bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Making a Way to Success: Self-Authorship and Academic Achievement of First-Year African American Students at Historically Black Colleges
Authors: Strayhorn Terrell L.
Published: April 2014

The purpose of the study was to estimate the relationship between academic achievement in college, as defined by first-year grade point average (GPA), and self-authorship among African American first-year students at an HBCU ( N = 140), using hierarchical linear regression techniques. A single research question guided this investigation: What is the relationship between measures of self-authorship and the academic achievement of African American collegians at HBCUs, controlling for potentially confounding differences? Findings reveal that self-authorship predicts first-year GPA above and beyond background characteristics and traditional measures of academic preparation for college (e.g., high school GPA, ACT/SAT); the final regression model accounts for approximately 58% of the variance in the dependent variable.
Parenting Styles and Adjustment Outcomes Among College Students
Authors: Love Keisha M. , Thomas Deneia M.
Published: April 2014

Research has demonstrated that parenting styles partially explain college students’ academic adjustment. However, to account for academic adjustment more fully, additional contributors should be identified and tested. We examined the fit of a hypothesized model consisting of parenting styles, indicators of well-being, and academic adjustment among 315 college students. The model demonstrated a close fit to the data and contained several significant paths.
Parental and Peer Support as Predictors of Depression and Self-Esteem Among College Students
Authors: Li Susan Tinsley , Albert Arielle Berman , Dwelle Deborah G.
Published: April 2014

We investigated the relationship between parent support and peer support as predictors of depression and self-esteem in college students. Several competing models of parental and peer influence were compared including a mediational model in which peer support was hypothesized to mediate the effects of parental support on adjustment. The results supported a model of mutual influence in which both parental support and peer support contributed equally to adjustment, and a mediational model in which peer support mediated the effect of parental support. Both of these models were tested using student self-reports of the measured constructs. To further validate the mediational model, mother-reported parental support was used in place of student-reported parental support; this mixed-reporter mediational model was not supported. Further investigation reaffirmed the existence of complexities in evaluating internal working models from an outsider’s perspective. Gender effects were modest and indicated differences in symptomatology, but not in supportive relationships. Multiple factors affect attachment in college students, including contact and residential status. Campus policies and services that promote support from parents may improve the transition to college and student adjustment.
Rural Compared to Urban Home Community Settings as Predictors of First-Year Students’ Adjustment to University
Authors: Ames Megan E. , Wintre Maxine G. , Pancer S. Mark , Pratt Michael W. , Birnie-Lefcovitch Shelly , Polivy Janet , Adams Gerald R.
Published: April 2014

Undergraduates ( N = 2,823) at 6 universities were surveyed longitudinally to examine the relevance of student home setting on the transition to university. Preliminary results indicated that rural students seem less likely to attend large, ethnically diverse universities. Hierarchical linear models revealed that “proximal rural” students reported better social adjustment than did urban students in November; however, this relationship was accounted for by living in residence. Similar results were found in March but not mediated by residence. Proximal rural students also reported greater institutional attachment than did urban students in November. The findings highlight important research issues pertaining to students’ adjustment to university.
The Influence of Cultural Social Identity on Graduate Student Career Choice
Authors: Haley Karen J. , Jaeger Audrey J. , Levin John S.
Published: April 2014

This study examines and enriches understanding of the career choice process for graduate students of color. Social identity theory (SIT) is used as a framework to expand our understanding of how and why graduate students choose (or do not choose) faculty careers. Graduate students’ cultural social identities influenced their career choice beyond work–life balance as they sought an integrated life that included values, beliefs, and perspectives that represent their cultural community.
Career Services at Colleges and Universities: A 30-Year Replication Study
Authors: Vinson Bonita M. , Reardon Robert C. , Bertoch Sara C.
Published: April 2014

This study examines career planning programs and career services offices at colleges and universities in the United States as viewed by senior student affairs officers (SSAOs). Findings from a 1979 study of career services offices (CSOs) were compared to the current findings. Additionally, new areas of research were examined in order to provide benchmark data for future studies. Several affirming findings emerge from the study informing higher education, student affairs, and career services professionals about the effectiveness and value of college and university career services offices well into the 21st century.
Recent Immigrant Students at Research Universities: The Relationship Between Campus Climate and Sense of Belonging
Authors: Stebleton Michael J. , Soria Krista M. , Huesman Ronald L. , Torres Vasti
Published: April 2014

Immigration issues continue to generate attention and vigorous debate at national and international levels; some of these discussions involve immigrant students and issues pertaining to higher education (e.g., DREAM Act). Camarota (2007) noted that from 2000 to 2007, 10.3 million immigrants arrived—the highest 7-year period of immigration in United States history. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, 24.3 million immigrants were reported in 1995; that number grew to 31.8 million in 2001, and is at 37.6 million for 2010 (Camarota, 2010). Based on these immigration trends, immigrant students (defined broadly to include recent immigrants born abroad as well as refugees) will continue to pursue post-secondary education. Many of these individuals will be ethnic minority immigrants who are first-generation college students (Erisman & Looney, 2007). According to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 12% of the total undergraduate population is comprised of immigrant students (Kim, 2009); yet, research on this growing population remains scant and the literature on student development issues of immigrant groups is still emerging. Research suggests that immigrants’ college experiences are unique from other students and merit further inquiry (Szelényi & Chang, 2002). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between campus climate and sense of belonging for recent immigrant generations (i.e., foreign born) who attend large, public research institutions located in the United States.
Blaming the Jocks and the Greeks?: Exploring Collegiate Athletes’ and Fraternity/Sorority Members’ Attitudes Toward LGBT Individuals
Authors: Worthen Meredith G. F.
Published: April 2014

While past research has documented significant relationships between both athletic and Greek system (fraternity and sorority) membership and negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians, such work seems to vilify membership in athletics and the Greek system as causal mechanisms of homophobia. In this way, athletes and Greeks may be easy targets to blame for the homophobia evident on college campuses. However, it may be more productive to attempt to identify underlying constructs that are related to collegiate athletes’ and fraternity/sorority members’ attitudes to best inform campus LGBT programs. In this study, athletes’ and fraternity and sorority members’ attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual men and women, and transgender (LGBT) individuals are examined. Further exploration considers how LGBT affiliations (i.e., knowing LGBT individuals, knowing about LGBT programs, and having Gay–Straight Alliances in high school) and religiosity may mediate the relationship between athletic and Greek membership and attitudes toward LGBT individuals. Results show that being a male athlete or being a fraternity member is related to unsupportive attitudes toward LGBT individuals; however, LGBT affiliations and religiosity mediate some of the significant relationships. In contrast, being a female athlete is unrelated to attitudes toward LGBT individuals while being a sorority member is related to attitudes toward LGBT individuals in some models. Campus LGBT program implications for both athletes and Greek system members are provided.
Networking Dickinson: Some Thought Experiments in Digital Humanities
Authors: Loeffelholz Mary
Published: April 2014

The most important and influential digital approaches to Emily Dickinson’s writings to date have focused on curating and presenting the singularity of her work through careful encoding of close textual detail, rather than on the kinds of large-scale, data-driven analytical and interpretive projects that increasingly drive work in the digital humanities. While sites like the Dickinson Electronic Archives and the new Emily Dickinson Archive have made aspects of Dickinson’s manuscript writings widely accessible over computer networks, scholars have yet fully to “network” Dickinson; that is, we have yet to explore whether digital approaches might help researchers map out and better understand her writing, its historical conditions of possibility, and its circulation within its surrounding literary and cultural economies. This essay argues for the value of developing new digital approaches aimed at networking Dickinson, in tandem with the ongoing projects of digital curation.
Emily Dickinson and Fidelia Hayward Cooke’s Springfield Republican
Authors: Scholes Judith
Published: April 2014

This essay traces a critical development in Dickinson’s relation to her daily newspaper, the Springfield Republican , during the early 1860s, when two of Dickinson’s poems—“I taste a liquor never brewed - ” and “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”—appeared among the paper’s literary selections. Printed in “Original Poetry” sections, as “The May-Wine” (May 4, 1861) and “The Sleeping” (March 1, 1862), these poems participated in what the essay identifies as the rhetorical project of the Republican ’s in-house literary editor Fidelia Hayward Cooke (1816–1897). During 1861–1863, especially, Cooke’s editing practice actively fostered a relationship between regional women’s poetry and Civil War news, such that regional women’s poetry became an active and indispensible source of affective renewal for war-weary Republican readers. Considering in detail how Cooke materially positioned Dickinson’s poems first to consummate and then to condition this affective renewal, the essay argues that Dickinson’s poems became so embroiled in the Republican ’s address to its readers that the epistolary aspect of the paper for Dickinson shifted irreversibly: what was once a letter from friends was now Dickinson’s own “letter to the World / That never wrote” to her.
Emily Dickinson’s Teenage Fanclub
Authors: Cohen Lara Langer
Published: April 2014

This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal , a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of Poets , which had appeared four years before, and Dickinson was almost certainly unaware of her distant adolescent fan. But Barker’s adoption of the poem—and, in a series of intriguing editorial interventions, his adaptation of it—transforms its paean to failure into a manifesto for amateurdom, networking Dickinson into one of the earliest teenage subcultures.
“Lifted Moments”: Emily Dickinson, Hymn Revision, and the Revival Music Meme-Plex
Authors: Wadsworth Sarah
Published: April 2014

This essay focuses on Dickinson’s poem “The Soul has Bandaged moments - ” (Fr360), placing it in relation to several interrelated hymns (Independent, Unitarian, and gospel) that share a common pattern of imagery deriving from the popular “Crowning Day” motif. Through a linked sequence of paired readings, it shows how connections between two loosely related texts sharpen and become meaningful when the two texts are brought into dialog with a third text. Juxtaposing three overlapping pairs of lyrics—first by Daniel Webster Whittle and William Channing Gannett, then by Philip Doddridge and Emily Dickinson, and, finally, by Gannett and Dickinson (with a brief coda on Frances Harper)—this essay illustrates how texts that probably did not bear on one another directly may have related to one another indirectly as they worked within and responded to a shared, dynamic network (or meme-plex) of hymns that underwent constant adaptation and recombination throughout the nineteenth century.
Alienating Language: A Poet’s Masque
Authors: Cohen Michael C.
Published: April 2014

“Alienating Language: A Poet’s Masque” argues that many of Emily Dickinson’s late poems, including “Belshazzar had a Letter - ,” “’Secrets’ is a daily word,” and “A little overflowing word,” portray a complex set of desires regarding language and selfhood. In these poems, language does not announce or express subjectivity, but instead communicative actions drain away possibilities for individual expressive agency. The essay looks in detail at the process that led to the inclusion of Dickinson’s “Success is counted sweetest” in the anthology A Masque of Poets , and it uses the details of this story to discuss anxieties about the use of words that were both specific to Dickinson and general to the language system within which she worked. Mischievous verbal acts—holding secrets, spreading opinions, making copies, writing graffiti—form a thread that runs through Dickinson’s late poems. The ways that these poems play upon and play back the sociality of writing and reading makes them both trenchantly critical and utterly typical of their era. The “networked” Dickinson of this essay is an author with diminished control over the production, propagation, distribution, and dispersal of her own language, one whose relations to the circulation of her language cut against the uses of that language, including her own uses of it. But as a result, her poems have social meanings that necessarily exceed their meanings as contained, autonomous, private, or otherwise lyric expressions.
“After a hundred years / Nobody knows the Place”: Notes Toward Spatial Visualizations of Emily Dickinson
Authors: Earhart Amy E.
Published: April 2014

This essay speculates on possible digital manipulations of the relationships between Dickinson texts—the letters and poems—and their spatial contexts and posits that such approaches are ripe for exploration by Dickinson scholars. The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive is used as a case study to explore how literature scholars might locate research questions that would be supported by visualization approaches. The article explores the potential for representational and interpretive approaches to visualization, positing that interpretive uses hold the most scholarly promise. Examining possible tools that might be used by scholars, including GIS and Neatline, the article argues that such tools help us, as Jerome McGann writes, “imagine what we don’t know.” The article ends by cautioning scholars to resist simple, positivistic spatial representations that fix representations. Instead, the article encourages scholars to use visualizations to disrupt, reorder, and expose new forms of inquiry.
Propositions and Judgments in Locke and Arnauld: A Monstrous and Unholy Union?
Authors: Marušić Jennifer Smalligan
Published: April 2014

Locke appears committed to the view that forming a propositional thought that p involves judging that p is true. He seems to inherit this commitment from traditional logics, like the Port-Royal Logic . P.T. Geach claims that pre-Fregean philosophers like Locke and Arnauld simply conflate predication and judgment and that the result is a “monstrous and unholy union.” I argue that Locke and Arnauld have good reasons for claiming that forming the propositional thought that p is to be explained in terms of judging that p , and that they can successfully respond to the problems that seem to face this view.
Leibniz on Privations, Limitations, and the Metaphysics of Evil
Authors: Newlands Samuel
Published: April 2014

In early writings, Leibniz mocks Scholastic privation theory, according to which evils are the lacks of appropriate perfections whose existence does not require the general concurrence of God. In the mid-1680s, Leibniz appears to change his mind, and he defends privation theory by name during the rest of his career. In this paper, I argue that this apparent about-face is misleading: the privation theory Leibniz later defends is not the traditional theory he once scorned. I show instead that Leibniz came to regard his own distinctive metaphysics of evil, his “original limitation theory,” as a suitable replacement for Scholastic privation theory and for which he could readily claim the mantle of traditionalism. I then explore Leibniz’s original limitation theory in fresh detail and conclude that the Scholastics themselves would have rejected Leibniz’s terminological co-opting on grounds that Leibniz’s original limitation theory contains a false ontology of evil.
Bolzano on Causation and Grounding
Authors: Schnieder Benjamin
Published: April 2014

The paper presents and discusses Bolzano’s account of causation. It (i) relates his proposal to his theory of grounding, (ii) clarifies the ontological assumptions behind his account, (iii) shows the originality of Bolzano’s position by locating it within the recent debate, and finally (iv) discusses two problems for the account.
The Interaction between the Just City and its Citizens in Plato’s Republic : From the Producers’ Point of View
Authors: Jeon Haewon
Published: April 2014

My main concern in this paper is the producers of the kallipolis in Plato’s Republic . More specifically, I am interested in what they value and aim for as ends. I want to ask whether they are appetitive – appetitive in the sense that they are capable of appreciating only bodily and material goods as the best goods there are and conduct their lives only to maximize those goods. If they are appetitive in this way, they are likely to suffer the very unfortunate consequence of never possessing virtue in any meaningful way. Many of us – and Plato is very likely to belong to this group – accept that a virtuous person should be motivated to do what she does for some worthy cause, and that maximizing appetitive goods is not a worthy enough cause for virtue. Since appetitive producers would do everything for the sake of some appetitive good in the end, they simply would not have the right sort of motivation no matter how good and law-abiding they might behave outwardly. Most scholars believe that the producers are appetitive in this sense and some persuasive arguments have been made to support such a conclusion. I shall argue that they are not. I will argue that different components of the dialogue tell us that they must be motivated by non-appetitive goods. Otherwise, the city cannot function as Plato envisions it.
Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Truth
Authors: Olfert C. M. M.
Published: April 2014

Aristotle’s notion of practical truth is fundamentally important to both the rationality and the practicality of practical reasoning. But what is practical truth? I argue for an original interpretation according to which practical truth is the truth about what is unqualifiedly good for a particular person when all of her particular circumstances are taken into account. In contrast to other current interpretations, this one allows practical truth to fall within Aristotle’s standard account of truth, and it explains the sense in which practical truth is nonetheless distinctly practical, using Aristotle’s so-called Guise of the Good account of motivation.
Praise and Self-Promotion in Ausonius’ Epistula 18
Authors: Hutchinson E.J.
Published: April 2014

Ausonius’ poetic Epistula 18 (Green) appears on its surface to be nothing more than a trivial piece of flattery for Ausonius’ younger protégé, Paulinus of Nola, the letter’s addressee. That, in fact, is how it has been read for several centuries. Upon closer examination it becomes clear that the poem’s superficial elements of praise, though doubtless sincere enough in the admiration they express for Paulinus, conceal a (perhaps playful) second agenda in the poem: self-advertisement for Ausonius himself, in respect to both his political and his literary attainments. Ausonius carries out this agenda by means of poetic technique, multivalent use of words, and self-referential allusion to his own poetry. This short letter demonstrates the high level of sophistication attained by literary correspondents in Late Antiquity.
From Stones to Myth: Temple Destruction and Civic Identity in the Late Antique Roman East
Authors: Busine Aude
Published: April 2014

This paper aims to assess narratives of temple destruction by raising the issue of their etiology. It reexamines the famous destructions of the temple of Zeus Belos at Apamea (trad. circa 386) and that of Zeus Marnas at Gaza (trad. circa 402), both of which, though well known, have been neglected in recent interpretative studies on religious violence. Both accounts are first analyzed according to the different contexts in which they were written, then considered in terms of the development of episcopal hagiography. This approach opens questions regarding how such stories were actually elaborated in practice. Comparison of various similar discourses on ancient stones sheds new light on issues that extend beyond narratives of temple destruction to touch upon the construction of Late Antique civic identities.
Making Space for Violence
Authors: Conybeare Catherine
Published: April 2014

This essay presents a theorization of the quotidian violence that is Brent Shaw’s subject. Through a re-reading of some of the accounts of specific acts of violence that Shaw uses as evidence, it strives for ethical engagement with the moment of violence; drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis of “the human condition” and of the “space of appearance” in which politics is played out, it focuses especially upon what happens when the space of appearance becomes a space for violence, and upon the vulnerability of the individuals involved.
The Making of Hagia Sophia and the Last Pagans of New Rome
Authors: Kaldellis Anthony
Published: April 2014

A figure overlooked in scholarship on Hagia Sophia is Phokas, the praetorian prefect of 532 under whom construction of the church began. He was a pagan who eventually took his own life in one of Justinian’s purges. His initial supervision of the construction of Hagia Sophia is attested by Ioannes Lydos, himself a pagan intellectual, who praised Phokas in superlative terms, despite Phokas’ infamous death. Consideration of all the evidence for an architect of Hagia Sophia, Anthemios of Tralleis, beyond the literary sources usually cited, strongly suggests that he belonged to the pagan wing of the school of Ammonios of Alexandria, as did the architect Isidoros of Miletos. Material presented here explains how the last pagans of New Rome contributed to the making of Hagia Sophia and suggests how they may have interpreted the monument on their own terms.
Shock, Horror, or Same Old Same Old? Everyday Violence in Augustine’s Africa
Authors: Grey Cam
Published: April 2014

Recent studies of violence in the ancient Mediterranean world have stressed just how radically undertheorized the phenomenon is in modern scholarly literature. In response to this, they have identified a particular aspect or expression of violence, then used that as a foundation for generating a theoretical framework for understanding violent behavior more generally. But what relationship does general, generalized, or everyday violence have to the more reified, bounded forms of violence that have been the subject of scholarly attention to date? How should we best interpret the place of violence within communities, and its relationship to “nonviolent” means of communication and interaction? Earlier literature on the place of violence in ancient societies focused upon quantifying whether the ancient world was “more violent” than modern society. This article eschews a quantitative approach and focuses instead upon the role that violence might have played, rhetorically and strategically, in social interactions. It considers two short vignettes drawn from the writings of Augustine of Hippo and uses the consonances and dissonances between the presentation of violence in those texts to propose and problematize some theoretical positions on the strategic and heuristic value of violence in late Roman North Africa. In particular, it explores the utility of the concept of reciprocity and the ethical distinction between (reasonable or justifiable) force and (illegitimate or irrational) violence as tools for understanding the role of violence in everyday interactions in the period.
Harnessing Violence: Armed Force as Manpower in the Late Roman Countryside
Authors: Lenski Noel
Published: April 2014

Brent Shaw’s monumental study invites reflection rather than critique. Proceeding from its demonstrations that Donatist violence was limited in scale, that Augustine’s extensive treatments of the movement have conditioned modern readers to see it as more violent and better organized than it was, and that the “circumcellions” were occasional agricultural laborers enlisted to bully sectarian opponents, this study explores Shaw’s findings on three fronts. First, it shows the relationship between Donatist sectarian violence and football hooliganism, both of which represent the expression of surplus male aggression in search of a cause. Second, it explores the relationship between violence and manual labor in an effort to rethink the dimensions of the problem. Finally, it situates the Donatist movement in a broader Mediterranean context by showing how it reflected a growing trend toward the breakdown of state authority in Late Antiquity.
Monotheism and Violence
Authors: Drake H.A.
Published: April 2014

A major accomplishment of Shaw’s monumental work on sacred violence is that it takes the religious violence that swept North Africa in the fourth century out of the privileged category of church history and moves it into the study of violence more generally. Like scholars of more recent periods, Shaw relies on “thick description” as a means to isolate the conditions that lead to violent encounters. The wealth of detail in this book, covering everything from rhetoric to labor practices, puts the conflict into a social and cultural setting, from which it can be compared with violence in other ages.
The Council of Turin (398/399) and the Reorganization of Gaul ca. 395/406
Authors: Mathisen Ralph W.
Published: April 2014

The Council of Turin, which quite irregularly met in Italy even though it proposed to deal with the church of Gaul, has been the most studied and least understood of all the councils involving the late antique Gallic church. This study argues for a single council, contrary to past suggestions that there were two or even three Councils of Turin. It pinpoints the date of the meeting in either 398 or 399 CE. It then investigates in detail the background, procedures, and consequences of the council. Because of the lack of authority of Italian bishops to legislate for the church of Gaul, the most the council could do was make suggestions. It is argued that, with the imperial court located in northern Italy and with the bishops of Milan attempting to aggrandize their influence, the Council of Turin was but one element of a coherent initiative to reorganize and regularize the secular and ecclesiastical administration of Gaul as of 395 CE. These initiatives were brought to a halt by the Gallic political crises of 406 and later. Contrary to past assumptions, the Council of Turin had very little direct influence on the subsequent history of the Gallic church, and was only very rarely cited as an authority.
Singularity and the Literary Market
Authors: Leypoldt Günter
Published: April 2014

This essay looks at how our perception of literary presence relates to markets and institutions. I wish to show how the commercialization of literary culture—from the 1800s to today’s “program era”—led to the rise of market-sheltered sites of consecration, “spaces of singularity” that shape people’s sense of cultural authority, and their orientation within the aesthetic and moral hierarchies of cultural space. Using examples from Walter Scott to Toni Morrison, I suggest that we experience literary singularity through a phenomenology of the sacred that manifests itself in the production of social trust.
Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics
Authors: Meretoja Hanna
Published: April 2014

Theorists of narrative have been divided into those who conceive of narrative primarily as a cognitive instrument for imposing meaningful order onto the real and those who consider it to be primarily an ontological category that characterizes the human way of being in the world, that is, something constitutive of human existence. These can be called respectively the epistemological and ontological position on the significance of narrative for human existence. Galen Strawson, in turn, has made an influential distinction between descriptive and normative positions on the narrativity of experience. In this essay, I suggest that even though these conceptual differentiations are helpful to a certain extent, such binary terms may also prevent us from paying adequate attention to complex interconnections between the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension of the relation between narrative and human existence. I argue that the question of the significance of narrative for human existence can be formulated with an emphasis on any of these philosophical dimensions but that the answers involve implicit assumptions concerning all three dimensions. In the debate on narrative and human existence, particularly undertheorized has been the role of tacit ontological assumptions concerning what is counted as real. In disentangling the debate, I argue that both experience and narrative are phenomena constituted by interpretative activity; while it is important not to conflate experience and narrative, it can be meaningfully said that narrative interpretations of experiences have a constitutive role in our existence. By looking at how certain novelists have dealt with this problematic, the essay also suggests how to tie the theoretical study of narrative more intimately to the study of the philosophical underpinnings of narrative forms in literary history.
Moll Flanders and the Bastard Birth of Realist Character
Authors: Gass Joshua
Published: April 2014

This essay applies genre theory to the 1722 Moll Flanders in order to outline a new history of character, reinterpreting the accepted division between early modern, “flat” characterization and the ostensibly more complex psychological practice of later realism. In the last fifty years, this contradictory text has become an important site of contention for critics examining narratorial unreliability, the origins of the novel, and nascent modernity. Critics have interpreted its inconsistencies as the result of deliberately designed irony, as the expression of the emerging ideologies of the modern world, or as simple incoherence. At base, however, Moll’s contradictory nature is an exaggeration of the kind of generic process common to many of the narratives of early print culture, a process emphasizing both formulaic repetition and fragmented generic mixture. Moll Flanders is only a more intense, more thoroughly mixed version of these ephemeral narratives, the product of an endemic bastardization of genres that lasts from the 1590s through the 1730s and beyond, particularly inhabiting the lower registers of mass culture. Yet at the same time, the text prefigures the structure and complex ethical and psychological dynamics of later realism. This confluence suggests that the later form of characterization, usually understood as a more concrete representation of individual and social life, is actually a naturalization of the fragmented generic mixtures of the earlier field of narrative. What we see in Moll Flanders , in other words, is the generic instability of early print culture transforming itself into modern character. This text also illuminates the familiar genre theory I use—one that sees genres as variously institutionalized sets of reader expectations—by displaying irony as a kind of generic negotiation.
Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene
Authors: Latour Bruno
Published: April 2014

Among the many problems raised by political ecology is one of language. The distribution between what is inert object and what is made of talking subjects does not do justice to science nor to literature—nor, of course, to politics. Hence, an effort to describe a relation with agency that focuses not on their characters (humans or nonhumans, animated or deanimated) but rather on their common source. This source is recognized here—both semiotically and then ontologically—as a “metaphorphic zone.” It is just such a common articulation that could allow speaking with and about former “facts of nature” in a different way, a way better adjusted to the new political situation.
Recognition or Reification?: Capitalist Crisis and Subjectivity in Little Dorrit
Authors: Parker Ben
Published: April 2014

This essay examines the representational obstacles posed for narrative recognition in the realist novel by crises in capitalism, focusing on Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857). Recognition scenes (Aristotle’s anagnorisis ) in Victorian novels tend to model a form of subjectivity and temporality, of concealment and recovery, while capitalist crisis is radically unknowable through this same narrative epistemology. This incompatibility of recognition with the logic of capitalist representation (reification) is brought out through a comparative close reading of two recognition scenes in the multi-plot Little Dorrit .
The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View
Authors: Hodder Ian
Published: April 2014

This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social networks. We cannot reduce things solely to the relational, to a semiotics of things. To do so undermines the power of things to entrap, and particularly to trap the more vulnerable. In the modern world, we have come to see that we need to use things sustainably and responsibly, to care for things. But this care and sustainability themselves too frequently involve further management and control of animals, plants, landscapes, resources, and humans. A long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements. It is in our nature as a species to try and fix our problems now by fiddling and fixing, but such responses may have their limits.
Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder
Authors: Harman Graham
Published: April 2014

In this article Graham Harman responds to pieces by the philosopher of science Bruno Latour and the archaeologist Ian Hodder in the same issue of New Literary History . A brief summary is given of Latour’s intellectual career, including his recent transition from actor-network theory to the “modes of existence” project. An asymmetry in Latour’s approach is also identified: though he abolishes both nature and culture as distinct realms of being, he retains and expands the “foritself” of culture even while abolishing the “in-itself” of nature. An opposite problem is identified in Hodder’s approach, which takes account of the virtue of the nonrelationality of things, but which retains the very nature/culture dualism that Latour had succeeded in dismantling. This leads Hodder in the direction of an untenable politics guided by the model of prehistoric humans uncontaminated by excessive dependence on things.
Naming the Indescribable: Woolf, Russell, James, and the Limits of Description
Authors: Zhang Dora
Published: April 2014

This essay examines a preoccupation in early twentieth century literature and philosophy with the limits of describing first-person experience in language. Reading Virginia Woolf’s novels together with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and William James, I argue that the indescribable in modernism is not so much a sublime beyond comprehension but rather the particularities of feelings that we ourselves know too well. These idiosyncratic experiential textures escape full expression by words that are inevitably general, but I suggest that Woolf stages this descriptive limit by exploiting a set of nondescriptive terms, whose distinctive features are elucidated by the remarks of James and Russell. The aim of this paper is to trace a less familiar intellectual history of literary modernism by highlighting its connections to early analytic philosophy, while at the same time working across literature and philosophy in a way that does not take recourse to the model of a “lens” or an influence study, but that instead examines the two fields” shared preoccupation with similar problems, which they elaborate in distinct ways.
Against Narrative Medicine
Authors: O’Mahony Seamus
Published: April 2014

This essay aims to provoke debate on how and what the medical humanities should teach. It argues that the field has been dominated (to its detriment) by two misguided movements, postmodernism and narrative medicine, and that it should be redirected from utilitarian aims towards the goal of exposing medical students to a climate of thought and reflection.
When Pigs Could Fly: Influenza and the Elusive Nature of Diagnosis
Authors: Jutel Annemarie
Published: April 2014

Diagnosis plays an important role in how we understand disease, and how medicine confirms its status in contemporary society. However, diagnoses are far less concrete than their taxonomies suggest. This essay presents influenza as a case study in the elusive nature of the diagnosis, and in its complicated realities. Using the metaphor of boundary transgression, it reveals the fluidity of diagnosis and the paradoxes presented by the naturalization of diseases. In order to contain influenza, medicine commits other paradoxical transgressions of boundaries. Lay self-diagnosis, use of the lay expression “flu,” and wide reliance upon the belief in the influenza-like syndrome are used to attempt to cement a concrete notion of influenza.
Noninvasive Prenatal Testing for Early Sex Identification: A Few Benefits and Many Concerns
Authors: Chapman Audrey R. , Benn Peter A.
Published: April 2014

A new technology, noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT), can identify fetal sex early in pregnancy, five weeks after conception, with a high degree of accuracy through analysis of maternal blood plasma. This article considers the possibility that NIPT will encourage greater sex selection in developed countries and discusses the implications. Sex selection raises serious social and ethical issues unless it is done for medical reasons. The article also assesses options to discourage sex-selective abortions, including the effectiveness of potential legal measures.
The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Experiments: A Case Study in Retrospective Ethical Assessment
Authors: Miller Franklin G.
Published: April 2014

During World War II, malaria research was conducted in prisons. A notable example was the experiments at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois, in which prisoner-subjects were infected with malaria for the purpose of testing the safety and efficacy of novel anti-malaria drugs. Over time, commentators have shifted from viewing the malaria research at Stateville as a model of ethical clinical research to seeing the experiments as paradigmatic of abusive human experimentation. This essay undertakes a retrospective ethical assessment of the Stateville malaria research during the 1940s in light of basic ethical principles and the Nuremberg Code, as well as contemporary malaria research. In addition to its historical interest, this case study provides a rich context for addressing basic issues of research ethics, including the voluntariness of consent, the justification of risks, and the exploitation of vulnerable subjects.
Medical Therapeutics: From Induction to Scientific Evolution
Authors: Nunes José Pedro Lopes
Published: April 2014

The field of medical therapeutics may be characterized as having suffered major scientific evolution in the last decades. The publication of landmark studies has been important enough to produce shifts in patient care. However, the scientific evolution in this field does not necessarily imply a progressively greater degree of certitude. In fact, it is not uncommon for new knowledge, when reflected in clinical practice, to weaken previous knowledge. In medical therapeutics, strict inductive reasoning implies the existence of empirical intervention data, typically clinical trial data. In many instances, however, such data does not exist—leaving room for a mixture of inductive and “pseudo-deductive” reasoning. It is often necessary to establish treatment on the basis of incomplete and inconclusive information, more so when the clinical situation is grave, but when no valid information exists, no treatment may be an option. In many instances, the rule “I wish not to impose on others” has superseded the concept “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
The Medical Ecoculture at Work: The Case of the Metal-on-Metal Hip
Authors: Gillick Muriel R.
Published: April 2014

The United States has the most expensive, technologically intensive system of medical care in the world, but not the most effective. Reforming health care will require understanding the interactions among the many individuals and institutions that collectively constitute the health-care ecoculture, an ecosystem with a major human component. Because technology is a key driver of health-care costs and a critical component of the patient’s experience of American medicine, it is fruitful to consider an example of a particular technology: why it was embraced, who benefited from its use, and the response of the ecoculture when a critical flaw in the technology emerged. The case of the introduction, diffusion, and withdrawal of metal-on-metal hip prostheses will be discussed from the perspective of patients, physicians, device manufacturers, regulators, and the legal system. Each of these groups responded to external stimuli by adaptation in an attempt to maximize its own interests. Interactions between the groups served as a further mechanism of maintaining the status quo within medicine. A single change, such as modification of the payment system or incentivizing patients, is thus unlikely to be effective in transforming health care; instead, a multi-pronged approach, along with reforms outside medicine, will likely be necessary.
Evolutionary Biology Redux
Authors: Torday John S
Published: April 2014

This article offers a novel, enlightened concept for determining the mechanism of evolution. It is based on homeostasis, which distinguishes life from non-life and as such is the universal mechanism for the evolution of all living organisms. This view of evolution is logical, mechanistic, non-scalar, predictive, testable, and falsifiable, and it illuminates the epistemological relationships between physics and biology, ontogeny and phylogeny, development and aging, ultimate and proximate causation, health and disease. In addition to validating Haeckel’s biogenetic law and Lamarckian epigenetics, reflecting the enabling value of the cellular approach, this perspective also expresses the evolutionary process at the cell-molecular level, since the mechanism of cell communication itself is universal in biology, in keeping with a Kuhnian paradigm shift. This approach may even elucidate the nature and evolution of consciousness as a manifestation of the cellular continuum from unicellular to multicellular life. We need such a functional genomic mechanism for the process of evolution if we are to make progress in biology and medicine. Like Copernican heliocentrism, a cellular approach to evolution may fundamentally change humankind’s perceptions about our place in the universe.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Global Health Blogging
Authors: Frischtak Helena , Sinha Pranay
Published: April 2014

Social media use in modern medicine is fraught with ethical dilemmas and risks of unprofessional behavior. This essay surveys the existing literature on the possibilities and pitfalls of social media use by health-care professionals and concludes that non-engagement with social media is not an option. A mindful approach, not vague guidelines or long checklists, will foster a generation of physicians comfortable using online platforms for education and reflection. The use of social media during global health experiences abroad has been largely ignored in the literature and presents special challenges. With a view to starting a reflective dialogue on this subject, this essay identifies some ethically nebulous aspects of global health blogging. The discussion focuses on physician and student blogging, but these principles should apply to other online platforms as well and should prove valuable for health-care professionals who are engaged in developing guidelines, educating medical students and resident physicians, or in sharing their experiences and insights on the internet.
The Role of Genetic Information in Personalized Medicine
Authors: Gamma Alex
Published: April 2014

Personalized medicine is the latest promise of a gene-centered biomedicine to provide treatments custom-tailored to the specific needs of patients. Although surrounded by much hype, personalized medicine at present lacks the empirical and theoretical foundations necessary to render it a realistic long-term perspective. In particular, the role of genetic data and the relationship between causal understanding, prediction, prevention, and treatment of a disease need clarifying. This article critically examines the concept of information in genetics and its relation to modern-day genetic determinism, using pharmacogenetics, personalized medicine’s core discipline, as a test case. The article concludes that: (1) genetic knowledge does not constitute a privileged basis for personalized medicine because there is an a priori complete causal parity of genetic and nongenetic resources of development; and (2) prediction, prevention, and treatment all depend on a causal-mechanistic understanding that will follow only from integrating data across the whole gamut of developmental factors—genetic and non-genetic. In a future successful personalized medicine, genes will have no special status, either as determinants of phenotype, markers of disease or as targets of treatment.