bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Creatures of Attention
Authors: Wankhammer Johannes
Published: October 2024

At the threshold of modernity, philosophers, scientists, and poets across Europe began to see attention as the key to autonomous agency and knowledge. Recovering the philosophical and literary works from eighteenth-century Germany in which “attention,” “subject,” and “aesthetics” developed their modern meanings, this book examines control over attention as the cultural technique underpinning the ideal of individual autonomy. Aesthetics, founded by Alexander Baumgarten as a science of sense perception, challenged this ideal by reframing art as a catalyst for alternative modes of selfhood and attention. While previous scholarship on the history of attention emphasized the erosion of subjectivity by industrial or technological modernization, this book asks how attention came to define subjectivity in the first place. When periodically recurring crises of attention threaten the coherence of the subject, the subject comes undone at the very seams that first sutured it together. The book offers the first systematic study of a foundational discourse on attention from 1650 to 1780. Presenting pre-Kantian aesthetics as a critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of strained attention, it offers a fresh perspective on poetics and aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany.
Subject
Authors: Wankhammer Johannes
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the disciplines of attention in the German eighteenth century. The term Aufmerksamkeit as the standard German word for attention was largely the work of a single author, the philosopher Christian Wolff. The chapter explains Wolff's Psychologia empirica (Empirical psychology; 1732) as a springboard for exploring the place of attention in German eighteenth-century thought and culture. In eighteenth-century pedagogy, reformers such as J. B. Basedow and J. H. Campe saw the improvement of attention as the bedrock of all further education. The chapter then elaborates on the connection between the regulation of attention and the formation of the self, a notion that haunts classical German philosophy.
Afterlives
Authors: Wankhammer Johannes
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines the modulations of attention since 1800. Following the mid-century publication of Baumgarten's Aesthetica, the Wolffian framework had given discussions on attention to remarkable coherence. The chapter then discusses the link between attention and subjectivity as per the thoughts of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Hegel, and Marx. Essentially, the faculty of attention shows no signs of losing its role as an increasingly precarious foundation of modern selves. The chapter explains that it is futile to confront the problem of attention through technical fixes or individual resolve without shaping collective environments, such as media ecologies, in which other forms of attention become practically possible.
State Actors, Market Games
Authors: Chen Muyang
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Chinese development finance. It begins by presenting China's national policy banks: the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export–Import Bank of China (China Exim). The CDB is mandated to finance infrastructure and industrial projects, while the China Exim is mandated to support the export and overseas investment of Chinese firms. As their name suggests, policy banks were created to serve policy goals, on the one hand, and pursue commercial interests as banks, on the other hand. A scrutiny of these agencies reveals the state–market boundary and demonstrates how political and economic factors interplay in a Chinese context. The chapter then considers how the conceptualization of China's development finance, which entails a mutually reinforcing state–market relationship, contributes to a broader discussion on the role of the state in late development. It also looks at the relationship between China's distinctive means of overseas development finance and existing international regimes.
Debt for Growth?
Authors: Chen Muyang
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses how the China Development Bank (CDB) has nurtured a domestic infrastructure-financing market against the backdrop of China's public finance reforms when the Chinese government lacked sufficient tax revenue to finance projects vital for economic growth. The CDB assisted subnational governments in creating financial vehicles, collateralized their lands and fiscal revenues, empowered them to borrow large quantities of loans from policy banks as well as other financial agencies, and allowed them to capitalize infrastructure and industrial projects in their respective municipalities and provinces. Replicating this means of finance nationwide starting in the late 1990s, the CDB turned subnational governments into market borrowers, transformed China's major means of public finance from direct government spending to state-backed project financing, and facilitated China's rapid urban and industrial development. In this process, the state has withdrawn from a direct role in allocating fiscal revenue, instead leveraging state assets and revenues and employing financial instruments to achieve public goals. However, the financialization of the state has incentivized subnational governments to spend more than their fiscal revenue allowed them to, thereby driving up debt volumes. To resolve debt issues, the central government has again adopted a market-based approach, conducting succeeding rounds of reregulation and refinancing for local government financial vehicles instead of bailing them out with tax revenue.
What’s Next?
Authors: Chen Muyang
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores whether policy banks are likely to continue financing projects in the way they have been. Comparing them to public financial agencies (PFAs) of advanced industrial economies, the chapter finds that policy banks, like their foreign precursors, cannot escape the general dilemma faced by PFAs: balancing the state's development-oriented objectives and firms' business-oriented objectives. Public financial agencies of catch-up economies are able to reconcile the two objectives because firms rely on the state's credit support for business expansion. Yet, as firms grow and attract commercial investors, PFAs are no longer financiers of last resort. Meanwhile, as the Chinese government becomes more capable of offering direct foreign assistance to developing countries, Chinese commercial banks expand their overseas markets and compete with policy banks, and Chinese firms advance their business and pursue more lucrative projects, policy banks' business scope has been significantly squeezed. They have reached a watershed where they have to make an immediate choice between prioritizing policy imperatives and commercial goals because they cannot maintain their dual identity as easily as they once did. This implies that in the long run, China may gradually adopt the Western means of managing overseas development finance.
Introduction
Authors: Shannon Matthew K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter delves into the beginnings of American Presbyterian evangelism in Tehran, highlighting the pivotal role of Reverend James Bassett and his wife, Abigail, who arrived in 1872. They were the first to establish a mission in Tehran, which marked the start of the Presbyterian century in Iran. The chapter details that the Bassetts' mission laid the groundwork for a significant American evangelical presence in Tehran, well before the arrival of the first US diplomat. The chapter also reveals how American evangelicals, alongside their European counterparts, divided Iran into spheres of influence for more effective proselytization. It examines how the Presbyterian Mission, which operated from 1872 to 1965, became a central point of US–Iran relations as it coincided with the rise of US global power and the Pahlavi dynasty's consolidation.
Fuzzy Traumas
Authors: Grillo Tyran
Published: October 2024

Blurring the binary between human and nonhuman, this book draws on Japanese science fiction, horror, guide-dog stories, and a notorious essay on euthanasia, treating each work as a case study of human–animal relationships gone somehow awry. The book makes an unprecedented case for Japan's pet boom and how the country's sudden interest in companion animals points to watershed examples of “productive errors” that provide necessary catalysts for change. Examining symbiotic concepts of “humanity” and “animality,” the book challenges negative views of anthropomorphism as something unethical, redefining it as a necessary rupture in, not a bandage on, the thick skin of the human ego. It concludes by introducing the paradigm shift of “postanimalism” as a detour from the current traffic jam of animal-centered philosophies, arguing that humanity cannot move past anthropocentricism until we reflect honestly on what it means for the human condition.
Back to Life
Authors: Grillo Tyran
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into the notion of pets as idols of trepidation. It primarily focuses on the comparison between Japanese horror author Otsuichi's short story “Flat Dog” (Heimen inu), which deals with animal disappearance, and Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which revolves around primal pessimism. The willingness to accept the death of fictional humans stems from people having died for a reason, but since animals are not seen as individuals, they are taken to be universals. The chapter notes that Japan's relationships with animals correlate with pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophy and religious cosmologies. It explains that the recurring theme of death highlights the arbitrary schisms between humans and animals and supports the delineations of Otsuichi and King.
From Incarceration to Repatriation
Authors: Grunewald Susan C. I.
Published: October 2024

This book explores the lives and memories of the nearly 1.5 million German prisoners of war (POWs) who were held by the Soviet Union during and after World War II and released in phases through 1956, seven years longer than the prisoners of any other Allied nation. The book argues that Soviet leadership deliberately kept able-bodied German POWs to supplement their labor force after the end of the war. The Soviet Union lost 27 million citizens and a quarter of its physical assets during the war, motivating Soviet leadership to harness the labor of German POWs for as long as possible. The book demonstrates that Soviet authorities detained German POWs primarily for economic rather than punitive reasons. In fact, the GIS mapping of the historical materials makes it clear that most of the four thousand POW camps across the USSR were strategically located near industrial, infrastructure, and natural resource sites that were critical to postwar economic reconstruction. The book draws together the distinct fields of Soviet and German history to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of German POW captivity in the USSR during and after World War II. Attending to the ways that the memory of German POWs remains in circulation in both the former Soviet Union and Germany, the book tracks the political repercussions of war commemoration.
The Levers of Influence
Authors: Wilson James Graham
Published: October 2024

This chapter reveals Paul Nitze's experiences during World War II, where he played crucial administrative roles vital to the war effort. While primarily based in Washington, DC, Nitze traveled to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, gaining firsthand insights into the war's impact. The chapter details Nitze's interactions with influential figures like Clarence Dillon and his time in high society circles that further shaped his worldview. It explores how Nitze's wartime experiences transformed him from an analyst to an executive, instilling in him a belief in the importance of action and strategic thinking. Nitze's reflections on the war emphasized the need for military preparedness and the role of technology in national defense, ideas that would later influence the establishment of key defense institutions like the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force.
The Nitze Scenario
Authors: Wilson James Graham
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses Paul Nitze's efforts to influence US nuclear policy during Jimmy Carter's presidency, despite being shut out of the administration. Nevertheless, Nitze remained influential, leveraging his expertise and security clearances to criticize Carter's strategic arms control policies. The chapter emphasizes Nitze's belief that the Soviets were gaining strength and geopolitical influence, while Carter's pursuit of a treaty between the United States and USSR—Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) II—was counterproductive. Nitze argued that a modest arms control deal would undermine support for strategic modernization and embolden Soviet risk-taking, exemplified by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The chapter reveals Nitze's significant impact on national security remained significant he continued to advocate for US strategic superiority and prepared for his final government assignment to negotiate ambitious nuclear arms agreements.
Recollections
Authors: Bunin Ivan , Gaiton Marullo Thomas
Published: October 2024

This edited translation provides an intimate look at leading political, social, cultural, and literary figures from late imperial Russia, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to the birth of the Russian diaspora and the rise of the Soviet state. Through engaging, colorful, and often idiosyncratic vignettes, Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) details his admiration for Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin. He shares his love–hate relationships with Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Kuprin. In addition, the translation reveals Bunin's hatred of avant-gardists, particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as his thoughts and experiences on war, revolution, and exile. Bunin's work led, in the end, to his bittersweet reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933) in Stockholm, making him the first Russian and the first writer in exile ever to receive this award. The book reveals the author's feelings toward this unprecedented event. It stands not only as a stark summa of his passage through literature and life but also as an equally bold apologia as to his place in both.
Jerome Jerome
Authors: Bunin Ivan
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses how Ivan Bunin met Jerome Jerome. Jerome's name was famous, but not many Russians can boast about meeting him. The chapter notes the literary banquet that introduced English writers and members of English society. Bunin describes Jerome as a thickset, very strong, and stocky old man with a face that was ruddy, wide, and clean-shaven, essentially the impression of a genuine old-world shopkeeper or clergyman. After several minutes, he made a decisive exit and then left with a lasting impression of a very pleasant person, but certainly not of a humorist or a writer of world renown.
Tolstoy
Authors: Bunin Ivan
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on Ivan Bunin's admiration for Leo Tolstoy. Bunin admired Tolstoy almost from childhood, especially since his father often laughed telling them about how some of the gentry neighbors read War and Peace separately. Writers then become a special kind of being for who he had ineffable feelings for. When Bunin decided to be a writer, life in the world of poetry and prose became his second existence. The chapter elaborates on how Bunin met Tolstoy himself several times before meeting Tolstoy for the last time with an aged and unhappy face. It cites how Tolstoy was familiar with Bunin's father.
Chaliapin
Authors: Bunin Ivan
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into Fyodor Chaliapin, who made friends with writers to spite Sobinov, his rival in fame. It explains that Chaliapin wished to further his reputation not only as a famous singer but also as someone with progressive ideas. Chaliapiin expressed his desire to meet Chekhov, so Ivan Bunin took the chance to introduce the writer to him, which meant a lot to Chaliapin. The chapter details Bunin's last encounters with Chaliapin at Gorky's speech about some “Academy of Free Sciences” in Petersburg and then at Chaliapin's last concert, where he was evidently ill. It mentions how Chaliapin lived a life without counting the cost.
Semyonovs and Bunins
Authors: Bunin Ivan
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into the interplay between the famous Semyonov family and the Bunin clan. In the first volume of Pyotr Petrovich Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky's memoirs, Semyonov often talks about our Bunin clan, to which the Semyonovs are related, and particularly about Anna Petrovna Bunina. Besides Semyonov's memoirs, one can find some information about her in an article written a long time ago by Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov. The chapter then provides an overview of Bunina's life, highlighting her energy and activity focused on education. However, she developed breast cancer and the rest of her life was dedicated to saving her or alleviating her suffering.
Stalin's Final Films
Authors: Knight Claire
Published: October 2024

This book explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. The book examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. It explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, the book also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. The book mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.
The Great Patriotic War on Screen
Authors: Knight Claire
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the most popular type of Soviet-made feature to screen during 1945–50: war films. War films were shaped by two priorities: first, the need to redefine the war narrative through a more stringently Soviet lens. The task for the film industry after the war was to relocate it to the firm grounding of Stalinist ideology. This was not the Stalinism of the 1930s, however, or even simply a more grandiose version of it. Instead—and this is the second consideration that defined war films—it was a Stalinism that sought to rectify the politically undesirable legacies of the war and the way in which it was won. Late Stalin-era war films engaged in developing a distinctly postwar iteration of Stalinism. Central to this task was the search for a suitable positive hero. The chapter then looks at three distinct categories of war film: the battle film, the Great Family film, and the spy thriller. It considers how war films sought to establish not only the narrative of recent victory but also the image of heroism at the heart of Soviet postwar culture.
Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma
Authors: Barrett Marsha E.
Published: October 2024

This book reveals the fascinating and influential political career of the four-time New York State governor and US vice president, Nelson Rockefeller. The book's portrayal of this multi-faceted political player focuses on the eclipse of moderate Republicanism and the betrayal of deeply held principles for political power. Although never able to win his party's presidential nomination, Rockefeller's tenure as governor was notable for typically liberal policies: infrastructure projects, expanding the state's university system, and investing in local services and the social safety net. As the Civil Rights movement intensified in the early 1960s, Rockefeller envisioned a Republican Party recommitted to its Lincolnian heritage as a defender of Black equality. But the party's extreme right wing, encouraged by its successful outreach to segregationists before and after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, pushed the party to the right. With his national political ambitions fading by the late 1960s, Rockefeller began to tack right himself on social and racial issues, refusing to endorse efforts to address police brutality, accusing, without proof, Black welfare mothers of cheating the system, or introducing harsh drug laws that disproportionately incarcerated people of color. These betrayals of his own ideals did little to win him the support of the party faithful, and his vice presidency ended in humiliation, rather than the validation of moderate ideals. The book details how the standard-bearer of moderate Republicanism lost the battle for the soul of the Party of Lincoln, leading to mainlining of white-grievance populism for the post-civil rights era.
Rockefeller Republicanism’s Last Gasp
Authors: Barrett Marsha E.
Published: October 2024

This chapter addresses Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 presidential campaign. Although often dismissed as folly, his final presidential campaign provides insight into the unpopularity of his urban policy in the wake of urban uprisings. His position on welfare, dating back to his entrance into politics a decade earlier in 1958, reveals that Rockefeller's vision for a civil rights-era Party of Lincoln never aligned with the modern Grand Old Party. Upon his defeat, Rockefeller chose a new conservative path forward that no longer attempted to bring together urban and suburban communities. In the face of mounting resistance—and electoral defeat—Rockefeller found a new winning strategy in 1970 that abandoned his commitment to a racially liberal Republican Party and exacerbated racial and class divisions in New York for his electoral benefit. Ultimately, the last gasp of Rockefeller Republicanism occurred on the campaign trail, the place where Rockefeller's case for a multiracial cross-class constituency had always been its most coherent and animating for those who shared his dream of reviving the Party of Lincoln.
Rockefeller Unmoored
Authors: Barrett Marsha E.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the final years of Nelson Rockefeller's political career, considering the substantial divide between Rockefeller and the African American community. Rockefeller's fatal response to the Attica uprising is the most glaring case, but it exists alongside subtler examples of his failure to see that developing policy to encourage equal access would not address the drivers of systemic inequality. Rather than reconsider his approach or take seriously demands for redistributive reforms, Rockefeller lashed out at those who demanded more than the status quo. Ultimately, Rockefeller would find himself in Washington, D.C. as vice president, but his efforts to get and stay there revealed that it was not a victory for Rockefeller Republicanism. During his final years as governor and brief tenure as vice president, Rockefeller undermined his previous efforts to build a cross-class, multiracial constituency. He also jettisoned his commitment to building a responsive government that prioritized the protection of rights and a social safety net. In the face of diminishing prospects, Rockefeller chose a form of partisanship paired with divisive rhetoric and policy that was antithetical to his goal of a civil rights-era Party of Lincoln.
Epilogue
Authors: Barrett Marsha E.
Published: October 2024

This epilogue reflects on Nelson Rockefeller's legacy. As decades passed and the Rockefeller drug laws took their toll on Black and Latino communities, many observers would conclude that the governor's anti-Black policies had worked as intended, but Rockefeller did not interpret his actions in that way. To the contrary, Rockefeller made the case that he was protecting decent people of all races who sought opportunity and safe environments for their families—his previous support of civil rights was grounded in a similar universal appeal. Rather than address addiction and its disproportionate effect in a thoughtful and measured way, however, Rockefeller chose political expediency. He also advocated for the drug laws despite knowing that their enforcement would cause further harm to African Americans who were already impacted disproportionately by systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Indeed, the laws were found to target poor and minority offenders while exempting the wealthy, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of those imprisoned for drug offenses were Black and Latino.
Singing by Herself
Authors: Worsley Amelia
Published: October 2024

This book reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms “lonely” and “loneliness” in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. This book shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclosure, this study of eighteenth-century poetry disrupts the presumed association between isolation, singular speech, and bounded models of poetic subjectivity. In five chapters focused on lonely poet figures in the works of John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith—which also take account of the wider eighteenth-century fascination with literary loneliness—the book shows how poets increasingly associated the new literary mode of being alone with states of disembodiment, dispersal, and echoic self-doubling. Seemingly solitary lonely voices often dissolve into polyvocal, allusive community, the book argues, when in dialogue with each other and also with classical figures of feminized lament such as Sappho, Echo, and Philomela. The book's provocative reflections on lyric mean that it will have a broad appeal to scholars interested in the history of poetry and poetics, as well as to those who study the literary history of gender, affect, and emotion.
Sapphic Flights
Authors: Worsley Amelia
Published: October 2024

This chapter examines Alexander Pope's interest in lonely female characters in grottoes and feminized lonely grotto spaces, which allow him to explore the tension between the poetry of loneliness and the poetry of retreat. Indeed, his portrayal of Sapphic grotto spaces offers him locations in which to experiment with representing extreme affective experiences, imaginative disembodiments, and metamorphoses, which he does not attempt elsewhere. The influence of Ovid's Sappho and the genre of female complaint can be detected in Pope's various portraits of the emotive feminine figures who occupy the cells and caves he centers in Eloisa to Abelard (1717) and The Rape of the Lock (1714). Yet Pope's depictions of Eloisa and Belinda are not the only instances in which he draws upon the Sapphic precedent; his poems about the grotto he built for himself in his own garden are also informed by his interaction with the Heroides. His well-documented interest in the Horatian poetry of retreat, which he more overtly uses to frame his own interest in retreat into his grotto, is often in tension with this Sapphic mode.
Elegiac Complaints
Authors: Worsley Amelia
Published: October 2024

This chapter evaluates the poetry of Thomas Gray as a case study, contending that female complaint is a structuring principle in two of his most famous poems, “Sonnet. [On the Death of Richard West]” (1747) and the “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751). Gray's references to loneliness have often been read as autobiographical. His poetry is freighted with so much sentimental feeling that it has to many critics seemed like a confession of his miserable sense of alienation from other people, and also of his lack of confidence in his own merits. Yet, when one juxtaposes these poems, which have been read as autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical, with the poems about loneliness that this book has been tracing, Gray's poems begin to look quite different. The chapter then offers a revisionary reading of Gray's two poems—two of the most canonical instances of lonely lyric masculinity in the eighteenth century—as poems that engage with the long tradition of female complaint.
Postscript
Authors: Worsley Amelia
Published: October 2024

This postscript focuses on John Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), which is a poem directly in conversation with the tradition of literary loneliness, although it has more often been read as a poem in the autobiographical mode than in this framework. Keats's “Ode” has often been read in dialogue with his own confessions of suicidal ideation amid the suffering of his illness, written around the same time. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” however, he depicts a lonely poet figure who has more in common with Shakespeare's Ophelia than with Hamlet. In the tradition of Ovid's suicidal Sappho, Elizabeth Singer Rowe's despairing solitaries, Pope's Eloisa, and Gray's loner in the graveyard, the lonely poet figure Keats depicts—who need not necessarily be gendered masculine like Keats himself—makes a complaint in which they imagine their own ecstatic death while listening to the song of a nightingale. Ultimately, paying attention to how this poem registers the influence of the genre of female complaint gestures toward a future in which many more Romantic poems might be reread as reckoning with the long history that this book traces.
Precarious Desires
Authors: Norako Leila K.
Published: October 2024

This chapter situates two representative Middle English Charlemagne romances—Otuel and Roland and the Ashmole Ferumbras—in the recovery romance subgenre. These works, if contextualized alongside other examples of crusading literature and against their contemporary sociopolitical climates, have much to reveal about late medieval crusading aspirations and related xenophobias. By focusing on Otuel and the Ashmole Ferumbras, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which these Middle English versions configure Charlemagne, the Douzepeers, and Muslims who convert to Christianity as crusading figures that inspire similar nostalgic and anticipatory gazing to that seen in other recovery romances. Unlike the romances treated in the first two chapters, however, the heroes in both of these romances are flawed and prone to failure or error. As a result, the projects of recovery they insist on are made ever more precarious and ephemeral. In this way, these romances markedly align with The Alliterative Morte Arthure, a text that also incorporates and fuels desires for a global Christianitas while simultaneously meditating on the ephemerality and unlikeliness of that endeavor.
Empire, Nation, and the Lure of Aesthetic Nationalism
Authors: Shevelenko Irina
Published: October 2024

This chapter begins by analyzing the Russian Empire's participation at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It argues that the exclusion of the cultural traditions of the westernized Russian educated class from the main Russian exhibition pavilion highlighted a remarkable symmetry: representation of the culture of imperial borderlands, which once were conquered or colonized, stood side by side with the display of the traditional culture of the Russian popular masses. This discussion inaugurates one of the principal lines of analysis in this book: the deployment of art as a medium for the imagination of Russian nationhood during the late imperial period. The chapter then looks at the retrospective narrative of a “national turn,” a turn from westernized to popular traditions in the arts, proposed in 1903 by Adrian Prakhov, an art historian and an ideologue of aesthetic nationalism. This narrative, which presents emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II as principal agents in the revival of Russian indigenous artistic traditions, showcases the prominence of discursive constructivism in defining traditions.
Environment, Culture, and Famine
Authors: Chen Yixin
Published: October 2024

This chapter offers a comparison of the famine experiences of three single-lineage villages located respectively in the affluent southern Anhui mountains, the impoverished northern Anhui plain, and the poverty-ridden western Anhui mountains. These are Eastern Yu (Dongyu), Inner Valley (Lingli), and Huang Court (Huangjiayuan). The chapter assesses whether the variation in their ecological environment, economic status, and lineage cultures made a difference in their survival rates. The abundant wild vegetation in the mountains, particularly starch-rich kudzu roots, served as a grain substitute, fostering higher survival rates in Inner Valley and Huang Court. Conversely, Eastern Yu suffered higher mortality rates as its people, lacking wild vegetation, had to resort to unripe crops for survival. The chapter then considers how the story of Huang Court best illustrates the importance of a village's cultural practices.
Perilous Wagers
Authors: Hammering Klaus K. Y.
Published: October 2024

The lives of the men depicted in this book take place in the squalor of Tokyo's old day-laborer district, San'ya, where they can be found eking out a living from occasional construction work and welfare handouts, permanently displaced from their hometowns to metropolitan Tokyo. Although San'ya has nearly vanished during the past twenty years, its import persists as a black market where its small population of male day-laborers can be contracted for the most undesirable of tasks, without consideration for their health or safety. In this context, the book examines classic ethnographic themes of labor, exchange, value, honor, shame, temporality, desire, gender, and personhood. It explores how one group of day-laborers embodied a transgressive masculinity intimately intertwined with honorable mobster values of old, and how they created dignity and sociality under abject conditions of life. The book tracks these underdog values across construction sites, non-profit organizations, hospitals, bunkhouses, and illegal gambling dens, giving imaginative life to a stigmatized, forgotten social world.
Growth
Authors: Tazudeen Rasheed
Published: October 2024

This chapter discusses the multiple origins—or the many growing grounds—of metaphor, with an emphasis on how a differently historied (and futured) metaphoricity limns inhuman modernist makings of world. It develops a theory of the inconceptual—as a generative indifference to concepts and conceptual structures—especially as it bears on philosophies of metaphor. The chapter then explores the tensions, or knots, out of which metaphor originates and which still inhere in and as metaphor. These include the tensions between metaphora and epiphora; metaphor as the transference of meaning and metaphor as the profusion of names; metaphor as logos- or concept-oriented and metaphor as inconceptual; along with the tensions between an animal or “zoontological” metaphorics (Rosi Braidotti) and a vegetal/plant metaphorics (Jacques Derrida). Ultimately, a multispecied metaphoricity is this knottedness of beings, times, and worlds: a means toward thinking another planetarity.
Dust
Authors: Tazudeen Rasheed
Published: October 2024

This chapter theorizes dust as both earthly material and as the primordial substance of creation, as the adamah from which Man/Adam/“earthling” was first shaped into flesh in biblical accounts. The Flaubertian and Joycean inhumanisms, of La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874) and the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (1922), offer alternative modalities of creation, through the medium of a still-vibrant dust that might be shaped otherwise than Man. What happens, both works ask, when nonsense infects both the logics of creation themselves and the relations ongoingly made among nonsense-shaped beings? In short, a metaphorics of contagion, in which all dust is made inseparable from all flesh and from all created material. The central characters of each text—Saint Anthony and Leopold Bloom—are simultaneously individuals as well as geologies, gatherings made in and of earth, that come to be re-created with each encounter in time and in space.
Introduction
Authors: Engst Elaine D. , Kammen Carol
Published: October 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the history of Cornell University's global dimensions. It starts with the foundation of the university with Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White who envisioned a new kind of institution with robust facilities, extensive courses, and a diverse student body. Cornell's early curriculum represented an international dimension since the early courses offered at the time included modern history and political science. Cornell's international involvements have continued to grow and expand through programs on campus and abroad, students and various collections. The chapter highlights Cornell's mission to educate the next generation of global citizens and improve the lives and livelihoods of students and people in New York and around the world.
The Fiske Icelandic Collection
Authors: Stevens Patrick J.
Published: October 2024

This chapter considers the extent of the Fiske Icelandic Collection. It starts with the collection's curator, Patrick J. Stevens, receiving the Order of Falcon in recognition of Cornell's leadership in preserving the Icelandic literary and history collection. Daniel Willard Fiske, during his life of traveling in Iceland, acquired and organized spectacular book collections that would all make their way to the Cornell University Library. The chapter provides an overview of the collection's endurance across the last century and the continuing acquisition of Icelandic literature in all genres in the Cornell University Library. It mentions that Iceland president Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson's visit in November 2022 foretold a future of collaborative research projects between Cornell and Iceland.
Supporting the Global Community
Authors: Wilcox Jerry
Published: October 2024

This chapter looks into the establishment of the International Student and Scholar Services Office (ISSO) at Cornell University. It provides an overview of the varying support for international students nationwide, especially after World War II wherein international students flocked to the United States for post-secondary education. Upon its creation in 1959, the International Student Office became a standalone unit reporting to the vice president for student affairs. The chapter explains the expansion to ISSO following the added responsibility for international academic staff to assist international scholars and researchers. It also considers the importance of Prepare, an undergraduate orientation program, and the evolving administrative homes to serve the international student and scholar population.
Design of Chinese painting style classification model based on multi-layer aggregation CNN
Authors: Du Xiaofang , Cai Yangfeng
Published: October 2024

This study delves deeply into exploring the artistic value of traditional Chinese painting (TCP) and aims to bridge the gap between its fundamental characteristics and the realm of human emotions. To achieve this, a novel convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification model for TCP emotions is proposed. By thoroughly analyzing the distinct emotional mapping relationships inherent in TCP, a comprehensive framework is developed. Notably, emotional feature regions are accurately extracted using image saliency, and a multi-layer aggregation recalibrated emotional feature module is seamlessly integrated into the CNN network structure. This integration strengthens the activation of features that significantly influence TCP emotions. Moreover, a method of multi-category weighted activation localization is skillfully employed to classify Chinese painting emotions within the CMYK (cyan magenta yellow black) color space. The empirical results convincingly demonstrate that our algorithm surpasses existing approaches such as VGG-19, GoogLeNet, ResNet-50, and WSCNet in the task of TCP emotion recognition, achieving an impressive accuracy of 92.36%, the largest error is 0.191. This improvement signifies the advancements made by our model in accurately capturing and understanding the emotional nuances within TCP. By outperforming previous methods, our research contributes to the convergence of multimedia technology and cultural education.
A preliminary study of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from patchy tropical seagrass meadows in Thailand
Authors: Halim Muhammad , Stankovic Milica , Prathep Anchana
Published: October 2024

Background

Seagrass meadows are a significant blue carbon sink due to their ability to store large amounts of carbon within sediment. However, the knowledge of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from seagrass meadows is limited, especially from meadows in the tropical region. Therefore, in this study, CO2 and CH4 emissions and carbon metabolism were studied at a tropical seagrass meadow under various conditions.

Methods

CO2 and CH4 emissions and carbon metabolism were measured using benthic chambers deployed for 18 h at Koh Mook, off the southwest coast of Thailand. The samples were collected from areas of patchy Enhalus acoroides, Thalassia hemprichii, and bare sand three times within 18 h periods of incubation: at low tide at 6 pm (t0), at low tide at 6 am (t1), and at high tide at noon (t2).

Results

Seagrass meadows at Koh Mook exhibited varying CO2 and CH4 emissions across different sampling areas. CO2 emissions were higher in patchy E. acoroides compared to patchy T. hemprichii and bare sand areas. CH4 emissions were only detected in vegetated areas (patchy E. acoroides and T. hemprichii) and were absent in bare sand. Furthermore, there were no significant differences in net community production across sampling areas, although seagrass meadows were generally considered autotrophic. Koh Mook seagrass meadows contribute only slightly to GHG emissions. The results suggested that the low GHG emissions from Koh Mook seagrass meadows do not outweigh their role as significant carbon sinks, with a value 320 t CO2−eq. This study provided baseline information for estimating GHG emissions in seagrass meadows in Thailand.
Taşkınpaşa Mosque Pulpit, Conservation and Repair Works
Authors: YILDIRIM ALTUN Cemile , CURA Murat
Published: October 2024

Bu makale, ahşap kültür varlıklarının korunması ve uygulanması amacıyla ahşap restorasyonunu derinlemesine inceleyen bir vaka sunumudur. Öncelikle ahşap malzemenin fiziksel ve kimyasal yapısının tanımı, bozulma mekanizmaları ve çevresel
faktörlerin koruma ve restorasyon çalışmalarına etkisi tartışılmaktadır. Taşkınpaşa Camisi minberinin geçmiş restorasyon faaliyetlerine ait detaylı kayıtlar incelenerek, müzeye getirildiği mimari yapıyla ilişkisi tespit edilmiş,
yerinde gözlem yapılarak mevcut durumu araştırılmıştır. Çalışma kapsamında modern teknolojik gelişmelerin yanı sıra geleneksel koruma ve restorasyon yöntemlerinden de yararlanılmıştır. Bu amaçla eserin üç boyutlu fotogrametrik
taraması yapılmıştır. Böylece ileri teknolojik gelişmelerin koruma ve restorasyon işlemlerinde sağladığı avantajlar belgelenmiş ve gerekliliği önerilmiştir. Koruma ve restorasyon çalışmalarında kullanılan malzeme ve yöntemler,
orijinal ahşap sanat dokusunu koruma, güçlendirme ve estetik değerini geri kazandırma potansiyeli değerlendirilerek etik çerçeveler içerisinde seçilmiştir. Taşkınpaşa Camii minberi ve tüm sanat eserlerinin tür tespiti, FTIR ve
XRF analizleri yapıldı. Ahşap sanat eserlerinde bozulmaya neden olan faktörler tespit edilerek farklı sanat eserleri için geçerli bir bozulma tablosu oluşturulmuştur. Koruma onarım işlemlerinde kullanılan teknik ve yöntemler, yapıldığı
dönemin teknolojisi ile gerçekleştirilme özelliğine sahiptir, bu işlemler teknolojik yeniliklerle sürekli kendini güncelleyerek gelişme özelliği gösterecektir. Çalışma, ahşap restorasyonunda farklı disiplinlerin iş birliği yaptığı
multidisipliner bir yaklaşımla hazırlanmıştır ve tüm eserlerin bu yaklaşımla ele alınmasının gerekliliğini vurgulayarak bu alandaki boşlukları doldurmayı hedeflemektedir.
Cyclization of Vinyl and Aryl Azides into Pyrroles, Indoles, Carbazoles, and Related Fused Pyrroles
Authors: Berkowitz William F. , McCombie Stuart W.
Published: June 2017

This chapter reviews in detail those reactions that form of a new pyrrole ring from vinyl, aryl, and heteroaryl azides via formal C–H insertion processes under thermal, photochemical, and metal‐catalyzed conditions. These reactions proceed via the intermediacy of vinyl or aryl nitrenes (or their metallonitrene equivalents) and generate a wide variety of pyrroles, indoles, carbazoles, and related systems. Methods for the synthesis of the starting azides are summarized, and a comprehensive survey of the cyclization processes is provided.
Snipper, an Eri1 homologue, affects histone mRNA abundance and is crucial for normal Drosophila melanogaster development
Authors: Alexiadis Anastasios , Delidakis Christos , Kalantidis Kriton
Published: June 2017

The conserved 3′–5′ RNA exonuclease ERI1 is implicated in RNA interference inhibition, 5.8S rRNA maturation and histone mRNA maturation and turnover. The single ERI1 homologue in Drosophila melanogaster Snipper (Snp) is a 3′–5′ exonuclease, but its in vivo function remains elusive. Here, we report Snp requirement for normal Drosophila development, since its perturbation leads to larval arrest and tissue‐specific downregulation results in abnormal tissue development. Additionally, Snp directly interacts with histone mRNA, and its depletion results in drastic reduction in histone transcript levels. We propose that Snp protects the 3′‐ends of histone mRNAs and upon its absence, histone transcripts are readily degraded. This in turn may lead to cell cycle delay or arrest, causing growth arrest and developmental perturbations.
Computerized Optimization of Liquid Chromatography Separations
Authors: Torrijos Rafael Cela , Romero Sara Triñanes
Published: June 2017

Computer‐assisted methods development (CAMD) of LC (liquid chromatography) separations comprises the strategies, methodologies, and software that can be used for more effective and efficient development of separations needed in the analytical chromatography laboratory. Substitution of costly and time‐consuming experiments by simulation, based on accurate regression models, provides a quick and convenient mode of testing hypothesis, verification, and reaching accurate conclusions in a period of seconds or minutes rather days or weeks of patient experimentation. Having been developed during the past four decades, CAMD provides actually several approaches that tackle separation problems both for mixtures in which all compounds are known (so the position of peaks in the experiments can be tracked) and for mixtures having a number of unknown components or components that cannot be tracked accurately. A chromatographer can select among a variety of more or less intuitive objective functions to adapt the performance of CAMD procedures to its goals. Software tools have made use of the advances in informatics and computation to provide user‐friendly and efficient graphical interfaces, relieving the chromatographer from making complex calculations, statistical testing of the reliability of simulations, and facilitating the interpretation of results. CAMD is not, and was never, intended to replace the chromatographers but to bring tools to make their work more efficient and facilitate the work of less‐experienced ones. Conveniently used, CAMD tools can help the analyst do a better job in a record time.