bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Birth of Tragedy in the Cinquecento: Humanism and Literary History
Authors: Haugen Kristine Louise
Published: February 2012

Humanist literary historians treated Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ in a distinctive way: as a historical source. How had the Greek tragedy arisen, what was its relation to the comedy, and how was it performed? They approached Aristotle’s scanty and confusing words with a repertoire of methods: bold inference and exegesis, textual criticism, and above all comparison with Roman texts. These discussions were deeply relevant to the rise of the opera around 1600. Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Robortello, Piero Vettori, and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso are examined.
Philology as Philosophy: Giovanni Pontano on Language, Meaning, and Grammar
Authors: Nauta Lodi
Published: February 2012

This article studies the views on language of an important yet understudied humanist, Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503). Attention is paid to his ideas on the origins of language; the emotive and active functions of language; the intrinsic connection between language and sociability; and his grammatical work. When compared to developments in the Enlightenment his views turn out to be philosophically interesting and relevant. As such this article underscores a still undervalued point that, even though humanists were perhaps not philosophers, philosophical assumptions and convictions did drive their textual-philological studies, having important implications for their wider views on history and culture.
Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Authors: Ware Ben
Published: February 2012

In 1919, Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig von Ficker explaining that, in addition to being “strictly philosophical,” the Tractatus was also a “literary” work with an “ethical point.” This paper re-examines the significance of these remarks, arguing that there is an intimate connection between the form and style of Wittgenstein’s text and the type of self-transformative, ethical activity which the work encourages the reader to engage in. In order to understand this connection, however, it will be necessary to recognize the dialectical character of the Tractatus, as well as its deep affinity with other works of philosophical and aesthetic modernism.
Introduction
Authors: Burke Martin J.
Published: February 2012

Introduction to a symposium held at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, October 2009, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Quentin Skinner's article, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."
Molly Bloom: A Re-Immersion in the Concrete
Authors: Rasmussen Goloubeva Irina
Published: February 2012

Do we still read the "Penelope" episode of Ulysses for all the wrong reasons? Does Joyce offer its readers a cathartic experience of marriage counseling, a candid expression of female sexuality, or a textualist staging of subversive femininity that undermines the law of the father? This essay reevaluates critical orthodoxies about the significance of Molly's character. Challenging what is too often perceived as her adultery, irrationality, and gender fluidity, it revises established accounts of Molly's symbolic femininity to argue that she asserts her identity through an oblique social critique of culture. Molly's reflections on cultural codes, social conventions, and gender roles reconnect Irish historical consciousness to the social field and reconfigure the parameters of discourses on justice, equality, and universal emancipation.
From Developmentalist to Conservationist Criticism: The New Narrative of South Korea in North Korean Propaganda
Authors: Gabroussenko Tatiana
Published: February 2012

During the sixty years of the separate existence of two Koreas, North Korean propagandists have managed to continually readjust the image of the Republic of Korea (ROK) to the challenges of reality by employing different methods and techniques. This article outlines the changing perspectives on South Korea in North Korean propaganda in 1945–2010 and correlates them with Korean cultural traditions, as well as old and new foreign influences and tendencies in the world’s intellectual trends. In so doing, I propose a new model, timing, and interpretation of the major changes in the South Korean paradigm of North Korean propaganda in 1945–2010 and base my conclusions on the investigation of various textual and visual materials published in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), related Internet resources, as well as North Korean films.
Belarus: A Tale of Two Elections
Authors: Potocki Rodger
Published: February 2012

The headlines spawned by the Belarusian presidential election of 19 December 2010 bore a remarkable similarity to those seen after the last such contest in March 2006. Yet the Belarus of today is not at all the Belarus of five years ago. If the 2006 election showcased the regime's strength and popularity at that time, the events following the 2010 contest have exposed that same regime's vulnerability and precarious support today. In order to explain why some authoritarian regimes are more stable, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way identify three key factors: linkage to the West, internal organizational power, and the leverage of the West. It seems to be only a matter of time before the supporters of change in Belarus form a critical mass.
Nigeria Votes: More Openness, More Conflict
Authors: Lewis Peter M.
Published: February 2012

Nigeria’s recent electoral season marked an important departure from the familiar trajectory of politics in that country. Departing from Nigeria’s history of flawed elections and oligarchic control, this most recent balloting offered a broadly credible and competitive exercise across most of the country. Yet the outcome of the presidential contest, though seemingly decisive in numerical terms, has also sharpened sectional tensions that could upset Nigeria’s fragile political equilibrium. Political initiative, economic strategy, and the changing nature of social movements will determine whether or not Nigerians can successfully navigate the risk of sectional conflict.
“A Matter of Physical Health and Strength”: Disciplining the Female Body and Reproducing the Czech National Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Authors: Frančíková Dáša
Published: February 2012

An 1850 article “Uzavírání sňatku” (“Marriage”) by Czech physician Jan Špott outlined the requirements for those who considered themselves part of the Czech national community. Špott stressed that those concerned with the future national existence had to educate themselves and each other to create healthy offspring. I examine Špott’s article with regard to contemporary ideas about fitness, the role of women, the need to discipline the female body, as well as the importance of education in reproducing the community. This article’s analysis—set in the broader context of the history of women, medicine, and nationalisms—shows that nation-oriented education could be perceived as a way to ensure the nation’s future existence while simultaneously emphasizing the responsibility of individuals, and particularly women, for the reproduction of the community. Špott’s propositions are significant to other nineteenth-century national movements and to postnational contexts where national fitness is a concern.
Two Tsadikim , Two Women in Labor, and One Salvation: Reading Gender in a Hasidic Story
Authors: Kauffman Tsippi
Published: February 2012

The paper offers a feminist-gendered reading of a Hasidic story about R. Yisroel of Ruzhin, who intervenes in the case of a pregnant woman experiencing difficulty in labor. R. Yisroel of Ruzhin chooses storytelling as the means to help the woman, reciting a known Christian tradition about a female pope and her birth experience. A critical-gendered reading could view this story within the broader cultural phenomenon of labor being expropriated by men. The paper in addition suggests a subversive reading, which sees the story as a unique, disguised attempt at creating an appropriate place for birth within the greater culture. Focusing on the use of the strange papal story as a way of affecting salvation, the paper proposes a sephirotic-symbolic reading of the internal story: R. Yisroel of Ruzhin identified sparks of hesed in the story of the female pope and elevated them through the telling of the story, realizing the Hasidic mission of "raising the sparks". This Hasidic activity of "raising the sparks", the paper suggests, could also function as an interpretive methodology offering new perspectives on a patriarchal world and a patriarchal text, including the present story and the Hasidic tradition in general. The paper shows how through gender sensitivity and with the aid of the appropriate theoretical tools, a Hasidic text unfolds to reveal answers to new questions, and questions to new answers, opening a rich interpretive space while at the same time opening the door to tikun 'olam, repair of the world.
The Rabbis and Palmyra: A Case Study on (Mis-)Reading Rabbinics for Historical Purposes
Authors: Appelbaum Alan
Published: February 2012

Several rabbinic texts refer to the Syrian oasis city of Palmyra and its third-century rulers, Odenathus and Zenobia. Historians, including specialists in Jewish history, have used these texts to claim that the rabbis, unlike other Jews of the time, were hostile to Odenathus, Zenobia and the Palmyra they led. This article re-examines the texts to discover what they reflect the rabbis saying and thinking about in their own terms, and reaches a negative conclusion: Rabbinic hostility to Palmyra is not found in them. The article's point is less about the past than about the present, and the way some scholars use rabbinic sources. When historians reach erroneous conclusions and include them in otherwise salutary books or articles, they mislead their students and other readers, who then include those conclusions in their own work without replicating research they assume is reliable because it was done by qualified predecessors. Instead of revealing evidence of rabbinic hostility to Palmyra, detailed examples show that these texts reveal, among other things, rabbinic concerns such as the need to reconcile inconsistent beraitot about captive women, for which purpose the rabbis used the unusual figure of Odenathus, and the problem of would-be Jews of uncertain ancestry, in connection with which the rabbis used Palmyra as a symbol of a locale inhabited by such people.
Rabbinization and the Making of Early Jewish Mysticism
Authors: Boustan Ra'anan
Published: February 2012

Hekhalot literature testifies to the heterogeneous nature of Jewish religious practice and authority at and across the boundaries of rabbinic Judaism. Yet, Hekhalot and rabbinic literatures do not reflect clear-cut social, cultural, and institutional divisions within Jewish society, nor are they complementary facets of a single, coherent religious system. Both of these options oversimplify the complex relationship between these rapidly evolving sites of Jewish literary culture. Rather, Hekhalot literature and the social groups that produced it were subject to the same institutional, technological, linguistic, and demographic transformations that reshaped Jewish society and culture more broadly toward the end of Late Antiquity (500–800 C.E.). The relationship between Hekhalot and rabbinic literatures can thus shed light on the dialectical process by which rabbinic authority was gradually extended into new areas of Jewish life, while itself being transformed in the process.
Sports Journalists' Use of Social Media and Its Effects on Professionalism
Authors: Reed Sada
Published: February 2012

The rise of social media gives sports writers new avenues for gathering information. This usage raises ethical issues that challenge an already-technologically morphing industry. In this pilot study, Minnesota-based sports journalists were interviewed about their use of social media, the effects Facebook and Twitter have on their news gathering practices, the ethics of pulling direct quotes from social mediums, and how these mediums have blurred traditional lines between sports writers' professional and personal relationships.
"Sino-Pacifica": Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History
Authors: Abalahin Andrew J.
Published: February 2012

Conventional geography's boundary line between a "Southeast Asia" and an "East Asia," following a "civilizational" divide between a "Confucian" sphere and a "Viet­nam aside, everything but Confucian" zone, obscures the essential unity of the two regions. This article argues the coherence of a macroregion "Sino-Pacifica" encom­passing both and explores this new framework's implications: the Yangzi River basin, rather than the Yellow River basin, pioneered the developments that led to the rise of Chinese civilization, and the eventual prominence of the Yellow River basin came not from centrality but rather from its liminality—its position as the contact zone between Inner Eurasia and Southeast Asia.
"Bricks without Straw": Economic Hardship and Innovation in the Chicago Public Library during the Great Depression
Authors: Novotny Eric
Published: February 2012

"Bricks without straw" is an expression that means to make do with insufficient resources. It is also an apt description of the challenges facing the Chicago Public Library during the early years of the Depression. The library was forced to limp along with a fraction of its normal funding. This article explores how the library coped with such difficult financial circumstances and how, in some ways, it ultimately emerged as an innovative, community-oriented institution.
The Great Depression and Its Impact on an Emerging Research Library: The University of North Carolina Library, 1929-1941
Authors: McGrath Eileen , Jacobson Linda
Published: February 2012

After World War I, the library of the University of North Carolina developed into a research library serving a modern university. The dedication of a new library building in October 1929 celebrated this transformation, but the stock market crash and the Depression that followed inhibited further growth. State support plummeted, and the library struggled to build collections and provide services. This essay examines the factors that prevented the library from experiencing a more devastating decline: support from foundations and individuals, federal aid, staff initiative, and the utility and symbolic value of the new library building.
Not Fair Enough: Historic and Institutional Barriers to Fair Trade Coffee in El Salvador
Authors: Tellman Beth , Gray Leslie C. , Bacon Christopher M.
Published: February 2012

¿Por qué pocos agricultores salvadoreños venden a mercados de "comercio justo"? Este artículo examina varias causas que limitan la participación de pequeños productores de café. Basado en un analisis historica de sociedad y café en el Salvador y de las cadenas de valor con dos estudios caso, uno en la sierra oriental y otro en la región oeste, ilustran los obstáculos prácticos de participar en comercio justo y notan como los productores han desarrollado soluciones alternativas tales como comercio directo y un mercado doméstico para café orgánico. Algunas de las barreras que ellos confrontan incluyen los costos de certificación, las economías de escala para cubrir las operaciones de exportación, las rigurosas exigencias de calidad y la limitación de tierra alta para su cultivo. Sin embargo, causas históricas como la represión de la sociedad civil, las desigualdades en el acceso a la tierra, y problemas con la deuda, también han afectado este sector. Una desventaja corriente que los pequeños productores deben negociar es el sistema de políticas estatales que han desalentado históricamente el desarrollo de uniones cooperativas dinámicas con capacidad para exportar el café producido.
Selective learning in the acquisition of Kannada ditransitives
Authors: Viau Joshua , Lidz Jeffrey
Published: February 2012

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children’s grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic consequences both within and across languages, namely the hierarchical structure of ditransitive verb phrases (Barss & Lasnik 1986, Larson 1988, Harley 2002). Next we show that while the semantic consequences of this structure are parallel in English, Kannada, and Spanish, the word order and morphological reflexes of this structure diverge. Thus, although it is clear that the same structures are exhibited crosslinguistically, the evidence available to learners that would allow them to identify these structures is variable. We then turn to an examination of children learning Kannada, demonstrating that they have command of the relation between morphological form and semantic interpretation in ditransitives with respect to quantifier-variable binding. Finally, we offer a proposal on how a selective learning mechanism might succeed in identifying the appropriate structures in this domain despite the variability in surface expression.
Trapped between a Rock and a Hard Place: What Counts as Information Literacy in the Workplace and How Is It Conceptualized?
Authors: Lloyd Annemaree
Published: February 2012

Information literacy has been proclaimed as a foundational literacy of the twenty-first century by many researchers, library practitioners, and international agencies. However, there is still disagreement about how information literacy is conceptualized and what key elements constitute the practice. This disagreement has led to the practice/skills debate that has emerged from workplace research into information literacy. It has also led to claims that research into information literacy lacks theoretical framing from which models can be grounded. While the library and higher education sector concentrate on information skills that are claimed to be generic and transferable, there is little evidence from workplace research to suggest that this is indeed the case. In fact, the opposite appears to be true: that information literacy is enacted as a situated, collective, and embodied practice that engages people with information and knowledge about domains of action that are authorized by the discourses of the setting. Consequently the information skills and competencies that are developed reflect the discursive practices of the setting. Without information literacy, other work-related practices and performances couldn't be accomplished; however, the continued focus on skills limits our ability to understand information literacy as a socially enacted practice, one that is constructed through a range of social activities. The issue therefore is how to represent the social activities that underpin information literacy. This article conceptualizes information literacy from a workplace perspective and presents ongoing work toward a theoretical framework. It advances the view that information literacy appears to be trapped between "a rock and a hard place." The rock is the current conception of information literacy, which is unsatisfactory, because it is confined by the discursive practices of the education sector and does not account for the complex social processes that inform learning to work. The hard place is the translation of information literacy practice with an understanding of how this practice happens, that is, from the education sector into workplace performance. Drawing from empirical studies, this article will explore the current key issues related to workplace information literacy.
Nabokov's Nomadic Humor: Lolita
Authors: Wepler Ryan
Published: February 2012

Though an extensive body of scholarship has characterized both Humbert Humbert and his author, Vladimir Nabokov, as exiles, an examination of humor in Lolita situates both figures in the more detached position of nomads. Humbert does not experience the exile's desire for a return to his homeland. Instead, his repeated use of incongruity-ambiguity humor consistently places him outside of two or more juxtaposed systems of discourse, in a position to constitute their meaning rather than be constituted by it. Though Nabokov holds this freedom of consciousness as his highest aesthetic ideal, the power over meaning-making that Humbert cultivates through his use of humor allows him to justify his violation of Lolita. In this way, Lolita is a penetratingly moral novel that dramatizes the dark consequences of human beings' freedom of thought.
Una máquina teatral: Forma e identidad en el teatro de Migdalia Cruz
Authors: Santana Analola
Published: February 2012

Migdalia Cruz's work stands out for its aesthetics, and because of the themes and characters that she so carefully develops through a focus on the scatological elements that compose the body as a form of grotesque beauty. This essay studies two particular plays, Miriam's Flowers (1992) and Fur (2000), focusing on the aesthetics that compose her works in relation to two specific dominant issues: love and sexuality. It is through these themes that her characters develop a sense of agency and it is possible to identify a concern towards identity construction that forms part of Migdalia Cruz's theatrical corpus.
Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting
Authors: García-Romero Anne
Published: February 2012

This article examines theatrical experimentation in three plays by U.S. Latina playwrights: Quiara Alegría Hudes' Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (2007), Caridad Svich's Tropic of X (2009) and Cusi Cram's Fuente (2009). Each playwright engages with an existing artistic form, fugue, hip hop and soap opera, as a means to develop the structure, characters and language of her play. The article argues that these playwrights' innovations, created by exploring and subverting diverse artistic models, reflect the dynamics of transculturation and that the resulting plays are not only commercially viable but vital to twenty-first century U.S. theater.
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Performance?: A Metacritical Overview of an Evolving Concept
Authors: Larson Catherine
Published: February 2012

It is fair to state that performance is one of the most contested terms in our field, clearly evolving and emerging in the last few decades as one of the most significant terms in a wide range of academic disciplines and in society in general. This essay lays out many of the principal critical and theoretical concepts and debates related to performance—performativity, performance studies, performance art, etc.—to illustrate how the field and the lens through which we view it have changed and are continuing to change, as well as how those of us who study Latin American theater fit into the larger picture of examining the embodiment of meaning. This study of some of the main contributions to the discipline and to the creation of the field of performance studies offers an overview of the concepts, scholarship, and bibliography that have helped shape the ways in which we talk about performance.
Neocolonial Global Capitalism and Imperial Desire in Lawrence Chua's Gold By the Inch
Authors: Chae Youngsuk
Published: February 2012

Lawrence Chua's Gold By the Inch depicts the conditions of Southeast Asia after decolonization in which the logic of exchange value ruthlessly circulates through commodified bodies and the local and global exploitation of labor. Chua's novel follows the interconnected relationships between the logic of capital and the logic of profit under the global capitalist mode of production and exposes the occluded narratives of the exploitation of differentiated racialized bodies. This essay argues that the text presents an incisive critique of the euphemistic notion of historical progress.
Retrieval and Invention: The Adaptation of Texts and the Narrativization of Photographs in Films on Immigration
Authors: Kalogeras Yiorgos
Published: February 2012

Post-World War II Greek cinema treated immigration as a theme which could be represented appropriately through comedy and melodrama. The emergence of New Greek Cinema, as well as the flourishing of modernism in European film, inspired young Greek directors to rethink the significance of immigration as a social phenomenon to be represented in their work. Influenced by Alexis Damianos's films, Lakis Papastathis created Γράμματα από την Αμερική (1972), a documentary that questions the cinematic representation of the immigration story as shown by earlier Greek feature films and also by Elia Kazan's America, America (1963). Papastathis's film complicates the notion that archival facts present unmediated evidence about the past. Structurally, the film develops an argument on the techniques of filmic representation, especially on the relation between voice off and photography, but it also comments on how a seemingly "static" movie can expediently narrate and ironize what appears to be a simple and undramatic immigration story.
The Empire Awaits the Barbarians: A New Perspective
Authors: Arampatzidou Lena
Published: February 2012

When Nikos Kazantzakis traveled to Alexandria as a newspaper correspondent in 1927, a most interesting part of his travel was the visit he paid to C. P.Cavafy at his house. The encounter of the two major Greek writers was narrated by Kazantzakis in a travel article on Cavafy. This travel text interacts mainly with Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" and provides the space for a new approach to Cavafy's text. Introducing the themes of the nomad/barbarian and the empire, later found in the perspective of the theories of nomadology and glo calization, Kazantzakis's travelogue reterritorializes Cavafy's poetry and its scholarship, and provides a new space for the generic identities of texts.
Promulgation and Registration of Royal Ethiopian Acts in Behalf of Political and Religious Institutions (Northern Ethiopia, Sixteenth Century)
Authors: Wion Anaïs
Published: February 2012

The study scrutinizes a corpus of 34 royal charters given to religious institutions and private persons of the Northern regions of the Ethiopian kingdom during the 16th century. This study sheds light on the prosopography of the bureaucracy, first, as well as on the role of the Aksum Ṣəyon church as an interface between the monarchy and religious or political institutions in the north of the realm. We better understand the distribution of roles between crown servants, officials from the Aksum Ṣəyon church where copies of the acts were made and kept, and the members of the clergy in the religious institutions concerned in the acts.
When Ethics Consultation and Courts Collide: A Case of Compelled Treatment of a Mature Minor
Authors: Spike Jeffrey P.
Published: February 2012

A fourteen year old is diagnosed with aplastic anemia. The teen and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. An ethics consult is called on the day of admission by an ethically sophisticated social worker and attending. The patient and his parents see this diagnosis as “a test of their faith.” The ethical analysis focuses on the mature minor doctrine, i.e. whether the teen has the capacity to make this decision. The hospital chooses to take the case to court, with a result that is at odds with the ethics consultation recommendations. Ethics was never deposed or otherwise invited to be involved with the hearing. Thus the larger question of the relation of ethics and law was brought into stark relief.
Novelty, Modernity, Adjacency
Authors: Levenson Michael
Published: February 2012

"Novelty, Modernity, Adjacency" engages the culture of Modernism as a provocation to our theoretical understanding of context. The essay recovers the history of literary a-contextualism and re-contextualism (from the utopianism of the Word to that of the Relation); it addresses the unstable play between absorption and distraction; and it offers a theoretical account of the problem of context in the philosophy of language, as it is appears in the work of Russell, Austin, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. The argument suggests that we break free from images of container and content in order to grasp the more indeterminate play of "adjacencies" that allow us to assimilate the New.
The Conceptualization of Emotion Events in Three Formosan Languages: Kavalan, Paiwan, and Saisiyat
Authors: Hsieh Fuhui
Published: February 2012

An important issue in the study of the language of emotion language, from a cognitive perspective, is to investigate how language conceptualizes emotions. Since the 1980s, linguists have been exploring how abstract concepts may be based on conceptual metaphors for bodily, physical concepts. However, conceptual metaphors have been shown not to be a universally preferred strategy in conceptualizing emotion events. Nevertheless, the factor influencing the selection of metaphorical strategies is underexplored and opaque. This study thus sets out to accomplish two goals. First, I postulate that limitation on the linguistic mechanism, namely, nominalization of emotion terms, may constrain language users' selection of metaphorical strategies in conceptualizing emotion events. My results show that languages having emotion nouns are found to have comparatively rich metaphorical expressions for emotions. To the contrary, in the languages where the linguistic mechanism to encode abstract emotion concepts is inadequate or unavailable, the metaphorical strategy is dispreferred. Second, as emotion events are inherently events of causality, and are characterized by deploying event participants, I examine how grammatical constructions, that is, recurrent syntactic patterns with their associated functions, are made available by the conventional resources of a language, and I investigate how language users in their daily communication conceptualize emotion events and portray participant relations by choosing different grammatical constructions.
Proto-Oceanic *k w
Authors: Ross Malcolm
Published: February 2012

This paper argues for the reconstruction of a rounded velar protophoneme *k w in Proto-Oceanic. This protophoneme occurred, however, in few lexical items. In those reconstructed to date, it always appears before *a and always, with one possible exception, word-initially. The paper concludes with a discussion of the probable status of *k w in Proto-Oceanic.
The Ethics of Temporality - A Rejoinder Syllepsis Redux and the Rhetoric of Double Agency
Authors: Stewart Garrett
Published: February 2012

Taking up leading threads from a response by Kent Puckett to the author’s previous essay in this journal on the syntactic figure of syllepsis in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend , this article rounds out the exchange by pursuing the continuing literary force of such split grammar — long after Dickens, or the new examples here from Austen and Poe — as it appears in contemporary writers as different as John le Carré and Toni Morrison. In answering Puckett’s call for an engagement with the mode of doubleness analyzed in William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral , it clarifies previous claims regarding an ethics of ambiguity in sylleptic grammar in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s work at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and poetics. In the process, this response extends the philosophical reverberations of this marked syntactic trope to include the Wittgensteinian line of thought in J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, not only in their comments on “ordinary language” but in the sylleptic turns of their own writing.
“Wonders Unconceived”: Reflections on the Birth of Medical Entomology
Authors: Cirillo Vincent J.
Published: February 2012

Prior to Patrick Manson’s discovery in 1877 that the mosquito Culex fatigans was the intermediate host of filariasis, the association of insects with disease and the nature of disease transmission was almost entirely speculation. Manson’s work was incomplete, however, because it showed the manner in which the mosquito acquired the infection from humans, but failed to show the way in which the mosquito passed the infection to humans. That pathogens were transmitted by the bite of an infected female mosquito was later proven experimentally with bird malaria by Manson’s protégé, Ronald Ross. In 1898 Ross demonstrated that the infective stage of the malarial parasite was injected into the host when the mosquito released saliva into the wound prior to injesting blood. Insects were suspected as carriers of disease for centuries, yet it was not until the late 1870s that the uncritical acceptance of folk beliefs was supplanted by research-based scientific medicine. Why did it take so long? The answer lies in the fact that early medicine itself was imprecise and could not have pursued the subject with any hope of useful results until the last quarter of the 19th century. A better understanding of the nature of the disease process (germ theory of disease) and improved technology (microscopes and oil-immersion lenses with greater resolving power, and synthetic tissue stains) were indispensable for revealing the nexus between those partners in crime: insects and parasites.
Negotiating Meanings About Embryos in Australia: From Potential Humans to Prohibited Substances
Authors: Harvey Olivia
Published: February 2012

In the late 1990s, human embryonic stem-cell research became a highly emotional and politicized debate. In 2001, the United States announced a ban on all federal funding for research involving human embryos, and other countries around the world were similarly engaged in political debate at the same time, and for very similar reasons—namely, that embryos are regarded as unique entities that warrant special protection. This article tracks the transformations in the history of legislative response in Australia to the anxieties provoked by the use of reproductive and regenerative human material over the last 40 years, in order to examine how embryos have come to adopt such a special position in the community’s psyche. “The embryo” is at once a biological, scientific, social, cultural, and political object, fixed by the legislative processes that seek to define it, and subject to definitions that change over time. Understanding the history of where our ideas about the embryo have come from can help us to negotiate the continuing debate about the use of human embryos in research.
A Tale of Two Cities: Reestablishing Cultural Identities in Eastern Europe
Authors: Givental Elena
Published: February 2012

My paper is based on the author's observations of contemporary cultural landscapes in the cities of Krakow (Poland) and Lviv (Ukraine), which prompted the analysis of the observed differences through the prism of Jewish minority dynamics. Having gone through the centuries of parallel histories, which resulted in the creation of convergent landscapes, Krakow and Lviv experienced dramatic changes in the twentieth century, associated with the Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and communist totalitarian regimes, which reduced the cities' Jewish population from a pre-war twenty-five to thirty-two percent of the total to nearly nonexistent. After the return of democracy to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, Krakow and Lviv acquired distinctively dissimilar cultural identities, characterized by the revival of Jewish culture in Krakow and its obliteration in Lviv. The suggested explanation of the observed differences is drawn from the unevenness of nation-building processes in Eastern Europe, which resulted in the advancement of Polish cultural plurality and Ukrainian nationalism. While Polish pluralism allows for the minorities to reestablish their cultural identities, Ukrainian nationalistic movement, aimed primarily at national unity, temporarily stifles the minority discourse. The dynamics of Jewish minority identities, expressed through the evolution of cultural landscapes in Krakow and Lviv, demonstrate the array of democratization pathways in contemporary Eastern Europe.
Three Beats, Two Crimes, One City: Place-Based Distribution of Property Offenses in Atlanta, Georgia
Authors: English Crystal
Published: February 2012

The City of Atlanta experienced its highest rate of residential burglaries in 2008, up twenty-four and one-half percent from the previous year. In the same year, thefts from motor vehicles also peaked—at nearly twenty-eight percent above the preceding year. The purpose of this study was to determine not only where clusters of offenses were occurring, but temporal frequencies of the crimes and what, if any, environmental factors were influencing increased criminal activity. To accomplish this, the research analyzed hot and cold spots of residential burglaries in three police beats comprising two distinct locations of the city, urban and suburban. It then compared thefts from motor vehicles in those same areas. The results indicated a marked difference in the socioeconomic status of the inhabitants, and the frequency of the crimes between the two areas; each having a comparable population density and beat size. The research also revealed environmental issues that were contributing elements on crime. The study concluded that each area experienced different rates of property crime for the selected categories, and that in this specific case, neighborhood design was an important consideration; and although the urban beats were subjected to higher crime rates per capita than the suburban beat, both selected areas shared a similarity in temporal occurrences of property crime incidents.
Scourging the Temple of God: Towards an Understanding of Nicolas Jacquier's Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum (1458)
Authors: Champion Matthew
Published: February 2012

Despite its importance as an early example of fifteenth-century attacks on a sect of demon-worshipping heretics, Nicholas Jacquier's Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum remains neglected in English-language histories of witchcraft and the late medieval world. Integrating Jacquier's text into such histories, I situate the Flagellum and its author within both modern scholarly discourse on demonology and reconstructed fifteenth-century contexts. By examining in detail the Flagellum's opening chapters on demonic illusion and corporeality, I elucidate many of the characteristic forms of Jacquier's argument, and conclude by signalling the possibilities for using texts like Jacquier's to construct wider cultural histories of late medieval Burgundy.
Turning Catholic: Peele's The Battle of Alcazar and Captain Thomas Stukeley
Authors: Roby Joanne W.
Published: February 2012

The English-born Captain Thomas Stukeley is the ostensible hero of George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar , yet the play emphasizes the ambiguity of Stukeley's identity as an English hero since he acts on behalf of Catholic interests. While the trope of 'turning' is usually associated with English fears of their countrymen 'turning Turk', Peele's construction of Stukeley's Catholic allegiances evokes this trope. Peele's play thereby investigates the extent to which opposing national and religious identities can coexist. It produces a more conflicted portrait of Stukeley than our traditional understanding of the captain's mythic legacy has previously acknowledged.
Desire, Death, and Women in the Master-Slave Dialectic: A Comparative Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Henry James's The Golden Bowl
Authors: Phipps Gregory Alan
Published: February 2012

What happens if we imagine that Hegel's master-slave dialectic occurs between two women? Henry James's The Golden Bowl provides some answers to this question. James's novel portrays an exclusively female master-slave confrontation that is driven by a feminine appropriation of male desire. This appropriation actually mirrors the process in the Phenomenology in which the male domain tries to appropriate the feminine task of alleviating the terror of mortality. However, because this latter process ultimately fails, there is a limit to how much fluidity we can bring to Hegel's gender boundaries. Consequently, The Golden Bowl ends with a reaffirmation of gender divisions.
Comic Anxiety and Kafka's Black Comedy
Authors: La Farge Benjamin
Published: February 2012

In order to explain why The Metamorphosis of Kafka is a black comedy, I argue that all comedy is governed by an illogical logic that generates a catharsis of wish and fear: we want the protagonist to succeed, but fear he will fail. Our fear is a form of anxiety. Mistaken identity and role reversal, two of the most common devices used in comedy (and also in satire), are funny to the degree they are unrealistic. Kafka's story is a comic satire on family love fraught with extreme anxiety.
The Ethics of Spanish Identity and In-difference
Authors: Folkart Jessica A.
Published: February 2012

The Madrid bombing of 2004 and increased immigration have intensified the centuries-old repulsion of the Islamic other in Spain. This social shift is represented in Spanish narrative as a preoccupation with liminal identity—identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither. This essay examines Levinas's ethical philosophy of subjectivity in dialogue with Cristina Fernández Cubas's Parientes pobres del diablo (2006). In her texts, the confrontation between doubling and "in-difference," or the difference within, renders indifference impossible, for the double ensures the subject's ethical responsibility for himself and also for the other.
Angels in Digital Armor: Technoculture and Terror Management
Authors: O'Gorman Marcel
Published: February 2012

O'Gorman is particularly interested in the relationship between death and technology, an area of research that he has dubbed "necromedia." This essay adopts Ernest Becker's conception of culture as a "hero system" that fulfills two primary existential needs: 1) the denial of death, and 2) the desire for recognition. By crossing Becker's work with the theories of Bernard Stiegler, Martin Heidegger, and Alexandre Kojève, the essay applies this notion of a cultural hero system toward a more contemporary analysis of technoculture. The role of media technologies in such tragic events as the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings and in the "death by gaming" trend in South Korea illustrate how technoculture offers a promise of immortality with which other cultural systems (school, religion, family) cannot compete. be observed in everyday life, wherever technology fulfills the desire for recognition and buffers us from the inevitability of death. From popular accounts of the search for an "immortality gene," to the explosive popularity of Facebook and Twitter, technological resources and the rhetorics that promote them have become the existential cornerstone of Western society.
The City & The City
Authors: Truong Hong-An , Dixon Dwayne
Published: February 2012

This video is composed of two channels: the first depicts Tokyo and Saigon in small vignettes on a split screen while the second channel is another split screen image of a man and a woman in separate rooms each singing karaoke in a choreographed interplay of Japanese and Vietnamese/English. The tightly framed images of the cities provide the architectonics of an emergent Asian urbanism produced through shared histories of modern warfare and occupations often obscured by intense expansions and modulations of capitalist spatiality. This series of exterior images contrasts with the close view of the two singers solitary in their separate rooms, performing songs that bring the present-tense into sharp and melancholic proximity with histories rendered through pop narratives and the intimate technology of the karaoke machine.
The Paradox of the Assessment of Capacity Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005
Authors: Shah Ajit
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
The Mental Capacity Act 2005 was fully implemented in England and Wales in 2007. The Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards were introduced into the MCA and fully implemented in England and Wales in April 2009. A range of anomalies and paradoxes in the use of DOLS are described in detail in this paper.
Economic Determinants of Japan's Low Fertility Rate: Cointegration Analysis
Authors: DeStefano Timothy , Kabaklarli Esra
Published: February 2012

This paper discusses the determinants of Japan's declining fertility rate from 1973 to 2008. We examine various economic factors: GDP per capita, infant mortality rates, female labour participation, cost of education, and urbanization and find that these variables are cointegrated. We discover that GDP per capita has a negative relationship with fertility rates and a 1% increase in GDP per capita leads to a decrease in fertility by 2.1%. In addition, we discover that female labour participation shows an unexpected positive relationship to fertility suggesting that their financial contribution to the family has lowered the cost of child rearing.
The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion
Authors: Stuckey Mary E.
Published: February 2012

There have been numerous studies of the frontier myth as it operated in the early republic and throughout our history. As a result of this work, we know a lot about the frontier myth, its history, elements, and ideological functioning. We know less, however, about how that myth developed when its ideological elements met the empirical realities of western emigration. I argue that four specific cultural fictions—erasure, civilization, community, and democracy—are integral elements of the larger fiction of the American frontier myth. By understanding them through the vehicle of the Donner Party narratives, we can deepen our understanding of that myth and the ways in which it operates and resonates throughout the national culture and contributes to the development of American national identity.
The Foursquare Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson
Authors: Maddux Kristy
Published: February 2012

Preaching across the United States and around the world, the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson built an unprecedented ministry between 1915 and 1944, an era typically remembered for Christian discord. In the formative years of her ministry (1915 to 1926), McPherson resisted the divisiveness of fundamentalism and modernism, instead continuing to preach in the evangelical style popular within American Christianity since the Great Awakening. Because fundamentalism and modernism prized science, rationality, and intellect, and tended to offer propositional logic that articulated the nuances of Christian doctrine, those discourses typically emerged in denominational conflicts and civil and ecclesiastical trials. Close analysis of McPherson’s public discourse, however, reminds us that evangelicalism endured in its more natural habitat—sermons and revivals. McPherson’s discourse can be characterized as the Foursquare Gospel of Aimee Semple McPherson: McPherson the prophet, evangelist, storyteller, and performer. Her example highlights how evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and modernism can be defined as rhetorical styles rather than institutions, groups of people, or individual leaders.
A Liberal Use of "Torture": Pain, Personhood, and Precedent in the U.S. Federal Definition of Torture
Authors: Vicaro Michael P.
Published: February 2012

Ongoing debates about the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used in the Global War on Terrorism, and the failure to prosecute officials who authorized these acts, have revealed deep controversy and complexity within popular and legal understandings of the term "torture." One source of this controversy lies in the U.S. federal definition of torture itself. A close reading of 18 U.S.C. § 2340 reveals a uniquely liberal-modernist conception of subjectivity and experience that offers inadequate legal protection against the "no-touch" techniques that have become paradigmatic of contemporary torture. Specifically, the moral and epistemological ambiguities within its legal categories of "pain" and "personhood" result in a law that effectively permits rather than prohibits the preferred torture techniques of liberal-democratic states. Following the critical-analytic work of this argument, the article offers an appeal for the inclusion of a more robustly rhetorical conception of experience in the formulation of a new legal definition of torture.