bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Use of Usus and the Function of Functio : Teleology and Its Limits in Descartes’s Physiology
Authors: Distelzweig Peter M.
Published: July 2015

Descartes rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy. Nonetheless, he employs the apparently teleological language of ‘ functio ’ and ‘ usus ’ in his physiology. I examine this interpretive problem by turning our attention especially to the explanatory structures Descartes uses and the medical context of his physiology. I employ analyses of ‘function’ in philosophy of biology to clarify my interpretive claims. Descartes primarily employs ‘ usus ’ and ‘ functio ’ to provide “function-analytical” explanations of the complex behavior of living things—a familiar project present also in the work of physician Jean Fernel. Here usus are treated like “Cummins-functions.” However, Descartes occasionally employs final causal explanations like those in the work of anatomists Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente and William Harvey. Here usus are treated like “Wright-functions.” Examples include Descartes’s explanations of the bicuspid mitral valve in the heart and of the psycho-corporeal physiology of sensation. This kind of explanation is problematic. Descartes’s explicit strategy for grounding such explanations in divine non-deceptiveness has significant difficulties.
The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to Hume
Authors: Reid Jasper
Published: July 2015

In the seventeenth century, one of the most popular arguments for the existence of God was that drawn from the universal consent of mankind; but this argument fell out of favor during the eighteenth century, never really to recover. This article charts some of the key stages in its early modern downfall. It highlights a general shift among the argument’s supporters, away from treating the existence of God as an innate principle to treating it instead as the result of discursive reasoning. And, if that could be made to work, all might still have been well. However, the effect of that shift was to open the door to alternative accounts of the psychological origins of theistic belief, ones based on sources like tradition or fear. But these other sources could not be relied upon to track the truth in the way that either innateness or reason might have done, meaning that the truth of the hypothesis could no longer be demonstrated from the mere fact that so many people believed it. Authors discussed include Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Ralph Cudworth, Edward Stillingfleet, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, Matthew Tindal, and David Hume.
Leibniz and Prime Matter
Authors: Duarte Shane
Published: July 2015

I argue that the prime matter that Leibniz posits in every created monad is understood by him to be a mere defect or negation, and not something real and positive. Further, I argue that Leibniz’s talk of prime matter in every created monad is inspired by the thirteenth-century doctrine of spiritual matter, but that such talk is simply one way in which Leibniz frames a point that he frequently makes elsewhere—namely, that each creaturely essence incorporates a limitation that is the ultimate source of an original imperfection that affects the creature from the first moment of its existence.
Wallace Stevens and Racial Melancholy
Authors: Glaser Brian Brodhead
Published: July 2015

This essay uses Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of racial melancholy to analyze Wallace Stevens’s poem “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” arguing that Stevens experiences the frustration of his ambition to be a representative poet when he finds himself confronted with an Africanist presence and its reminder of racial violence. As an instance of racial awareness in the context of white modernism, Stevens’s poem is exemplary as an immanent critique of the modernist ambition for the representative poet who can sustain celebrity. The essay argues that the poem models a kind of coldness that is calculated to make visible to readers the diﬃ culties for a white poet as he affectively approaches an imaginative encounter with racial violence against an Africanist presence.
“It Couldn’t Be Robbery To Steal That”: Artistic Appropriation and Twain’s “Jumping Frog”
Authors: Newman Andrew , So Brandi
Published: July 2015

In “The Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894), Mark Twain prefaces his account of the provenance of the famous story that launched his career with two anecdotes about artistic theft. Rereading the “Jumping Frog” in light of these anecdotes and the theory of originality Twain espouses in the “Private History,” this essay disputes the widespread interpretation that credits the internal, vernacular narrator, Simon Wheeler, with a subversive deadpan humor. On the contrary, this frame necessarily identifies the fictional Wheeler as a genuine simpleton. Twain similarly framed his historical source for the “Jumping Frog” story;ͱhis possession accrued not from exercising artistic originality but through publication and accreditation.
Spenser, Harvey, and the Strange Poetics of The Shepheardes Calender
Authors: Wadoski Andrew
Published: July 2015

This essay examines those aspects of The Shepheardes Calender that its commentator, E. K., describes as “strange,” arguing that these features reflect interpretive practices cultivated in the coterie surrounding Edmund Spenser’s friend and mentor, Gabriel Harvey at Cambridge in the 1570s. Constituting a significant reorientation of the humanist critical project as exemplified by contemporary theorists such as Sidney and Puttenham, these interpretive practices ground a poetics in which meaning is not found in synthesizing or subsuming all forms of knowledge under a common system, but rather in contemplating formal variety itself. The Shepheardes Calender notably rejects the commonplace humanist notion that poems exist apart from the world as rationalizing or limiting correctives to the uncertainties of material experience. Rather, the book locates its poems’ affective and conceptual force in their capacity to operate as adaptive responses to, and means of discovery within, a world of persistent, and persistently strange singularities.
The Screened Stages of Slavoj Žižek: The Surplus of the Real
Authors: Joseph Rachel
Published: July 2015

This essay explores the poetics of surplus in relationship to reproducibility, theatricality, and presentness by analyzing Sophie Fiennes’s documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006). The film restages moments from cinema history with Slavoj Žižek acting as performer, guide, philosopher, and Lacanian analyst. When Žižek embeds himself within reproductions of the sets of the films he discusses (ranging from Chaplin and Hitchcock to the Marx Brothers and David Lynch) he creates a surplus by, as Samuel Weber has explored, “installing” a theatricality that is in excess to reproducibility. Fiennes and Žižek frame these theatrical interruptions in such a way that they establish “screened stages”—moments when theatre appears within cinema. Žižek’s performance creates within the reproducible universe a sense of presence: the surplus that screened stages produce. These instances of surplus offer a glimpse of the Lacanian Real, that aspect of reality that eludes comprehension and the symbolic order.
“Hybrid Vigor”: The Pillow Book and Collaborative Authorship in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Authors: Milne Leah
Published: July 2015

While critics have explored Ozeki’s novel, My Year of Meats , in light of ethnicity, gender, environmental issues, and the politics of the food industry, this article focuses on an aspect that connects all of these elements—namely, the authorial collaborations at the center of the text. The two author-protagonists, the narrator, Jane Takagi-Little, and her Japanese counterpart, Akiko Ueno, define themselves in relation to a third author, Sei Shōnagon, and her tenth-century miscellany text known as The Pillow Book . In response to Roland Barthes’s arguments about the “modern scriptor,” I argue that Jane’s understanding of authorship shifts in relation to her increasingly intricate interactions with Ueno and Shōnagon, eventually leading to the realization that authorial power can manifest itself in positive and productive ways. Through these collaborations, Jane begins to comprehend her own hybridity and difference, her role as editor, and a new way to view creative and artistic freedom.
Mapping the Terrain of Black Writing during the Early New Negro Era
Authors: Jimoh A Yęmisi
Published: July 2015

The literary movement that so many refer to as the “Harlem Renaissance” remains contested terrain and the need to periodize and name the movement is ongoing. As the literary production of the New Negro era came to a close, participants in the literary movement such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Wallace Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, Dorothy West, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson and others gave different accounts of its value, its beginnings, and its end. Subsequently, historians and literary scholars, as well as New Negro Movement participants, have found very little consensus on key questions of periodization. This essay returns to the question of periodizing this movement by identifying a broad range of its distinguishing characteristics and by bracketing its duration, although with a clear recognition that the temporal frame and characteristics may be re-positioned yet again. The project here is not to determine the perceived failure or success of the literary movement or the collective quality of the literary production, a project that would involve determining by whose standards of success, failure, or quality such judgments would be made. This study of the New Negro era expands its boundaries and opens a space for engaging the literary movement by mapping it in ways that scholars too often have deemphasized or have not explored.
Making Distinctions: Economic and Cultural Capital in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House
Authors: Dyck Reginald
Published: July 2015

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House presents a complex social world marked by status anxiety. St. Peter’s sense of place has depended on his status as a professor whose taste exceeds his means, or whose cultural capital exceeds his economic status. Thus, he sustains the illusion that his eminent good taste places him outside of materialistic concerns. Often described as anti-materialist, Professor St. Peter in fact is better understood as a strategic materialist. His new wealth causes him to feel displaced since he must now contend with being one of the nouveau riche. In astutely and acutely engaging the 1920s social world of her professor, Cather particularizes the ways social structures shape the individual choices and self-conceptions of her characters. Their struggles to create personal meaning in a changing world address the problematics of taste and truth.
Staging the German Family Photo Album: The Wehrmacht Exhibit and Thomas Bernhard’s Vor dem Ruhestand
Authors: Dembling Kerstin Mueller
Published: July 2015

In this article, I employ the notion of a Holocaust performative developed by Vivian Patraka and modifies it to accommodate German cultural production about the memory of Germans as Holocaust perpetrators. Rather than engage with the irretrievable absence of the Holocaust victims, many cultural products produced for German audiences highlight the reappearance of the perpetrators in postwar decades. With this as my framework, I analyze the performative strategies involved in cultural texts that invoke the family—and by extension the nation—as a site of memory, including the utilization of photographs. I explore the ways in which such “family albums” have been used in the context of a variety of media, such as the first and the revised Wehrmacht exhibit, the drama Vor dem Ruhestand (1979) by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who wrote this play specifically for the theater in Stuttgart, and Michael Verhoeven’s documentary film Der unbekannte Soldat (2006). My discussion underscores how each of these media perform in intermedial ways to highlight the Germans’ conflicted and difficult engagement with the Nazi past, affecting German cultural and memory politics.
Melancholie und Menschwerdung zur Zeitenwende: Heimito von Doderers “Ritter-Roman” Das letzte Abenteuer
Authors: Wolf Yvonne
Published: July 2015

This article presents a comparison of Heimito von Doderer’s historical texts “Das letzte Abenteuer” and “Ein Umweg” and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s short story “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” and one-act play “Der Tor und der Tod” in order to demonstrate Doderer’s relationship to the art and literature of the fin-de-siècle era. It focuses on melancholia, a central theme of culture around 1900 that plays a foundational role in Doderer’s works. This investigation concentrates on the Dance of Death as an especially significant motif. Alongside memory, melancholia can be understood as a central aspect of Doderer’s works.
Der Teilnehmende Zuschauer: Spectatorship, Community, and Violence in Elfriede Jelinek’s Ein Sportstück
Authors: Muston Edward
Published: July 2015

This article discusses the critique of sports spectatorship in Elfriede Jelinek’s 1998 play Ein Sportstück . In contemporary sports-obsessed society, the stadium is often regarded as a model for a type of activated or participatory spectatorship that sublimates individuals into a crowd and builds communal identities. This article argues that Ein Sportstück shows that the commodification of such experiences engenders a narcissistic mode of self-spectatorship where no true deindividuated crowd can coalesce. Instead, the stadium becomes a site where “anything goes” in the pursuit of heightened individual experience, while theories of crowd behavior are selfconsciously invoked to excuse violently transgressive activity. In this sense, this article shows that Jelinek sees sports fans specifically and spectatorship in general as re-instantiating many of the most pernicious modes of conduct that have plagued Austrian society since 1945.
Foto-Texte, Bild-Poesie: Zwei Überlegungen zu foto- und bildtheoretischen Implikationen von literarischen Foto-Texten am Beispiel von Arno Geigers Die Bewohner von Château Talbot
Authors: Oberreither Bernhard
Published: July 2015

This article examines Arno Geiger’s series “Die Bewohner von Château Talbot,” a literary photo-text with complex visual and theoretical implications that has appeared since 2010 in the journal Volltext . In the series, private snapshots of unknown origin are combined with literary texts. Photography and text appear to tell the same story. How does this collaboration function? Under what theoretical conditions does it present itself and where does the fundamental difference between the two media lie?
From Ritual Dance to Flight?: Glimmers of the Fantastic in Robert Müller’s Tropen: Der Mythos der Reise
Authors: Lim Wesley
Published: July 2015

In this article, I examine how the Austrian writer Robert Müller—in his novel Tropen: Der Mythos der Reise from 1915—depicts the protagonist Brandlberger’s experience of watching ritual dances of the Dumara tribe in the Amazon. Brandlberger observes two series of dances: first, the tribesmen in a communal dance and second, the priestess Zana in a series of solos and duets. His dance depictions continually hint at developing fantastical and intensifying animalistic elements such as the tribesmen Moki donning wings and flying—as a result of Zana’s ecstatic dancing—as well as her multiple transformations into animals. Likely aware of the expressionist dance movement ( Ausdruckstanz )—represented by Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and others, Müller, I argue, depicts similar literary dance forms but also departs from these styles by demonstrating how humans can attain fantastic qualities through dance.
Academic Libraries and High-Impact Practices for Student Retention: Library Deans’ Perspectives
Authors: Murray Adam
Published: July 2015

Numerous studies on retention have highlighted the role of student engagement in influencing students’ withdrawal decisions. This study seeks to address how academic libraries affect student retention by examining the perception of academic library deans or directors on the alignment between library services and resources with ten nationally validated high-impact practices (HIPs). This study used a survey distributed to the academic library deans and directors of public master’s universities in the United States. A positive correlation was found between library instruction, library facilities, and library collections with each of the HIPs.
Impacting Information Literacy Learning in First-Year Seminars: A Rubric-Based Evaluation
Authors: Lowe M. Sara , Booth Char , Stone Sean , Tagge Natalie
Published: July 2015

The authors conducted a rubric assessment of information literacy (IL) skills in research papers across five undergraduate first-year seminar programs to explore the question “What impact does librarian intervention in first-year courses have on IL performance in student work?” Statistical results indicate that students in courses with greater levels of strategic faculty-librarian collaboration performed significantly better in IL outcomes than those in courses with low collaboration. Intensive librarian course support was not necessary to achieve significant learning gains; these tended to occur when librarians provided initial input into syllabus and assignment design, followed by one or two assignment-focused IL workshops.
Human and Machine Entanglement in the Digital Archive: Academic Libraries and Socio-Technical Change
Authors: Manoff Marlene
Published: July 2015

This essay urges a broadening of the discourse of library and information science (LIS) to address the convergence of forces shaping the information environment. It proposes adopting a model from the field of science studies that acknowledges the interdependence and coevolution of social, cultural, and material phenomena. Digital archives and library collections are technocultural artifacts. To understand the entanglement of technologies, institutions, and practices in the production of the digital archive, we must transcend disciplinary divisions and engage in more nuanced and historically informed analysis. This work will provide an appreciation of the myriad ways in which tools shape and inflect the research process.
Academic Librarians and Graduate Students: An Exploratory Study
Authors: Baruzzi Andrea , Calcagno Theresa
Published: July 2015

Graduate students are a significant part of a university’s research population who may begin their studies without all of the skills they need to be successful. The authors conducted a convenience survey, sent to five library e-mail lists, to explore if librarians interact with graduate students and what methods they use to do so. Results show that a majority of respondents meet with graduate students in classes and workshops as well as through direct contact, though the quality of these interactions is unclear. The authors recommend areas of opportunity and discuss ways academic libraries can better serve graduate students.
Examining Mendeley: Designing Learning Opportunities for Digital Scholarship
Authors: Hicks Alison , Sinkinson Caroline
Published: July 2015

Researchers have widely adopted computer programs for reference management, such as Mendeley, due to their ability to support a variety of research practices, including organization and storage of pdfs. These programs also afford participation and networking within new scholarly information landscapes. This paper uses a survey and semi-structured interviews to explore use of Mendeley at the University of Colorado and to provide an initial snapshot of scholars’ adoption of new digital practices. Because these new practices call for different capacities, the authors then used the results to design meaningful learning opportunities for scholars and students.
Serving the Needs of Performing Arts Students: A Case Study
Authors: Mayer Jennifer
Published: July 2015

The intent of this case study was to gain insight into the information needs and research behaviors of upper-division performing arts students, and how to best address those needs. This article presents findings from focus group interviews of thirty music, dance, and theater majors at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The data revealed several themes, including that performing arts students have unmet multimedia, primary, and interdisciplinary research needs and that they struggle with the discovery layer and the catalog. The findings have implications for how library instruction and research services should evolve to serve this population.
“I Never Had to Use the Library in High School”: A Library Instruction Program for At-Risk Students
Authors: Fleming-May Rachel A. , Mays Regina , Radom Rachel
Published: July 2015

Most academic library instruction is limited to one class period, despite empirical evidence that this approach is likely less effective than more sustained instruction. To determine if additional sessions would boost student learning and reduce library anxiety, the authors collaborated with representatives from a program for at-risk undergraduates to develop a three-workshop model for basic instruction and orientation. They first delivered the program during the summer of 2012 and subsequently offered it to three additional groups of students, including a cohort of doctoral students in the sciences. This article describes the process of designing the workshops and evaluating their effectiveness, with special attention to demonstrating how the program supported the parent institution’s goals and mission.
Teaching for Transfer: Reconciling the Framework with Disciplinary Information Literacy
Authors: Kuglitsch Rebecca Z.
Published: July 2015

This article explores the tension between information literacy as a generalizable skill and as a skill within the disciplines. The new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education addresses many challenges facing the previous ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, but the tension between disciplinary expertise and generalizable skills remains. Viewing the documents through the lens of teaching for transfer—that is, instruction that enables students to utilize knowledge and skills gained in one context in other situations—offers a useful approach. Exploring the Framework from the point of view of teaching for transfer addresses both practical and theoretical challenges. This viewpoint respects both the generalizable nature of information literacy and the highly contextual nature of its application in an academic setting.
“A loftier tone”: “Laodamia,” the Aeneid , and Wordsworth’s Virgilian Imagination
Authors: Stryer Steven
Published: July 2015

This article argues that Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” demonstrates the shaping influence exercised by Virgil’s Aeneid over the English poet’s creative imagination. In its focus on the title character’s devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, “Laodamia” treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with the Aeneid , echoing the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil’s Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic’s plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love: Andromache’s hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido’s self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid , “Laodamia” constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet’s creative engagement with the classical inheritance.
Language Barriers
Authors: Fyler John M.
Published: July 2015

The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 offers the most powerful paradigm for linguistic divisions as they harden into language barriers and become markers of human alienation and mutual incomprehension. This essay discusses medieval examples of these barriers, both literary and historical, from a variety of sources including Chaucer. It focuses on several topics: issues of translation, including biblical translation; the perceived contrast between supposedly fixed languages such as Latin and ever-changing vernaculars; and vernacular languages, especially French and English, in their relations to one another.
Dualism in Old English Literature: The Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV
Authors: Riyeff Jacob
Published: July 2015

Scholarship on the Old English body-and-soul theme has largely focused on the damned soul’s hostility toward its body, especially as this is represented in the poem Soul and Body . Yet, whether censuring the poem’s perspective or attempting to rehabilitate it, studies of this theme have not clearly described the concept at its heart, anthropological dualism. This article argues that we as critics must clarify our terms when discussing the body-and-soul theme if we are to gain purchase on just how anthropological dualism is represented in the theme’s various instantiations. Following my treatment of anthropological dualism, I read Vercelli Homily IV as a unique instantiation of the body-and-soul theme that ultimately affirms the complementarity of body and soul and their mutual implication in one another—specifically through the use of dramatic form in the homily’s Judgment scene. Christ’s speeches in this scene produce a structural irony out of the traditional material, simultaneously including the familiar positions while critiquing them internally through an anthropological dualism that is complementary, not hostile, and found in Latin patristic texts commonly studied in Anglo-Saxon England.
The Politics of Translation: Sanitizing Violence in William of Palerne
Authors: Ward Renée
Published: July 2015

Critics frequently identify the fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative romance William of Palerne as a relatively faithful translation of the twelfth-century Old French Guillaume de Palerne . They also often remark that the English poet heavily abbreviates significant episodes in the original, most notably those concerning central martial events: the Duke of Saxony’s rebellion against the emperor (OF 1781–2439; ME 1067–1325) and the protagonist’s breaking of the Siege of Palermo (OF 5459–7035; ME 3261–3934). While explanations for these abbreviations vary, none directly examines the content of the reduced passages in order to understand the poet’s motivations. A comparative analysis of the French and English depictions of these sequences, however, reveals that the English poet goes to great lengths either to eliminate specific content from his source or to significantly sanitize much of the violence present in the original. He carefully separates his protagonist from the characterizations of the French text that employ negative animal imagery and depictions of excessive or unrestrained violence, and he reworks the dénouement scene connected to the protagonist’s lupine (werewolf) companion. Contextual evidence suggests that these targeted edits link directly to the poet’s patron, Humphrey IX de Bohun: the absent or missing content has ties to Humphrey’s social and political position within the fraught internal politics of fourteenth-century England, as well as to his childhood experiences within this context.
“The Gardyn is Enclosed Al Aboute”: The Inversion of Exclusivity in the Merchant’s Tale
Authors: Zedolik John
Published: July 2015

This essay argues that the Merchant’s Tale uses images of figurative and literal enclosure to suggest the irony of January’s regarding himself master of his young wife, May. Though the old man creates figurative and literal enclosures around his wife in order to keep her to himself in an unreasonable manner, the crafty young woman, aided by her young paramour, Damyan, eventually places the old man in a figurative enclosure, leading her to keep the keeper, in a comedic inversion of the unequal dichotomy of husband/wife and master/servant. Like and unlike January, who is unreasonable—due to hubris and delusion—and who loses control, Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator willingly relinquishes control of the narrative and thereby maintains moderate control. Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator illustrates this reasonable relinquishment by moving out of the static portrayals of pilgrims within the General Prologue —which he narrates—and into tales the pilgrims themselves narrate, in addition to engaging in dramatic episodes with other pilgrims—including Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator, who has relinquished enough control to become a participant in the drama.
Sidney’s Greek Poetics
Authors: Lazarus Micha
Published: July 2015

Sir Philip Sidney has exemplified the meager access English readers are thought to have had to Aristotle’s Poetics in the sixteenth century. This article shows, on the contrary, that a passage of his Defence of Poesie was directly translated from the Poetics . Philological analysis across extant translations and contemporary polyglot dictionaries demonstrates, moreover, that Sidney’s source was the Greek itself, and suggests a revised model for English encounters with this crucial text in the Renaissance. [A] thing well said will be wit in all Languages; and though it may lose something in the Translation, yet, to him who reads it in the Original, ’tis still the same.
“fuimus Torys”: Swift and Regime Change, 1714–1718
Authors: Marshall Ashley
Published: July 2015

Accounts of Swift’s life in the months and years following Queen Anne’s death (August 1714) stress his melancholic acceptance of the new world of Hanoverian rule: however unhappy he was about Whig ascendancy, he was unequivocally supportive of the Hanoverian accession and resigned to the Tory collapse. The extant evidence, however, suggests that Swift’s hopes for the Tory future died quite slowly and that his attitude toward the Hanoverian regime was not as conservative and innocuous as most scholars seem determined to believe. Though we have no reason to suppose that Swift was a committed Jacobite, neither are we wise to suppose that he was entirely innocent in his disaffection. Significantly, in autumn 1714 he transferred his allegiance from the Earl of Oxford to the Viscount Bolingbroke—in other words, from the moderate to the radical, from the man looking to join and temper a Whig ministry to the man wanting to challenge it. Swift’s correspondence in this period is frequently partially coded, and many incriminating letters were evidently burned by Swift and his friends, which means that we will never fully know what Swift thought or wanted in the first years of George I’s reign. But what is clear is that the dominant view of Swift’s politics—“Old Whig” despite his being a Tory in religion—does not satisfactorily encapsulate his multifaceted response to regime change in 1714–16.
Linguistic Human Rights Discourse in Deaf Community Activism
Authors: Murray Joseph J.
Published: July 2015

The past three decades of activism for linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000) have witnessed examples of language planning by various national and supranational actors in national and international spaces, with an exchange of ideas and strategies employed by national, regional, and worldwide organizations. In many countries a key goal of deaf-led advocacy organizations has been promotion of the right to use sign language in a variety of settings, from those involving the larger society to those surrounding deaf children’s use of sign language. These organizations maintain that this is a core right, one that can ensure that deaf people are able to fully participate in society at large. This article traces the formation of a sign language–based human rights discourse by deaf communities and outlines what appear to be the main tenets of this discourse. It examines the historical period preceding the era of sign language legislation to explain why a particular form of language planning—status planning—figures so prominently in legislative measures to date. The application of this discourse can be seen in an overview of the legal recognition of sign language in subnational, national, and international settings. A look at research on the outcomes of existing legislation (and legislative efforts) reveals that subsequent outcomes have not fully realized deaf organizations’ stated linguistic human rights goals. A specific failure noted by deaf organizations is that current legislation has not brought about legally codified sign language rights for deaf children.
Ideologies and Attitudes toward Sign Languages: An Approximation
Authors: Krausneker Verena
Published: July 2015

Attitudes are complex and little research in the field of linguistics has focused on language attitudes. This article deals with attitudes toward sign languages and those who use them—attitudes that are influenced by ideological constructions. The article reviews five categories of such constructions and discusses examples in each one.
Standardization of Sign Languages
Authors: Adam Robert
Published: July 2015

Over the years attempts have been made to standardize sign languages. This form of language planning has been tackled by a variety of agents, most notably teachers of Deaf students, social workers, government agencies, and occasionally groups of Deaf people themselves. Their efforts have most often involved the development of sign language books with lists of signs in alphabetical order (as distinct from sign language principles) and more recently as CD-ROMs, DVDs, or websites. With regard to the all-important question about language standardization, Karin Hoyer asks, “Who is behind the effort?” and goes on to say that “standardization actions (often with the aim of reducing lexical variation) have frequently been undertaken with the strong support of the hearing-run education system—from outside, often without any support from the language users themselves” (2012, 32). Today, sign language planning is still carried out largely by hearing professionals; thus, that standardization still needs to be examined in relation to “language ownership” (Eichmann 2009).
A Barking Dog That Never Bites?: The British Sign Language (Scotland) Bill
Authors: Meulder Maartje De
Published: July 2015

This article describes and analyses the pathway to the British Sign Language (Scotland) Bill and the strategies used to reach it. Data collection has been done by means of interviews with key players, analysis of official documents, and participant observation. The article discusses the bill in relation to the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 and posits that, although the bill will raise awareness, it also has significant weaknesses. These include the absence of enforceable rights, the representative imbalance during the negotiation process, the perception of BSL as a tool to access public services, the question who is benefiting from recognition, and most of all the absence of educational linguistic rights and cultural rights.
Evaluating Effects of Language Recognition on Language Rights and the Vitality of New Zealand Sign Language
Authors: McKee Rachel Locker , Manning Victoria
Published: July 2015

Status planning through legislation made New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) an official language in 2006. But this strong symbolic action did not create resources or mechanisms to further the aims of the act. In this article we discuss the extent to which legal recognition and ensuing language-planning activities by state and community have affected the instrumental rights of Deaf NZSL users and consider the prospects for the vitality of NZSL. As evidence, we draw on both the findings of a 2013 Human Rights Commission inquiry into inequalities for NZSL users and data from a study of the vitality of NZSL. We conclude that progress on the language recognition outcomes desired by the Deaf community falls well short of aspirations and that the vitality of NZSL is threatened by declining community size and the current conditions for intergenerational transmission.
The Legal Recognition of Sign Languages
Authors: Meulder Maartje De
Published: July 2015

This article provides an analytical overview of the different types of explicit legal recognition of sign languages. Five categories are distinguished: constitutional recognition, recognition by means of general language legislation, recognition by means of a sign language law or act, recognition by means of a sign language law or act including other means of communication, and recognition by legislation on the functioning of the national language council. The article further describes three categories of implicit (legal) recognition.
Collaborative Knowledge and Merging Media: Teaching Victorian Periodical Print Using Digital Tools
Authors: Ehnes Caley , Hingston Kylee-Anne
Published: July 2015

Using our teaching experiences as case studies, we demonstrate how the development of collaborative digital projects for students blends academic and public dialogue in way that mirrors Victorian periodical print culture. We discuss how our use of digital tools in Victorian literature courses produced profound and engaged student learning. These projects allowed students to participate in Victorian scholarship and understand their work as part of a broader academic conversation through the culture of sharing embedded in Web 2.0. Working with digital tools also helped them develop a more complex understanding of the contexts of Victorian literature.
Periodical Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Classroom
Authors: Mahoney Kristin , Abrams Kaitlyn
Published: July 2015

This essay considers methods for encouraging students at smaller, regional universities to engage in Victorian periodicals research. Even at institutions where access to hardcopy originals and digitized resources is limited, students desire training in research methodology in order to engage with the vast amount of material available to them in the wake of the “digital revolution.” Instructors at these institutions should work to develop teaching collections of hardcopy originals in order to complement digitized resources and to enable students to engage with the materiality of print culture.
Advances in the Visualization of Data: The Network of Genre in the Victorian Periodical Press
Authors: Dewitt Anne
Published: July 2015

This article uses network analysis to explore the reception of theological novels in periodicals during the 1880s. It seeks to redress the neglect of readers shown in arguments for distant reading and to contribute to a growing field of scholarship that applies digital methods to Victorian periodicals. By using data visualization, I analyze how periodical writers drew connections among theological novels. This approach teaches us to see genre not as genealogy but as a means of classification used by readers seeking to make sense of a literary field.
Rethinking Student Research and Writing in the Digital Age: The Punch Historical Archive, 1841–1992 and the NINES Classroom Exhibit Space
Authors: Phegley Jennifer
Published: July 2015

This essay explores the use of the Punch Historical Archive and other digital collections to create online student projects in the NINES classroom exhibit space and other public wiki sites. Phegley uses Punch cartoons to model the kinds of research she asks students to undertake in the classroom.
Cobweb heuristic for multi-objective vehicle routing problem
Authors: Okitonyumbe Y. F Joseph , Ulungu E.-L Berthold , Kapiamba Nt. Joel
Published: July 2015

Solving a classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) by exact methods presents many difficulties for large dimension problem. Consequently, in multi-objective framework, heuristic or metaheuristic methods are required. Due to particular VRP structure, it seems that a dedicated heuristicis more suitable than a metaheuristic. The aim of this article is to collapse different heuristics solving classical VRP and adapt them for to solve the multi-objective vehicle routing problem (MOVRP). The so-called Cobweb Algorithm simulates spiderâ€™s behavior when weaving cobweb. This paper presents the algorithm, a didactic example, concluding remarks and way for further researches.
Notes from the Editors
Authors: The Editors -
Published: July 2015

This issue of Monthly Review began as an invitation to one writer to review Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital shortly after it was published by Monthly Review Press near the end of 1974. It soon became apparent, however, that there was no need to invite a review: a number of economists and sociologists expressed a desire to review the book or elaborate on themes either stressed or touched upon in Harry Braverman's analysis. So we changed the plan from a single review to a special issue of Monthly Review, inviting as authors not only those who had already expressed an interest but also others we thought would have useful contributions to make.

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Work and Consciousness
Authors: Ehrenreich John A. , Ehrenreich Barbara
Published: July 2015

There are some books—a very few-that explain so much that they are most likely to be criticized for not explaining everything. Labor and Monopoly Capital falls in this category; it can be faulted mainly for what it does not do, for failing to answer the questions it never raised in the first place. The most frustrating "omission" of this sort is the one which Paul Sweezy acknowledges in the book's foreword: the failure to analyze "the subjective aspects of the development of the working class under monopoly capitalism." (our emphasis) Yet we think that Labor and Monopoly Capital has a lot to say about the "subjective" issues which preoccupy socialist activists. Braverman does not give the answers (after all, he never raised the questions), but we will argue that he gives some pretty broad hints.

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Capitalist Efficiency and Socialist Efficiency
Authors: Gordon David M
Published: July 2015

Marxism has been blooming around the world. Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff call it "a veritable renaissance." Samir Amin celebrates an "extraordinary rebirth." Just as socialist practice has deepened and spread its roots internationally, so has Marxian theory borne increasingly rich and bounteous fruit.… The Marxian renaissance has involved some theoretical tussles with the earlier Marxist orthodoxy. These theoretical reformulations have necessarily focused on the central problematic of the materialist perspective…. With Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman has provided some central elements lor this clarified focus, helping arm us with many critical arguments for our assault on traditional views.

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Division of Labor in the Computer Field
Authors: Greenbaum Joan
Published: July 2015

Throughout the 1960s there was intense academic debate about the effects of automation, particularly as represented by the computer, on the labor process. Bourgeois economists and sociologists,while admitting that automation frequently reduced skills among many kinds of workers, pointed to the growing employment in the computer industry itself as a bright spot for labor. Many of the new jobs in this growing field were categorized as technical and professional and were considered illustrative of labor-force upgrading.… What was missing from these early evaluations was a firm understanding of the labor processes of capitalism. Marx's analysis is no less applicable to an occupation that could not have been conceived of in his day. In a short twenty-year span, work in the computer field has been transformed by capitalism to suit its needs, through carefully planned division of labor.

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Marx as a Student of Technology
Authors: Rosenberg Nathan
Published: July 2015

This paper will attempt to demonstrate that a major reason for the fruitfulness of Marx's framework for the analysis of social change was that Marx was, himself, a careful student of technology. By this I mean not only that he was fully aware of, and insisted upon, the historical importance and the social consequences of technology. That much is obvious. Marx additionally devoted much time and effort to explicating the distinctive characteristics of technologies, and to attempting to unravel and examine the inner logic of individual technologies. He insisted that technologies constitute an interesting subject, not only to technologists, but to students of society and social pathology as well, and he was very explicit in the introduction of technological variables into his arguments.

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Social Relations of Production and Consumption in the Human Service Occupations
Authors: Stevenson Gelvin
Published: July 2015

The human services require an explicit theoretical analysis of the social relations of consumption in addition to the social relations of production. The purpose of this paper is to begin such an analysis.

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The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption
Authors: Weinbaum Batya , Bridges Amy
Published: July 2015

The housewife is central to understanding women's position in capitalist societies. Marxists expected that the expropriation of production from the household would radically diminish its social importance. In the face of the household's continuing importance, Marxists have tried to understand it by applying concepts developed in the study of production." Yet obviously, the household is not like a factory, nor are housewives organized in the same way as wage laborers. As Eli Zaretsky has written, the housewife and the proletarian are the characteristic adults of advanced capitalist societies." Moreover, households and corporations are its characteristic economic organizations. Just as the socialization of production has not abolished the housewife, so accumulation has not abolished the economic functions of the household. Harry Braverman has demonstrated how the accumulation process creates new occupational structures, and he has documented the expansion of capital's activity to new sectors. We will argue that these developments also change the social relations of consumption, an economic function which continues to be structured through the household and performed by women as housewives.

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Marx versus Smith on the Division of Labor
Authors: Weiss Donald D.
Published: July 2015

The division of labor is a particular form of the differentiation of productive functions; just as the differentiation of productive functions is a particular form of social cooperation.… Social cooperation occurs whenever people work jointly to effect a particular end. Differentiation of function occurs when those who are cooperating perform qualitatively distinct tasks.… Division of labor is a special case of functional differentiation. It occurs whenever the various productive functions are performed in such a way that each person is assigned a task as his or her particular occupation. If jobs are rotated, then we have differentiation of function but not division of labor. This distinction is crucial.

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Two Comments
Authors: Braverman Harry
Published: July 2015

I would like to take this opportunity to comment on two of the many issues that have been raised in the accompanying articles. The same issues have been raised in a number of other reviews and communications on Labor and Monopoly Capital. The first has to do with the connections between the subject matter of the book and the women's movement. The second has to do with the consciousness of the working class as a class for itself, struggling in its own behalf, apart from its objective existence in itself.

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