children` s cognitive performances. Participants in the research were 32 students from the second grade based on the results they obtained on „Progressive Reaven Matrices” test (QI values in the range 68-85). Participants were organized in two groups: 16 in the experimental group and 16 in the control group. Test-retest method with a single dependent variable was used. Qualitative results of this research are: the metaphors used in the stories taught the students to overcome the emotional barriers, they learned that they can ask several times about something they did not understand, without being criticized or stigmatized for their lack of knowledge; the symbols used in the construction of the stories led to the development of an efficient communication between the parents and the students included in the experimental group; the cognitive stimulation program facilitated the structuring and restructuring of learning leading to the improvement of learning difficulties.

The article deals with the phenomenon of medieval Arabic manuscript book or a book written in Arabic script in non-Arabic language. Despite the large number of works where this phenomenon was analyzed, their authors did not provide a clear list of the criteria, which are specific to the Arabic manuscript book tradition in comparison to other medieval manuscript traditions of the West and East. Methodologically, the work is based on the principles of the “immanent analysis” of the phenomenon developed by the Russian and Soviet philological schools at the beginning of the last century in relation to the analysis of literary works. The authors of this article came to the conclusion that the structure-forming components of the phenomenon of the Arabic medieval manuscript book were as follows: 1) the Arabic script, as well as 2) the architectonics of the text of the Arabic manuscript book and 3) the specific features of the Arabic bibliographic description. The authors believe that these three components identified the Arabic (arabographic) handwritten book throughout its existence: from the 9th century AD to the present and from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. The results allow us to clearly understand what distinguished a book belonging to the Arabic manuscript tradition from manuscript books that were transcribed at the same time and in the same region, such as Coptic or Syriac.

Synthesis means intermarriage and compatibility between more than one raw material in a single artwork. Interacting with its various properties and sources to reach a balance between expressive and technical aspects within the framework of the technical and technical capabilities of that raw material. By adding raw materials, they are woven with textured structures or by the new method developed through the art of gluing or collage and the art of assembly through deletion and addition within the scope of plastic treatments of the textile surface or by using both the traditional and the new method combined to merge between Woven materials and added media on the surface of the artwork. The research deals with synthesis through the ages (the ancient Egyptian - Coptic - Islamic - popular) and some schools of modern art (Cubism - Dada - Pop Art) and some pioneers in plastic art in Egypt (Munir Kanaan - Ahmed Nawar - Farghali Abdul Hafeez - Zainab Sabra). Research Problem: - To what extent can the aesthetic and plastic values ​​be benefited from the different treatments of natural and synthetic textile materials for the concept of synthesis? Research Aims: - Revealing the aesthetic, plastic, and artistic values ​​of the synthesis method throughout the ages to find new approaches to teaching manual fabric. - Create innovative aesthetic values ​​and formulations on the surface of the tissue sphere. The current research provides a program consisting of 3 teaching entrances that depend on a number of key and sub-concepts proposed for the concept of synthesis through art education. Keywords: The Aesthetic - Plastic Values - The Concept of Synthesis – Variables of Material and designing - Hanging Textile

IntroduzioneUn ritratto di Samuel E. Finer — Sammy per gli amici - deve inevitabilmente cominciare da due caratteri fuori dal comune: il suo è un caso di rara mobilità intellettuale, e di uno straordinario rapporto tra fratelli. Samuel Finer nasce nel 1915, figlio minore di una coppia di ebrei immigrati in Gran Bretagna dalla Romania nel 1900, e stabilitisi in uno dei più poveri quartieri londinesi. Il fratello, maggiore di 18 anni, sarebbe divenuto in breve un brillante junior lecturer alla London School of Economics, per poi spostarsi alla University of Chicago. Si narra che il giovane Sammy abbia presto detto: «voglio essere come mio fratello» (1980a). A circa 15 anni deve aver visto il fratello Herman affittare un cavallo e un calesse per portare al suo editore londinese un grosso manoscritto. Si trattava della prima stesura di The Theory and Practice of Modem Government. Secondo la tradizione l'editore insistette perché fosse ridotto della metà, ed esso apparve così nel 1932 in un'edizione in due volumi di più di 1.500 pagine fittamente stampate, più le appendici. Il libro fu una pietra miliare nella letteratura di comparative government, sostituendo i tradizionali confronti paese a paese con lunghe analisi istituzionali di Parlamento, Esecutivo e Civil Service, che comparavano dati inglesi, americani, francesi e tedeschi. Già nel 1934 usciva un'edizione ridotta di un solo volume, il che contribuì molto a diffondere il richiamo del libro (ma nella mia copia della nuova edizione del 1949 ci sono le 954 pagine a due colonne mancanti!). Con il successivo Constitutional Government and Democracy. Theory and Practice in Europe and America di Carl Friedrich (1937, e diverse altre edizioni con titoli leggermente differenti), l'opera di Herman Finer divenne per molto tempo il testo fondamentale di comparative government, rimpiazzando i seminali volumi di J. Bryce, A.L. Llowell et al. Esso divenne esemplare per la sua esaustività, per la forte componente storica delle analisi, e per l'erudizione generale. E tradiva anche il perenne problema di testi del genere, ovvero che la comparazione presuppone la conoscenza dei sistemi politici da comparare. Non stupisce quindi che Herman Finer abbia sentito la necessità di pubblicare un successivo libro dal titolo Governments of Greater European Powers (1956), che tornava sugli stessi quattro paesi con la vecchia formula dal confronto a due. Questo lavoro, che ebbe meno successo del primo pur se di pari erudizione, consta anch'esso di quasi 951 pagine a due colonne, con altre 94 pagine di appendici, commenti, indici, ecc.

The city of Alexandria in Egypt was and remains the centre of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, and it was one of the major centres of Christianity in the Eastern Roman Empire. St. Mark the Evangelist was the founder of the See, and the Patriarchate's emblem is the Lion of Saint Mark. It was in this city where the Christian faith was vigorously promoted, and in which Hellenic culture flourished. The first theological school of Christendom was stablished which drove catechesis and the study of religious philosophy to new heights. It was greatly supported in its quest by numerous champions of the faith and early Church Fathers such as inter-alia, Pantaenus, Clement, Dionysius, Gregory, Eusebius, Athanasius, Didymus and Origen. Both the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and also the Coptic Church, lay claim to the ancient legacy of Alexandria. By the time of the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE, the city had lost much of its significance. Today the Greek or Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria remains a very important organ the dissemination of Christianity in Africa especially due to its missionary activities. The head bishop of the Patriarchate of Alexandria and all Africa, Theodore II, and his clerics are performing meritorious works on the continent to the glory of God’s Kingdom. This article traces, albeit it in a limited sense, the history of the faith in Alexandria using a desk-top research methodology. In order to trace Alexandria’s historical development and especially its Christian religious focus, existing relevant primary and secondary data considered to be relevant was utilised including research material published in academic articles, books, bibliographic essays, Biblical and Church documents, electronic documents and websites.

The femme fatale of film noir has come to be regarded as an expression or symptom of male paranoia about the shifting dynamics of gendered power relations in patriarchal Western culture. This theoretical perspective is influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is grounded in the “School of Suspicion” because it sees consciousness as false, an illusion shrouding darker, disturbing truths (Ricoeur 33). However, while the femme fatale has become firmly established as a subject of suspicion, her male incarnation, the homme fatal, has generally been overlooked and any research that has been done on the figure to date has attempted to align him with the same latent anxieties as those underpinning the femme fatale. I will explore the validity of this assumption by examining the neo-noir films Mr Brooks (Bruce A. Evans, 2007) and The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010). Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner), the eponymous character in Mr Brooks, is a husband, father, extremely wealthy and successful businessman, philanthropist, and Portland Chamber of Commerce man of the year. But this homme fatal character is also a “deadly man” who has a powerful addiction to serial murder. On the one hand Earl enjoys killing immensely, but the rational, logical part of his mind tells him that he should stop before he gets caught. This creates an internal battle which is played out on screen, with these two sides of Earl’s psyche portrayed by two different people: realistic Earl and reckless, indulgent Marshall (William Hurt). In The Killer Inside Me, Deputy Sheriff and homme fatal Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) narrates the tale of how he came to be a brutal and sadistic serial killer, offering a variety of psychoanalytically grounded reasons and excuses for his despicable behaviour that ultimately leave the audience no more enlightened about his state of mind at the end of the film than at the beginning. I will argue that these figures are problematic within the context of Ricoeur’s theory of suspicion and that the self-reflexive insight and knowledge of Freudian theory depicted by these hommes fatals suggests that the construct cannot be read merely as a male incarnation of the femme fatale. Rather than being a subject or object of paranoid expression, I contend that the homme fatal is instead a catalyst for it. Psychoanalysis and the School of SuspicionThe premise of Freudian theory is that our consciousness is just the surface of our mental apparatus, and that hidden underneath in the unconscious part of our mind is a vast body of other material such as fears and desires that we have repressed because they are too disturbing for the conscious mind to contend with. Although we are unaware of these buried emotions they still impact upon our lives, surfacing in the form of neurotic symptoms (Freud 357–58). For Freud, the latent content of the psyche can be brought to the fore through psychoanalysis and by accessing and understanding unpalatable truths, the manifest symptoms they create can be alleviated (358). Thus, for Ricoeur psychoanalysis functions as a “demystification of meaning” (32) because it seeks to explain irrational symptoms. Ricoeur argues that Freud and fellow theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are “masters of suspicion” (35) because of their common view of consciousness as false, opening the path for critical interpretation as an “exercise of suspicion” (33). However, suspicious interpretation is not just a practice for mental health practitioners and philosophers. It also has an established history as a method for exploring the relationship between socio-cultural anxieties and their expression in film and popular culture. According to literary theorist Rita Felski, the popularity of the use of psychoanalysis to study culture is partly inspired by the deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted nature of Freudian schemata (5), but a suspicious analysis also brings with it a form of substantive pleasure: “a sense of prowess in the exercise of ingenious interpretation, the satisfying economy and elegance of explanatory patterns; the gratifying charge of inciting surprise or admiration in fellow readers” (Felski 18). In film theory psychoanalysis is a well-recognised way of exploring underlying socio-cultural fears and anxieties that manifest on screen through visual and narrative depictions. The Femme Fatale and SuspicionThe femme fatale of film noir is a popular subject for suspicious interpretation by feminist film scholars including Mary Ann Doane, Elisabeth Bronfen, Pam Cook, and Kate Stables. Her beautiful, powerfully seductive exterior juxtaposed with a cold, cunning, and ruthless interior has earned the femme fatale a reputation as a manifestation of male fears about female sexuality and feminism (Doane 3). As Bronfen asserts: “One could speak of her as a male fantasy, articulating both fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about female domination” (106). In classic film noir of the 1940s and 1950s the femme fatale is generally considered to represent a projection of paranoid male fears over increased economic and sexual independence of women generated by World War II (Cook 70). Similarly, in neo-noir productions such as Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), the femme fatale is seen to function as an expression of anxiety over the postmodern collapse of traditional roles governing sexual difference occasioned by second-wave feminist movements, along with an increased presence of women in the public sphere (Stables 167). For example, in both Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction the femmes fatales are successful businesswomen who are also ruthless killers with an insatiable appetite for sex, wealth, and power. The Homme FatalWhile the femme fatale has been prowling around the dark alleys of noir, another deadly creature, the homme fatal, has also been skulking in the cinematic landscape. He can be found in early thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 classic Suspicion, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourner, 1944), and A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956). He can also be located in many neo-noir thrillers including Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990), Guilty as Sin (Sidney Lumet, 1993), In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003), Twisted (Phillip Kaufman, 2004), Taking Lives (J.D. Caruso, 2004), as well as Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me. One of the few scholars to examine the homme fatal from a psychoanalytic perspective is Margaret Cohen. In her paper “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man” Cohen explores breakdown of gender divisions to emerge in neo-noir thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a popular movement towards films featuring a female investigator pitted against a deadly male (for example, Internal Affairs, Blue Steel, and Guilty as Sin). Focusing on Internal Affairs, Cohen contends that corrupt cop and homme fatal Dennis Peck (Richard Gere) is a “larger-than-life alternative to the femme fatale” (113). Like the deadly woman, Peck has no morals, he is obsessed with power and wealth, and has no qualms about employing his sex appeal or collapsing sexual intimacy into business in order to get what he wants (Cohen 115–16). According to Cohen, just as the femme fatale is a manifestation of male paranoia about social transformations of gendered power, Internal Affairs crystallises male anxieties about the transformations in gender roles and the place of the new man in 1980s and 1990s postmodern culture (114). However, while hommes fatals such as Dennis Peck can be aligned with the femme fatale as a subject or object of psychoanalytic interpretation regarding repressed fears, other hommes fatals subvert such an analysis through their predisposed insight into psychoanalytic theory and suspicious interpretation. Aside from the films Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me, which I will explore in detail in the coming section, the hommes fatals in Gaslight and Experiment Perilous display a knowledge of Freudian theory, using it to convince their female victims that they are insane, and in Taking Lives the homme fatal uses his psychological prowess to fool a female FBI behavioural specialist assigned to profile him. The psychoanalytical insight depicted by these deadly men is something the femme fatale is not ordinarily privy to (with the exception of Catherine Trammell [Sharon Stone] in Basic Instinct, who has a degree in psychology). This suggests that the homme fatal is not simply a male incarnation of the female archetype, but rather a figure with a certain insight into latent socio-cultural anxieties who deliberately sabotages suspicious interpretation. Pleasure, Subversion, and the Homme Fatal Part of the pleasure of a suspicious analysis of a text is that it allows the critical theorist to act as a detective—“solving mysteries, nailing down answers, piecing together a coherent narrative, explaining away ambiguity through interpretation of clues” (Felski 13). However, in The Killer Inside Me, homme fatal Lou Ford subverts this process, using his knowledge of psychoanalysis in a way that prevents him from being subject to suspicious interpretation. In her paper on the source text from which Winterbottom’s film was adapted, “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me,” literary theorist Dorothy Clark argues that “if Lou Ford provides a Grand Narrative, it is one in which he uses the appearance/reality outer/inner world motif to pitch to us a too-apparent Freudian psychoanalytic explanation for his actions” (54). A suspicious reading of The Killer Inside Me is disrupted and subverted by Lou’s employment of a psychoanalytic model to explain what he calls “the sickness.” By offering up a rational explanation for his otherwise irrational behaviour and grounding it in suspicion, Lou continually constructs and then deconstructs the narrative in such a way that it “conceals rather than reveals, continually eluding containment and definition” (Clark 59). According to Clark (51), what distinguishes The Killer Inside Me from the standard detective narrative is that rather than progressing from a state of enigma to one of knowledge, the story eludes knowledge, becoming increasingly complex and uncertain. Although Clark’s discussion focuses on the hard-boiled novel by Jim Thompson (1952), her observations about the character of Lou Ford are equally relevant to the 2010 neo-noir cinematic remake, which is a direct adaptation of the original novel. (Many classic films noir are reworkings of hard-boiled novels. For example, director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film The Lady in the Lake was based on a novel originally written in 1943 by Raymond Chandler.) In the film The Killer Inside Me, as in the novel, Lou pragmatically detaches himself from his behaviour, and his dialogue creates a continuous state of puzzlement and perplexity that constantly undermines any attempt at understanding through interpretation. In Mr Brooks, any effort at a suspicious reading is equally well thwarted, but the strategy employed is the polar opposite to that used in The Killer Inside Me. In a more conventional “whodunit” narrative structure, Brooks, known as the “thumbprint killer,” might be presented as a mystery. The audience might be provided with the same clues and limited insights that Detective Atwood (Demi Moore) is given, embarking on the same journey of reconstruction, conjecture, and interpretation that she does. A picture might gradually emerge about the killer: his motivations, his rationale, what his fetishes and weak points are, and ultimately, who he is. Instead, the audience is presented not only with the identity of the killer, but the inner-most workings of his mind. According to psychoanalytic theorists, the psychical mechanism that cuts off unpleasant repressed material, blocking it from entering and disrupting the consciousness, is the ego. For Freud, the ego responds to the external world and is grounded in common sense, control, planning, and intellectual rationale (“Ego & Id” 363). However, the repressed can still communicate with the ego through the id. The psychical id is where the powerful pleasure principle reigns unrestricted; it is the primitive, infantile part of the mind in which immediate satisfaction is all that counts, despite the ego’s best attempts to “bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies” (Freud, “Ego & Id” 363). For Freud, the psyche also contains a third element—the super-ego, a portion of the ego that sets itself over the rest of the ego, creating a tension that is felt consciously as a sense of guilt (Freud, “Ego & Super-Ego” 374). It is a part of Earl’s psyche that only surfaces when he realises that his daughter may have inherited the same killing impulses as him. In Mr Brooks, Marshall represents Earl’s id. He is like an evil clown, set up in opposition to the controlled, methodical, and sensible Earl, whose primary concern is that he might get caught. All Marshall wants to do is have “fun.” With pleasure his sole preoccupation, much of the film centres on the various levels of conflict between Earl and Marshall. Sometimes they are like best friends, laughing together, united in their pursuit of pleasure; at other times, when Earl tries to ignore Marshall or control him by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings (without revealing the nature of his own addiction), it becomes a battle of wills, with Marshall trying to undermine, goad, and torment Earl into giving in to his impulses. Early in the film Marshall’s persistence pays off when Earl breaks his two-year drought and surrenders to Marshall, indulging in the pure ecstasy of murder. Here, the play between the two characters clearly represents the psychical interaction between the ego and the id. This interplay provides the audience with seemingly transparent insight into the latent mechanisms of Earl’s psyche, eluding enigma entirely and jumping straight into knowledge of the most intimate kind. One cannot speculate about Earl’s latent thoughts because they are there, laid bare on the screen. Further, Earl makes no apologies for his behaviour. He kills because he likes and enjoys it, period, a fact that Marshall is continually reminding him of. His desire to stop is motivated only by the logical, rational, common sense part of his psyche, his ego. Despite the two different approaches to the subject of the killer inside them, both Earl and Lou manage to successfully subvert a suspicious analysis and with it the pleasure to be found in such an investigation. Lou does so by playing games with the audience’s assumptions that there is an underlying reason for his behaviour, expending a great deal of energy providing psychoanalytically grounded excuses for it: he is the victim of childhood sexual trauma, a victim of elemental human passion, he has dementia praecox, he has paranoid schizophrenia, he wants revenge, he is a flower misplaced and wrongly labelled a weed, or perhaps he is just cold-blooded and as smart as hell (Clark 46–49). Mr Brooks, on the other hand, cuts right through all the diversionary tactics and gets straight to the core of what really motivates Earl—a raw instinctual desire for pleasure. Conclusion In feminist film theory (and Western culture in general) suspicious interpretation has become a deeply ingrained and almost taken-for-granted way of understanding meaning. Part of the popularity of a suspicious analysis is the pleasure readers/viewers/critics find in the mystery-solving process of interpretation and the chance to act as detective. However, the neo-noir thrillers Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me exhibit a self-reflexive insight into Freudian theory, the school of suspicion, and the assumptions that accompany it, using that knowledge to deliberately subvert the opportunity for suspicious analysis. Lou plays guessing games with the audience’s desire to solve the riddle of his psyche, generating his own pleasure in the process. In Mr Brooks the audience is denied the opportunity for speculation when it comes to Earl’s mind because the innermost workings of it are laid bare for all to see, leaving no room for interpretation. The only pleasure to be had is Earl’s—the raw and brutal pleasure of killing. In patriarchal Western society the femme fatale is considered to be symptomatic of male paranoia surrounding the breakdown of gender difference and power relations. While, as Cohen suggests, this may also be true of the homme fatal, the figure’s propensity to undermine understanding through psychoanalysis suggests that as a male manifestation of male paranoia the construct of the homme fatal is an insightful catalyst of fear rather than a subject or object of it. ReferencesA Kiss Before Dying. Dir. Gerd Oswald, 1956.Blue Steel. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1990.Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History. 35.1 (2004): 103–16. Clark, Dorothy. “Being’s Wound: (Un) Explaining Evil in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 42.1 (2009): 49–65. Cohen, Margaret. “The ‘Homme Fatal,’ the Phallic Father, and the New Man.” Cultural Critique. 23 (1992–93): 111–36. Copjec, Joan. Shades of Noir: A Reader. New York: Verso, 1993. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Experiment Perilous. Dir. Jacques Tourner. RKO, 1944.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today. 32.2 (2011) 215–34. Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1991. Gaslight. Dir. George Cukor. MGM, 1944.Guilty as Sin. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Hollywood Pictures, 1993.Internal Affairs. Dir. Mike Figgis. Paramount Pictures, 1990.In The Cut. Dir. Jane Campion. Screen Gems / Columbia Pictures, 2003.Killer Inside Me, The. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Icon, 2010.Mr Brooks. Dir. Bruce A. Evans. Metro – Goldwyn – Mayer, 2007.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002. Suspicion. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. RKO, 1941.Taking Lives. Dir. D. J. Caruso. Warner Brothers, 2004.Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. London: Orion, 2006.

Lorri Neilsen, whose feature article appears in this edition of M/C Journal, is Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Neilsen has been teaching and researching in literacy studies for more than four decades. She is internationally recognised as a poet and as an arts-based research methodologist specialising in lyric inquiry. In the latter half of this last decade she was appointed for a five year term to be the Poet Laureate for Nova Scotia. As an academic, she has published widely under the name of Lorri Neilsen; as a poet, she uses Lorri Neilsen Glenn. In this article I refer to her as Neilsen. This article reflects specifically on the poetics and the politics of the work of poet-scholar Lorri Neilsen. In doing so, it explores the theme of catastrophe in several senses. Firstly, it introduces the reader to the poetic articulations of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss found in Neilsen’s recent work. Secondly, it uses Neilsen’s work on grief and loss to draw attention to a rarely recognised scholarly catastrophe: the catastrophe of the methodological divide between the humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research project design, knowledge production, and relationships between researchers and subjects, to which Lorri Neilsen’s ground-breaking use of lyric inquiry is a response. And thirdly, it alerts us to the need to fight to retain the arts and humanities within universities, in order to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order. In undertaking this exploration, the article uses several terms with which some readers of M/C Journal might not be familiar. Research literacies is a term used to signal capacity and fluency in the understanding and use of research methodologies. Arts-based inquiry is the umbrella term used by researchers using their creative practice in the arts—in writing, theatre performance, visual arts, music, dance, movement—to lead them into new insights into the topic under investigation. This work is frequently embodied and sensuous. So, for example, the understanding of anorexia might be deepened by a dance performance or a series of paintings or a musical score devised in response to work with research participants; or, as I argue here, understandings of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss might be deepened by the writing of poetry or expressive prose that uncovers nuance and sheds light in ways not possible using the more traditional research methodologies available to social scientists. Lyric inquiry, a sub-set of arts-based inquiry, is Neilsen’s own term for a research methodology that uses writing itself as the research tool, and whose hallmark is embodied language expressed as poem, song, or poetic prose, to “create the possibility of a resonant, ethical, engaged relationship between the knower and the known” (Handbook 94).This article, then, reflects on the research work of Lorri Neilsen. In this article I use Neilsen’s responses to grief and loss as the starting point to follow her journey from the early days of her involvement in literacy research to her present enchantment with arts-based inquiry in literacy and social science research. I outline her writing on research literacies, explore her notion of lyric inquiry as a crucial facet of arts-based research, and conclude with examples of her poetry born of creative reflection on what we might call everyday catastrophes. Ultimately I argue the need to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order from those Neilsen explores, through the continued recognition of the crucial place of the arts in academic institutions.I open with excerpts from a piece in Lorri Neilsen’s collection, Threading Light, published in 2011. This piece, The Sea, written out of the grief of losing her aged mother, is one I find most moving. It begins: Days later—a week, a month, hard to tell—sun comes out of drizzle and ice and fog and snow showers, ripping open a bright day. Snow-mounded. If you were a kid, you’d look for your sled. He is sure the box of wrenches is in the cabin, and you know a drive to the country is better than another day in bed with Kleenex and a hacking cough, hiding a flayed heart, and pouring CBC into your ears around the clock. (104) The two figures in the piece, he and she, head south to their seaside cabin. They take a walk beside an ice-covered seashore.Today, you step carefully because of ice, and what you find catches your breath. For a brief moment you have escaped the grizzly claws of grief ripping at your chest. You are kneeling on the ice, touching the frosted edges of kelp and weeds, slimy umber and sienna, and putrid green growths that slurp in and out most of the year, but here, now, are stunned, immobile, impaled on the rocks by the cold. Desire is a feral animal; let it loose, it will seek beauty. You point out to each other tableaus: rimming white, translucent blues and greens, coppered plants flash-frozen, fringed by crystalline tatters. A Burtynsky, you think, but not man-made. This is life’s ebb, as Tu Fu wrote. The ocean’s winter verge. Death’s magnificent intaglio. Your fingers follow the lines of kelp: these things once lived, and moved. Take the long view, maybe they still do. You pause to sit on a cold rock and look at the sky; for a moment you are back beside her body, that last morning, your fingers on cooling flesh. Then, water, the sound of waves. Presence. You look up. He has found one periwinkle fused to a rock, then another. Several more. He places them in your hand, one by one, each dark brown ball with its own scurf of ice that gives off the smallest breath of mist as it touches the heat of your palm. Each a small jolt. This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides: precise cups of glossy perfection with curves like a blues howl that open your heart, craning for light. (Threading Light 104–5)One of the things I appreciate most about Lorri Neilsen’s lyric work is her capacity to hold the miniscule simultaneously with the universal; a flash of insight under the arc of a timeless sky. “Smaller than small; larger than large,” write the Hindu prophets (Upanishads). “This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides,” she writes, and in that moment of reading I am jolted into an awareness of the contours of grief that no amount of social scientific observation could provide: an awareness of the nature of self-absorption and inward focus so intense that even the most inevitable of natural rhythms—the ocean’s tides—are forgotten: forgotten, that is, until the protagonist is shaken awake again, by exquisite beauty, into a new kind of response-ability to the world. Lorri Neilsen’s feature article in this edition of M/C creates layer upon layer of insights exploring the notion that loss, an everyday catastrophe, involves a turning inside-out, a jolting into a new sense of self, or a propulsion out of an old, restrictive one; and that inevitably it propels us headlong into a state of living in the moment, of being present to what is, rather than distantly taking stock of what we have. As I ponder this experience, as a reader of her work, I re-experience that moment of stasis:physiologically we all know that experience of time suspended after shock, time inexplicably, irrationally, standing still. But what Neilsen has done so successfully as a poet-scholar, in my view, is not simply find words to express this turning inside out as poetry. Additionally, she has claimed the moment of poetic insight as a crucial form of knowledge-making that has a central and necessary place in illuminating our social worlds. This claim has far-reaching political significance for social science researchers, introducing, as it does, a re-invigorated understanding of the very concept of research:Research [she tells us] is not only the creation of products to market at the academic fair; research is the process of learning through the words, actions and revisionings of our daily life. […] Research is the attuned mind/body working purposefully to explore, to listen, to support, to transgress, to gather with care, to create, to disrupt, to offer back, to contribute, sometimes all at once […] Inquiry is praxis that cannot be boxed up and delivered: it is a story with no ending. (Knowing 264) Neilsen’s particular fascination is with lyric inquiry which she claims as political, poetic, and sustaining of the individual and the larger world: It has the capacity to develop voice and agency in both researcher and participant; it foregrounds conceptual and philosophical processes marked by metaphor, resonance and liminality; and it reunites us with the vivifying effects of imagination and beauty – those long-forgotten qualities that add grace and wisdom to public discourse. (Knowing 101)So what has led her here, to that place where lyric inquiry forms the basis of her engagement with the knowledge-making endeavour in the academy and beyond? As a feminist scholar fascinated by biography, by life writing and story, I find myself drawn as much towards the story of Neilsen’s evolution as a poet-scholar as to the work itself. How has she come to an awareness of the need to create new ways of doing research? What has she uncovered here about the ethics and the politics of doing research in the social world? As I read her work I become aware that her current desire to dance at the edge of the conventional research world has been driven as much by a series of professional catastrophes as by an underpinning desire for methodological innovation. Neilsen herself explores these issues in her 1998 collection of academic essays, called Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. There are several threads weaving their way through this account of a young academic researcher and scholar finding her way into a larger, wiser, more resonant space: there’s the story of the young graduate student learning the language of and experiencing the perpetual isolation of disembodied fact-finding statistically resonant research into literacy; there’s the story of the young mother juggling academic life and research and parenting, wanting to make sense to the teaching research participants she is working with, wanting to close the gap between the public and the private worlds, wanting to spend time with her partner and her two sons, especially her second son whose birth could have been a catastrophe but whose gentle ways of being in the world gifted them all with the desire to slow down, to see afresh; and, later, there’s the story of the mature woman whose impulse is to community and to solitude, to living with a generosity of spirit that takes seriously the intertwining of her poetic life and her academic and everyday worlds. Interwoven with these stories is the story of writing itself: here we find the formal disembodied writing of Western scientific research practices; here now is collectivist writing generated at kitchen tables, in community centres, in schools; here now is every mode of writing that evokes nuance and explores the senses; and here now too is the research writing that privileges response-ability, scholartistry, bodily sensation, reciprocity, engagement with the world.Neilsen’s account of this journey begins when, as a young postgraduate student doing research into literacy, she learned the language of statistical significance to measure syntactic complexity, noting, as she wrote up her MA, the distance between the language she had learned and the everyday language of the classroom teachers the research was meant to inform. The emphasis of this early research was on removing language from its context, isolating components of language for scrutiny, making findings that were replicable. In time she came to see this kind of knowledge-making as dry, limited, rule-bound, androcentric. From this disengaged, disembodied place she moved, over decades, into a space where compassion, wisdom, humility, and wonder combine to locate her as researcher who understands, alongside researcher David Smith, that “writing is a holy act, an articulation of limited understanding” (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 119). In an echo of Luce Irigaray’s insistence that the research and writing we do as fully alive feminist scholars will link the celestial and the terrestrial, the horizontal, and the vertical, and in a further echo of Helene Cixous’ claim that when writing from the body, “an opera inhabits me” (Cixous 53), Neilsen writes unabashedly of the metaphysical nature of her research world: Artful living, artful writing, connecting with a purpose to help each other transcend and grow through inquiry. Connection, embodiment, transformation, transcendence. All these expressions tap spiritual chords […] But if inquiry is to transcend the destructive circumstances of our lifeworlds, if its purpose is to make a difference, not a career, we cannot avoid using words such as vision, spirit, humanity, soul. Interest in metaphysical perspectives is not new in feminist circles, but is IS new in conventional research communities where the intangible, the deeply disturbing and consciousness-awakening dimensions of life are compartmentalized, reserved […] for a walk by the ocean, for the rare meditative times of our lives, if we find them at all […] But (she concludes) the awareness that we know when we live in the eternal present […] is an awareness full of tremendous power, and, ultimately, hope. (Knowing 280)In the final chapter of this 1998 text outlining her journey into research literacies, called Notes on Painting Ghosts and Writing the Poetry Report: Some Things I know But Not For Certain, Lorri Neilsen writes confidently against the grain of what she sees as the limits of androcentric research practices: Everything we know is at once out there and in here […] My place is to apprentice myself to the world, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, not in subservience and compliance, as the androcentric practices we have followed would keep me, but in reciprocity, curiosity and response-ability. What we must seek are the transgressive experiences and the fresh words which reveal us, in Annie Dillard’s words, ‘startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down bewildered’. (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 261)And in a gesture that I find heartwarming, she writes of the impact of being scooped up into a collective research-making endeavour, of belonging to a community of scholars (including poet-sociologists Laurel Richardson and Trinh T. Minh-ha) whose research agenda is to expand the ways we might know, to reflect the fullness and richness and complexity of the research endeavour itself, and, in so doing, of human experience: Time and enculturation have combined to make inquiry a terrain where I live, rather than a place I visit on occasion.Inquiry is less a stance and more an intentional gesture, a re-bodied approach to working with people, particularly women, on projects which matter to them locally and globally. Inquiry is a conspiracy, a breathing together, for which we need the conditions of being together and sharing a climate, or air, for breathing. Inquiry values difference, rather than fearing it, sees contiguity or complementarity as necessary for working together without suppressing our diversity. (Knowing 262) Hers is no airy-fairy disengaged mood-making endeavour. It is decidedly political: the inclination is to openness and growth, to take risks, to create critical spaces[…] When we make the assumptions of the norms of research problematic, we make the assumptions and the norms of life together on this planet problematic as well. We begin to dismantle the Western knowledge project, and we begin to learn a fundamental humility. Expanding our research literacies keeps us full of wonder, in spite of the shakey ground and the shadows. We can learn more when our pen is a tool of discovery, not domination.And her focus is ever on the artistry of research practices: The ontological and epistemological waters in which these [research] literacies continue to develop are social, political, ecological [...] Re-imagining inquiry is re-imagining ways to work with people and ideas which keep us, like the painter, the dancer, and the performance artist, watchfully poised, momentarily still, and yet fluidly in motion. (Knowing 263)In summary, then, the kind of writing that accompanies the research methodology that Lorri Neilsen has created cuts across the notion of knowledge as product, commodity, trump card. Knowing [for Neilsen] is an experience of immersion and expression rather than one of gathering data only to advance an argument […] A reader does not take away three key points or five examples. A reader comes away with the resonance of another’s world…our senses stimulated, our spirit and emotions affected. (Knowing 96) This kind of writing emerges from her desires to create a resonant, embodied, ethical, activist, feminist-honouring, and collaborative way to grapple with the nuance of human experience. This she calls lyric inquiry. Lyric inquiry sits on the margins, inhabits the liminal spaces, “places where we perceive patterns in new ways, find sensuous openings into new understandings, fresh concepts, wild possibilities” (Knowing 98). In her chapter on lyric inquiry in the 2008 Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, Neilsen argues that lyric inquiry leans on no other mode of enquiry: it stands on its own, resonant and expressive, inviting fresh ways to see, read, consider experience. Unlike the narrative enquiry that currently popularly accompanies much social science research in order to bolster an argument, or illustrate a point being made in policy formulation or discussion (Hopkins), lyric inquiry adopts its own mode, its own performative spaces. It’s a heady concept and, I would argue, a brave contribution to the repertoire of qualitative arts-based research methodologies.For me Lorri Neilsen’s stance as poet, writer, researcher, woman, is beautifully captured in her piece from Threading Light which she has titled Writing has always felt like praying. Here we glimpse the lives of four figures: the Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the poet herself, each responding to catastrophe of sorts: Gotama saw the face of his infant son and sleeping wife,shaved his head and beard, put on his yellow robe, andleft without saying good-bye. Duties, possessions,ties of the heart: all dustweighing down his soul. He walked and walked,seeking a life wide open, complete and pure as polished shell.In a cave away from the fray of Mecca, vendettas,and a world soured by commerce, Muhammadshook as the words of a new scripturecame to him. Surrendered himselfto its beauty, singing and weeping verse by verse, year by yearfor twenty-one years.Of course you remember the man from Galileewho carried on his back the very wood on whichhis blood was spilled. How he pushed back the rockfrom the front of the cave and – this is gospel –ascended, emptied of self and full of god, returningnow in offerings of bread and wine.I pace back and forth on a cliff above the unknowable, luredby slippery and maverick tales that call forth terror, crackthe earth, shatter my bones with light. I have no needto verify old brown marks of stigmata, translate Coptic fragments.A burlap robe on display in the cold stone air of the Church of Santa Croceis inscrutable: it tells me only that my body is a ragged garmentand will be discarded too.But here, now, I am ready as a tuned stringto witness what is ravenous, mythic. Here I am holy, misbegotten,gossip on the lips of the gods, forgotten by the time the cupsare washed and put away. So I start as I start every day,cobbling a makeshift pulpit, casting for truths as they are given me:Man, woman, child, sun, moon, breath, tears,Stone, sand, sea. (Threading Light 102–3) It is ironic that the kind of research that Neilsen advocates, research that draws specifically on the arts to create new methodologies for the uncovering of topics traditionally explored by the social sciences, is being developed at precisely that moment when university arts departments around the world are being dismantled, and their value questioned (See Cohen, NY Times; Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education; Kitcher, Republic). As I indicated at the beginning of the article, I use this homage to Lorri Neilsen and her work to make the broader point that we lose the arts and the humanities in our universities at our peril. It’s not just that the arts are a pleasant addition, a ruffle on the edge of the serious straight-tailored cut of the research garment: rather, as Neilsen has argued throughout her research and writing career, the arts are central to our survival as a response-able, interactive, creative, thoughtful species. To turn our back on the arts in contemporary research practices is already a dangerous erosion, a research and knowledge-making catastrophe which Neilsen’s lyric inquiry seeks to address: to lose the arts from universities altogether would be a catastrophe of a much higher order. References Cohen, Patricia. “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. New York Times. 24 Feb. 2009. Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1993. Donoghue, Frank. “Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 Sep. 2010. 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