bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Challenges for dependent case
Authors: Bárány András , Sheehan Michelle
Published: July 2024

This chapter discusses challenges to dependent case theory. Dependent case theory, in its strongest form, holds that morphological case is never assigned by functional heads but always based on the syntactic configuration of a predicate’s arguments. This contribution investigates certain phenomena such as transitivity-sensitive case in Romance causatives and global case splits, which challenge the strongest interpretation of dependent case. In both Romance causatives and global case splits, the structural configuration of the predicate’s nominal arguments does not suffice to explain morphological case-marking patterns. Rather, both phenomena are better modelled as consequences of Agree relations between functional heads and the relevant arguments.
Case and the theory of parameters
Authors: Roberts Ian
Published: July 2024

This chapter rather programmatically discusses four principal issues surrounding Case and its role in linguistic theory, all of which arise when the original notion is subjected to a minimalist critique. The first is the question of whether a system can lack abstract Case altogether; here the results reported by Sheehan and van der Wal (2018) are of central importance and, accordingly, these are summarized. The second concerns the relation between Case and agreement; here Baker’s (2008a, 2015) Case Dependence of Agreement Parameter (CDAP) is central. The third issue is the question whether case relations should be construed as dependencies among DPs in a given domain, rather than as features of functional heads, as originally proposed by Marantz (1991) and developed in depth by Baker (2015) (see also Baker and Bobaljik 2017). Finally, there is the question of the reason that Case should exist at all. Here the proposals in Hinzen (2017: 55–8) are considered.
Genitives and datives with Ancient Greek three-place predicates
Authors: Anagnostopoulou Elena , Macleod Morgan , Mertyris Dionysios , Sevdali Christina
Published: July 2024

This chapter investigates the behaviour of three-place predicates in Ancient Greek. Three classes of predicates are investigated: taking two accusative arguments, an accusative and a genitive, and an accusative and a dative respectively. Corpus data are used as the basis for a new system of classification, making finer and more accurate distinctions than traditional classifications. Analysis of the data supports the view that the genitive and dative were lexical cases aligned with specific theta-roles. The two cases display parallel, yet non-uniform, behaviour: some, but not all, genitives and datives can alternate with nominatives in passive constructions. While many alternating verbs are prefixed, prefixation is not in itself a good predictor of such alternations, which are more closely correlated with verb semantics and theta-roles. The genitive and dative in such constructions may be described as syntactically active lexical cases.
Book 1
Authors: Bachvarova Mary R.
Published: July 2024

Achilles’s anger against the Achaean leader Agamemnon and his subsequent withdrawal from the battlefield spur Zeus’s intervention in the final year of the Trojan War. To honor Achilles by showing how indispensable he is, Zeus agrees to Thetis’s request that he temporarily give the Trojans the upper hand in the fighting. Under the category of themes, this chapter discusses Zeus’s plan, Achilles’s anger, disputes over honor, the Homeric warrior ethos, and powerful speech. Under the category of poetics, it discusses the textualization of the Iliad, synchronic versus diachronic interpretations, features of oral poetry (festival setting, composition in performance, formulas, type scenes, traditional referentiality, variation, serialization, transference of motifs), and Indo-European and Near Eastern contributions to the Homeric tradition.
Book 3
Authors: Lyons Deborah
Published: July 2024

Book 3 begins with Hector reproaching Paris for his deficiencies as a warrior. Paris responds by proposing a duel with Menelaus for possession of Helen. The goddess Iris summons Helen to watch the duel from the walls of the city, where she answers Priam’s questions about the Greek warriors. Aphrodite rescues Paris from injury and summons a reluctant Helen to join him in his bedchamber, where she compares him unfavorably to her former husband. Meanwhile Menelaus searches fruitlessly for his opponent. This chapter discusses the following items under the category of themes: the contrast between Paris and Hector, divine gifts, the power of the gods over mortals, fate, epiphany, oath-sacrifices, women and weaving, Helen’s relationship to epic, and Indo-European elements in the Teichoskopia (“Watching at the Wall”). Under the category of poetics it discusses: similes, the two names of Paris, the organization of the narrative, and counterfactual constructions.
Book 4
Authors: Anhalt Emily Katz
Published: July 2024

Iliad 4 depicts the aftermath of the abortive duel between Menelaus and Paris and the resumption of battle between Greeks and Trojans. Like the Iliad as a whole, book 4 distinguishes the perspective of the epic’s external audience from that of the mortal characters within the story, enabling the audience to evaluate the mortal characters’ words and actions. A divine assembly reveals that morality and justice are the responsibility not of gods but of human beings. Interactions between gods, gods and mortals, and mortal leaders emphasize the interdependence of individual and communal fortunes. Mortal moral transgressions and the glorification of violence produce the morally indiscriminate devastations of warfare. Unlike the characters within the story, book 4 celebrates not violence but the uniquely human capacity for logical thought and articulate speech, exemplified by reciprocal moral agreements and narrative storytelling. Book 4 deploys epic poetic techniques of ekphrasis, simile, and para-narrative.
Book 9
Authors: Myers Tobias
Published: July 2024

Book 9 represents a major turning point in the poem, despite the fact that nothing happens on the battlefield. As Zeus’s support for the Trojans in book 8 has placed the Achaeans in desperate straits, Agamemnon agrees to send an embassy to Achilles, promising many gifts if he will return to the fighting. Achilles’s vehement refusal, his attempts to explain himself, and his friends’ efforts to persuade him to fight open up a host of rich interpretive questions. This chapter explores the themes of Homeric values and status, moira (“allotment”), the consequences of mortality, and the ethical implications of Achilles’s choice as he presents it. The poetics section discusses Homeric nods, paradigms, plot, and metapoetics.
Book 10
Authors: Tsagalis Christos C.
Published: July 2024

Book 9 presents the failed embassy to Achilles and ends with the realization that the Achaeans must deal on their own with Hector’s mad rage. Before attacking the Trojan army in book 11, they decide to send a spying mission to the Trojan camp in the plain to ascertain Hector’s plan for the following day (book 10). This chapter explores the following themes: the characterization of the key Achaean leaders (Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Diomedes, and Odysseus) and two Trojan figures (Hector and Dolon), the nexus of backward and forward thematic associations and phraseological links of book 10 with preceding and subsequent books of the Iliad, the function of book 10 as a thematic pair with book 9, epic retardation, the ambush type scene, and dressing and clothing. It discusses the following topics under the category of poetics: type scenes, clothing, arming, and epic retardation.
Book 18
Authors: Karanika Andromache
Published: July 2024

Book 18 opens with the scene of a messenger coming to Achilles to give him the news of Patroclus’s death. Thetis and the Nereids lament Patroclus, anticipating Achilles’s fate. Hector and Polydamas argue about the Trojan strategy. On the Achaean side, Achilles offers funerary rites. The second half of book 18 presents Hephaestus’s work on Achilles’s armor and a description of the shield of Achilles. This chapter discusses the following items under the category of themes: mourning and funerary rites, fate and prophecy, divinity and mortality, Trojan debate over strategy, epic time and space, and the shield of Achilles and its scenes. It discusses the following items under poetics: lamentation as an oral genre, similes, and ekphrasis.
Book 20
Authors: Stocking Charles
Published: July 2024

Book 20 marks Achilles’s official reentry into battle against the Trojans, and with that reentry Zeus allows the gods themselves to participate in the war. The central episode of the book is Achilles’s confrontation with Aeneas. The main theme of Iliad 20 is divine intervention, as it relates to Zeus’s plan for the Trojan War and the divine genealogy of heroes. Because book 20 marks Achilles’s reentry into battle, significant thematic attention is given to the act of killing and the anatomy of death. The main poetic features of Iliad 20 discussed here include the role of destiny and counterfactuals, interformularity, and speech acts of blame.
Robotic Persons and Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
Authors: Palacios-González César
Published: July 2024

Famously, the writer Isaac Asimov came up with three laws of robotics. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. But these laws rest on the notion that artificial intelligence can never reach the stage that robots would acquire moral status—a premise with which this chapter takes issue.
The Pioneers
Authors: Townend Matthew
Published: July 2024

This chapter explores the early stages of the Victorian engagement with dialect. It traces the history of dialectology in the pre-Victorian period, examining a series of national and regional glossaries and their connections with antiquarianism and early philology. It then explains the importance of an enhanced understanding of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) in the 1840s in giving dignity to England’s regional dialects, paying particular attention to the writings of William Barnes (1801–86). It explores the influential comments made on dialect by Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–86), and also reviews the sense of urgency and danger that dialect collectors felt, fearful that regional dialect was being effaced by the processes of mobility and education. It concludes with an extended study of J. C. Atkinson’s Cleveland Glossary (1868), as an example of what the new, philological approach to dialect studies looked like.
Folklore and the Past
Authors: Townend Matthew
Published: July 2024

This chapter explores the connection between dialectology and the study of the past in the Victorian period. It shows how nineteenth-century scholars and collectors believed that regional dialect, as a form of historical evidence, cast a unique light on the language and culture of England in the early medieval period, as well as on the language of Shakespeare. It also explores the intimate connection between dialect study and the study of folklore, looking at such topics as flora and fauna, agriculture, trades and industries, and supernatural creatures. It concludes by reading a number of examples of folkloric fiction from the later Victorian period, especially R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869), Sabine Baring-Gould’s Red Spider (1887), and Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887).
Subject ellipsis and impersonal pronouns
Authors: Haegeman Liliane , Danckaert Lieven
Published: July 2024

This chapter discusses restrictions on subject ellipsis in second conjuncts in French. In Standard French, as well as in the register-specific grammar of text messages, referential weak pronouns such as il and elle (“he” and “she”) can be omitted in second conjuncts, whereas this is impossible with the impersonal pronoun on “one” (Rizzi 1986a). It is proposed that French on occupies a structurally lower position than the other pronouns (De Crousaz and Shlonsky 2003) and that it is associated with a non-overt pronominal in the canonical subject position (Kayne 2010). The ellipsis asymmetry is then accounted for in terms of a “small conjunct” analysis, with coordination below the canonical subject position. A comparison with the ellipsis behavior of Dutch impersonal men furthermore suggests that the unavailability of on omission in French second conjuncts is not due to the discourse-inert status of the latter pronoun.
Chile’s Mining-Led Growth Strategy, 1990–2020
Authors: Nem Singh Jewellord T.
Published: July 2024

This chapter seeks to answer two key questions. Firstly, how do we account for Chile’s hybrid mining model—discursively sustained by private sector governance but materially embedded in SOE Codelco’s presence in the mining sector—and secondly, to what extent has this governance model pursued structural transformation in Chile? In this way, the chapter offers a nuanced reinterpretation of Chile’s state transformation and its development model. Pinochet’s neoliberal model was fiercely defended by the post-dictatorial governments, leading to gradual, incremental changes in the institutional framework. Chilean political elites maintained a contradictory strategy of reifying and retaining state ownership in its most critical sector. On the one hand, elites have embraced neoliberalism as a hegemonic paradigm promoting the value of private sector innovation in mining. On the other hand, Codelco’s overwhelming presence in copper mining provided the political resources for Concertación governments (1990–2009) and the succeeding coalitions in 2010s to craft a narrative of ‘private sector-driven growth’. Despite the image of institutional stability, pressures for institutional change in this hybrid model have gradually escalated leading to profound questions about the future of Chile’s neoliberal governance architecture. Thus, demands for a new institutional arrangement challenging the subsidiaru role of the state and in favour of stronger state participation have produced intense political debates on copper mining—and now lithium—governance.
Introduction
Authors: Abad Del Vecchio Julene
Published: July 2024

The introduction sets out to establish the parameters, methodology, and necessary definitions for the proposed darker interpretation of the Achilleid. The introduction offers a comprehensive assessment of the methods and significance of this new tragic reading, what the novel reading aims to achieve, and how this shift in interpretation places the poem closer to its Neronian and Flavian literary predecessors. The interpretation proffered aims to present the darker components and alternatives that run deep alongside the composition’s more playful notes. Reflections on the vexed question of its unfinished status are advanced, as well as discussion of the use of anagnorisis, anticipation, and cyclicality as narrative strategies. This examination transitions into the final section of the introduction, which pushes an original reading of the mirroring structure of the Achilleid, and brings to light the high level of refinement and subtlety that the poem offers, ending with analysis of the tonal dissonance and competing perspectives that emerge from within. The introduction closes with a summary of chapters.
The State of the Field
Authors: Dimova Gergana , Flinders Matthew , Hinterleitner Markus , Weaver R. Kent , Rhodes R. A. W.
Published: July 2024

This chapter maps the existing knowledge base as it relates to the analysis of blame. It undertakes this exercise in conceptual cartography in response to concerns that the existing knowledge base is as scattered as it is diffused. A sophisticated bibliometric analysis dating back several decades provides a data-based foundation for this chapter and allows the authors to highlight a core spine of scholarship. It also identifies a number of ‘gaps’ and ‘traps’ in relation to the study of blame. The former ‘gaps’ relate to areas or topics that have not formed the focus of blame-theoretic research; the latter ‘traps’ highlight dominant assumptions that are very rarely questioned, let alone challenged, within the existing research base. The research presented in the chapter also indicates the existence of a number of central reference points, a lack of connective intellectual tissue between approaches, and a number of emergent themes that demand further analysis. The final section seeks to stretch and push the boundaries of how, why, and where the politics and governance of blame (and therefore credit) is approached and understood.
Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Blame
Authors: Alaszewski Andy
Published: July 2024

This chapter focuses on the contribution that anthropology can make to the understanding of the ways in which blame is used in different societies, and the implications of this for the politics of blame. Anthropology is a study of the ways in which societies and cultures respond to and manage challenges. Misfortune represents one such challenge when disease, accidents, or crop failure kill members of the community, survivors seek to identify those responsible. Such blaming is shaped by beliefs about the cause of misfortune, malevolent individuals using supernatural powers—witchcraft or sorcery, sinners inviting divine retribution, or, in contemporary societies, risk takers failing to identify and manage risks. In contemporary society, public inquiries are used to name and blame those who failed to identify risks and the chilling effects of such inquiries can be seen in the defensive practice of professionals tasked with managing risks.
Storytelling and Statecraft
Authors: Kettell Steven , Kerr Peter
Published: July 2024

This chapter makes three key contributions to our understanding of the management of blame. First, it brings together the literatures on blame avoidance and de-politicization, works that have tended to talk past one another, by examining the UK government’s handling of the COVID crisis as a form of statecraft. Second, it does this by analysing continuity and change in the narrative frames used by government figures as they sought to navigate an unpredictable and rapidly changing crisis situation with a process of ‘discursive hopping’. Here, officials sought to manage public perceptions about their handling of the crisis by shifting the balance between claiming credit for policy successes and de-politicizing failures. Third, the chapter highlights the broader links between these narratives and the populism of the Johnson government, which put almost as much energy into seeking credit as it did into apportioning blame.
Blame Avoidance during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Baldini Gianfranco , Pritoni Andrea
Published: July 2024

As several scholars have shown, the COVID crisis is a peculiar prism through which to analyse how governments adopt blame-avoidance techniques, shifting responsibilities towards other actors, such as sub-state governments, experts, and citizens. This chapter compares the strategies adopted by the two governments in facing these two phases of the COVID crisis in Italy. While the first two waves of the pandemic were managed by the second Conte government, a new technocratic-led executive, led by Mario Draghi, was formed in February 2021, with the aim of implementing the vaccination campaign (as well as the management of the European Union Recovery Funds). Through a careful investigation of the communication strategies adopted by the two prime ministers in their press conferences, the chapter traces the blame games played among the main institutional actors responsible for managing the pandemic, providing key insights into the changing relations between politics, technocracy, and expertise in Italy.
Why the International System (Still) Matters
Authors: Green Duncan
Published: July 2024

This chapter analyses how change happens in the international system. In many ways, the international system is an extraordinary success story, with smoothly functioning exchanges occurring under a fairly loose system of governance—a combination of norms, rules, procedures, and institutions—and without any recognized world government. The chapter explores how the international system has evolved over time, then looks at how activists can harness both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power to initiate change. Here, they have two choices: ‘hard power’, which can compel governments to act, such as international laws; or ‘soft power’. A case study of the successful campaign for a global Arms Trade Treaty illustrates how these factors interact. In recent years, the growing fragmentation of the international system in response to the declining control of the US has new threats and opportunities for activists.
Disentangling the Identification of Parties and the Concepts of Armed Conflict in Multiparty Conflicts
Authors: Wentker Alexander
Published: July 2024

Chapter 3 disentangles the concepts of international and non-international armed conflict from the criteria for identifying parties. The chapter argues that in settings involving multiple potential co-parties, those elements of the notions of international and non-international armed conflict that specify the nature of the collective entities involved—particularly the organisation requirement in non-international armed conflicts—must be fulfilled separately by each co-party. By contrast, it is sufficient that all co-parties jointly fulfil those elements of the notions of international and non-international armed conflict that relate to the nature of the confrontation as a whole—that is, the existence of recourse to armed force in international armed conflicts and protracted armed violence in non-international armed conflicts. Accordingly, while identifying parties is intimately linked to the notions of armed conflict, the issue ultimately needs to be addressed through a distinct legal framework.
Literature Against Fundamentalism
Authors: Khair Tabish
Published: July 2024

This book argues that literature is a mode of thinking, stories being perhaps the oldest thinking ‘device’ known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material (‘language’) and its subject matter (‘reality’, internal, external, or both). These relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as writing (and not just as any writing)—and, hence, this book looks at the book too, distinguishing between oral and written literatures without dismissing the former or subsuming the latter. It argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language, and language in reality—where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive. This mode of engagement is defined and illustrated as essentially an agnostic one. Hence, among other things, literature is an antidote to fundamentalism. The book argues that reading literature as literature, and not just as material (which it also is) for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses, is essential for humanity. In the process, the book offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature, as in ‘a call to arms’.
Conclusion: A Call to Literature
Authors: Khair Tabish
Published: July 2024

This chapter looks again at what literature does, this time in the light of the controversy between the humanities and science, where the former mostly comes out thoroughly battered or heavily defensive in other accounts. While staying focussed on literature, it argues that the humanities deal with highly mutable realities, and hence cannot offer the predictability of the sciences. This, and related matters, are essential to understanding what literature does, and why the agnostic reading demanded by literature is not a choice or a fad, but a necessity. This final chapter also ties together the loose ends of the larger argument and stresses that the ability to read literature as literature is crucial to our survival as a distinctive species of sentient beings.
Summer
Authors: Wharton Edith
Published: July 2024

Charity Royall lives in the small New England village of North Dormer. Born among outcasts from the Mountain beyond, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward. Never allowed to forget her disreputable origins Charity despises North Dormer and rebels against the stifling dullness of the tight-knit community surrounding her. Her boring job in the local library is interrupted one day by the arrival of a young visiting architect, Lucius Harney, whose good looks and sophistication arouse her passionate nature. As their relationship grows, so too does Charity’s conflict with her guardian; darker undercurrents start to come to the surface.

Summer is often compared to Wharton’s other New England story, Ethan Frome, and it shares the same intensity of feeling and repression. Wharton regarded it as one of her best works, and its compelling story of burgeoning sexuality and illicit desire has a strikingly modern and troubling ambiguity.
Fashion and Tourism
Authors: Clemente Deirdre
Published: July 2024

Here, I consider how three tourist destinations became fashion centers of national acclaim—Palm Springs, Miami Beach, and Santa Fe. In each of these places, tourism served as a catalyst for fashion production and distribution, not only through ever-ready retailers but also through the tourists themselves. Through Palm Springs’ dude ranch dungarees or the backless dresses of South Florida’s resorts, for example, vacationers pushed the boundaries of acceptable attire. People liked their “sports frocks” and wanted to wear their unstructured jackets, ankle socks, and brightly printed, cotton playsuits when they got home, too. Using trade press accounts, Chamber of Commerce memos, and personal account in letters and oral histories, this chapter aims to answer questions that historians have not ignored, but rather, never asked: How has tourism shaped the American wardrobe and who made that happen?
Working Memory
Authors: Postle Bradley R. , Oberauer Klaus
Published: July 2024

Working memory supports the guidance of current thoughts and actions with temporarily selected representations deriving from either long-term memory or information recently perceived in the environment. It is characterized by the rapid establishment of bindings between these representations and/or with representations of context to create new temporary structures, by the ability to manipulate these structures, and by the ability to shift flexibly between a maintenance mode and an updating mode. This chapter emphasizes a distinction between “plans”—hierarchical sets of rules used to achieve a goal—and “data”—the contents of working memory. These map, respectively, onto the contemporary formulation of procedural and declarative working memory. From this perspective, the chapter considers the current state of theoretical and computational models, including the distinction between memory systems and state-dependent models, differing accounts of capacity limitations, the relation of working memory to long-term memory, and the relation of working memory to attention and cognitive control. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the neural bases of working memory, emphasizing results from lesion and neurophysiological experiments, carried out with humans and nonhuman primates, that are associated with the theoretical and computational considerations discussed in the chapter. Important topics include the working memory functions of the prefrontal cortex, the delay-period representation of information (including alternatives to sustained, elevated delay-period activity), and the neural bases of the control of working memory.
Laws of Human Memory
Authors: Kahana Michael J. , Diamond Nicholas B. , Aka Ada
Published: July 2024

The search for laws—invariances across conditions and subjects—is essential to the project of understanding memory. Despite the complexity of memory and its diverse manifestations in people’s daily lives, certain mnemonic effects appear to hold across a wide range of conditions. This chapter discusses the effects of recency, contiguity, similarity, primacy, and repetition as potential laws of memory, evaluating their explanatory scope and discussing their theoretical significance. The chapter shows that apparent violations of these laws occur when different effects come into conflict, as in the situation of opposing physical forces. The chapter notes that the search for law-like phenomena is guiding the development and refinement of integrative memory theories.
Dopamine and Learning
Authors: Duncan Katherine , Shohamy Daphna
Published: July 2024

A central challenge for theories of memory is to understand how the brain prioritizes learning based on motivational relevance. Emerging findings indicate that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a critical role in this process. Dopaminergic modulation links learning and memory to motivation and reward, thereby ensuring that memories are adaptive for future behavior. This chapter reviews the neural pathways and behavioral and cognitive consequences of this modulation, with a focus on two main dopaminergic targets: the striatum and the hippocampus. It reviews evidence regarding the neural and computational mechanisms by which dopamine reinforces learning of habits in the striatum and also the role of dopamine in modulating long-term episodic memories in the hippocampus. Understanding the effects of dopamine across multiple learning and memory systems helps resolve a fundamental challenge in memory research: explaining what humans learn, and why.
Memory Capacity of Neural Network Models
Authors: Fusi Stefano
Published: July 2024

Memory is a complex phenomenon that involves several distinct mechanisms. These mechanisms operate at different spatial and temporal levels. This chapter focuses on the theoretical framework and the mathematical models that have been developed to understand how these mechanisms are orchestrated to store, preserve, and retrieve a large number of memories. In particular, this chapter reviews the theoretical studies on memory capacity, in which the investigators estimated how the number of storable memories scales with the number of neurons and synapses in the neural circuitry. Memory capacity depends on the complexity of the synapses, the sparseness of the representations, the spatial and temporal correlations between memories, and the specific way memories are retrieved. Complexity is important when the synapses can only be modified with limited precision, as in the case of biological synapses, and sparseness can greatly increase memory capacity and be particularly beneficial when memories are structured (correlated to each other). The theoretical tools discussed in this chapter can be harnessed to identify the important computational principles that underlie memory storage, preservation, and retrieval and provide guidance in designing and interpreting memory experiments.
Memory and Stress
Authors: Schwabe Lars
Published: July 2024

Stressful events have a major impact on memory. This chapter discusses classic and more recent findings suggesting that stress may have distinct effects on different stages of memory—encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and reconsolidation—and that these effects are closely linked to the precisely timed action of hormones and neurotransmitters that are released in response to stress. In addition to these time-dependent changes in memory performance after stress, the chapter discusses evidence showing that stress modulates the engagement of multiple memory systems in a manner that facilitates rather simple but rigid “habit” memory, at the expense of cognitively more demanding forms of memory. It is argued that this shift toward habit memory may be adaptive for performance under stress but results in rather inflexible memories. Finally, some implications of stress-induced changes in memory are discussed.
Adorno, Black Studies, and Critical Race Theory
Authors: Winters Joseph R.
Published: July 2024

This chapter draws connections between Adorno and Black studies in a manner that includes but decenters the focus on Adorno’s critique of jazz. Drawing on the work of scholars like Fumi Okiji, this chapter contends that there are fraught affinities between Adorno’s ethics of the negative and the rejection of progress narratives (or a celebration of the human, reason, Western civilization, etc.) in authors like Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson. For these authors, ethics begins with a refusal to affirm a social order organized by violence that is displaced and denied. In addition, this chapter shows how Adorno’s call for a new way home, which is connected to an ethics of not being at home in this world and a practice of fugitivity, resonates with Fred Moten’s understanding of Blackness as perpetual movement and dispossession. Furthermore, the author broaches Hortense Spillers’ reading of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, particularly her description of the oceanic, as a way to supplement Adorno’s use of Odysseus’ voyages as a metaphor for (colonial) modernity.
Emerson, Nature, and Networks in the Black Press
Authors: Fielder Brigitte
Published: July 2024

Over the past twenty years many scholars such as Len Gougeon, Joel Myerson, Martha Schoolman, and Christopher Hanlon have focused on Emerson’s antislavery activism. What has been absent from this scholarship, however, is an assessment of the ways Emerson circulated in the Black press during the years prior to the Civil War and how African Americans’ interest in him extended beyond his antislavery stance. By eschewing, rather than centering, slavery as the topic for Black engagements with this thinker, this essay reaches beyond the most predictable topics of interest in Emerson. Reading a discussion of Emerson’s 1867 collection May-Day and Other Pieces published in the Christian Recorder of that year, this essay maps a context for reading Emerson amid Black attention both to nature and networks that allows us to surmise what appeal these particular poems may have had for the paper’s readers.
Emerson’s Market Forces
Authors: Kopec Andrew
Published: July 2024

This essay draws on recent historiographies of capitalism to identify Emerson’s sustained interest in capitalist activities and institutions. Across his long career, Emerson imagined self-reliance as a form of risk-taking that gains legibility within nineteenth-century ideologies about the intersection of commerce and identity. From the perspective of the “new history of capitalism,” standard Emerson texts like “The American Scholar” (1837), “Self-Reliance” (1841), and “Wealth” (1860) take on new meanings as accounts of the modern self’s relation to capitalism. But business ideologies can also allow bringing less frequently studied texts to the fore. And in “Address on Education” (1837), “Prudence” (1841), “Perpetual Forces” (1862), and even Emerson’s abolitionist lectures, we see his Transcendentalism work itself out as a program for managing the turbulent “wave” of social life. Emerson thus approached commerce as yet one more path, as he put it in 1860, “on the way to the highest” good.
Emerson and the Socialists
Authors: Jackson Holly
Published: July 2024

This essay aims to restore utopian socialism, especially the 1840s enthusiasm over the philosopher Charles Fourier, as a key context for reading Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Renaissance. Though he frequently rejects a straw-man Fourier, Emerson’s thought hews closer than he admitted. In reaction to industrialization and the entrenched institutions of “civilization,” they both advocated a “whole man” theory of labor and sought to amplify individual desires and insights as the essential precursor to larger community formations. However, Fourier hoped for the end of marriage, capitalism, and the private home, aims from which Emerson publicly recoiled. While the more socially radical Transcendentalists spread an Americanized version of Fourier’s ideas, and free-lovers such as Marx Lazarus and Stephen Pearl Andrews embraced both Emerson and Fourier, Emerson moved away from his earlier interest in these ideas to develop a reactionary counter-revolutionary philosophy utopianizing the individual, free trade, and nationalism.
Aphasic Etymology
Authors: McLaughlin Don James
Published: July 2024

This chapter describes as “aphasic etymology” Emerson’s studied devotion to concealed histories of linguistic meaning, his attunement to our inability to excavate all we attempt to express. Emerson’s interest in etymological estrangement shapes his essay “The Poet” (1844), which likens poetry to etymology. “The poets made all the words,” Emerson explains. “For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was a stroke of genius. … The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” Here collective memory loss becomes the landscape of speech itself. “The Poet” thus makes room for a social model of aphasic etymology, resituating the “fossil poetry” embedded in language as a forgetting commons. “Poetry” is the mechanism of accessibility that endeavors to traverse these spectral distances. This chapter concludes by using such concepts to reframe Emerson’s relationship with Walt Whitman.
Emerson, Melville, Futility
Authors: Banner Rachel
Published: July 2024

This chapter attends to a thread of early literary scholarship on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville that positions them as combatants. It shows how a critical staging of Emerson and Melville in a pasteboard arena of abiding philosophical conflict helps us understand a great deal about the cultural psychodramas of professional literary criticism of earlier periods. It poses the issue of Emerson and Melville’s ongoing value within US literary studies as a genuine question and considers their own writings about grief, violence, and unhappy endings to propose an unlikely answer: that their most profound relationship to one another in this cultural moment may be that both of them evince a philosophical contentment with the necessity of their own increasing irrelevance. And yet, attending to each writer’s theorizations of their own futility may paradoxically offer a way for future readers to still find something of use in their writings now.
Transcendental Geologies
Authors: Morgan Patrick
Published: July 2024

This chapter excavates the geological substratum of Emerson’s 1844 antislavery address, “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.” Geological time is not a recipe for a tepid abolitionism, but is rather closely related to immediatism. Emerson practiced geologic presentism, or deep kairos: a traversing of deep time in the human mind, embodying in the present moment the progressive thrust of Earth’s history. The chapter unveils how Emerson’s geologic presentism connects back to his earliest readings of the geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell gave Emerson an understanding of geologic time beyond mere duration—an understanding that resonated with Emerson’s sense of sacred time and the present moment. This origin story of Emerson’s present-oriented geology reconfigures the discussion over the timing of Emerson’s antislavery, showing how he was able to attach the time of Earth with the timing of coming out against slavery.
Realism and the Subaltern in India
Authors: Anjaria Ulka
Published: July 2024

As in many colonized or formerly colonized contexts, the call for realism in India has always been politically motivated. However, Indian realism is never simplistically mimetic or propagandistic. Focusing on three seminal moments in the history of Indian realism, this chapter argues that Indian realism’s political project to represent the subaltern has always also been an epistemological question about how literature can contribute to political change. While many Indian writers since the foundation of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 have been politically committed to representing marginalized or oppressed characters in their literature, their writings have simultaneously registered the difficulty of such representation through metatextual techniques such as narrative estrangement, frame narratives, and bifurcated texts, among others. Indian realism, then (and postcolonial realism more broadly), can be understood as a set of questions about what it means for literature to do political work.
Resources
Authors: Wilson Peter H.
Published: July 2024

The Seven Years’ War saw fighting across the globe, but in fiscal-military terms, Europe remained the epicenter and was the source of most of the manpower, ships, weaponry, and other war materials. Non-European resources were important in campaigns elsewhere; these operations nonetheless always depended on European input, whereas non-European resources played only a minimal role in the fighting in Europe. This chapter assesses the character, mobilization, and employment of war-making resources, and evaluates the relative efficiency of the belligerents in finding and deploying what they needed, and how they responded to their experience through postwar reform. It argues that the superior ability of Britain and Prussia to mobilize, procure, and employ resources played a significant part in determining the war’s outcome.
Empires
Authors: Ruggiu François-Joseph
Published: July 2024

This chapter assesses the impact of the Seven Years’ War on the British, Spanish, and French empires, which signed the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It examines how and to what extent the language of empire permeated the political cultures of the three countries before and after the war. It then considers the place of the overseas territories in the geopolitical visions of the three Crowns. Finally, it analyses the substantial reforms that have triggered, from the last months of the war until the end of the 1760s, a deep change in the internal working of empires. The chapter shows that there was then a radical divergence in the political choices made by the rulers of the three countries relating to their overseas empire. The question of the loyalty or subordination of the local populations, particularly the elites, was a key factor in determining these choices.
The Directorate of Religious Affairs
Authors: Kocamaner Hikmet
Published: July 2024

Under Turkey’s conservative AKP government, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) began to deploy state-employed preachers and other religious functionaries to provide Sunni Muslim citizens with religious advice and guidance on matters of marriage, parenting, and family life. While also serving Muslim men, the Diyanet’s Family and Religious Guidance Bureaus was an integral part of an initiative to serve the religious needs of women through female religious authorities who were previously sidelined by this state institution. Within the last two decades since these Islamic family offices were initiated, the Diyanet has hired an ever-increasing number of female preachers and other religious functionaries, as well as placed women in prestigious positions within its institutional hierarchy. While challenging the historical dominance of male religious authorities, women working for the Diyanet’s Family Bureaus often end up performing a balancing act between their religious authority, bureaucratic positions, and wishes to advocate for women’s rights within the confines of Sunni-Islamic jurisprudence and patriarchal Turkish society.
Mary Magdalene in Modern Visual and Popular Culture (Including Documentaries)
Authors: Bolton Lucy
Published: July 2024

This chapter considers the array of representations of Mary Magdalene on the cinema screen between 1912 and 2022. The survey shows the perennial fascination with the sexuality of Mary Magdalene and the range of stereotypes and assumptions that the cinema perpetuated in popular culture. Ranging from early cinema, through the “swords and sandals” epics, and into television movies and miniseries, the popularity of Mary Magdalene has remained strong and the allure of her persona has persisted. Acknowledging the impact of The Da Vinci Code phenomenon on the reputation of the Magdalene, the chapter considers the flourish in nonfiction films and documentaries about the alleged mysteries and conspiracies that have abounded in the last twenty years, as well as discusses the scholarship devoted to Mary Magdalene that has led to more critical and serious reappraisals. The chapter considers the films Mary Magdalene and Magdala, both of which have responded to these new perceptions about the apostle to the apostles and offered profoundly original and spiritual encounters with the enduringly fascinating Mary Magdalene.
Léon Brunschvicg and the Development of French Neo-Kantianism
Authors: Terzi Pietro
Published: July 2024

This essay examines a purported ‘French neo-Kantianism’ during the Third Republic and shows that this label, although largely inappropriate, may well apply to Léon Brunschvicg, a powerful professor at the Sorbonne who advanced a critical idealism. However, by analysing the primary aspects of Brunschvicg’s doctrine—the philosophy of judgement, historical reflectivity, and scientific philosophy—the chapter shows how Brunschvicg was more interested in the ‘spirit’ of Kantianism than in its ‘letter’. In fact, with Brunschvicg, fidelity to the Kantian heritage goes hand in hand with a profound critical revision and correction of it—an example that will be fundamental for much of later French epistemology.
Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch
Authors: Morgan Michael L.
Published: July 2024

In order to elucidate Emmanuel Levinas’s distinctive contribution to our understanding of ethics and the human condition, this chapter compares and contrasts his thought with Vladimir Jankélévitch. I use two very helpful comparisons of Levinas and Jankélévitch, one by Kelley and another by Robert Bernasconi, to frame my discussion. My strategy will be to discuss both of these accounts, with an eye to showing how both fail to emphasize sufficiently the special role of the interpersonal relation exhibited by the second-person in Levinas’s thought. In short, I show that Levinas’s special contribution to contemporary philosophy is his account of the face-to-face and the primacy of the second-person interpersonal relation and that it is an account that goes further than anything we find concerning interpersonal relations in Jankélévitch.
Frantz Fanon, Philosophizing (in) the Colonial Situation
Authors: Mercier Lucie K.
Published: July 2024

This chapter focuses on the concept of ‘situation’ in Fanon’s philosophy, a notion that has seldom been analysed as pivotal in his thought. My argument follows the circulations of the concept of ‘situation’ in post-war psychiatry as well as in the philosophies of ‘existence’ of Karl Jaspers, Günther Anders, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The first two sections address Fanon’s discussion of ‘situational diagnoses’ in Fanon’s earliest writings and as a general methodological framework for Black Skin White Masks (1952). It is on the basis of a condensed philosophical genealogy of the concept of ‘situation’ presented in the third section, that the fourth section re-examines the role of meaning in racial identification in ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’. The final section argues that Fanon’s intervention in post-war philosophy cannot be grasped without understanding the theoretical displacements it effectuated: by situating critique Fanon paradoxically expanded the scope of philosophy.