bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Deciding to Settle: Rural-Rural Migration and Agricultural Labour Supply in Southwest Nigeria
Authors: Agbonlahor M. U. , Phillip D.O.A.
Published: November 2014

The study investigates the factors that influence rural migrants’ decision to settle in rural communities as farm labourers in southern Nigeria. This is against the backdrop of the critical roles play by the migrants infilling the farm labour supply deficit; which is occasioned by high rural-urban drift (annual estimate is 37%). Data for the study were obtained from a sample survey of 766 rural migrants drawn from 81 communities in Southwestern Nigeria via a multistage sampling technique. The result shows that the migrants were from within and outside the country. About 76% of the migrants worked as farm labourers in the receiving community while wage employment accounted for about 80% of total employment. The logistic regression estimates reveal that, among other factors, previous migration efforts, household’ and community’ socio-economic and development statuses reduce the odds in favor of migrants’ willingness to settle in the receiving rural community.
Economic Development and Sub-Regional Identities
Authors: Zeaiter Hussein F. , Khalil Raed El , Fakih Khodr
Published: November 2014

This study argues that the regions classified by the World Bank are not coherent in terms of economic structures. The special identities within each region dictate that the economic performance in different sub-regions should be determined independently. Embracing Barro’s (1991) regional uniqueness analysis, each region is divided according to distinctive characteristics. A fixed effects unbalanced panel model for 185 countries over the period 1970–2012 is used. The results indicate that explanatory variables responded differently in each group, which indicates the significant effect of the identities used to determine the division of the regions. Based on our findings, this study recommends that governments should act as follows: (1) adjust their policies so that the population grows according to the growth requirements, (2) rationalize the management of natural resource-revenues and establish a multi-sectored economy, and (3) enhance political rights and civil liberties in addition to fighting corruption.
Valuing Environmental Conservation in the Asean Region: A Contingent Valuation Study of Ulu Temburong National Park
Authors: Tabrani Andi , Lawrey Roger , Pillarisetti J. Ram
Published: November 2014

This paper presents an economic valuation of Ulu Temburong National Park, located on the island of Borneo, which has great potential as a repository of biodiversity and an ecotourism destination. The paper employed the contingent valuation (CV) method to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) of Bruneians for conserving the national park for ecotourism and biodiversity protection purposes, and developed econometric models to analyse the preferences of respondents. According to the results, some dependent variables have a significant impact on the respondents’ WTP and the probability of respondents visiting the national park. The WTP values are low, reflecting a view that the park’s natural wealth should be managed through government funding. Though public support for conservation is strong up to now, there is a need for change to cope with economic challenges associated with depletion of the country’s oil and natural gas resources. The study concludes that policy makers should enhance public awareness, promote forest-based small and medium enterprises, and involve indigenous and local communities in decision-making processes. The government should also consider setting up a research centre for the study of conservation of parks in the entire Borneo region in addition to Ulu Temburong National Park.
The Tax-Spend Nexus in Nigeria: Evidence from Asymmetric Modeling
Authors: Aworinde Olalekan Bashir , Ogundipe Mushay Adeniyi
Published: November 2014

This paper examines the relationship government expenditures and revenues in Nigeria by reposing the implicit assumption of a symmetric adjustment process underlying the standard cointegration and error correction model. The study estimates an asymmetric error correction model using the momentum threshold autoregression framework over the period 1961–2012. First, the results suggest that revenues and expenditures are cointegrated and that the adjustment process of the budgetary disequilibrium is asymmetric. Second, in the short-run there is evidence of a bi-directional causal relationship between government revenues and expenditures. Third, the long-run results show that revenues and expenditures respond to budgetary disequilibrium. The asymmetric adjustment reveals that revenues respond only to a worsening budget, and government expenditure respond to a worsening budget than for an improving budget.
Application of Multiple Output Data Envelopment Analysis in Interpreting Efficiency Improvement of Enterprise Resource Planning in Integrated Circuit Firms
Authors: Tsai Bi-Huei , Chou Shin-Bin
Published: November 2014

This paper is the first to employ multiple outputs, patents and net sales, in our data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine whether operational efficiency improves after enterprise resource planning (ERP) installations. The ANOVA analysis results show that granted patent number significantly increases after ERP installations. ERP implementation indeed stimulates integrated circuit firms to concentrate on innovation activities. Also, the DEA results show that firm efficiency significantly increases after the third year subsequent to ERP implementations. The Tobit regression results further prove that the curtailing of receivable turnover days and inventory turnover days are attributed to efficiency elevation through ERP installations.
Nonlinear Threshold Unit Root Test And PPP In Transition Countries
Authors: Bahmani-Oskooee Mohsen , Chang Tsangyao
Published: November 2014

This study applies the threshold autoregressive (TAR) method proposed by Caner and Hansen (2001) to test the validity of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) in 14 transition countries, using monthly real effective exchange rates over the period January 1994– June 2012. The empirical results indicate that PPP holds only in five countries (i.e., Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Slovenia). Furthermore, we found that the adjustment toward PPP is nonlinear.
Tagging Communication and Information Technology Issues in Developing Countries
Authors: Reaiche Carmen
Published: November 2014

It is important for developing countries to enact IT policies that enable them to take advantage of the new technologies and any consequent economic development. This paper attempts to gain an understanding of how developing countries, in particular Venezuela and Nepal, could incorporate information technology in the overall socio-economic development through a definite information technology strategy.
An Econometric Analysis Regarding the Path of Non Performing Loans-A Panel Data Analysis from Mauritian Banks and Implications for the Banking Industry
Authors: Polodoo V. , Seetanah B. , Sannassee R.V. , Seetah K. , Padachi K.
Published: November 2014

The present study pertains to unravelling the internal (bank specific) and external (macroeconomic) determinants of nonperforming loans in Mauritius using annual report data from a panel of 10 existing banks and macroeconomic data for the period 2000 to 2012. The model used in the present instance comprises of a vector of bank specific and macro economic variables which include the inflation rate, lending interest rates, growth of the construction sector and tourism sector as well as global variables such as the Euro zone’s GDP growth. The model is tested both in a static and dynamic framework. Four estimation techniques are considered, viz Fixed Effects, differenced GMM, System GMM and Random coefficient estimation. The results indicate that, notwithstanding there are many significant factors influencing NPL, the most critical elements nevertheless remain declines in the construction sector and the rise in cross border loans. Interestingly, the study provides important policy insights which centres on the improvement of credit concentration guidelines as well as the modification of the MCIB reporting.
How Ahmadinejad Changed Iran’s Economy
Authors: Habibi Nader
Published: November 2014

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the 2005 presidential election promising economic justice and fairness. Throughout his eight-year presidency, he adopted several populist financial and fiscal policies intended to fulfill his promise. Initially he froze the privatization program but later reactivated it after substantial changes that set aside a portion of shares for the poor. Ahmadinejad brought many commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia into his cabinet and facilitated the sale of a large number of privatized firms to these institutions and their economic units. As a result, the Revolutionary Guards are now actively involved in all types of economic and financial activities in Iran. His most important economic reform was the reduction of price subsidies on energy and fuel products. With the active support of the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards, Ahmadinejad implemented the price subsidies reform in December 2010.
Striving for Authenticity
Authors: de Vries Sophia J.
Published: November 2014

Sophia J. de Vries (1901–1999), who studied with Alfred Adler, Lydia Sicher, and Alexander Mueller, wrote this introduction in 1990 to a series of journal articles by Adler that she had translated. At the time she was living in Oakland, California, and was a consultant and senior training analyst for the Alfred Adler Institute of San Francisco. Her work served as an incentive to carry on the translation of Adler’s clinical works and as reference documents for later translations.
Conversations With Henry Stein
Authors: Wolf James J. , Stein Henry
Published: November 2014

This article was compiled from several audio-and video-recorded encounters with Dr. Henry Stein over the years, starting in 1996 and through 2013. The interviewer, Jim Wolf, is a licensed marriage and family counselor in the San Francisco Bay area who has collaborated closely with Stein for more than 30 years. The interviews cover Stein’s early development and education, his collaboration with Sophia de Vries, and the development of the Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapy approach. The article then focuses on current activities undertaken to promote Adler’s original method and theory by means of current technologies.
A Narrative Survey of Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapists
Authors: Mansager Erik
Published: November 2014

This article reports on information gathered in 2013 from available Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapists worldwide. After a summary of what is involved in the certification training, simple data from the questionnaire are shared.
Applying the Classical Adlerian Family Diagnostic Process
Authors: Pfefferlé Jane , Mansager Erik
Published: November 2014

The authors demonstrate how a thorough intake procedure can prepare the therapist for effective therapy. They apply the Classical Adlerian family diagnostic process in their conjoint work with a client family. Case examples are used to illustrate the components: demonstrating its context, providing session content, and sharing some of the initial questioning. The article concludes with a case assessment featuring lifestyle interactions and a tentative treatment plan.
Classical Adlerian Assessment of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic: “Queen of the Derelicts”
Authors: Pienkowski Dyanne
Published: November 2014

The author demonstrates the technique of questioning and how to make guesses about a client’s psychological movement and life style. A specific case example is provided to illustrate the process of guessing the client’s private logic, psychological movement, scheme of apperception, and life style. The conclusion summarizes some of Adler’s theoretical constructs used during treatment.
Examples and Explanations of the Socratic Method in CADP
Authors: de Vries Sophia J. , Stein Henry T.
Published: November 2014

The following demonstrations by Sophia de Vries (1901–1999) include process commentary by Henry Stein in order to clarify the strategies and logic behind each of a therapist’s responses to a client’s statements. The “clients” are volunteers dealing with a single issue in workshop demonstrations.
Rediscovering Adler
Authors: Stein Henry T.
Published: November 2014

The article addresses the importance of understanding Adler in his original expression rather than relying on contemporary summaries of his work. The author establishes The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler as the foundation of Classical Adlerian Depth Psychotherapy training, which is currently the only training based on Adler’s original work, authentically representing him.
A Room of Her Own: The Woman’s Library, a Footnote to New York City Library History
Authors: Roff Sandra
Published: November 2014

The revolutionary idea of a library for working women in New York City can be traced to 1830, but it remained dormant for twenty-eight years until a group of prominent New Yorkers revived the cause. In 1858 an address by Henry Ward Beecher and other influential citizens reviewed the benefits of such a library, and after two years of planning the women’s library became a reality. New York City was unique in providing a library just for women; however, financial support dwindled, and it was forced to be taken over by the Women’s Protective Union by 1870.
Recordkeeping in Book Form: The Legacy of American Colonial Recordkeeping
Authors: Zhang Jane
Published: November 2014

As a legacy system, book-form recordkeeping plays an important role in documenting and preserving American colonial history. Through a close examination of four sample colonial collections in the Boston area, this study looks into the capacity of book form as a recording, keeping, organizing, and retrieving system in American recordkeeping history. The study highlights the importance of understanding the characteristics of recordkeeping forms and their historical transformations in managing modern archives.
On Cars and Food: Reflections on Sources for the Historical Study of Everyday Information Behavior
Authors: Aspray William , Ocepek Melissa G. , Royer George
Published: November 2014

Historical approaches are beginning to be used in the study of everyday information behavior. The ideal sources for carrying out this kind of scholarship would be large bodies of correspondence or large numbers of diary entries that discuss particular everyday activities, spread across long periods of time. Given the general lack of availability of these kinds of sources, historically minded everyday information behavior scholars need to find alternative source materials to employ in their research, even if these sources give only indirect rather than direct information about individuals’ everyday information behavior. This article discusses a number of these alternative sources (consumer magazines, popular magazines, corporate marketing literature, guidebooks, reviews, and various kinds of advertising) and shows how they were used in historical studies on car buying and eating out in America.
The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory
Authors: Clement Tanya
Published: November 2014

Our cultural institutions host large collections of audio recordings comprising important cultural artifacts. Some of these recordings date back to the nineteenth century and up to the present day. These recordings include music but also poetry readings, field recordings, and presidential speeches and phone calls, as well as the only recordings of languages, oral traditions, and voices that we no longer remember. We have dedicated significant resources to digitizing these collections, yet, even digitized, these artifacts are only marginally accessible for listening and almost completely inaccessible for new forms of access and scholarship. In order to discover convergences in seemingly divergent theories that may guide how we build information infrastructure around our sound heritage, this article considers how early information theory, much of which was crafted within the context of developing communication and sound technologies, can provide a framework for thinking through how to build an information infrastructure that facilitates inquiry with digital audio collections in the humanities.
Boots Book-lovers’ Library and the Novel: The Impact of a Circulating Library Market on Twentieth-Century Fiction
Authors: Wilson Nicola
Published: November 2014

In a report for the Society of Bookmen in 1928, British publishers estimated that between a quarter and two-thirds of all the books they published went to the big four circulating libraries: Boots, W. H. Smith, Mudie’s, and the Times Book Club. This article examines the literary impact of one of the largest of these, Boots Book-lovers’ Library (1899–1966), which by 1935 had around four hundred libraries attached to its high-street pharmacies catering for the literary tastes of over one million subscribers a year. The article considers the impact of the Boots Book-lovers’ Library on authors’ practices of writing and revision and on literary marketing and censorship, focusing in particular on James Hanley’s The Furys (1935) and using unpublished correspondence in the Chatto & Windus archive at the University of Reading to demonstrate how the publisher’s sense of the tastes and expectations of the Boots library reader influenced the revisioning process.
Distancing Disaster: Trauma, Medium, and Form in the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange
Authors: Stroebel William
Published: November 2014

Recent work in trauma studies has begun to differentiate collective trauma from its individual counterpart: while the latter is a psychosomatic phenomenon, the former is a secondary product, mediated materially, temporally, socially, and linguistically. The collective trauma that emerged from the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange of 1919–1924 serves as an exemplary case in point. Looking in particular to literary production, I assess how the trauma narrative of 1919–1924 was “remediated” in two Greek novels. For much of the twentieth century, the field of Greek prose fiction was dominated by the formal regime of realism, which masked the mediations of textual production and promulgated instead a rhetorical logic of authentic and immediate historicity. Using Elias Venezis’s Το νούμερο 31328 (The number 31328) and Kosmas Politis’s Στου Χατζηφράγκου (In the Hadjifrangou neighborhood), I trace the formal strategies by which two particular trauma narratives reacted to this realist regime, developing a theory of the self-reflexive medium.
National Political Parties and EU Policy Developments: The Case of Greece Prior to the Crisis
Authors: Lefkofridi Zoe
Published: November 2014

Greece’s membership in the European Union (EU) and EU policies became key issues in the elections that took place during economic crisis, namely the May and June 2012 legislative and the May 2014 European elections. As the crisis was, and continues to be, an extraordinary period for both Greece and the EU as a whole, the key question concerns whether, due to their ongoing impact on national legislation, EU policy developments have affected national party positions during normal times of integration. However, we know little about Greek party preferences for EU involvement in policy-making and whether EU policy developments affected party competition before the crisis. The present article thus studies party positioning in the policy space during the decades prior to the crisis (1993–2006) using an original survey inquiring Greek party politicians about the crucial policy areas of agriculture and migration, as well as foreign and security affairs. The study reveals differences across Greek parties as well as within parties over time and discusses these findings in the context of the broader debate of party (organizational and policy) change in response to European integration. Besides contributing to this scholarly debate—a literature where, thus far, the Greek case is largely absent—this study enhances our understanding of Europeanization effects on Greek party politics.
Resonance of Solidarity: Meanings of a Local Concept in Anti-austerity Greece
Authors: Rakopoulos Theodoros
Published: November 2014

Scholarly approaches to the Greek crisis usually centered on its political character, tackle it as “a state of exception” or emphasize its “exceptional” features. Departing from a discussion on the nature of the crisis, in this article I examine social reactions to “it,” focusing on grassroots economic activity. I undertake a case study of a “solidarity economy” movement and from there I explore the wider political repercussions of this activity that has appeared in contemporary Greece where grassroots social welfare projects are organized in order to address hardships in the actors’ livelihoods. In this way, I explore the meaning of solidarity, a term that has become ubiquitous in the public discourse of contemporary Greece. Through an ethnographic study of the activities of a movement that organizes anti-middleman food distributions in Greece, I argue that such activities not only tackle the immediate effects of the crisis but also pose a conscious, wider critique to austerity politics. Activists’ appeal to solidarity economies is informed by their aim to formulate more efficient distribution cooperatives in the future.
Muslims in Athens: Narratives and Strategies of Belonging
Authors: Salvanou Emilia
Published: November 2014

In Greece, Muslim migrants are usually conceptualized as an undifferentiated group and are targeted as the most dangerous domestic enemy to the nation’s cultural survival. Nevertheless, Muslim migrants are a highly differentiated group, within which various strategies prevail for negotiating inclusion and resisting exclusion. Drawing from ethnographic research in the relatively long-standing Pakistani community of Nea Ionia, Athens, this paper aims to scrutinize the multiple differentiations that divide the groups who are conventionally categorized as “Muslim migrants.” It focuses on the discourses that emerged among migrants concerning the first protest by Muslims in Athens in 2009, and examines the elements that define and shape them as political agents. The paper also underlines the importance of spaces of solidarity and the renegotiation of the migration experience occurring in the process of the emergence and shaping of the agency of the migrants.
No Bones to Pick with Lanthimos’s Film Dogtooth
Authors: Metzidakis Stamos
Published: November 2014

While most critical reactions to Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Κυνόδοντας (Dogtooth) (2009) have been positive, as indicated by the Cannes Film Festival award it received, many people find it hard to understand and painful to watch. Combining extreme violence and humor in unusual ways, it includes scenes of extraordinary perversity and depravity. This essay argues that the film thereby constitutes a striking example of absurdist cinema in general and of what has been called the “Greek Weird Wave” in particular. For, it refuses to reassert or privilege certain long-standing artistic norms and conventions or traditional values over others. It thus encourages viewers to put aside qualms (“bones”) they have with several scenes in order to appreciate better the questions the film raises about contemporary Western society, especially the social construction of the family in Greece, as well as the new ways the film allows us to rethink such questions.
Harmony and Strife in Memories of Greek-Turkish Intercommunal Relationships in Istanbul and Cyprus
Authors: Halstead Huw
Published: November 2014

In Greek-Cypriot and Istanbul-Greek oral testimonies, two contrasting narratives of Greek-Turkish intercommunal relationships are persistently articulated: one stressing harmonious co-existence, the other violent strife. While the strife narrative bears a stronger resemblance to the emphases of official Greek rhetoric, I reject the notion that we can understand either narrative purely through an opposition between dominant myth and popular reality, and argue that both should be seen as attempts by individuals to understand and represent their experiences. Sometimes as Hellenes, sometimes as Cypriots or Romioí , both groups construct and contest narratives of “hostile Turkish enemies” and “civilized Turkish/Turkish-Cypriot friends.” Greek Cypriots and Istanbul Greeks cope with their traumatic experiences—war and forced migration, respectively—by both connecting themselves to a wider history of Hellenic martyrdom through narratives of strife and distinguishing themselves from the stigma of conflict and intercommunal incompatibility through stories of harmony.
Twentieth-Century Greek Cypriot Art: An “Other” Modernism on the Periphery
Authors: Danos Antonis
Published: November 2014

Twentieth-century Cypriot art, from its emergence within the conditions of colonialism to its flowering in the post-independence era, constitutes a case of an “other” modernism on the periphery. It was a “site-specific” modernism that responded to particularities of Cyprus’s experience of modernity. With regard to Greek Cypriot artists in particular, these responses included a varied negotiation of tradition as well as of modern art as part of both the need to define a collective identity for the colonial moment and the process of achieving a post-colonial present and future. The works of Adamantios Diamantis, Georghios Pol. Georghiou, and Christoforos Savva—three of the most prominent modern Cypriot artists—constitute important episodes in the course of Cypriot modernity, especially in the middle decades of the century. Taken together, their artistic oeuvres chart the trajectory of Greek Cypriot modernism in the pre-1974 era, the mapping of which contributes to the discourse of “alternative” instances in the history of modern art.
Re-Imagining Union in Europe: The Politics of Body, Family, and Reproduction in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Short Stories
Authors: Çelik Ipek Azime
Published: November 2014

In an era of intense migrant labor flow followed by economic crisis in Greece and in several other European countries, Sotiris Dimitriou’s short stories reflect on the affective influence of these changes on the fragile body of the individual as well as on social and sexual reproduction. As the body becomes a receptacle of social tensions, the ideals of healthy reproduction and communitarian identity, an ideal “union” based on family, are disrupted in Dimitriou’s work. The author’s dystopias of reproduction provide an insightful portrayal of the way neoliberal regimes of production in contemporary Europe bring migrants and the underclass together: both groups are subject to the violent politics of disposability of bodies under an economy obsessed with efficiency. Dimitriou’s short stories, elusive as they are to social and political analysis, render visible a population excluded from the promise of prosperity in post-Cold War Europe and propose alternative forms of community.
Literary Invisibility
Authors: Horowitz Evan
Published: November 2014

Literature is largely invisible, unlike film which relies so heavily on visual images. One way to grasp the aesthetic power that comes from this invisibility is to look at adaptations, to watch as characters migrate from book to film and struggle to adjust to the bright new environment. Using the most visually distracting things available—ugly monsters, including the painting in Dorian Gray, Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, and Mr. Hyde from Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde —I show how invisibility helps us relate intellectually to objects and characters which might otherwise get trapped at the level of mere appearance. And I explore the possibility that eyes can work differently in literary texts, that they are enabled to see things—immaterial things, divine things—which our eyes never could.
World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature
Authors: Cheah Pheng
Published: November 2014

Recent theories of world literature (Casanova, Damrosch and Moretti) have obscured its normative dimension because they have only understood the world in terms of spatial circulation, the paradigmatic case of which is global capitalist market exchange. This essay offers a critical analysis of the limitations of the recent revival of world literature. It outlines an alternative temporal understanding of the world as the normative basis for a radical rethinking of what “world literature” signifies and develops a normative account of world literature as an active power of world-making that contests the world made by capitalist globalization.
Poetry in the Modern State: The Example of W. B. Yeats’s “Late Style” and “New Fanaticism”
Authors: Sheils Barry
Published: November 2014

In this article I propose to connect Yeats’s “new fanaticism” and his “late style”—a term I have borrowed from Edward Said to describe the preposterous self-consciousness of the poet’s old age. There are two major aspects to my argument: first, that Yeats’s repeated use of violence as a poetic device, especially when he was an old man—inter-generational murder, hunger strike, political protest, or severe cultural critique—was not simply the cathartic exaggeration of a malcontent but the basis of a dialectical imagination. Second, that Yeats’s “new fanaticism” expresses the predicament of modern poetry as it finds itself, according to Hegel’s influential genealogy of the modern, stranded in the discrepant time/space between art and philosophy, between the classical world of sensuous forms and the modern state. I argue that poetic nonsynchronicity or disjointedness as it occurs in Yeats’s work, itself situated between the modes of Victorian neo-romanticism and twentieth-century modernism, frames an exemplary mode of historical thinking in and of the modern world.
Hayden White’s Philosophical History
Authors: Hunter Ian
Published: November 2014

Hayden White’s philosophical history is usually approached as a theory and history of historical consciousness capable of being true or false. In this paper I argue that it is better described as the instrument and effect of a cultural politics aimed at the subordination of empirical historiography to a rival intellectual subculture. This subculture first emerged in 1780s Protestant Germany in the form of Kant’s metaphysical anthropology. But it was the reception of Kantianism in the Protestant colleges of the Northeastern United States, and thence in American pragmatism, that formed the version of this subculture that would shape White’s metahistory. White’s pursuit of the transcendental structures of historical consciousness should itself be understood historically, as an activity internal to the forms of moral and intellectual grooming maintained within a particular academic subculture.
Singing Nonsense
Authors: Ventzislavov Rossen
Published: November 2014

Nonsense is a philosophical concept of strange ubiquity—it is very often used but not often explained. In this paper I turn to the lyrical content of popular songs and the particular brands of nonsense it allows for. The problem I identify is that even at their most nonsensical the lyrics of popular songs lend themselves to certain steady attributions of sense. In other words, while pop songs have the tendency to collapse into lyrical nonsense they also avail themselves of corrective mechanisms that somehow salvage their lyrical and/or musical meaning. Why lyrical nonsense is so frequent in pop songs and how it gets dissolved are questions that merit philosophical attention. My attempt to suggest answers to these questions is twofold. Firstly, I propose a simple taxonomy of lyrical nonsense in songs and try to relate that to the existing scholarship on musical expression and performance. Secondly, I explore the relationship sung nonsense stands in to musical meaning. What ultimately makes nonsense work in songs is not our “common sense” tendency to avoid taking such lyrical content seriously. I argue that our acceptance of sung nonsense is more likely due to the fact that such nonsense suggests its own, heretofore unstudied, conditions of understanding.
The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us
Authors: Goldstone Andrew , Underwood Ted
Published: November 2014

We use quantitative methods to analyze a collection of 21,367 scholarly articles in literary studies from 1889–2013. Our approach reveals aspects of our disciplinary history that have been occluded by existing histories’ emphasis on generational and methodological conflict. We demonstrate gradual, unnoted shifts in the themes and vocabularies of scholarship—including the long rise of new subjects (like violence); we show the surprising novelty of central theoretical concepts; and we explore transformations in the shared rationales for literary scholarship that exceed the boundaries of conventional labels like “New Criticism” and “New Historicism.” Though our method uses computational tools, we not claim to provide a definitive or objective perspective on disciplinary history; instead, our approach, like the related methods of content analysis in the social sciences, allows us to pursue nuanced interpretations of the language of many texts at once.
Generation in Literary History: Three Constellations of Generationality, Genealogy, and Memory
Authors: Erll Astrid
Published: November 2014

“Generation” is a twofold term. Understood as generational identity (generationality) the history of “generation” can be traced back to its foundational moment during the First World War. In its second meaning, as genealogy, the idea of generation is age-old. While sociological and historical research tends to focus on generationality, literary and cultural studies have recently reinvigorated the study of generation as genealogy. Both concepts are deeply enmeshed with literature and other representational media. Such entanglements point well beyond our field’s traditional practice of using the notion of generation as a means of writing literary history (from the “first-generation Romantics” to the “angry young men”). What is at stake, rather, is the development of comprehensive and conceptually rigorous approaches to the many-layered interrelationships between generation, memory, and literature. “Generation” deserves to be put on the agenda of a “new” literary history. This article therefore proposes an integrative literary- and memory-studies perspective on generation, combining classic and more recent theories of generation with historical case studies. It reconstructs three discursive constellations around “generation” that have shaped the past century (the First World War and the “lost generation,” the Holocaust and the “generation of postmemory,” and the nexus between immigration and generation) with a focus on the question of how literature and literary studies have intervened in these discourses. It does so in order to show the rich, and still largely untapped, potential of studying generationality and genealogy as part of literary history.
Almost Gone: Rembrandt and the Ends of Materialism
Authors: Goldsmith Steven
Published: November 2014

This essay looks to Rembrandt’s late religious portrait The Apostle Bartholomew (1661) for a counterpoint to the affirmative materialism characteristic of much criticism today, a trend especially evident in recent vitalist revivals of Lucretius. Against the tendency of contemporary thinkers such as Stephen Greenblatt and Jane Bennett to celebrate the generative powers of recombinatory materialism, and against the tendency of art professionals to scrutinize every material aspect of a painting in order to preserve its physical state across time, Rembrandt’s Bartholomew presents the possibility of a mere materialism—a materialism that, without answering to our needs, allows for loss to be nothing other than loss. Taking advantage of its traditional subject matter (martyrdom by flaying), the painting calls attention to the vulnerability of skin and thus to the deterioration of material surfaces. This susceptibility to damage includes the painting’s own chemical surface, its pigments subject to darkening and decomposition under the influence of ordinary environmental elements: light, air, humidity. This essay also considers the Romantic era provenance of The Apostle Bartholomew , which happened to belong to a materialist in the Lucretian tradition, the English antiquarian Richard Payne Knight. In his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), Knight’s reduction of painting to an austere optics devoid of emotion brings him very close to the impersonal materialism of the Rembrandt painting he owned, but his insistence on the timelessness of Rembrandt’s materialism—immune to degradation because of Rembrandt’s technical mastery and choice of durable pigments—indicates the prevailing blind spot of his aesthetic theory. Knight’s reified materialism is not anomalous; similar principles continue to guide the practice of art conservation today.
Sexual Violations and the Question of Experience
Authors: Alcoff Linda Martín
Published: November 2014

This paper explores the complications of naming and interpreting experiences of sexual violation that arise from the complexity of experience and the possibility of a discursive relativism. If our experiences are discursively and historically constituted, even in part, by the happenstance of the cultures we are born into, by what Foucault wonderfully called our historical a priori, how does this alter the epistemic status, and fruitfulness, of experience claims, and the epistemic authority of survivors? I argue that interpretive processes are usefully understood as occurring within a phenomenological context and as a practice of enacting affordances: in this way variability can be explained without obviating the special epistemic status of survivors.
Rawls in Japan: A Brief Sketch of the Reception of John Rawls’ Philosophy
Authors: Fukuma Satoshi
Published: November 2014

This essay explains how John Rawls’ philosophy has been received in Japan, especially in relation to Japanese culture, politics, and economy. It discusses the reason why, in the 1970s, Rawls’ works were first introduced into Japan not by ethicists and philosophers but rather by economists and jurists. From the 1980s, however, although Rawls’ thought has been mostly ignored by the general public, academics have become more interested in his ideas. In the 2000s, Japan entered a prolonged economic slump, and the resulting tension in society could direct public attention to the theories of justice and Rawls’ philosophy. Finally, future research on Rawls’ philosophy in Japan is proposed.
The Confucian Conception of Freedom
Authors: Li Chenyang
Published: November 2014

Attributing a notion of “free will” to Confucian philosophy has serious limitations; it will be more fruitful to draw on contemporary feminist theories of freedom and autonomy, particularly the notion of autonomy competency, in explicating Confucian freedom. Here, the Confucian notion of freedom in terms of choosing ( ze 擇) is articulated, and a Confucian conception of freedom as choosing the good ( ze shan 擇善) is advanced. Under such a conception, freedom is competence-based, and its realization is liberating and fulfilling. The political implications of Confucian freedom are elaborated and it is argued that while Confucianism leaves plenty of room for civil liberties, a key consideration of the boundaries of individual liberty is the good of humanity.
Non-Representational Language in Mipam’s Re-Presentation of Other-Emptiness
Authors: Duckworth Douglas S.
Published: November 2014

This essay probes the discourses of other-emptiness in the Jonang (jo nang) and Nyingma (rnying ma) traditions. After briefly introducing other-emptiness in Jonang, the locus classicus for other-emptiness in Tibet, I contrast the way Mipam (‘ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846–1912) positions the discourse of other-emptiness in his interpretative system. I then demonstrate how Mipam’s portrayal of other-emptiness highlights the way he uses a perspectival means to incorporate a diversity of seemingly contradictory claims that he uses to support his view of ultimate reality as indeterminate. It is argued that an implication of his view is a non-representational account of language about the ultimate.
Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan
Authors: Sharf Robert
Published: November 2014

Some scholars of Chinese Chan Buddhism maintain that the innovations associated with early (eighth-century) Chan were largely in the area of doctrine and mythology. In other words, early Chan meditation and ritual practices would have been indistinguishable from non-Chan forms until the emergence, in the Song, of distinctive new methods such as kanhua meditation. This article argues that at least some of the early Chan patriarchs did indeed experiment with a new method (or methods), and that this method foreshadowed, at least superficially, techniques developed in twentieth-century Burmese Theravāda that we now associate with the satipaṭṭhāna movement (i.e., “mindfulness,” understood as “bare attention”); similar innovations, possibly influenced by early Chan, can be found in Tibetan Dzogchen. There is evidence that in eighth-century China, as in twentieth-century Burma, these new techniques emerged in order to make Buddhist practice more accessible to the laity, who were not in a position to engage in more traditional forms of meditation. And in China, as in Burma, the innovations sparked controversy: opponents held that the cultivation of a non-judgmental, non-discursive meditative state was ethically dubious and at odds with orthodox Buddhist teachings.
Economic Equity, the Well-Field System, and Ritual Propriety in the Confucian Philosophy of Qi
Authors: Kim Jung-Yeup
Published: November 2014

It is argued here that the function of the well-field system of land ownership is consistent with the role of ritual propriety in Zhang Zai’s philosophy of qi 氣, which emphasizes the realization of a great harmony; a state of vital, affective harmony and equilibrium. In other words, this configuration of land works to realize economic equity, a means to the further end of producing and sustaining equilibrium and harmony among members of a community, and this, I argue, is also the function of ritual propriety.
Karma and Rebirth in the Stream of Thought and Life
Authors: Burley Mikel
Published: November 2014

This essay explores the concepts of karma and rebirth in the light of some key themes from the later work of Wittgenstein. After clarifying what it means to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” it is considered how certain Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers, notably İlham Dilman and D. Z. Phillips, have sought to recover the meaning of “soul” from metaphysical misappropriations by invoking Wittgenstein’s notion of a “picture” The sort of conceptual recovery involved in this task resembles, in some respects, the “demythologizing” and “psychologizing” approaches of certain interpreters of the doctrine of karma and rebirth, especially within the context of Buddhist studies. Illustrative examples of these approaches are compared and contrasted and discussed in relation to instances of individuals articulating their belief in karma and rebirth. On the basis of this discussion, it is concluded that the interpretive approaches in question fail to account for the sense of individual responsibility for one’s own present circumstances that is central to how talk of karma and rebirth frequently operates “in the stream of thought and life.”
Suffering Free Markets: A “Classical” Buddhist Critique of Capitalist Conceptions of “Value”
Authors: Donahue Amy K.
Published: November 2014

This is a critique of capitalist conceptions of “value” that draws on Diñnāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s “exclusion of the other” semantics, Marxist philosophy, and poststructuralist feminist and queer theories. It diagnoses sufferings that are integral to the legal subject of capitalist economics, and raises questions about current interpretations of Buddhist appeals to “conventional truth.”
Leaving the Garden: Al-Rāzī and Nietzsche as Wayward Epicureans
Authors: Groff Peter S.
Published: November 2014

A dialogue is initiated here between classical Islamic philosophy and late modern European thought, by focusing on two peripheral, “heretical” figures within these traditions: Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyā’ al-Rāzī and Friedrich Nietzsche. What affiliates these thinkers across the cultural and historical chasm that separates them is their mutual fascination with, and profound indebtedness to, ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Given the specific themes, concerns, and doctrines that they appropriate from this common source, it is argued that al-Rāzī and Nietzsche should be read as Epicureans and seen in relation to their predecessor as part of the subterranean tradition of philosophical naturalism. However, while each figure appropriates the philosophy of Epicurus, they ultimately transform it in important ways: al-Rāzī offers us a qualified “Platonic” Epicureanism, while Nietzsche forges a radicalized “Dionysian” Epicureanism. The point of such a comparative examination is twofold. First, analyzing the divergent paths of these “wayward” Epicureans sheds new light on the historical trajectory of naturalism as a philosophical stance (as well as its current prospects and limitations). Second, by initiating a dialogue between the classical Islamic and modern European philosophical traditions, we can better understand the antagonisms and shared concerns between these two horizons, as well as the ambiguities and self-questioning that occur within them.
Retrospective on the Global Reach of the East-West Philosophers’ Conferences (Plenary Address at the Tenth East-West Philosophers’ Conference, May 16, 2011)
Authors: Stepanyants (Stepaniants) Marietta
Published: November 2014

Comparative philosophy has been institutionalized in different ways due to the East-West Philosophers’ Conferences started in Honolulu in 1939. The tradition of the EWPC is dynamic, sensitive to the changes and demands of the times. It moved ahead considerably from the initial “synthesis” approach to an examination of specific philosophical issues and themes that could be addressed from the background of different cultural perspectives. The EWPC might justly be recognized as the genuine forerunner of the dialogue of civilizations.
Mozi’s Teaching of Jianai (Impartial Regard): A Lesson for the Twenty-First Century?
Authors: Thompson Kirill O.
Published: November 2014

In response to the waste, violence, and destruction of his times, Mozi began teaching jianai 兼愛 (impartial regard), a reflection on Confucius’ Silver Rule (SR) and teaching of ren 仁 (humaneness). Mozi regarded the negative formulation of the SR as too passive, and the concomitant expressions of ren conduct as circumscribed by the li 禮 (ritual action) that supported hierarchical elite clans and courts. Accordingly, it is argued here that SR and ren practice contributed to harmony and stability within the elites but not among them. Jianai thus reflects a positive Golden Rule (GR) and enjoins a mutual concern that crosses hierarchical levels and clusters, involving a notion of justice as fairness and equity. As an ethical precept of both intrinsic validity and practical efficacy for Mozi’s chaotic world, jianai sits well with our human intuition of fairness and equity, and empirically is shown conducive to fair and positive outcomes. Today, we are increasingly aware of other peoples around the world but also know that our interconnected global village is radically imbalanced. Most of the wealth entering impoverished areas is siphoned off to elites and does not contribute adequately to disadvantaged communities. Could jianai , as corollary of the GR, provide a missing link in contemporary arguments for viewing justice as equity? It expresses a clear and compelling moral truth that encourages empathy and consideration toward others, and the sort of human intuition that economic and business theory attempt to conceal, to the advantage of the vested interests. Mozi saw jianai as a moral theme conducive to a harmonious, win-win society and world.