bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Manuel Maples Arce, Salvador Novo, and the Origin of Mexican Vanguard Autobiographies
Authors: Warner-Ault Ann
Published: May 2014

This article brings into dialogue Manuel Maples Arce’s manifesto “Actual N°-1” (1921) and Salvador Novo’s short narrative piece, El joven: ¡QUE MEXICO! Novela en que no pasa nada (1923), two of the first pieces of vanguard writing in Latin America. Although the two authors belonged to competing Mexican vanguard groups (Maples Arce was an Estridentista and Novo, a Contemporáneo) the article argues that these two early pieces inspired the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos alike; it also explores the similar devices of the two authors. In these early texts Maples Arce and Novo borrow slogans from advertising and politics, voice doubts about state-sponsored modernizing projects, the Mexican revolution and its legacy. Furthermore, both utilize protagonists that are veiled versions of the authors themselves, wandering the streets of Mexico City and pondering the role of the Mexican artist in the wake of the Revolution. Many critics have failed to credit the Estridentistas and the Contemporáneos for their original contributions to Mexican and Latin American literature, criticizing them for parroting tropes from European movements or for failing to relate to their own social and political context. This side-by-side approach to the Estridentistas and Contemporáneos, however, reveals a distinctly Mexican aesthetic that emerged in Mexico between 1921 and 1929, suggesting that a distinctly Mexican vanguard form—the experimental autobiography—emerged in Mexico during the 1920s. Finally, the article proposes that Maple Arce and Novo’s early texts influenced vanguard authors not only in Mexico, but throughout Latin America.
Luis Loayza y el canon de la literatura peruana: condición colonial, ética literaria y forma ensayística en El sol de Lima
Authors: Castañeda Luis H.
Published: May 2014

This article argues that Peruvian writer Luis Loayza’s essay collection El sol de Lima (1974) rewrites the national literary canon of Perú from the ethical perspective of a writer’s devotion to the craft of writing. In his essays, which examine Peruvian authors from colonial times to the twentieth century, Loayza discusses José Carlos Mariátegui’s and Luis Alberto Sánchez’s ideas about Peruvian literature in order to suggest that it has been burdened by a long-lasting and widespread “colonial condition” that can be found at work in modern times and located even in its most prestigious names (Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Ricardo Palma, etc.). Disowning this colonial tradition, Loayza builds a new corpus of writers who, by assuming their literary vocation and an ethics of self-sacrifice, have defeated the sense of being peripheral in certain passages and moments of their work (Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Abraham Valdelomar, Martín Adán, etc.). This tradition created by Loayza does not rest upon fixed notions such as work and author , but is fragmentary and fleeting in nature. According to El sol de Lima , the Peruvian literary canon is not so much a monumental system of great books as an anthology of brilliant textual instants.
Contra Sartre: El marxismo estructuralista de López Aranguren y los límites de la Transición
Authors: L-Quiñones Antonio Gómez
Published: May 2014

This essay explains that López-Aranguren’s intellectual relationship with Marxism is quite symptomatic of a whole generation of young but influential fascist figures that eventually evolved towards liberal and reformist positions. Although he never was a Marxist thinker, Aranguren published El marxismo como moral in 1968 as a strategic intervention in some of the cultural and political debates that galvanized the Spanish intellectual life during the last years of Franco’s regime. On one hand, it is evident that this philosopher did not want to lose any relevance among a young generation of (more or less) radicalized university students, writers and activists. Marxism was, in the late 1960s, the theoretical idiom to establish this dialogue. On the other hand, Aranguren did not sympathize with those humanist and existentialist trends of Marxism that had an important moral, behaviorist, operational, revolutionary and individual dimension. According to this thinker, who gained his philosophical prestige in the field of moral philosophy, one had to purge Marxism of its ethical, utopian, and even emotional-psychological aspects in order to embrace a more sober, austere, realist, and limited version of this school of thought. Aranguren found this version in Althusser’s recently and successfully published texts in Paris. However, Aranguren’s approach to Althusser is revealingly idiosyncratic since its function in El marxismo como moral consists in emphasizing a centrist type of political possibilism that could counteract a left-wing, radical Marxism, eager to conceive the end of the dictatorship as a revolutionary opportunity for a voluntarist and collective political subjectivity.
Poesía y juramento: los monólogos dramáticos de Álvaro Cunqueiro
Authors: Villar María Do Cebreiro Rábade
Published: May 2014

The aim of this article is to recognise the relations of linguistic, semantic and pragmatic contiguity in a series of poems of the book Herba aquí ou acolá , by the Galician writer Álvaro Cunqueiro. The performance dimension of the poems is based on their link to the judicial declaration—generally built from the self-nomination of the characters. As a result of literary styling, the place of justice in these texts becomes a threshold largely determined by declarative peculiarities pertaining to dramatic monologue. Even though theoretic sources on dramatic monologue have highlighted its character based on a specific place, the places referred to in these texts revolve around a net of transcultural references, deeply affected by the update of the historical-literary and/or mythical past. The series dislocates and transmutes the spatial references, undoing the identity illusion of being rooted to an exclusive space, as well as the linguistic principle of decorum. The linguistic register is, in fact, one of the elements through which Cunqueiro creates a dislocated semantic reference. It is also an eloquent hint at the somewhat liminal position acquired by some bilingual texts/authors.
Visualizing the Passion in Andrés de Li’s Summa de paciencia
Authors: Rivera Isidro J.
Published: May 2014

In 1505, Jorge Coci reprinted in Zaragoza Andrés de Li’s Summa de paciencia . Its sole pictorial element is a single, full-page image of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, also known as the Imago pietatis . This essay explores how this image is actualized through the technologies of reading and visualization. Unlike previous studies of Summa de paciencia , this article will study how Andrés de Li incorporated Passion-centered devotional techniques into his treatise on the virtue of Christian Patience. This type of Christocentric spirituality did not play a major role in most medieval treatises on Patience, where the emphasis is traditionally on exemplary sufferance by individuals facing adversity. The distinctiveness of Li’s text resides in its incorporation of Passion-centered techniques within the framework of an exploration of the virtue of Patience. Further, through the medium of print Li and his printer offered laypeople “ways of seeing” their faith through devotional activities focused on the suffering Christ.
Toward an Aesthetics of the Abject: Reimagining the Sensory Body in Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos
Authors: Spira Karen
Published: May 2014

This article offers an interpretation of José María Arguedas’s engagement of the politics of the sensory body in his second novel, Los ríos profundos (1958). The article traces how, through unobtrusive moments of narrative description, Arguedas’s narrative voice reconfigures the reader’s sensory body so that she becomes receptive to the rich sensory experiences available through interaction with the purportedly abject: dirt, rot and excrement. I term the alternate sensibility developed through these passages “sensory complexity” and argue that sensory complexity functions as a daring narrative rejoinder to the image of the “dirty Indian,” a stereotype with a strong hold even on those fighting for indigenous rights in 1950s Peru. Arguedas’s positive reimagination of the abject goes beyond reappropriation; in Los ríos profundos , Arguedas connects sensory complexity to Quechua-speaking indigenous culture’s ecological sensibility, its valuing of the full cycle of life including not just the rose in full bloom but also the dirt that nurtures its growth and the insect and bacteria life that enable its decay. In a paradoxical yet important way that sets his work apart from other indigenista authors of the period, Arguedas uses abject representations to value indigenous culture and convey indigenous worldviews within the novel-form.
The Experience of Ceremony in Henry V
Authors: Smith Matthew J
Published: May 2014

Shakespeare’s Henry V is often paradoxically understood as a nationalistic memorial and an iconoclasm of idol ceremony. Given the play’s elaborate use of religious imagery, this paradox extends to the Renaissance controversy over church ceremony. Yet Henry V is also preoccupied with a third, more problematic type of ceremony: that of the public theater. This essay explores theatrical ceremony’s phenomenology and argues that the play’s most climactic moments—Henry’s soliloquy and the St. Crispin’s speech—do not mark points of transformation, but instead assert monarchy’s and theater’s dependence on ceremony and its paradoxes.
Corporate Nationalism in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday
Authors: Morrow Christopher L.
Published: May 2014

This essay examines the intertextuality between Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Shakespeare’s Henry V and situates their relationship in the military context of 1590s England. It argues that Dekker’s play responds directly to Shakespeare’s by renegotiating contemporary issues of nation and national identity that Shakespeare deploys. Specifically, The Shoemaker’s Holiday rejects Henry V ’s monarchic and martial nationalism and replaces it with a more open and tolerant corporate nationalism based on occupation: Dekker’s shoemakers form a “band of brothers” who redraw traditionally national as well as class boundaries and focus on occupation and communal values over individual honor and conflict against other nations.
Sodomy and Stage Directions in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward(s) II
Authors: Shirley Christopher
Published: May 2014

Nearly all scholars assume that the assassin Lightborne kills Edward by raping him with a spit at the conclusion of Marlowe’s Edward II . They thus assert that this act mocks the desire it punishes—Edward’s for Gaveston. This article emphasizes that early modern texts of the play lack the stage direction that would describe Lightborne’s actions and hence argues that this stage omission’s ambiguity undercuts sodomy’s early modern cultural logic. Marlowe does not defend sodomy but demonstrates that accusations of sodomy are themselves sodomitic, foreclosing jurisprudential efforts to categorize sexual acts in moral terms.
Gender, Genre, and Elizabeth’s Princely Surrogates in Henry IV and Henry V
Authors: Andrews Meghan C.
Published: May 2014

In opposition to readings of The First Part of Henry the Fourth , The Second Part of Henry the Fourth , and The Life of Henry the Fifth that see the plays’ male-dominated worlds as an erasure of Elizabeth, this essay demonstrates that England’s queen in fact powerfully shapes Henry IV and Hal. These plays present a fantasy of a regenerated, revitalized Elizabeth, and this essay argues that our reading of the Henriad’s gender politics and of Shakespeare’s treatment of Elizabeth, maternity, and feminine political power must therefore change. Furthermore, this essay deepens our understanding of the synergy between Shakespeare’s comedies and histories, exploring how these genres responded to their cultural moment during the 1590s.
Thomas Nashe, The Vnfortvnate Traveller , and Love’s Labour’s Lost
Authors: Hunt Maurice
Published: May 2014

This paper describes hitherto unnoticed collocations of passages in Thomas Nashe’s The Vnfortvnate Traveller and their counterparts in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost . In each case, the constellations discovered consist of references to “mote,” especially the biblical mote in the eye; to the Nine Worthies; and to Neo-Platonic imagery of light, eyes, and soul in love sonnets. Since The Vnfortvnate Traveller arguably predates Shakespeare’s play, these constellations, along with other evidence—such as the repeated use of the word “infant” in each work—confirm Shakespeare’s remarkable receptiveness to Nashe’s diction and imagery.
Opportunistic Portia as Fortuna in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice
Authors: Caldwell Ellen M.
Published: May 2014

Renaissance emblematic iconography suggests Portia’s similarity not to Justice or Mercy but to Fortuna or Occasio, figures who are virtually interchangeable in the Renaissance and are both admirably suited to a play about risk taking. References to Portia as prize and to her toppling of Shylock and rescue of Antonio’s merchandise suggest her affinity with Fortuna. Far from being impartial in her judgment, Portia rewards and punishes according to her desire. As the Fortuna of Venice, Portia is the marketplace’s opportunistic entrepreneur who most successfully negotiates the worlds of commerce and love.
Jews, Scots, and Pigs in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: Goldstein David B.
Published: May 2014

The Merchant of Venice is another of Shakespeare’s Scottish plays in that its examination of Jewishness is simultaneously an examination of Scottishness. The threats of Judaism and Judaizing to the Venetian corporate body find stark echoes in the debates about English and Scottish hegemony during the waning years of Elizabeth’s life. The Merchant of Venice uses pork, among many other tropes, in order to explore this double problem of Jews and Scots. Its anatomy of a contemporary crisis of secession leads us to an entirely new reading of the play’s political, cultural, culinary, and religious stakes.
(De)Valuing the Crown in Tamburlaine , Dido Queen of Carthage , and Edward II
Authors: Preedy C. K.
Published: May 2014

In Elizabethan England, the term “crown” could signify either a coin or a royal diadem. This duality resonates strongly in Christopher Marlowe’s drama. Whereas contemporary sovereigns’ crowns were said to signify divine monarchical right, Marlowe’s fictional rulers reduce their crowns to objects that can be traded at will: Tamburlaine treats diadems as prizes to be stolen, Dido bribes Aeneas with her regalia, and Edward II offers crowns to his favorites. The crown’s treatment in these plays brings contemporary political ideology into question, as Marlowe interrogates the royal diadem’s reinvention as a marketable commodity.
Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama
Authors: Lupton Julia Reinhard
Published: May 2014

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follow.
Persia and Kingship in William Cartwright’s The Royall Slave (1636)
Authors: Houston Chloë
Published: May 2014

The recent reorientation of early modern studies draws attention to the Renaissance stage as a site of exploration of images of the Islamic world. This article examines the use of ancient and contemporary Persia in William Cartwright’s The Royall Slave (1636), in which Persia figures as a convenient space through which to examine political issues relevant to the audience at home in England. Assessing the construction of idealized societies and rulers in the play, The Royall Slave is a contemporary Court and academic drama that demonstrates its importance as one of a number of synchronous texts that represent Persia.
Pliny’s Epistolary Re-Inscription: Writing the Tombs of Verginius Rufus and Pallas the Claudian Secretary A Rationibus
Authors: Leach Eleanor
Published: May 2014

Present day appreciation for Pliny’s letters highlights the triadic inter-relationship of epistolary writing, self-representation and memory often seen in the permeability of epistolary boundaries between other literary genres that create lasting fame: oratory, history, lyric, even epigram. This paper examines two pairs of letters that confront memory in epigraphical form in ways that construct the letter writer as both reader and collaborator in ingesting inscribed information and reprocessing its significance in discursive writing. The letters amplify the elliptical communication of inscriptions by responding to commemorations that are provocative in opposite ways: in Letters 6.10 and 9.19 the funerary epigraph for Verginius Rufus because it has not been permanently incised; in Letters 7.29 and 8.6 the bronze sepulchral inscription honoring Claudius’ freedman secretary Pallas, because it has been posted on the Via Tiburtina, arouses Pliny’s indignation.
The Caged Bird In Roman Life And Poetry; Metaphor, Cognition, And Value
Authors: Jones Frederick M. A.
Published: May 2014

This paper considers the domestic caged bird as a cultural artefact in Rome, identifying it as a specifically Roman phenomenon related to Roman habits of acquisition, collection, and display. It further considers the aesthetic aspects of the caged bird and how it impacted on social and mental space both directly and through the media of painting and literature. In this respect the caged bird is considered in relation to accessible metaphoric readings and to the physical and cognitive patterns of the house. Finally, the relationship of the caged bird to art and fashion is considered.
Rhetoric and The Immortal Soul in Tusculan Disputation 1
Authors: Hanchey Daniel P.
Published: May 2014

In the core argument of Tusculan Disputation 1, the interlocutor M identifies four qualities or behaviors of the soul that render it immortal: motus, memoria, inventio , and philosophia . The first three of these activities correspond to three of the activities typically prescribed for the orator. A consideration of Cicero’s discussion of these activities in various rhetorical works reveals that he tends to treat each of them with unique philosophical depth, connecting each to psychic activity. Based on the arguments of Tusc. Disp. 1 then, the orator, in composing and delivering speeches, is practicing the highest behavior of his immortal soul and therefore is doing something worthy, whether in the field of public oratory or rhetorical philosophy.
Cicero and Exile: Building a House of Letters
Authors: McIntosh Gillian E.
Published: May 2014

The identity of a Roman elite man was tied to his house. Thus when Cicero went into exile, and his Palatine property was destroyed, his identity was in danger of crumbling. The sense of loss of self is apparent in the early exilic letters: Cicero is disconsolate, particularly because of the specific loss of the house and all that it represented. Over time, however, Cicero becomes less distraught: he adopts a more distanced attitude to the area where his house once stood. This paper argues that Cicero is able to exact a change in attitude in part by constructing a surrogate place for housing his identity, and that one alternate place is in fact the letters themselves.
The Battle of Alalia
Authors: Papalas Anthony J.
Published: May 2014

The Battle of Alalia, ca. 540 BCE, took place in the Sardinian Sea between the Phocaeans and a coalition of Etruscans and Phoenicians. According to Herodotus (1.166.2) the Phocaeans with sixty galleys achieved a "Cadmeian victory," over the coalition forces consisting of one hundred and twenty galleys. Both sides presumably deployed biremes, penteconters with two levels of oarsmen. The Phocaeans, out-numbered two to one, did not resort to the traditional method of naval warfare: fighting from the decks of their galleys. Instead they reduced the odds against them by introducing the bronze ram, and naval maneuvers that included not only ramming but also the diekplous . Penteconters, however, were not ideally suited for such tactics. The Greeks had developed the trireme more than a century before Alalia but had deployed it in non-military situations. In the generation after Alalia, influenced by the lessons of that battle, they converted the trireme into a ramming machine, thus transforming naval warfare.
Horace, Catullus, and Maecenas
Authors: Skinner Marilyn
Published: May 2014

This essay argues that the scenario of Horace’s Epode 3 is modeled upon that of Catullus 14. In each case the speaker protests against a practical joke played by a friend; the obvious programmatic stance of the latter poem, moreover, casts light on the operations of the former. In c. 14, Catullus threatens to respond to Calvus’ gag volume of doggerel with his own collection of no less awful verse. Suffering heartburn from a dish primed with garlic, Horace meanwhile wishes garlic breath upon his host Maecenas should he try the same trick again. Both malefactors will thus be repaid in kind. Like the anthology of bad poets, the garlic arguably has metapoetic significance, and an allusion to Catullus 13 at the close of the epode suggests that Horace is poking fun at Maecenas’ fondness for composing verse in the neoteric style. Fragments of Maecenas’ own hendecasyllabics addressed to Horace support that possibility.
Caracalla’s Armenia
Authors: Patterson Lee E.
Published: May 2014

We are hard pressed to understand the events of Caracalla’s Parthian war, including the role Armenia played in the conflict, because of gross inadequacies in our sources. A careful analysis suggests that Caracalla intended to annex Armenia but never saw the project through. His intentions can be gauged by his treatment of Edessa, for whose annexation the evidence is more solid. Caracalla was trying to secure his rear, from Osrhoene to Armenia, in preparation for a full-scale Parthian war. Because the goal of stabilizing Armenia proved elusive, given local hostilities, Caracalla had to scale back his plans.
"Then Our Symposium Becomes a Grammar School": Grammarians in Plutarch’s Table Talk
Authors: Eshleman Kendra
Published: May 2014

This article investigates Plutarch’s depiction of grammarians as symposiasts in the Table Talk . Plutarch is unusual in making grammarians part of his ideal sympotic society, but their inclusion meshes with his larger interest in handling diversity within a symposium. Plutarch’s narratives illustrate the intellectual and social limitations of grammarian guests and model techniques for keeping them within bounds. At the same time, they hint at the experience of grammarians in this privileged site of elite culture. Intellectually circumscribed, socially vulnerable, and treated as junior partners, Plutarch’s grammarians nonetheless assert themselves in ways that resist outside views of their discipline.
The decline of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai: public opinion polls posting the writing on the wall
Authors: Booysen Susan
Published: May 2014

The dramatic decline of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T) in the July 2013 elections – to 35 per cent of the presidential vote and 23 per cent of parliamentary seats – was first flagged in a series of 2012 public opinion polls. The elections brought to an end a period of power-sharing government and ended all speculation that some form of inclusive government might be retained post-election. The MDC-T’s poor result in Election 2013 followed a decade of valiant resistance against the often underhanded and violent quest by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to retain power. Many expected that the MDC-T would continue its upward trajectory and emerge from the period of joint government with a victory over ZANU-PF and be ready to assume power. History unfolded contrarily. The MDC-T’s weaknesses in the transitional period were on display while the economy and people’s living conditions improved, however marginally, and hope for better conditions prevailed. Under the cover of the unity government ZANU-PF was implementing a recovery strategy that entailed both the direct out-manoeuvring of the MDC-T and policy change that appeared to articulate with citizen sentiments. By all opinion poll indications, and as the subsequent election confirmed, Zimbabwean voters gave ZANU-PF the majority. With the use of polling data, the article traces these attitude changes. The main data set is the series of Freedom House (FH) polls of 2009, 2010 and especially 2012. The article also compares the 2012 FH findings with the results of other 2012 polls.
‘I was amazed that there are still people like this’: first-year students’ reflections on experiences of racial discrimination at the University of the Free State
Authors: Conradie Marthinus Stander , Brokensha Susan Iris
Published: May 2014

Using CMM (the co-ordinated management of meaning approach), this article investigates differences between white and black first-year students’ interpretations of personal experiences of racism, emphasising the degree to which respondents construct these as linked to past systems of oppression, specifically apartheid. In the narratives thus collected, students racialised as white focus on encounters with restitution, while black respondents relate personal, face-to-face confrontations with racism in public spaces. In the themes that emerged from participants’ reflections on factors such as the motives/causes of prejudicial treatment, white respondents construct restitution as institutionally-sanctioned racism. Black participants link perpetrators’ motives directly to apartheid, but concurrently resist interpreting these as symptoms of a pervasive culture of racism among whites. Examining the results for correlations with Steyn and Foster’s (2008) work on white talk among much older white journalists, suggests that the discursive repertoires that mark these discourses impact the efforts of both white and black students (born in or shortly before 1994) to negotiate their experiences. As such, the findings offer insights into some of the prevailing beliefs that circulate in the sample under study, and are liable to affect efforts at social cohesion in a country where university spaces are considered as increasingly telling barometers of transformation (Soudien 2010).
Coercion, consent, and the construction of capitalism in Africa: development studies, political economy, politics and the ‘Dark Continent’
Authors: Moore David
Published: May 2014

The academic sub-discipline of development studies is too often shorn of politics , but that field too is usually divorced from its material dimension: the unity of political economy (which constitutes the essence of ‘development’) has been sundered. Concentration on the relationship between consent and coercion – between freedom and force – perhaps the core element of the politics behind the pursuit of power and the formulation and execution of accumulation strategies, could reopen analysis of the construction of capitalism in Africa. All societies’ transitions to capitalism have been accompanied by a large degree of violence; Africa’s history has been especially so and the transition is far from complete now – if indeed it can be fulfilled. Yet the ‘legitimacy’ of ruling classes in the making – the consent to their rule that builds hegemony for them and the new socio-economic system they are constructing – is important too. This contribution’s main question is: how can one understand the relationship between coercion and consent while Africa ‘develops’, unevenly and haltingly, towards capitalist democracy? The query ranges theoretically and empirically; its tentative conclusion emphasises the necessity for the deepening of democracy at time when it seems to be diminishing.
Job destruction in Newcastle: minimum wage-setting and low-wage employment in the South African clothing industry
Authors: Nattrass Nicoli , Seekings Jeremy
Published: May 2014

From its establishment in 2002, the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry (NBC) was used by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) and mostly Cape Town-based employers to raise wages in lower-wage areas, including Newcastle. Rising minimum wages were agreed in the NBC, and then extended countrywide by the Minister of Labour. In Newcastle (and elsewhere), major firms shut down, whilst others failed to comply fully with the repeatedly raised minimum wages and levies imposed by the NBC. In 2010, the NBC launched a new ‘compliance drive’, using the labour courts to put pressure on, and close down, non-compliant firms, threatening at least 20,000 jobs. The NBC also agreed further wage increases, and presented these to the Minister of Labour for extension countrywide. Newcastle employers responded by taking legal action against the Minister of Labour and the NBC. The struggle over minimum wages in areas like Newcastle is of broader importance because the non-compliant firms comprised the labour-intensive rump of the last remaining labour-intensive manufacturing sector in South Africa. The Newcastle crisis reveals starkly the tensions between labour market policies and institutions and employment. The Newcastle case shows how, under the guise of promoting ‘decent work’ for workers and the supposed levelling of the playing field for producers, an unholy coalition of a trade union, some employers and the state initiated and drove a process of structural adjustment that undermined labour-intensive employment and exported South African jobs to lower-wage countries such as Lesotho and China.
Can rights-based activism be transformative?: Analysing grassroots mobilisation in the Anti-Privatisation Forum
Authors: Runciman Carin
Published: May 2014

This article challenges the distinction often made in the literature about South Africa’s new social movements between those which pursue a rights-based approach to collective action and those that advocate wider transformative economic, political and social change. It argues that this dichotomy is based on a narrow interpretation of the content of rights-based activism and counter-hegemonic challenges which belie the messy everyday realities of how political mobilisation is forged in the entangled relations between hegemony and counter-hegemony. Through an analysis of the collective-action frames of two affiliates of the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), the article shows how rights and anti-capitalism were understood within each organisation. It also demonstrates how the differing interpretations were forged in interaction with the localised political-opportunity structure. In so doing, this article expands the empirical analysis of grassroots community-based organisations in South Africa and contributes to debates on the counter-hegemonic potential of rights-based activism.
Broken rituals: On the disintegrative power of conflictive media events on English Wikipedia
Authors: Bilić Paško
Published: May 2014

The article studies the integrative social capacities of media events, as hypothesized by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, to understand the transformation of media events in the network era. Media events have become increasingly deterrritorialized and performed within cultures of spatial reach across different mediated centres that transcend national borders. In the global and network age media events are performed not only as integrative, but also as disruptive and conflictive. A case study follows closely the dynamic by which the audience of English Wikipedia editors reacts to global media reports, and reorganizes information to create new event spheres based on specific internal community norms and values. Due to a conflictive event, or a disaster marathon, it was difficult for the community to integrate the available information and it experienced a series of failed performances. The event was filled with anxiety, distrust and disagreements over its nature and outcome. Nonetheless, with the affordances of networked technologies and globally dispersed community of editors, Wikipedia performed the role of an online host community of the event by creating and renegotiating a new definition and meaning of the event.
The ethnocultural film festival as media happening: French-Maghrebi film in Marseille
Authors: Stewart Michelle
Published: May 2014

This article analyses the efforts of a local film festival to bridge the cultures north and south of the Mediterranean by bringing North African film to Marseille. Marseille’s distance from national broadcast culture underscores the city as an unlikely host for an integrative media event, but allows for an examination of how the small scale of the community film festival provides an important counterpoint to the national thrust of the broadcast media event. Such festivals are non-broadcast media events. They are local, face-to-face, and immediate (i.e., live in a non-broadcast sense). They constitute a form of ‘slow media’, several days of physical presence in the theatre, focused viewing, and shared public discussion between film-makers and audiences. As such, the ethnocultural film festival is a media happening that strives to interrupt the continuous broadcast of official media events that picture the lives of minority communities in ways that run counter to their experience and understanding of them.
Beyond the blue fence: Inequalities and spatial segregation in the development of the London 2012 Olympic media event
Authors: Finlay Christopher
Published: May 2014

This article presents two cases studies of local resistance to the conscious effort of Olympics actors to use East London as representational space to produce and reinforce dominant nationalist and neo-liberal themes in the 2012 Olympic media event narrative. The blue Olympic fence, a 17.5-kilometre plywood barrier that encased the Olympic Park construction site, is used as a device in both case studies to explore the production and contestation of discourses of Olympic space. It is argued that  the blue fence is both the subject and object of discourse about the purposes, values, impacts and flows of Olympics-led development. The first case study is an analysis of alternative representations of East London produced by local political leaders who found themselves on the wrong side of the blue fence and frustrated by the weak community engagement efforts of Olympic organizers. The second case study is an analysis of digital and transmedia projects and texts produced by local East London residents in response to the Olympic blue fence and the Olympic narrative it stood for.
Remaking the ‘World-Class City’: The Commonwealth Games as a media event in ‘Emerging India’
Authors: Sarkar Sreela
Published: May 2014

This article examines the Delhi Commonwealth Games as a media event that facilitated the creation of a divided ‘global city’ at a time when India is celebrated as a rising economic power. The remaking of the capital city of Delhi promised employment and inclusion for India’s subaltern majority. However, the neo-liberal state in conjunction with powerful corporations was involved in accelerated processes of land grabs that dispossessed many urban poor communities. The English-language press was a powerful force in emphasizing deadlines for urban projects and manufacturing consent for unequal modernization through the spectacle of the Games. ‘India Emerging’ was a common frame used by the international media to point to India’s economic success and to simultaneously question its ability to modernize. The international and national media played a vital role in mobilizing elite support for beautification projects while mainly remaining silent on violent processes of urban cleansing. Further, news frames focused on ‘squalor’ and ‘shame’ associated with a narrow understanding of ‘corruption’ that denied the voices of marginalized communities in the city. It is vital to locate the relationship between sports media events and stratified host cities to understand contemporary debates about contested processes of globalization.
Review
Authors: Oliver Rowan
Published: May 2014

Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music, Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman (eds) (2013) New York: Bloomsbury, 375 pp., ISBN: 9781441159373, p/bk, £17.99
COMPARAÇÃO ENTRE MÉTODOS MAGISTRAIS DE HOMOGENEIZAÇÃO PARA A PREPARAÇÃO DE CÁPSULAS E ALENDRONATO DE SÓDIO: SACO PLÁSTICO X ALMOFARIZ
Authors: Myuki Wada Mayara , Ferreira Ribeiro Ana
Published: May 2014

A homogeneização em almofariz é o método tradicional de mistura de pós, usado na manipulação magistral de cápsulas. Para melhorar o processo de produção, farmácias magistrais tem utilizado um método de mistura alternativo utilizando sacos plásticos inflados com ar. O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar a eficiência desta técnica em comparação ao método do almofariz, para a produção de cápsulas de alendronato de sódio. Foram produzidas cápsulas contendo 70 mg de ácido alendrônico por unidade (equivalentes a 91,42 mg de alendronato de sódio triidratado), empregando, para a mistura dos pós, o método de homogeneização em almofariz (ALE-A) e o método do saco plástico com tamisação prévia (ALE-SP-T) e sem tamisação prévia dos componentes (ALE-SP). Para a análise quantitativa da substância ativa nas cápsulas foi utilizado método titulométrico ácido-base. Cada lote foi avaliado com relação ao teor médio, peso médio e uniformidade de conteúdo, apresentando resultados de acordo com as especificações farmacopeicas. No entanto, após análise estatística dos dados de uniformidade de conteúdo, encontramos uma diferença significativa entre a variância do lote ALE-SP e a dos outros lotes, principalmente em comparação ao lote ALE-A (P < 0,0001, para α = 0,05). Este resultado sugere baixa eficiência de homogeneização para o método do saco plástico sem tamisação prévia das matérias-primas.
RISCOS E BENEFÍCIOS DA SUPLEMENTAÇÃO MEDICAMENTOSA DE CÁLCIO NOS IDOSOS
Authors: Bidu Nadielle Silva
Published: May 2014

O cálcio é um dos minerais de importância ímpar no organismo humano, exercendo importantes funções celulares, principalmente sobre o sistema ósseo. Com o envelhecimento, alguns órgãos sofrem alterações que comprometem o seu funcionamento, como no caso do osso que tem a sua densidade reduzida a partir do envelhecimento, aumentando o risco de fraturas e de doenças ósseas como, por exemplo, a osteoporose. Uma opção para diminuir este desgaste ósseo é a utilização de suplementos medicamentosos à base de sais de cálcio, os quais possuem concentrações diferentes de cálcio, além de necessitarem de um pH estomacal ótimo para absorção e apresentarem diferentes graus de solubilidade, podendo, portanto, serem utilizados em diferentes situações clínicas. Além da redução da perda óssea, tal forma de tratamento possui outros benefícios como a redução da pressão sanguínea e redução da dislipidemia, mas também está associado à calcificação vascular e outros riscos que promovem o aumento da mortalidade nos pacientes, além de promover o acúmulo de metais pesados. Como estes suplementos podem ser adquiridos sem prescrição médica, os mesmos estão facilmente ao alcance da população idosa que é induzida pelas campanhas publicitárias, sendo risco de ocorrência de complicações multiplicado. Com isso, o presente estudo teve por objetivo realizar uma revisão sobre
os riscos e benefícios relacionados à suplementação medicamentosa de cálcio realizada, geralmente sem orientação médica, por idosos.
The Media Got it Wrong! A Critical Discourse Analysis of Changes to the Educational Policy Making Arena
Authors: Piazza Peter
Published: May 2014

The context for education policy making has changed dramatically in recent years. Policy-making at the state-level has become characterized by near-unprecedented enactment of neo-liberal education policies, increased influence of so-called Education Reform Advocacy Organizations (ERAOs) and increased challenges to unions’ political influence. In this article, I explore the news media’s characterization of power and political influence in this new policy making arena. I offer case study analysis of a Massachusetts law, passed in the summer of 2012 with support from a non-profit advocacy group called Stand for Children, that limits seniority-based tenure for public school teachers. I use Critical Discourse Analysis to explore how themes, or discourses, common to this new context of policy making played out in the media coverage of the law, and I identify and characterize differences between media coverage of the law and the historical account as told in stakeholder interviews with major players involved in policy debate and development. Ultimately, I suggest that differences between media and interview data can tell us a lot about power and political influence in a time of dramatic policy change.
Accounting Rules for the European Communities: A Theoretical Analysis
Authors: Biondi Yuri , Soverchia Michela
Published: May 2014

In the last decade, the European Union (EU) has reformed its accounting system, issuing its own conceptual framework and 18 accounting standards that draw upon the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) issued by the IPSAS Board. The aim of this article is to analyse this renewed EU accounting system that frames and shapes financial accounting and reporting of the European Communities (EC), in order to assess its capacity to “truly and fairly” represent EC economic activity as a non-business entity.

The EU accounting rules are analysed from a theoretical perspective that disentangles three different accrual-based accounting representations focusing respectively on wealth (static accounting), cash flow and economic flow (dynamic accounting). Our analysis retains a modified dynamic accounting representation that fits the specific economy of public administration. This modified dynamic accounting representation is then applied to assess the representational quality of the EU accounting system. This legal-economic, normative analysis of consistency with our theoretical model is complemented and somehow corroborated by documental analysis, financial analysis and few semi-structured interviews with EU officials.

Generally speaking, our analysis shows that the EU accounting system provides a consistent representation of the EC economic and financial activities, although the reference to the IPSAS has somewhat involved the application of a balance sheet accounting approach that is inconsistent with this representation. In particular, the new EU accounting system has improved on some objectives of financial accounting and reporting, such as: the economic function of redistribution related to the economic solidarity between its constituencies (Member States); the prevention of frauds concerned with transfers and financial operations; the accomplishment of intergenerational and transnational equity, through the recovery of incurred expenditures by constituencies (Member States and, indirectly, taxpayers) located in different places at different times.

These findings seem relevant not only to assess the quality of accounting representation provided by the EU accounting system but also in the view of its possible influence on the European Public Sector Accounting Standards – making process launched since 2013. This process is expected to reframe and reshape EU Member States’ accounting systems in the near future.
Bergson on Possibility and Novelty
Authors: Sinclair Mark
Published: May 2014

Abstract: In “Le possible et le réel” Henri Bergson offers an influential critique of the modal category of possibility: traditional ideas that possibility precedes actuality invert the real relation of priority, and express an inability to apprehend the continual creation of unforeseeable novelty in experience. This article shows how Bergson’s ideas concerning possibility and novelty are involved in his inheritance of a modern concept of genius as a principle of fine art production. Only in grasping the nature of Bergson’s philosophy as a ‘metaphysics of genius’, I contend, is it possible to understand adequately not only his critique of prior possibility and conceptions of novelty but also the positive conception of modality that he advances in the essay according to an idea of the retroactivity of the possible. In conclusion, I argue that this reflection on retroactivity represents a new development in Bergson’s thought that he is unable to develop fully precisely because he is tied to an idea of genius interpreted as a function of the will.
Survey, Illustrations and Limits of Game Theory for Cyber-Physical Energy Systems
Authors: Bosetti Hadrien , Khan Sohail , Aghaie Hamid , Palensky Peter
Published: May 2014

Cyber-physical systems integrate physical components and computational processes,
setting up reciprocal feedback loops between them.
The natural questions arising are how software processes can be integrated with the physical components in a clever way,
and which algorithmic approaches have to be considered according to the objectives pursued.
This paper presents a non-exhaustive review of game-theoretic approaches applied to cyber-physical energy systems.
Der Mehrwert von E-Books und deren Nutzung auf mobilen Geräten
Authors: Wenk Bruno
Published: May 2014

Im Gegensatz zu gedruckten Büchern ist die Nutzung von E-Books an Lesegeräte gebunden. E-Books können als Dateien in verschiedenen Formaten vorliegen. Andere E-Books werden online angeboten, und deren Nutzung setzt einen aktiven Internetzugang voraus. Ein Modell zur Kategorisierung von E-Books vermittelt einen Überblick über deren unterschiedliche Ausprägungen und bildet den Rahmen zur Erläuterung des Mehrwerts von E-Books, vor allem im Zusammenhang mit deren Nutzung auf mobilen Geräten wie Tablets oder Smartphones.
Stability and convergence of the Sasaki–Ricci flow
Authors: Collins Tristan C.
Published: May 2014

We introduce a holomorphic sheaf

ℰ

${\mathcal{E}}$

on a Sasakian manifold S and study two new notions of stability for

ℰ

${\mathcal{E}}$

along the Sasaki–Ricci flow related to the ‘jumping up’ of the number of global holomorphic sections of

ℰ

${\mathcal{E}}$

at infinity. First, we show that if the Mabuchi K-energy is bounded below, the transverse Riemann tensor is bounded in

C
0

${C^{0}}$

along the flow, and the

C
∞

${C^{\infty}}$

closure of the Sasaki structure on S under the diffeomorphism group does not contain a Sasaki structure with strictly more global holomorphic sections of

ℰ

${\mathcal{E}}$

, then the Sasaki–Ricci flow converges exponentially fast to a Sasaki–Einstein metric. Secondly, we show that if the Futaki invariant vanishes, and the lowest positive eigenvalue of the

∂
¯

${\bar{\partial}}$

Laplacian on global sections of

ℰ

${\mathcal{E}}$

is bounded away from zero uniformly along the flow, then the Sasaki–Ricci flow converges exponentially fast to a Sasaki–Einstein metric.
On Aniconicity
Authors: Leone Massimo
Published: May 2014

Why has semiotics focused more on iconicity and resemblance than on aniconicity and dissemblance? Can a semiotic theory of how signs, and in particular icons, tum into non-signs, be formulated? Taking as theoretical point of departure Peirce's triadic conception of signs as consisting in the relation between a representamen and an object through an interpretant, the article explores the evanescence of iconicity and resemblance through several examples of aniconicity and dissemblance: a son who cannot recognize his own father's picture because it is too old; a writer who cannot recognize his own city because it was turned into rubble by aerial bombing; a cubist painter who distorts the pictorial icon of an object so that viewers cannot recognize it; etc. Through these and more examples, the paper points out that semiotics should develop not only a cultural theory of how signs are created, but also a cultural theory of how they are dissolved.
Tartu Semiotics between Semiotic Modelling and Semiotic Analysis
Authors: Kull Kalevi
Published: May 2014

With this issue, Chinese Semiotic Studies continues the column on the Tartu Semiotics School. These introductory notes specify some aspects of the current scope and tasks of semiotic research. A brief account of the Tartu Semiotics Summer School 2011 on the topic of semiotic modelling is added.