bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy
Authors: Levin Richard
Published: February 2007

The thematic approach adopted by a number of feminist critics of Shakespearean tragedy raises serious problems. Some of these are inherent in thematism itself, such as the need to select the facts of the play to fit the theme and to manipulate the theme to fit the facts. But other problems are peculiar to their choice of “gender conflict” or “patriarchy” as the central theme that is the subject of these tragedies and the cause of their outcomes. This leads to the confusion of a necessary condition with a sufficient cause and to difficulties in their treatments of the protagonists, the emotional effects, the tragic genre, and the role of the author, who is supposed to be condemning “patriarchy” in these plays. Further problems arise because of the particular conception of masculinity that some of these critics bring to their readings.
A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula
Authors: Stevenson John Allen
Published: February 2007

Vampire sexuality, as represented in Bram Stoker's Dracula, reveals itself both as a phenomenon that is terrifyingly foreign to typical experience and, paradoxically, as a distorted mirror of human behavior. On the one hand, the vampire inspires a xenophobic response because his needs violate the normal limits of exogamy: he is physiologically dependent on women who are foreign to him. On the other hand, the novel undermines the very idea of the “foreign” by suggesting that even the most bizarre aspects of a vampire's sex life are strangely familiar—usually because they parody or literalize human sexuality.
Foucault's Oriental Subtext
Authors: Schaub Uta Liebmann
Published: February 2007

Foucault's work has been investigated from within the Western intellectual tradition. My study approaches it from outside that tradition, from the perspective of Oriental thought. Oriental concepts were appropriated by the Western counterculture of the sixties and were espoused by associates ofTel quelwhen Foucault began to develop his radically subversive critique of Western discourse formation. Eastern models appear to have shaped his own discourse to such an extent that they function as a concealed subtext in his work. He criticizes the West for its anthropocentrism and logocentrism, its antagonistic dialectics, and its confidence in an unlimited advance of systematic knowledge. Foucault's enterprise is grounded in Oriental, chiefly Buddhist, systems that emphasize a progressive decentering of the individual through praxis rather than theory, a logic of coexisting opposites, a paradoxical language, and a knowledge unattainable through logocentric rationality.
The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama
Authors: Pechter Edward
Published: February 2007

This essay, while referring particularly to commentary about Renaissance drama, examines the new historicism more generally as one of the most powerful and interesting forms of criticism on the contemporary scene. How do new-historicist critics characterize the text? What do they mean by history? How do they understand the relation between the two? And finally, are there other, arguably more useful kinds of answers available to us than the ones the new historicists typically provide?
Cherchez la Femme: Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel
Authors: Waller Margaret
Published: February 2007

The malaise depicted in early nineteenth-century French novels is said to characterize the age but is in fact a malady of men. In these works male alienation takes the form of emasculation. Nevertheless, Chateaubriand's René illustrates how the male protagonist's feminization becomes a sign of moral superiority and poetic genius. Although the hero claims to tell a tale devoid of conventional intrigue, he makes his solipsistic discourse prurient and melodramatic by introducing a woman who suffers the consequences of desiring him despite his disablement. The mal du siècle strategy consists in creating interest in character through the feminine in the man while providing drama in plot through the man's fatal effect on the woman. While the early Romantic novel breaks down stereotypes of masculinity by feminizing the hero, its conventions of narrative causality and discursive empowerment draw on traditional ideologies of gender difference to reempower alienated postrevolutionary man.
Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime
Authors: Ramazani R. Jahan
Published: February 2007

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.
Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death
Authors: Cunningham Karen
Published: February 2007

Interpretations of violence in Christopher Marlowe's plays have emphasized biographical, literary, and philosophical roots over social and historical conditions. If, however, we glance out Marlowe's window at contemporary rituals, we can enlarge these views of staged violence. His numerous references to official methods of persecution—from boiling to pressing, from branding to beheading—are not only projections of dramatic character but also revisions of corresponding Tudor social practices: public executions and their kin, torture. Although these entertainments provide Marlowe with ready-made elements for dramatizing tragedies of will, he uses those elements to turn theatricality against itself and to expose the fraudulent core of such exhibitions, even as he acknowledges their thematic power. Exaggerating the profound ambiguity of artifice, Marlowe undermines the moralizing that accompanies spectacles of punishment and transforms a theater of pain into a drama of subversion.
“The Situation of the Looker-On”: Gender, Narration, and Gaze inWuthering Heights
Authors: Newman Beth
Published: February 2007

In its frequent attention to visual acts,Wuthering Heightsexplores the sexual politics of the gaze. Not only does Bronte's novel make the gaze important thematically (as both a psychosexual phenomenon and a means of surveillance), it also suggests that narration itself is dependent on and produced by a gaze. But through its treatment of its two narrators and of Hareton and the second Catherine as gazing subjects, the novel suggests that there are limits to the power of the gaze to objectify, appropriate, and control. ThusWuthering Heightsanticipates questions that feminist theory has been asking about a possible “female gaze” and provides a feminist context for thinking about the visual metaphors pervading post-Jamesian theories of the novel.
“The High Roman Fashion”: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage
Authors: Helms Lorraine
Published: February 2007

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's inTitus AndronicusandAntony and Cleopatra,Marston's inSophonisba,and Heywood's inThe Rape of Lucrece)draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.
Canonicity
Authors: Harris Wendell V.
Published: February 2007

The canon of biblical books is frequently cited as a parallel to a unitary literary canon that, though often presumed, is in fact not to be found. The biblical canon was created for the purpose of forestalling change and exiling competition. There are at least ten kinds of literary canons, all ultimately resulting from selections made for such distinct purposes as providing models, transmitting a heritage, creating common frames of reference, logrolling, legitimating theory, historicizing, and pluralizing. Canons formed for any of these purposes necessarily yield to change over time and compete with one another at any given time. We can reasonably expect neither the abolition of selective canons nor agreement on a single one; we can, however, seek clarity about purposes.
Discourse and the Problem of Closure in theCanterbury Tales
Authors: Grudin Michaela Paasche
Published: February 2007

Critical restiveness with Chaucer's “unsatisfactory” endings points to one of his most profound strategies. In theCanterbury TalesChaucer finds at least a dozen ways to ignore, skirt, transcend, or even anticipate structural closure in favor of an engagement between the narrative and its responding audience that fundamentally works against closure. By repeatedly subverting conventional closure, he turns our attention to the dynamics of discourse as social interaction. He creates in theCanterbury Talesacopiaof the human motives—social, psychological, or political—that generate communication and misunderstanding. Chaucer's sense of closure casts light on the narrative frame and on the so-called Retraction. The subversion of conventional closure, instead of undermining the text, often enriches it, deeply characterizing his whole attitude toward discourse and toward knowledge. In Chaucer's epistemology nothing is ever complete.
Hearing Woman's Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen
Authors: Kuzniar Alice
Published: February 2007

In his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen Novalis eroticizes and idealizes the female voice as unmediated poetic utterance expressing the body. Women write from the breast, with their own fluids for ink. Personifying poetry, the female character puts the burgeoning male author into an impossible position: he cannot master what she represents unless he switches gender. The mother-beloved herself undergoes constant transformation in the novel, turning into flowers, trees, and other characters. Female metamorphosis challenges androcentric Bildung, as Heinrich progressively draws on female qualities. The migratory female voice finds its way into two other German Romantic tales, Heinrich von Kleist's “Die heilige Cäcilie” and E. T. A. Hoffmann's “Rat Krespel.” In contrast to Heinrich von Ofterdingen, these works travesty the attempt to mimic the female voice.
This Is Not a Universe: Metaphor, Language, and Representation
Authors: Papin Liliane
Published: February 2007

Positivist science has been marked by its reliance on an objective, transparent, and purely descriptive language, an approach that modern philosophers of science have questioned and rejected. With the advent of the theory of relativity, followed by the theoretical framework of quantum physics, many physicists themselves have been led to wrestle with the traditional concept of representation and language. They have joined poets and literary critics in questioning the definition and function of metaphor. Echoing Magritte's famous “This is not a pipe,” David Bohm and David Peat suggest “this is not a universe” as an inscription to be borne in mind for each new scientific hypothesis. Scientific metaphors as well as literary metaphors need to be recognized, unity and difference unfolded. This exploration of “metaphorical play” might help define fields of interpretation and true interdisciplinary convergence, which is only a broadening of metaphorical activity.
Negotiation and New Historicism
Authors: Leinwand Theodore B.
Published: February 2007

The rhetoric and the models of social process that inform much of the work of new historicists and cultural materialists in the field of English Renaissance studies are governed by a subversion-containment binarism. While conceptualizations of the operations of power based on this binarism (and its underlying Foucauldian vocabulary) have generated important insights, it may prove useful to reconceive conflict as negotiation, exchange, and accommodation. The Elizabethan English constable, representing a flexible deployment of power, offers us an alternative to repressive masters and subversive peasants. His role in Shakespearean drama and his characteristic malapropisms suggest that aristocrats and common folk were together enmeshed in what Anthony Giddens calls a “dialectic of control”.
History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich'sTracks
Authors: Peterson Nancy J.
Published: February 2007

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel,Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.
Rereading the Poet's Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin, and Stalin
Authors: Cavanagh Clare
Published: February 2007

In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking speaks of the mature poet's effort to shape a summation in verse that will give meaning and wholeness to the poet's lifework. Osip Mandelstam refused to create such a summation, unlike many of his modernist contemporaries. He developed instead a complex, playful, defiantly open-ended poetics that resists all attempts to shape a definitive, fitting conclusion to his life-in-art. Seeking an appropriate poetic ending to the life of the poet-martyr—Mandelstam died en route to the gulag at the height of Stalin's terror—many critics chose to overlook the provocatively playful lyrics that accompany his more somber late verses. Through analysis of two poems on Charlie Chaplin written near the end of Mandelstam's life, this essay aims both to reopen the question of the poet's ending and to complicate the reader's portrait of the artist's final days.
Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll
Flanders and Roxana
Authors: Kibbie Ann Louise
Published: February 2007

Historians and literary critics alike have emphasized the obsolescence
of the antiusury doctrine in the transition in England from a precapitalist
to a capitalist society. Instead of viewing the scholastic opposition to
usury solely as an impediment to the development of a capitalist ethos, this
essay stresses the continuing relevance of the antiusury tradition to an
evolving theory of capital increase in the early eighteenth century.
Moll Flanders and
Roxana are the central texts for a discussion
of how the analogies between monetary and biological generation that the
antiusury writers developed to regulate capital increase provide the
foundation for the naturalization of capital, for the transformation of
capitalism from an external to an internal economy. At the center of this
metamorphosis is the figure of the woman, whose body becomes the body of
capital.
Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again
Authors: Caughie Pamela L.
Published: February 2007

The recent controversial transformation of the humanities is due partly to the institutional acknowledgment of diversity and partly to critics' efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the categories of identity on which programs devoted to the study of diversity are founded. This double agenda creates anxiety over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university. My essay offers a means of working through this tension: a performative pedagogy based on a descriptive theory of the dynamics of passing. I exemplify this dynamic by reading debates on white feminists' appropriation of black women's writing, comparing student responses to the 1934 filmImitation of Life, and discussing Fannie Hurst's novel on which the film is based. I posit the pedagogical relation as the privileged site where passing, which is inevitable in any subject position, can be enacted and made explicit.
Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom
Authors: Noland Carrie
Published: February 2007

Cultural studies has tended to neglect poetic texts, but poetry is in fact well suited to provoke classroom debates concerning the cultural construction of the aesthetic object, as Blaise Cendrars'sDix-neuf poèmes élastiques(Nineteen Elastic Poems) confirms. Bakhtin's notion of the heteroglossic helps to demonstrate that Cendrars's poems are also “rejoinders” in a dialogue with their institutional other: advertising. But Cendrars does not merely claim advertising as poetic material; he identifies poetry as a form of advertisement. Cendrars suggests that the symbolic capital of poetry cannot exist unless the poem brings attention to itself by means of a practice that it posits, paradoxically, as its other. However, the fact that poetry is constructed by advertising its difference does not make poetry equivalent to advertising. Cultural studies reveals the institutional construction of poetry, but only close textual analysis can highlight the semiotic distinctions between poetry and advertising that institutional boundaries engender.
Rereading Flaubert: Toward a Dialogue between First- and Second-Language Literature Teaching Practices
Authors: Keller Betsy
Published: February 2007

There are many disparities in literary competence between teachers and students. It is emblematic of these differences that students in introductory college literature courses usually read assigned texts only once, while the teacher's normative experience involves multiple rereadings. For inexperienced readers in these classes, the task of acquiring literary competence may seem as difficult as learning a foreign language. Research in the study of foreign languages and literatures contains valuable insights for the teaching of first-language literature. The traditional lecture-and-discussion format fails to address the individual student's background knowledge, motivation for literary study, and personal response to texts. Prereading activities, tasks to accompany at-home reading, and collaborative strategies in class discussion can lead readers to engage texts more meaningfully in the introductory literature classroom.
Botticelli'sMadonna del Magnificat: Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy
Authors: Schibanoff Susan
Published: February 2007

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in hisMadonna del Magnificat(c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”
Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine “Internal Enemies,” and the Domestication of National Identity
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: February 2007

In Felicia Hemans's reception, if nowhere else, Victorian culture, and particularly Victorian patriotism, may still seem stable, enviably simple, and almost threateningly immediate. Hemans was no Victorian, however, and as her notorious “Casabianca” suggests, even the Victorians' favorites among her verses could be deeply disturbing. Through a wide, complex, and self-contradictory range of patriotic poetry, Hemans consistently sought both to reconcile militarism with “the domestic affections” and to mediate between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of patriotism. Relying on the symbolic power of soldiers' graves and using a Hegelian dialectic in which mournful femininity is the constitutive “internal enemy” of the state, her verses attained powerful resonance within Victorian attempts to domesticate imperialism. Nonetheless, her visions of feminine patriotism remain revealingly self-divided, often presenting relations between familial and state power as both unstable and potentially terrifying.
Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class inThe House of Mirth
Authors: Kassanoff Jennie A.
Published: February 2007

Edith Wharton's 1905 novelThe House of Mirthdocuments a twenty-nine-year-old debutante's disinheritance—from money, family, power, love, and social position. On a more profound level, however, the novel pursues the opposite end. Although Lily Bart is plainly vulnerable to the whims of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called the “sexuo-economic relation,” she is nonetheless dramatically resistant to the attritional ravages of racial disintegration. This paper argues that race inThe House of Mirthis an essentialist—if deeply problematic—answer to the cultural slippages of class and gender. By locating the novel within the diverse range of cultural phenomena that contributed to its racialized logic, this essay connects Wharton's fears of class mobility, mass production, immigration, and “race suicide” to the taxidermic aesthetic of racialized stasis. Part of a rare and endangered species, Lily becomes Wharton's decadent specimen of racial permanence.
“Circles and Circles of Sorrow”: In the Wake of Morrison's Sula
Authors: Novak Phillip
Published: February 2007

Toni Morrison's Sula develops out of and centers on images of violence and violation, proffering itself as a catalog of traumatic experiences, of literal and figurative deaths. Such traumas almost invariably register as watched, the novel thus functioning, by means of its characters, as an act of bearing witness. Inasmuch as the story Sula tells is framed by passages mourning the loss of the world the novel imagines, the narrative structurally articulates an absence. Together these elements—Sula's thematic preoccupation with witnessed dying and its insistence that the narrative mark loss—locate the novel's center of interest in grieving. Folding the history of loss it narrates within a recursive structure, Sula pitches itself against the conventional notion that mourning must be worked through: indeed, the novel implicitly argues for—and persistently works to effect—a sustaining of grief. To move beyond mourning in the context of continuing cultural fragility, the novel suggests, may well constitute a surrender to the processes of cultural absorption and dispersal Sula describes toward its conclusion.
A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes'sNightwood
Authors: Smith Victoria L.
Published: February 2007

Djuna Barnes's experimental textNightwoodoffers a difficult narrative shaped around a sense of loss. Barnes outlines a loss of access to history, to language, and to representation in general for those consigned to the margins of culture. By using a torrential and Byzantine language—a language of indirection—Barnes creates a lexicon of loss that acts as a strategy for recuperating what has been unspeakable, particularly the culturally disempowered: in this text, Jews, women, and homosexuals. Her psychic and textual strategies work through analogy to recover unrecorded history and to show the unrepresented. Barnes reconfigures the culturally privileged discourse of melancholia and in doing so articulates a structure of loss for those whose histories have been effaced.
History, Cultural Memory, and the Tasks of Translation in T. Obinkaram Echewa's I Saw the Sky Catch Fire
Authors: Brodzki Bella
Published: February 2007

Across a range of disciplines and discourses, translation has become a central concern for many scholars working in the humanities. Indeed, the notion of translation has begun to inflect the most compelling and consequential debates on meaning and representation. My essay gives attention to Walter Benjamin's redemptive and generative notion of translation as survival and to postmodern currents in translation studies alongside a contemporary Nigerian diasporic novel written in English, I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Framed by a passing on of the story of the Women's War (the Igbo women's tax revolt against the British in 1929), Echewa's narrative critiques the complicitous practices of translation, colonialism, and anthropology. In this exemplary instance of a type of hybrid postcolonial textuality, processes of intergenerational and intercultural transmission, conceived as both acts of translation and instruments of historical consciousness, perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory.
Phillis Wheatley's Vocation and the Paradox of the “Afric Muse”
Authors: Bennett Paula
Published: February 2007

Traditionally, criticism on Phillis Wheatley has emphasized her conformity to neoclassic conventions, failing to explore the depth of her commitment to Western culture or her resistance to colonial society. Building on recent studies that have focused on Wheatley's use of double voicing to mediate racial and political issues in her poetry, I examine how Wheatley exploits neoclassic conventions to rage at the limitations she felt prevented her from practicing her vocation fully. Wheatley sought to authorize her poetry in a culture that refused to legitimize her talent and accomplishments. Throughout her oeuvre she insists on her paradoxical identity as an “Afric muse” and stresses the peculiar spiritual and epistemic authority this oxymoronic identity gives her. Wheatley could not condemn her forcible transport to America, despite her abhorrence of slavery. Enlarged as well as oppressed by her society, she experienced a clash of competing ethnic allegiances that for her became a fructifying authenticity.
Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner'sAngels in America
Authors: Freedman Jonathan
Published: February 2007

The discursive ligature between the Jew and the sexually transgressive is crucially revised in Tony Kushner'sAngels in America.Kushner creates a powerful series of metonymies between the queer and the Jew that suggest their affinities but refuse to reify a unitary queer-Jewish identity. The center of this imaginative project is Kushner's Roy Cohn, who both illustrates and transforms the image of the queer Jewish power broker that circulated in American anti-Semitic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Cohn's fate in the play suggests that the author's attitude toward Jewishness is conflicted, and the play's turn to Christian imagery confirms the suggestion. To fulfill laudatory political ends, Kushner deploys a typological vision common in American imaginative production and fulfills a pattern of assimilation equally common in American Jewish experience. I conclude by turning to Walter Benjamin, one of Kushner's sources, for a different model of identity formation that might avoid this fate.
“To Be Continued …”
Authors: Grass Günter
Published: February 2007

Having made this announcement, nineteenth-century works of fiction would go on and on. magazines and newspapers gave them all the space they wished: the serialized novel was in its heyday. While the early chapters appeared in quick succession, the core of the work was being written out by hand, and its conclusion was yet to be conceived. Nor was it only trivial horror stories or tearjerkers that thus held the reader in thrall. Many of Dickens's novels came out in serial form, in installments. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was a serialized novel. Balzac's time, a tireless provider of mass-produced serializations, gave the still-anonymous writer lessons in the technique of suspense, of building to a climax at the end of a column. And nearly all Fontane's novels appeared first in newspapers and magazines as serializations. Witness the publisher of the Vossisiche Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first saw print, who exclaimed in a rage, “Will this sluttish story never end!”
Limits of Transliteration: Nigerian Writers' Endeavors toward a National Literary Language
Authors: Onwuemene Michael C.
Published: February 2007

The multiethnic and multilingual character of Nigeria compelled the country's writers to use some form of English, but standard imperial English was not long acceptable to patriotic Nigerians. So Nigeria must develop for its literature an English whose norms were created by Nigerians in response to the special circumstances in their country. Such an English (Nigerian Pidgin) existed at the time of independence, but because it was maligned, the first generation of Nigerian writers sought a more respectable English literary medium. Hence they devised the strategy of “transliteration”—introducing ethnic-language tropes and idioms into the English text. But transliteration was a flawed approach, and its literary output, in a language only marginally different from imperial English, remained inappropriate in Nigeria. Even so, the strategy served the desired goal by demystifying standard English. As a result, Nigerian Pidgin is coming into its own as a literary medium, and Nigerian writers are taking greater liberties in their reconstitution of English.
Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology
Authors: Herman David
Published: February 2007

This essay begins by differentiating between narratively organized sequences of events and nonnarrative sequences associated with deductive reasoning, conversational exchanges, descriptions, and recipes. After reviewing classical accounts of narrative sequences, the essay sketches developments in language theory and cognitive science that have occurred after the heyday of structuralist narrative poetics and that throw further light on two interlinked questions: what is necessary to make a sequence of events a narrative, and what makes some narrative sequences more readily processed as stories than others? Both questions can be addressed by the concept, drawn from artificial-intelligence research, of “scripts”—knowledge representations storing finite, sequentially ordered groups of actions required for the accomplishment of particular tasks. Exploring some literary applications of a theoretical model based on scripts, the final section of the text outlines research strategies for a postclassical narratology that encompasses cognitive approaches to stories. By examining different modalities of the script-story interface, theorists of narrative may be able to rethink the historical development of narrative techniques and to understand better the differences among narrative genres at any given time.
What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse
Authors: Avallone Charlene
Published: February 2007

Since “American renaissance” criticism emerged in 1876, it has derogated women's writings while idealizing men's, despite its shifting definitions of period, canon, and literary standards. My genealogy of the critical discourse of renaissance details ways that this criticism has denied literary value to women writers, especially at historical moments of women's increased publicity and apparent gains of power, thereby helping to maintain larger gender and racial hierarchies. Because of this tradition, I argue, the renaissance discourse is inadequate to current efforts to reenvision United States literary history and to a democratic culture.
Association study of dysbindin gene with clinical and outcome measures in a representative cohort of Italian schizophrenic patients
Authors: Tosato Sarah , Ruggeri Mirella , Bonetto Chiara , Bertani Mariaelena , Marrella Giovanna , Lasalvia Antonio , Cristofalo Doriana , Aprili Giuseppe , Tansella Michele , Dazzan Paola , DiForti Marta , Murray Robin M. , Collier David A.
Published: February 2007

There is evidence suggesting that Dysbindin (DTNBP1) is a susceptibility gene for schizophrenia in Caucasian, Chinese, and Japanese populations. We sought to determine if dysbindin was associated with schizophrenia and its symptoms in a representative group of schizophrenic patients from a Community‐Based Mental Health Service (CMHS) in Verona, Italy. A prevalence cohort of schizophrenic patients (n = 141) was assessed at baseline and then 3 and 6 years later. Eighty patients and 106 healthy controls were genotyped for polymorphisms in dysbindin. We tested if diagnosis, clinical symptoms as measured by the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), and functioning as measured by the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (GAF), were associated with the presence of certain dysbindin polymorphisms. Finally, using the longitudinal clinical data, we tested if patients carrying dysbindin high‐risk haplotypes had a more unfavorable longitudinal clinical outcome. A trend towards statistical association (P = 0.058) between schizophrenia and rs2619538 was found. Using GENECOUNTING software, we found that rs2619538‐P1583 (P = 0.048), P1320‐P1757 (P = 0.034), and rs2619538‐P1583‐P1578 (P = 0.040) haplotypes occurred more often in cases compared to controls before correction for multiple testing. The rs2619538‐P1583 haplotype was more likely to be transmitted to subjects with more severe and persistent psychopathology. These preliminary results are compatible with the view that DTNBP1 is a susceptibility factor for schizophrenia, and is associated with worse psychopathology. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Fate of Benzalkonium Chloride in a Sewage Sludge Low Temperature Conversion Process Investigated by LC‐LC/ESI‐MS/MS
Authors: Sütterlin Heike , Trittler Rainer , Bojanowski Sebastian , Stadlbauer Ernst A. , Kümmerer Klaus
Published: February 2007

Thermocatalytic low temperature conversion (LTC) is a new method for the disposal of sewage sludge. Using this method, sludge is converted into a residual solid (coal) along with reaction water, oil, and non‐condensable gases. The oil can be used as an energy source and the coal as a substitute for charcoal. To this end, it is important to determine whether there are any easily available contaminants present in the coal generated by the process. Contaminants that can be strongly sorbed by sewage sludge solids are, e. g., pharmaceuticals and disinfectants. As an example the fate of the persistent and strong adsorbing disinfectant benzalkonium chloride (BAC) has been investigated within the LTC process. The sewage sludge was spiked with BAC and then subjected to the LTC process. The resulting coal was extracted and analyzed using LC‐LC/ESI‐MS/MS (ion trap). BAC could not be detected in the LTC coal, although it could be extracted from the spiked sludge before the LTC treatment. It can thus be concluded that the investigated compound is not easily available in the coal, and hence that its use does not present a risk.
A note on imposing displacement boundary conditions in finite element analysis
Authors: Wu Baisheng , Xu Zhonghai , Li Zhengguang
Published: February 2007

In this paper, an improved procedure for imposing displacement boundary conditions in the direct stiffness method of the finite element analysis is presented. The proposed procedure neither changes the original order of the master stiffness matrix, nor does it require the rearrangement of the coefficient matrix. Consequently, it is easy to be implemented. Especially, the condition numbers of coefficient matrices of the improved procedure are remarkably reduced; hence the sensitivity of the solution to perturbations is considerably lowered. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed procedure. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cover Picture: Two‐Focus Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy: A New Tool for Accurate and Absolute Diffusion Measurements (ChemPhysChem 3/2007)
Authors: Dertinger Thomas , Pacheco Victor , von der Hocht Iris , Hartmann Rudolf , Gregor Ingo , Enderlein Jörg
Published: February 2007

The cover picture shows the two focal regions of a two‐focus fluorescence correlation spectroscopy set‐up with molecules diffusing through these regions. The depicted curves are the fluorescence autocorrelation curves for the first and the second focus, respectively, as well as the fluorescence cross‐correlation between both foci. In their Article on page 433 Dertinger et al. introduce an external ruler into a fluorescence correlation measurement by having two focal regions with a fixed and well‐defined distance. This allows for absolute and precise determination of molecular diffusion.
A novel method for integrating MEG and BOLD fMRI signals with the linear convolution model in human primary somatosensory cortex
Authors: Nangini Cathy , Tam Fred , Graham Simon J.
Published: February 2007

Characterizing the neurovascular coupling between hemodynamic signals and their neural origins is crucial to functional neuroimaging research, even more so as new methods become available for integrating results from different functional neuroimaging modalities. We present a novel method to relate magnetoencephalography (MEG) and BOLD fMRI data from primary somatosensory cortex within the context of the linear convolution model. This model, which relates neural activity to BOLD signal change, has been widely used to predict BOLD signals but typically lacks experimentally derived measurements of neural activity. In this study, an fMRI experiment is performed using variable‐duration (≤1 s) vibrotactile stimuli applied at 22 Hz, analogous to a previously published MEG study (Nangini et al., [ 2006]: Neuroimage 33:252–262), testing whether MEG source waveforms from the previous study can inform the convolution model and improve BOLD signal estimates across all stimulus durations. The typical formulation of the convolution model in which the input is given by the stimulus profile is referred to as Model 1. Model 2 is based on an energy argument relating metabolic demand to the postsynaptic currents largely responsible for the MEG current dipoles, and uses the energy density of the estimated MEG source waveforms as input to the convolution model. It is shown that Model 2 improves the BOLD signal estimates compared to Model 1 under the experimental conditions implemented, suggesting that MEG energy density can be a useful index of hemodynamic activity. Hum Brain Mapp 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Thymidylate synthase polymorphisms and colon cancer: Associations with tumor stage, tumor characteristics and survival
Authors: Curtin Karen , Ulrich Cornelia M. , Samowitz Wade S. , Bigler Jeannette , Caan Bette , Potter John D. , Slattery Martha L.
Published: February 2007

Thymidylate synthase (TS) is a key enzyme in folate metabolism, a pathway that is important in colorectal carcinogenesis. We investigated the role of functional polymorphisms in the TS 5′‐UTR promoter enhancer region (TSER, 3 or 2 repeats of a 28‐bp sequence) and the 3′‐UTR (1494delTTAAAG) and their association with colon tumor characteristics, including tumor stage and acquired mutations in p53, Ki‐ras and microsatellite instability. Data from a population‐based incident case–control colon cancer study in northern California, Utah and Minnesota (1,206 cases, 1,962 controls) was analyzed using unordered polytomous logistic regression models. In both men and women, individuals with variant TS alleles were at reduced risk of having an advanced stage tumor (metastatic disease: OR = 0.35, 95% CI: 0.2–0.6 vs. wildtype TSER and 3′‐UTR). Stage‐adjusted survival did not differ by genotype. Men with 1 or 2 variant alleles in both the TSER and 3′‐UTR genotypes had a 50% reduced risk of a p53‐positive tumor (OR = 0.5, 95% CI: 0.3–0.9 vs. homozygous wildtype TSER and 3′‐UTR). Women with 1 or 2 variant alleles for either the TSER or 3′‐UTR polymorphism had reduced risk of having any colon tumor that did not vary by mutation status. This study provides some support for associations between TS genotype and colon cancer tumor characteristics. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Restoration of FcRγ/Fyn signaling repairs central nervous system demyelination
Authors: Seiwa Chika , Yamamoto Masahiro , Tanaka Kayoko , Fukutake Masato , Ueki Toshiyuki , Takeda Shuichi , Sakai Risa , Ishige Atsushi , Watanabe Kenji , Akita Masumi , Yagi Takeshi , Tanaka Kotaro , Asou Hiroaki
Published: February 2007

Disruption of myelin causes severe neurological diseases. An understanding of the mechanisms that control myelination and remyelination is needed to develop therapeutic strategies for demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS). Our previous finding indicating the critical involvement of the γ chain of immunogloblin Fc receptors (FcRγ) and Fyn signaling in oligodendrocyte differentiaion and myelination demands a fundamental revision of the strategies used for MS therapy, because antigen–antibody complexes in MS patients may induce the direct dysregulation of myelination process as well as the inflammatory destruction of myelin sheath. Here we show that the FcRγ/Fyn signaling cascade is critically involved in cuprizone‐induced demyelination/remyelination, with no lymphocytic response. The levels of phosphorylated myelin basic proteins (p‐MBPs), especially the 21.5‐kDa isoform, but not the levels of total MBPs, decreased markedly during demyelination induced by aging, cuprizone treatment, and double knockout of FcRγ/Fyn genes. We also showed that the recovery from demyelination in cuprizone‐treated and aged mice is achieved after administration of the herbal medicine Ninjin'yoeito, an effective therapy targeting the FcRγ/Fyn—Rho (Rac1)—MAPK (P38 MAPK)—p‐MBPs signaling cascade. These results suggest that the restoration of FcRγ/Fyn signaling represents a new approach for the treatment of demyelinating diseases. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Lysis of human chondrosarcoma cells by cytolytic T lymphocytes recognizing a MAGE‐A3 antigen presented by HLA‐A1 molecules
Authors: Bluman Eric M. , Coulie Pierre G. , Xiaojuan Sun , Machan Jason , Lin Chouzao , Meitner Patricia A. , Block Joel A. , Terek Richard M.
Published: February 2007

Treatment of chondrosarcomas is limited to resection because these tumors are unresponsive to standard adjuvant treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation. We have previously shown that high‐grade chondrosarcomas express unspecified members of the Melanoma Antigen (MAGE) gene family. We show here that FS human chondrosarcoma (FS) cells express MAGE‐A3 gene and HLA‐A1 molecules. In vitro assays show that a cytolytic T‐lymphocyte clone (CTL) specific for a MAGE‐A3 peptide presented by HLA‐A1 specifically lysed FS chondrosarcoma cells. Addition of antigenic peptide did not increase the susceptibility of FS cells to CTL mediated lysis, suggesting that HLA‐A1 expression by the chondrosarcoma cells limited their susceptibility to lysis by the anti‐MAGE‐A3 CTL clone. Incubation of FS cells with 50 U/mL interferon‐γ increased surface expression of HLA class‐I molecules, increased their susceptibility to lysis, and had no effect on MAGE‐A3 gene expression. These results suggest that immunotherapy targeted against chondrosarcoma cells is possible. © 2007 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 25:678–684, 2007
Diverse types of epineural conduits for bridging short nerve defects. An experimental study in the rabbit
Authors: Ignatiadis Ioannis A. , Yiannakopoulos Christos K. , Barbitsioti Antonia D. , Avram Adrian M. , Patralexis Haralambos G. , Tsolakis Charilaos K. , Papalois Apostolos E. , Xenakis Theodoros H. , Beris Alexandros E. , Soucacos Panayiotis N.
Published: February 2007

In this study the process of peripheral nerve regeneration through an epineural flap conduit was examined using four groups of 126 New Zealand rabbits. There were three study groups (A, B, and C) and 1 control group (D). A 10‐mm long sciatic nerve defect was bridged either with 3 variations of an epineural flap (Groups A, B, and C) or with a nerve autograft (Group D). Animals from all groups were examined 21, 42, and 91 days postoperatively to evaluate nerve regeneration employing light microscopy and immunocytochemistry. Nerve regeneration was studied in transverse sections at 3, 6, and 9 mm from the proximal stump. The gastrocnemius muscle contractility was also examined prior to euthanasia at 91 days postsurgery in all groups using electromyography. Immunohistochemical, histochemical and functional evaluation showed the presence of nerve regeneration resembling the control group D, especially in group A, where an advancement epineural flap was used. In this experimental model an epineural flap can be used to bridge a nerve defect successfully. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc. Microsurgery, 2007.
Effects of adenosine monophosphate‐activated kinase activators on bovine oocyte nuclear maturation in vitro
Authors: Bilodeau‐Goeseels Sylvie , Sasseville Maxime , Guillemette Christine , Richard François J.
Published: February 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an activator of AMPK (5‐aminoimidazole‐4‐carboxamide 1‐β‐D‐ribofuranoside (AICAR)) on bovine oocyte nuclear maturation in vitro. After 7 hr of culture, AICAR (1 mM) significantly increased the percentages of cumulus‐enclosed oocytes (CEO) and denuded oocytes (DO) remaining at the germinal vesicle stage. After 22 hr of culture, AICAR significantly reduced the percentage of CEO reaching metaphase II (MII). AICAR at 1.0 mM also increased the inhibitory effect of the adenylate cyclase activator forskolin in CEO; however, at 0.05 mM, AICAR increased the percentage of oocytes at MII after 22 hr of culture compared to forskolin alone. The adenosine kinase inhibitor 5′‐aminodeoxyadenosine reversed the effect of AICAR in CEO and DO showing that phosphorylation of AICAR by adenosine kinase is required for its inhibitory activity. GMP, but not AMP, inhibited meiosis in CEO and DO; however, inhibition of guanyl and adenyl nucleotides synthesis did not reverse the effect of AICAR suggesting that the inhibitory effect of AICAR is not due to increased synthesis of these nucleotides. Metformin, another activator of AMPK, also inhibited GVBD in CEO and DO. The α‐1 isoform of the catalytic subunit of AMPK was detected in oocytes and cumulus cells, and reverse transcription‐polymerase chain reaction experiments showed the presence of transcripts for α‐1, α‐2, β‐1, and γ‐3 isoforms of the regulatory subunits in cumulus cells and oocytes. These data show that the AMPK activator AICAR is inhibitory to nuclear maturation in bovine oocytes due to activation of AMPK. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 74: 1021–1034, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.