bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Religious Viewing of Sculptural Images of Gods in the World of Late Antiquity: From Dio Chrysostom to Damaskios
Authors: Deligiannakis Georgios
Published: June 2015

This article investigates an important aspect of traditional religiosity, the veneration of statues, as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between opinions (often philosophical) found in non-Christian texts and the actual religious practices of communities. These presented arguments for the religious use of statues on the basis that statues offered a symbolic presentation of divinity, served as an acceptable concession to limited human intellect, and represented something of the intelligible nature of the divine in material form. It appears that cult statues remained important until at least the fifth century, among intellectuals as well as among the general populace. As long as shrines existed, they continued to act as contact portals. With the destruction of shrines, the pagan community turned to other, humbler forms of worship. Rising in importance during this time is the intermediary role of the holy man and the recourse to hieratic magic. Theurgic methods of invoking and compelling divine immanence relied on this long tradition of statue worship. It is here argued that the ardent commitment to cult and statues among prominent pagans was a response to the new situation after Constantine and the result of the close connection between philosophy and ritual in late Platonists through the theurgic dimension of late Neoplatonism.
Style and Substance: A Bust of a Sasanian Royal Woman as a Symbol of Late Antique Legitimacy
Authors: Rousseau Vanessa , Northover Peter
Published: June 2015

The silver bust presented here may be the only extant portrait bust of a Sasanian royal woman. Art historical analyses complemented by metallurgical analyses date the piece to the late Sasanian or early Islamic era, fitting it into the known corpus of Sasanian and related metalwork based on stylistic and iconographic analysis. While an exact identification of the woman in this unique bust remains elusive, the portrait can be associated with the family of Ḵosrow II and may represent his wife, Širin; one of his daughters, Bōrān or Āzarmīgduxt; or even his legendary great-granddaughter Šahrbānū. The possibilities for identification reveal much about the roles of women and the use of art as a tool to promote status and legitimacy in the Sasanian and early Islamic eras. Despite looking odd or even inauthentic at first glance, the portrait fits well within the framework of Sasanian and Sasanian-inspired metalwork that emulated the art of the Sasanian court and reflects the artistic syncretism between the Sasanian, Byzantine, and early Islamic luxury arts.
Challenges for a theory of islands: A broader perspective on Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven
Authors: Schütze Carson T. , Sprouse Jon , Caponigro Ivano
Published: June 2015

Subjacency characterizes a set of phenomena whose acquisition must be explained by any proposal for human language learning. We take a broader perspective than previous responses to Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014), arguing that they have not shown that this UG principle is ‘redundant’ because their proposed alternative does not take into account firmly established constraints on A-bar dependencies. We illustrate a range of challenges for theories hoping to reduce subjacency to independently motivated, primarily nonsyntactic constraints: they must include a way to account for attested crosslinguistic variation in island effects, the cross-construction generality of island effects, and the effects of resumption and of wh -in-situ on island behavior.
Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions
Authors: Roelofsen Floris , Farkas Donka F.
Published: June 2015

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.
Can phonological universals be emergent?: Modeling the space of sound change, lexical distribution, and hypothesis selection
Authors: Morley Rebecca L.
Published: June 2015

This article is an analysis of the claim that a universal ban on certain (‘anti-markedness’) grammars is necessary in order to explain their nonoccurrence in the languages of the world. Such a claim is based on the following assumptions: that phonological typology shows a highly asymmetric distribution, and that such a distribution cannot possibly arise ‘naturally’—that is, without a universal grammar-based restriction of the learner's hypothesis space. Attempting to test this claim reveals a number of open issues in linguistic theory. In the first place, there exist critical aspects of synchronic theory that are not specified explicitly enough to implement computationally. Second, there remain many aspects of linguistic competence, language acquisition, sound change, and even typology that are still unknown. It is not currently possible, therefore, to reach a definitive conclusion about the necessity, or lack thereof, of an innate substantive grammar module. This article thus serves two main functions: acting both as a pointer to the areas of phonological theory that require further development, especially at the overlap between traditionally separate subdomains, and as a template for the type of argumentation required to defend or attack claims about phonological universals.
The role of the language production system in shaping grammars
Authors: McDaniel Dana , McKee Cecile , Cowart Wayne , Garrett Merrill F.
Published: June 2015

We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Hawkins (2014) and others who have advanced this idea focus primarily on parsing. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures. The phenomenon we examine, which we term the mirror asymmetry , runs in opposite directions for within-clause and across-clause (long-distance) extraction, showing a preference for subject extraction in the former and for object extraction in the latter. We review several types of evidence suggesting that the mirror asymmetry and related phenomena are best explained by an account of the formation of grammars that assigns an important role to properties of sentence planning in production.
Mobile object markers in Moro: The role of tone
Authors: Jenks Peter , Rose Sharon
Published: June 2015

Object markers alternate between a prefix and a suffix position in the Thetogovela dialect of Moro, an underdocumented Kordofanian language of Sudan. Although the alternation appears to depend on the morphosyntactic category of verb forms, we show that it actually follows from the tonal properties of these verb forms. Verb stems that are usually marked with a default, phonologically predictable leftmost high tone select prefix object markers. The high-toned prefix object marker appears inside the stem, and its high tone serves as the default tone of the stem, obviating the need for inserted high tone. Verb stems that impose other tone patterns, either all high or all low, select suffix object markers, a fact that we attribute to the incompatibility of high-toned prefix object markers with all-high and all-low tone patterns. The data are analyzed as a case of phonology conditioning prefix placement and overriding standard suffix position. Although such phonologically determined mobile affixes are rare in the world's languages, the Moro case provides a new example of affix mobility based on a novel property, tone, and it underscores the need to incorporate such cases into the architecture of grammatical systems.
Case alternations in Ancient Greek passives and the typology of Case
Authors: Anagnostopoulou Elena , Sevdali Christina
Published: June 2015

This article presents and discusses evidence that genitive and dative objects regularly become nominative in Ancient Greek passives of monotransitives and ditransitives. This is a typologically and theoretically significant state of affairs for two reasons. (i) As is well known, nonaccusative objects are, in many languages, not allowed to enter into Case alternations, a fact that has been accounted for in the government-binding/principles-and-parameters literature on the basis of the assumption that nonaccusative objects—prototypically datives—bear inherent, lexical , or quirky Case. By this reasoning, Ancient Greek genitives and datives must be concluded to have structural Case. (ii) Even in languages where dative-nominative (DAT-NOM) alternations do obtain, they are often limited to ditransitives, a fact that can been taken to suggest that dative qualifies as structural Case only in ditransitives. A language like Ancient Greek, which allows genitive and dative objects to become nominative in all passives (monotransitives and ditransitives), shows that it is, in principle, possible to have a linguistic system where genitive and dative qualify as structural Cases in both monotransitives and ditransitives. Case theories must be designed in such a way as to allow for this option. We argue for an analysis of Case alternations that combines the view that alternating datives and genitives enter the formal operation Agree with a morphological case approach to the distribution of overt case morphology. We furthermore compare Ancient Greek DAT-NOM and genitive-nominative (GEN-NOM) alternations in passives to Icelandic DAT-NOM and GEN-NOM alternations in middles, pointing to a number of interesting differences in the two types of alternations that depend on (i) the types of nonaccusative arguments entering Agree, (ii) the verbal head (Voice or v) entering Agree with nonaccusative objects, and (iii) the rules of dependent case assignment in connection to the role of nominative in the two languages.
What is really wrong with universal grammar (Commentary on Behme)
Authors: Lin Francis Y.
Published: June 2015

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014; AP&L) identify three problems with universal grammar (UG), namely: linking, data coverage, and redundancy, and argue for an alternative approach to child language acquisition. Behme (2014) aims to make a stronger case against UG. She attempts to show, by combining AP&L's arguments with evidence from developmental psychology and formal linguistics, that UG should be rejected. In this commentary, I argue that Behme's article does not present strong enough evidence to reject UG. Although Behme has pointed out some problems for UG theorists to consider, she fails to pinpoint where UG has really gone wrong. I then try to make clear what the fatal problem with UG is.
Patterns of contrast in phonological change: Evidence from Algonquian vowel systems
Authors: Oxford Will
Published: June 2015

This article proposes that patterns of phonological contrast should be added to the list of factors that influence sound change. It adopts a hierarchically determined model of contrast that allows for a constrained degree of crosslinguistic variation in contrastive feature specifications. The predictions of this model are tested against a database comprising the set of vowel changes in the Algonquian languages. The model reveals striking commonalities in the underlying sources of these changes and straightforwardly predicts the previously unrecognized patterning of the languages into two groups: (i) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */i/ and palatalization is triggered by */i/, and (ii) those in which */ɛ/ tends to merge with */a/ and palatalization is triggered by */ɛ/. In addition to providing a new argument for the relevance of contrast to phonology, the model also gives us a way to import traditional philological findings into a framework that brings them to bear on theoretical questions.
A Narrative of Fear: Advice to Mothers
Authors: Åström Berit
Published: June 2015

Taking present-day research into so-called new momism and intense mothering as a starting point, this article argues that the current mothering discourse, rather than articulating a new phenomenon, perpetuates a regulative discourse developed in the nineteenth century, in advice books written by medical doctors for pregnant women and new mothers. Both the Victorian and the present-day texts play on feelings of guilt and inadequacy in order to control the actions and emotions of mothers, although the threatened outcome differs: present-day mothers are warned that their children may become obese or develop neuropsychological disorders, whereas Victorian mothers are warned that their children might die.
Shirley Jackson’s “The Tooth”: Dentistry as Horror, the Imagination as a Shield
Authors: Haas Robert
Published: June 2015

On her way to a dreaded dental appointment to have an aching tooth pulled, Clara Spencer meets a solicitous stranger, Jim, and by the end of the story runs off with him, in many interpretations to perdition. But since 1) Shirley Jackson (who herself had much dental work and hated it) has suffered from typecasting as a horror writer, 2) dental gas anesthesia protocols of the time as Clara is anticipating could lead to sexual hallucinations, and 3) contemporary literature celebrated escapist fantasy (e.g., the invisible giant rabbit in Harvey ), this article proposes instead that Jim is Clara’s own imaginative, comforting, therapeutic creation.
Disembodiment and Identity in Literary Depictions of Epilepsy Surgery
Authors: Vaccarella Maria
Published: June 2015

This article explores the often perplexing experience of being an epilepsy surgery candidate, as portrayed in four book-length accounts: Laura Doermer’s Moritz mein Sohn (Moritz my son, 1990), David B.’s L’ascension du haut mal (The ascent of the high evil, 1996; published in English as Epileptic , 2003), Ray Robinson’s Electricity (2006), and Alberto Capitta’s Il giardino non esiste (The garden doesn’t exist, 2009). Building upon critical disability studies and the work of French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I analyze issues of embodiment, identity and narrative (re)construction in the postsurgical alleviation of chronic illness. I argue that these texts highlight the inevitable disruption of self that brain surgery entails and ultimately resist biomedical normativization. They also call for a narratological reconsideration of current illness narrative typologies, among which Arthur Frank’s “chaos narrative” emerges as the best suited to accommodate the chronic fragmentation of consciousness and voice in epilepsy.
Narratives of Public Health in Dickens’s Journalism: The Trouble with Sanitary Reform
Authors: Smith Ralph F.
Published: June 2015

Although Dickens is still known as having been a highly visible supporter of England’s well-known nineteenth-century sanitary movement, he became, in fact, deeply troubled by many of this movement’s fundamental tenets, as evidenced by journal narratives on fever that he edited and wrote in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than water and sewer engineering works and a sanitary regime policed by government agencies as envisaged by Edwin Chadwick and other sanitary reformers, Dickens’s view by 1855 was that only a massive erasure of the existing social and political systems and their replacement by an utterly new infrastructure would suffice.
Lauren Slater and the Experts: Malingering, Masquerade, and the Disciplinary Control of Diagnosis
Authors: Grubbs Lindsey
Published: June 2015

The work of psychologist and author Lauren Slater has elicited strong reactions from both medical professionals and disability studies theorists, ranging from criticism to high praise. Attending to these responses, I argue that her work, in perhaps perverse fashion, can provide a narrative touch point for attempts from both fields to complicate the outdated binary division of the medical and social models. I illustrate the need for this collaboration through the example of malingering, suggesting that reading Slater’s work through the lens of Tobin Siebers’s theory of “masquerade” can open progressive conversations about “illness deception,” which is an issue of central importance in disability rights, psychiatry, and political conversations. By using Slater’s work and research on malingering as a test case, I point to potentially productive convergences among academic, medical, and social fields.
Redefining the Poet as Healer: Valerie Gillies’s Collaborative Role in the Edinburgh Marie Curie Hospice Quiet Room Project
Authors: Severin Laura
Published: June 2015

This article examines the poetic contribution of Valerie Gillies, Edinburgh Makar (or poet of the city) from 2005–2008, to the Edinburgh Marie Curie Hospice Quiet Room, a new contemplation space for patients, families, and staff. In collaboration with others, Gillies created a transitional space for the Quiet Room, centered on the display of her sonnet, “A Place Apart.” This space functions to comfort visitors to the Quiet Room by relocating them in their surroundings and offering the solace provided by nature and history. With this project, her first as Edinburgh Makar, Gillies redefines the role of the poet as healer and advocates for newer forms of palliative care that focus on patients’ spiritual and emotional, as well as physical, wellbeing.
The Torments of Spring: Jake Barnes’s Phantom Limb in The Sun Also Rises
Authors: Anesko Michael
Published: June 2015

While critics recently have found The Sun Also Rises a fruitful text for reexamining issues of gender and sexuality in Hemingway’s work, a significant aspect of Jake Barnes’s genital wounding has been overlooked. At least from the time of the American Civil War, a diverse body of medical literature has documented the psychosomatic reality of phantom genitalia in traumatically injured men. Revisiting the novel from this perspective—imagining that Jake Barnes is haunted by a penile ghost—allows us to see this character as something more than a victim of disability. Instead, we might think of Jake’s material self as figuratively masculine but accidentally transgendered: a body that others can desire and that still can choose, or not, to reciprocate sexual feeling.
Autism and the Question of the Human
Authors: Bergenmar Jenny , Rosqvist Hanna Bertilsdotter , Lönngren Ann-Sofie
Published: June 2015

The article explores how normative notions of emotions and interaction are active in constructions of the categories of “human” and “animal” in different discourses about autism: scientific and autobiographical. In the scientific discourse of autistic emotionality, a deficit perspective of autism is central. The general affective deficit discourse relies on normative discursive notions of “humanity” or “human emotionality.” Thus, neurotypicals are produced as real “humans” and neurotypical emotionality as “normal” human emotionality. This human normativity is challenged in the Swedish autobiographical texts by Gunilla Gerland (b. 1963), Iris Johansson (b. 1945) and Immanuel Brändemo (b. 1980). Along with American authors of autobiographies about autism, such as Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures (1995) and Dawn Prince-Hughes’ Songs of the Gorilla Nation (2004) they destabilize the categories of “human” and “animal” by identifying with nonhuman animals, describing themselves as such, or feeling disqualified as real humans.
Passionate Virtue: Conceptions of Medical Professionalism in Popular Romance Fiction
Authors: Miller Jessica
Published: June 2015

Medical romance fiction is a subgenre of popular romance fiction that features medical professionals in their work environment. This essay explores the way professionalism is portrayed in popular medical romance fiction written during the early twenty-first century, a period of significant disruption in both the public image and self-understanding of organized medicine. I analyze a selection of contemporary medical romance novels, published between 2008 and 2012, demonstrating that medical romance fiction is a form of public intervention in apparently insular debates over medical professionalism. I conclude that they promote “nostalgic professionalism,” a vision of physicians as a select group of highly educated, self-regulated experts who provide, with a caring and altruistic attitude, a vitally important service to society, while at the same time generating implicit critiques of it.
The Body, Gender, and Biotechnology in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
Authors: Dolezal Luna
Published: June 2015

In this article, I will argue that Winterson’s use of satire and the common tropes of science fiction in her 2007 novel The Stone Gods provides an effective and important critique of the gender discrepancies arising in the implementation of aesthetic medical biotechnologies under the logic of neoliberal consumerism. In particular, engaging with aspects of Winterson’s fictional landscape in Part 1 of The Stone Gods , I will explore the themes of bodily normalization, the medicalization of youth and appearance, and the notion that biotechnologies such as cosmetic surgery can inculcate happiness through some sort of “psychological cure.” Ultimately, I will argue that Winterson’s aim in this novel is to raise important questions about where rising standards of enhancement and appearance, implemented through biotechnologies, will take us and, furthermore, to demonstrate that the problems of the human condition require more than the surface fixes offered by consumption, technological innovation, and narcissistic body projects.
A Sense of Time: Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on the Temporality of Life
Authors: McNeill William
Published: June 2015

The phenomenon of movement in the broadest sense appears to be essential to any and every understanding of life. And this would seem to imply that all life is constituted by temporality as its very condition. Yet does this entail that everything that lives also has a sense of time? Aristotle in several places writes of a “sense of time”; yet it is only certain living beings, not all, that possess this sense of time, he claims. Nietzsche gives us the famous image of the grazing cattle that are completely absorbed in the moment and, having no sense of time, are completely content. Heidegger, in the context of the issue of affection, identifies as a crucial problem the question of “whether and how the Being of animals is constituted by a ‘time’,” yet it is a question that he deliberately neglects to pursue in his most detailed analyses of animal life. In this essay I explore some of the stakes in the question concerning a sense of time, with reference to the three thinkers mentioned.
“Advancing necessarily askew”: The Technology of Mourning in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
Authors: Brickey Alyson
Published: June 2015

I take up the concept of mourning as what Derrida calls “work”: an active labour that is nonetheless construed as automatic, and therefore technological. Through a discussion of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , I suggest that mourning requires an oscillation in which looking back also means confronting, head-on, the inescapability of death.
Queer Children, Queer Futures: Navigating lifedeath in The Hunger Games
Authors: McGuire Riley
Published: June 2015

This essay revisits Lee Edelman’s work on the futurism of “the Child” by examining contemporary cultural spectacles of dead children, exemplified in The Hunger Games . I will re-evaluate the symbolism of “the Child” a decade after Edelman’s No Future by thinking about the intersections between queer children and killer children.
Le demi-vivant : figuration critique d’une mutilation épistémique
Authors: Cazaban-Mazerolles Marie
Published: June 2015

Étudiant des représentations narratives de la vie réduite ou lacunaire, cet essai montre comment ces figures épistémiques polémiques sont destinées à infirmer des définitions extra-littéraires du vivant stigmatisées comme déficientes et permettent aux écrivains de s’insérer dans le débat aujourd’hui ravivé de ce qui mérite le nom de vie.
Lifedeath and Suicide
Authors: Krell David Farrell
Published: June 2015

When someone we know ends his or her life we are banished to the silence of the outside; uncomprehending is too weak a word for this extrusion. Among the matters of lifedeath, suicide is perhaps one of the most compelling, if not one of the most avidly discussed. I will touch on the debate surrounding “assisted suicide,” although this is not my theme. My theme is the radical exteriority and the silence to which we others are abandoned in virtually every instance of suicide. The outside and the silence have something to do with writing.
“Modern Death” in Don DeLillo: A Parody of Life?
Authors: Helvacioglu Banu
Published: June 2015

This essay aims to carve out an uncharted space to critically reflect on death in our times. It problematizes the existentially absurd and paradoxical nature of death by focusing on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Socratic questioning and the undecided relationship Don DeLillo’s characters have with the actuality of their own deaths.
“A vital, unliveable force”: Rhythm through Nathalie Sarraute and Schizoanalysis
Authors: Negrete Fernanda
Published: June 2015

Nathalie Sarraute, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, particularly in Entre la vie et la mort and A Thousand Plateaux , present an idea of rhythm that attunes us to a non-signifying dimension of language. The force of rhythm at once sustains creation and reveals the common lifedeath matter from which both words and bodies (the writer’s, the reader’s) are made.
Conceiving a Subject of Mutation: Event, Plasticity, and Mutation
Authors: Nisbet Nancy
Published: June 2015

Bringing together the constitutive phenomenon of mutation, concepts of the event, plasticity, the subject, hospitality, and love, this essay draws on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Catherine Malabou to consider the possibility of becoming a subject of mutation.
L’apoptose selon Claude Régy : un dispositif scénique
Authors: Dodet Cyrielle
Published: June 2015

Phénomène cellulaire de sculpture du vivant par la mort, l’apoptose est adaptée au théâtre par le metteur en scène français Claude Régy. Cet essai analyse les conséquences poétiques, scéniques et spectatorielles de cette adaptation à travers trois créations, où l’apoptose en scène devient un dispositif artistique.
Ages of Cruelty: Jacques Derrida, Fethi Benslama, and their Challenges to Psychoanalysis
Authors: Weber Elisabeth
Published: June 2015

For Jacques Derrida, one of the most urgent tasks of philosophy today is to think “sovereignty” and the ways in which it is inseparable from the two “ages” of cruelty of today’s wars: one techno-scientific, from which the “cruor” of blood seems to have been wiped away, and another, bloodily “archaic,” reacting savagely to the first. Derrida and the French-Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama assert that these two “ages” of cruelty are closely intertwined, and that for both of them, today’s media play a crucial role. For Derrida, the “revolution of psychoanalysis” would consist in addressing cruelty without alibi, without political, moral, theological, or other justifications, while refusing to neutralize ethics and politics, that is, the specific geo-political realm in which psychoanalytic theory and practice intervene. In this spirit, Benslama attempts an analysis of the particular new cruelty some Middle-Eastern countries are confronted with today.
Livingdying
Authors: Scott Charles E.
Published: June 2015

I will speak of livingdying, speak in attunement with that neologism. Such attunement is poetic in its manner and connects, always I imagine, experientially and autobiographically with the person thinking, speaking, and writing. This perspective is guided by how livingdying happens in its immediacy. I will speak of livingdying as I look for a discourse to speak of what cannot be said directly. Stories and poetry (especially that of Robinson Jeffers) will be important for what I say: I am saying now that what I say will not—cannot—say livingdying directly, and that impossibility is intrinsic in the way of speaking of livingdying if we want—if we desire to draw closer to living-dying in the sense we make as we speak. The desire to draw closer to livingdying will permeate my remarks. This engagement will have no conclusion.
Lines of Flight of the Deadly Nightshade: An Enquiry into the Properties of the Magical Plant, its Literature and History
Authors: Carruthers David M.J.
Published: June 2015

Writing of his encounters with a Sonoran sorcerer, Carlos Castaneda describes his experience of flight under the influence of datura . To the question “Did I really fly, don Juan?” his benefactor explains that, while in flight, Carlos’s corporeal body was “in the bushes,” raising questions on the relationships of consciousness to corpse, body to perceptual environments, and human mind to nature’s pharmacopoeia .
Between Life and Death: Representing Trafficked Persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen
Authors: McCallum Pamela
Published: June 2015

Human trafficking is a global, highly profitable industry in which persons exist between life and death. Using Judith Butler’s reflections on “precarious life,” this essay argues cultural texts provide sites that open up the possibility of seeing trafficked persons not merely as passive victims, but as singular individuals with concrete agency. The texts challenge readers to imagine and be open to the lived experience of others.
Life(and)death in Harry Potter : The Immortality of Love and Soul
Authors: Stojilkov Andrea
Published: June 2015

This essay examines various features belonging to the liminal area between life and death in the world of Harry Potter . Being fantasy novels, Rowling’s works are free of the reins of empirical thinking. The border they posit between possible and impossible may be displaced; still, it is more or less firmly set.
Implicit Theories of Change as a Barrier to Change on College Campuses: An Examination of STEM Reform
Authors: Kezar Adrianna , Gehrke Sean , Elrod Susan
Published: June 2015

This study examines the role of implicit theories of change in inhibiting STEM reform and identifies a range of approaches to help change agents alter their implicit beliefs in order to develop more explicit theories of change. Through observations and interviews, we focus on the experience of reform teams on 11 campuses that were involved in a statewide STEM reform project. The findings provide empirical evidence that change agents’ views can serve as a barrier to implementation and success of changes, and we offer strategies for changing implicit views to garner greater success in change.
Educational “When,” “Where,” and “How” Implications of In-State Resident Tuition Policies for Latino Undocumented Immigrants
Authors: Darolia Rajeev , Potochnick Stephanie
Published: June 2015

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of in-state resident tuition (IRT) policies, which allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state rather than out-of state tuition, on when and where undocumented immigrant students enroll, and how they finance their education. We identify effects based on differences in pre- and post-policy outcomes between those covered and not covered by the policy, net of the educational trends of citizens. Using data from two nationally representative data sources and multiple citizen comparison groups, we find that IRT policies affect when students’ enroll in college, and can have implications for other key educational decisions, including where and how to attend.
Embedded Neoliberalism within Faculty Behaviors
Authors: Levin John S. , Aliyeva Aida
Published: June 2015

Although there are claims that neoliberalism has not only commandeered the agenda and actions of universities and colleges but also become identified with the work of academic professionals, there is little empirical evidence to show that neoliberalism has infiltrated the work of faculty. This qualitative field work investigation of three California higher educational institutional types determines that while faculty are not necessarily apologists for or proselytizers of neoliberalism, neoliberal principles are tied to faculty behaviors in subtle and covert ways.
Development of a Scale to Measure Academic Capital in High-Risk College Students
Authors: Winkler Christa , Sriram Rishi
Published: June 2015

This study presents a psychometric instrument that measures academic capital in college students. Academic capital is a set of social processes that aid students in acquiring the knowledge and support necessary to access and navigate higher education. This study establishes the validity and reliability of the Academic Capital Scale. In addition to validating the six components of academic capital identified by St. John, Hu, and Fisher (2011), two additional components of academic capital were identified. Providing scholars and practitioners with a measure of academic capital allows institutions to critically examine and restructure their current support programs for high-risk college students.
The Influence of Campus Racial Climate on Graduate Student Attitudes About the Benefits of Diversity
Authors: Ward Kelly Marie , Zarate Maria Estela
Published: June 2015

This paper examines the relationship between campus racial climate and graduate student attitudes about the benefits of diversity. Grounded in the campus racial climate frameworks proposed by Hurtado, Carter, and Kardia (1998) and Milem, Chang, and Antonio (2005), the authors build a case for documenting how student attitudes about diversity may be influenced by campus environments. Multi-level regression analysis is applied to data from a climate survey administered to graduate students (N = 1052) at a large, public, research-based university. Findings support the authors’ hypothesis, that campus racial climate influences student attitudes about the benefits of diversity.
José Agustín and the New Classical Music of Counterculture
Authors: Price Brian L.
Published: June 2015

El presente artículo analiza el primer libro que ofrece una crítica profesional del rock publicado en México. Lejos de ser simplemente un análisis de música, La nueva música clásica de José Agustín articula una nueva comunidad imaginada basada en la experiencia musical de los adolescentes mexicanos que trasciende el rígido nacionalismo de los años sesenta. El texto pretende identificar una genealogía del rock extranjero dentro la cual se podrá circunscribir a los nuevos grupos nacionales. Este artículo comienza con un breve recorrido por la historia del rock y de la contracultura en México y con una discusión de las presiones gubernamentales e institucionales que enfrentaban los adolescentes fanáticos del rock. Luego sigue un análisis de La nueva música clásica , con atención especial a cómo dicho libro responde a estas presiones. Concluye con una lectura de la posterior crítica de rock de José Agustín para mostrar las continuidades que vinculan esta obra primeriza con su producción tardía.
Eat Moor Vegetables: The Semiotics of the Eggplant in Don Quijote
Authors: Allen Heather
Published: June 2015

Este artículo investiga el papel de la berenjena en El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha de Miguel de Cervantes. Aunque aparece solo cuatro veces, su función como signo ambivalente merece un análisis más detenido. A través de una examinación de sus funciones como epíteto para el narrador moro Cide Hamete Benengeli/Berenjena y adjetivo que describe una nariz protuberante y unos labios jaspeados de dos habitantes de Barataria, la ínsula gobernada por Sancho, demuestro cómo la verdura es aún otro medio con el cual el narrador moro ejerce control humoral sobre el protagonista, empeorando su locura. Propongo además que el uso de la berenjena como adjetivo para las partes del cuerpo de los personajes baratarianos evoca un ekfrasis fragmentado de Verano , un cuadro al estilo tromp l’oeil de Giuseppe Arcimboldo, el pintor oficial de la corte de los Habsburgo. Con su fragmentación literaria, Cervantes se burla de esta pintura que supuestamente alaba el reino del rey Habsburgo Rodolfo II. A través de este ekfrasis parcial, sugiero que Cervantes considera la monarquía española igual y desastrosamente fragmentada.
Historia, política y performance en México a partir de Yo fui Plutarco Elías Calles
Authors: Alonso Milvet
Published: June 2015

La figura del expresidente mexicano Plutarco Elías Calles ha sido construida en diferentes frentes: el literario, el histórico, el político, el cinematográfico y el dramatúrgico. En los tiempos que corren el fantasma de este personaje histórico se ha hecho presente debido a dos circunstancias: la publicación de su biografía escrita por su nieto Alfredo Elías Calles y la vuelta al poder del partido que este político fundó en 1929. Algunas declaraciones durante la presentación de esta novela dejaron fuera la crítica literaria y trasladaron su contenido al plano real y al tiempo presente, como el discurso de Manlio Fabio Beltrones, coordinador del Partido Revolucionario Institucional en el Senado. En ese discurso, el entonces senador usó la famosa frase del general Calles “no más caudillos” para hablar del contexto de violencia y desempleo que vive el país. La publicación de esta obra, la revisión de la historia y los acontecimientos políticos, sociales y económicos recientes en México dan cuenta de una interesante dinámica de performances (con Calles como actuante central) que propongo analizar en este trabajo.
Natural Science and Empire in Carlos Octavio Bunge’s “La sirena” (1908)
Authors: Austin Elisabeth L.
Published: June 2015

Carlos Octavio Bunge, escritor argentino que se consagró al darwinismo social, presenta su evaluación de la ciencia y de la nación en el cuento “La sirena” (1908). En el relato, el protagonista libera a una sirena de ser sujeto del estudio científico, y a la primera vista el cuento parece ser la historia simple de la compasión de un hombre para un monstruo. Sin embargo, el cuento critica implícitamente la construcción de la Argentina “moderna” por la cosecha de artefactos científicos—sean humanos o de otra especie—para llenar los museos nacionales. El relato enfatiza a la vez los dilemas éticos de la ciencia y la historia brutal del estado argentino en los siglos XIX–XX. Esta actitud crítica parece sumamente paradójica dada la misma orientación darwinista de Bunge. Este ensayo indaga las tensiones entre el estado argentino, la ciencia y los cuerpos de los sujetos nacionales para concluir que el cuestionamiento de los derechos de la nación y del ser humano en “La sirena” en realidad explora la subjetividad del ciudadano de un estado moderno en proceso de construcción.
La resistencia a la modernidad. Ruinas (1866), de Rosalía de Castro, entre lo residual y la emergencia
Authors: Candeira Margarita García
Published: June 2015

Ruinas , novela breve escrita por Rosalía de Castro en 1866, propone desde su mismo título una dialéctica entre pasado y futuro que ilustra la problemática transición entre dos modos de producción diferenciados que generan subjetividades específicas analizables mediante el pensamiento crítico de raíz marxista. Suspendidos entre dos tiempos, sus tres protagonistas representan el impasse entre el feudalismo y la hegemonía de la sangre noble y un capitalismo incipiente que privilegia el orden económico. Su condición residual , empleando el análisis de los cambios culturales por Raymond Williams, desvela las contradicciones implícitas en el orden dominante . El desarrollo del argumento es posibilitado por varios conflictos de clase que muestran la irreductibilidad de dos mundos y propician un cambio traumático del estado de cosas con la muerte de doña Isabel y la locura de Montenegro. Este trasfondo alegórico se completa con cuestiones concretas del momento histórico en que fue compuesta: así, las disquisiciones sobre el trabajo reflejan la conflictiva recepción de los postulados ilustrados y revolucionarios en Galicia y España y, por otra parte, la reflexión sobre los usos del pasado conecta con el nacimiento de la historiografía gallega moderna. Con su posicionamiento ambiguo y desconfiado ante los nuevos tiempos—en el que influye su propia condición emplazada en las coordenadas socioeconómicas de la época—Rosalía de Castro se alinea con corrientes críticas respecto a la modernidad emergente como las antimodernas, y muestra una lúcida conciencia de las disfunciones que las nuevas dinámicas de abstracción y destrucción anuncian.
Figures of Dialectical Imitation in Góngora’s Major Ovidian Poems
Authors: Farmer Julia
Published: June 2015

El presente estudio examina las representaciones figurativas de la imitación dialéctica en dos obras de Luis de Góngora que se basan en las Metamorfosis de Ovidio: su Polifemo y La ciudad de Babilonia (también conocido como el Píramo y Tisbe ). Partiendo de las nociones de Thomas Greene sobre la imitación en el Renacimiento, se propone que los dos poemas, con sus estilos tan diferentes, tienen más en común de lo que podría parecer a primera vista. El Polifemo y el Píramo y Tisbe representan en modos muy similares el poder del poeta barroco sobre sus modelos principales y el dominio inevitable de estos modelos sobre los textos de Góngora. En los dos poemas se introducen figuras que no aparecen en el texto de Ovidio—figuras cuyas características particulares las vinculan a la poética gongorina. De esa manera, los textos de Góngora reflejan la naturaleza contingente de su propia intervención en la tradición literaria.
La insubordinación del público: intelectuales y redes sociales en México
Authors: Lemus Rafael
Published: June 2015

Durante los meses previos a las elecciones presidenciales de 2012 tuvo lugar un fenómeno que afectó sensiblemente las prácticas y los hábitos de la discusión en la esfera pública mexicana: la inusitada proliferación de opiniones, polémicas y disputas en las redes sociales (sobre todo en Twitter), desde las cuales numerosos sujetos se sumaron al debate público sin necesidad del arbitraje de los medios de publicación habituales. Interpelados y, en ocasiones, impugnados por los usuarios de esos medios, no pocos intelectuales se vieron obligados a responder, ya inter-viniendo activamente en las redes sociales, ya condenando la discusión generada allí. Este ensayo se detiene en las reacciones de tres escritores—Enrique Krauze, Héctor Aguilar Camín y Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo—a la vez que analiza la disputa por la voz y la autoridad en la expandida opinión pública mexicana.
William North’s The City of the Jugglers and the “Conventional Necessity” of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Authors: Pionke Albert D.
Published: June 2015

An almost unknown example of Victorian financial fiction, William North’s The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the “Golden” Age (1850) interrogates at length Victorian conceptions of power, status, and authority, in particular the heavily-leveraged position reserved for those whom later social theorists would label the intelligentsia. Unlike its better-known contemporaries, including Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzelwit (1844) or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), City follows fraud for its own sake, and not as a figure for other characterological or social concerns.By making financial speculation its sign rather than its signifier, North’s unusual fiction internalizes at the level of form the notion of unfettered free trade that it repudiates. That is, its critique of the market comes to look like the market, monstrously inclusive, with none of the aesthetic protections normally afforded to either the text or the reader by generic convention.
Elegy and the Unknowable Mind in Jacob’s Room
Authors: Martin Linda
Published: June 2015

Focusing on Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room , this paper uses a cognitive-theoretical approach to explicate how the novel produces the sensation that Jacob is an “unknowable” protagonist; in doing so, I address an ongoing debate in the critical literature on whether the elegiac construction of the text should be read sincerely or satirically. These two issues are linked and mutually enlightening: by analyzing Woof’s textual strategies in relation to cognitive-narratological work on cue inconsistency and source monitoring, we can clarify the elegiac impulse in the novel and obviate the sincere/satirical opposition constructed by critics. Ultimately, my analysis of Woolf’s compositional techniques suggests that Jacob’s Room is at once a sincere expression of bereavement and grief in the wake of the loss of life in World War I, as well as a critique of England’s educational, political, and social institutions.
“Before the Destruction Began”: Interrupting Post-Imperial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Authors: Quarrie Cynthia
Published: June 2015

This essay argues that Ian McEwan’s Atonement articulates and comments on the condition of post-imperial British melancholia (as described by Paul Gilroy) through its engagement with canonical English literary history. Atonement is both a country-house novel and a World War Two narrative, two genres that are particularly bound up in contemporary British self-understanding. However, because the novel is also a failed speech-act—the fact that it cannot atone for the crimes it represents is overdetermined—the novel aligns its self-knowing, performative ‘afterwardsness’ with Gilroy’s sense that a ‘more productive shame’ about Britain’s imperial past is possible. I argue that the structure of Atonement continually generates ironies, conditioning a posthumous mode of wary reading that situates the novel as a coda to a certain insular English novel tradition. In so doing, the novel points beyond itself to a more expansive notion of Englishness and to another kind of novel.
Performing the Abyss: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and the Law
Authors: Young Hershini Bhana
Published: June 2015

Using the courtroom scenes in Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling , this essay traces the often obscured imbrications of law and performance. Through an analysis of the performative aspects of legal proceedings, I insist that the ritual theatricality of the legal system cannot be thought of in opposition to ‘truth.’ Foregrounding performative aspects of the law can move us away from the law as an individualized remedy for limited, state prohibited wrongs. Instead it points towards an understanding of the law as both a necessity and the necessary failure of legal remedy for large scale injustices such as slavery that have been inherited and that exist in the present.
“To Be from the Country of People Who Gave”: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah
Authors: Hallemeier Katherine
Published: June 2015

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, delinks the dollar from intimately experienced, ongoing histories of white supremacism.