bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Summoner Approach: A New Method of Plato Interpretation
Authors: Byrd Miriam
Published: July 2007

The traditional "doctrinal" approach to interpreting Plato's dialogues has been criticized in recent literature on grounds that it can neither account for the structural complexities of the dialogues nor resolve conflicts within or between dialogues. Accordingly, a non-doctrinal, dramatic approach has been offered in its place. In response to this literature, I argue that, though the doctrinal approach is flawed, the non-doctrinal, dramatic approach does not provide a viable alternative. Instead, I offer a revised doctrinal approach based upon Socrates' discussion of "summoners" in Republic 522e–525a and supported by the Meno.
Berkeley and the Spatiality of Vision
Authors: Grush Rick
Published: July 2007

Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision presents a theory of various aspects of the spatial content of visual experience that attempts to undercut not only the optico-geometric accounts of e.g., Descartes and Malebranche, but also elements of the empiricist account of Locke. My task in this paper is to shed light on some features of Berkeley's account that have not been adequately appreciated. After rehearsing a more detailed Lockean critique of the notion that depth is a proper object of vision, Berkeley directs arguments he takes to be entirely parallel against the notion that vision has two-dimensional planar contents as proper objects. I show that this argument fails due to an illicit slide unnoticed by both Berkeley and his commentators—a slide present but innocuously so in the case of depth. Berkeley's positive account, according to which the apparent spatial content of vision is a matter of associations between, on the one hand, tactile and motor contents, and on the other hand non-spatial visual contents, also fails because of an illicit slide—again, unnoticed by Berkeley and his commentators. I close by discerning the salvageable and correct core of Berkeley's theory of the spatiality of vision.
Berkeley and Bodily Resurrection
Authors: Hight Marc A
Published: July 2007

Establishing and defending the Christian faith serves as both a guide and a limit to Berkeley's intriguing metaphysics. I take Berkeley seriously when he says that his aim is to promote the consideration of God and the truth of Christianity. In this paper I discuss and engage Berkeley's superficially weak argument (which I call the natural analogy argument) in defense of the plausibility of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. When his immaterialist resources are properly applied, the argument has more merit than one might initially believe. I conclude by speculating that Berkeley had reason to believe that immaterialism was a better fit with Christianity than materialism.
Can God Make a Picasso? William Ockham and Walter Chatton on Divine Power and Real Relations
Authors: Keele Rondo
Published: July 2007

This article focuses on one aspect of the late mediaeval debate over divine power, as it was discussed by Oxford philosophers Walter Chatton (d. 1343) and William Ockham (d. 1347). Chatton and Ockham would have agreed, for example, that God is ultimately responsible for the existence of the works of Pablo Picasso, but they would not agree over wheher it violates God's omnipotence to say that he cannot make something that Picasso made, for example, the painting Guernica, without using Picasso himself as an intermediate cause. The context of their dispute was a larger debate regarding the ontological status of relations. This article (1) explains how these two issues, omnipotence and relations, became so interestingly tangled together, (2) tries to see which of the two men mentioned above got the better of their exchange, and finally (3) draws out some important consequences for fourteenth-century discussions of causality, occasionalism, and omnipotence.
Socratic Epagōgē and Socratic Induction
Authors: McPherran Mark L.
Published: July 2007

Aristotle holds that it was Socrates who first made frequent, systematic use of epagôgç in his elenctic investigations of various definitions of the virtues (Meta. 1078b7–32).  Plato and Xenophon also target epagôgç as an innovative, distinguishing mark of Socratic methodology when they have Socrates' interlocutors complain that Socrates prattles on far too much about "his favorite topic" (Mem. 1.2.37)—blacksmiths, cobblers, cooks, physicians, and other such tiresome craftspeople—in order to generate and test general principles concerning the alleged craft of virtue.  It is remarkable, then, how little secondary literature exists on this subject—moreover, several of the few accounts we do have naively assume that epagôgç is the same as modern inductive generalization.  Others are in conflict as to whether, for example, we can find any legitimate instances of probabilistic inductive epagôgç in the Socratic dialogues.  This paper addresses these and other issues by offering a new, critical account of Socratic epagôgç—one tied to its occurrences in several key Socratic elenchoi.
The Functioning of Philosophy in Aquinas
Authors: West J. L. A
Published: July 2007

I argue that for Aquinas philosophy is a necessary tool of theology and that philosophy is not changed by its theological context. Rather, the subalternation of disciplines results in a reciprocal relation between philosophy and theology. This is understood in terms of the distinction between what is better known in itself and what is better known to us. This view is defended by (1) reinterpreting Aquinas' use of the metaphor of the water of philosophy being transformed into the wine of theology; and (2) his position that the theological use of philosophy is an instance of grace perfecting nature.
American Developmentalism and Hierarchies of Difference in R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's
Authors: Reyes Eric Estuar
Published: July 2007

This article examines the ways that R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's (1995) explores the production of gendered, sexual, and spatial hierarchies of difference. Filipino American writing is often examined in relation to assimilation narratives. Reyes argues that reading Filipino American writing in the historical and theoretical framework of American developmentalism reveals the ways that Filipino American subject formation navigates the local and global forces of Americanization, U.S. imperialism, and transnational capitalism. Through a close reading of Linmark, Reyes shows how the tensions between these forces manifest as hierarchies of difference, which inevitably are lived through as hierarchies of power.
International Ballroom Dance and the Coreographies of Transnationalism
Authors: Uba George Russell
Published: July 2007

Once regarded as a preserve of the upper class, international-style ballroom dancing has reached an unprecedented level of popularity with the success of the television series, Dancing With the Stars. All but lost in the media frenzy is the majoritarian presence of Asian Pacific ballroom dancers in the very region that produces the show. This article examines both the history of international ballroom dancing—with the imperialist anxieties accompanying that history—and the meanings of widespread Asian Pacific ballroom dance participation. Unstable to begin with, ballroom dancing's colonial race and class signifiers are renationalized by American television but more deeply unsettled by Asian Pacific dancers, who renormalize ballroom dancing as a transnational social activity. Both studios and dancers choreograph space and time, as well as tensions between different types of ballroom dancing, to create a daily performance archive of transnational interactivity.
The Concentric Circles of Dictee: Reclaiming Women's Voices through Mothers and Daughters' Stories
Authors: Wester Michelle Black
Published: July 2007

Scholars have widely debated the meaning of Dictee including its structure, organization, purpose, and representation of the women depicted. Dictee is typically framed according to the nine Greek muses that are understood to outline each section of the text. The organization of nine sections according to the Greek muses forms an incomplete structure, however, that we as readers must recognize. Readers must not only recognize the ordering according to an epic structure, but also the ordering that draws from Korea, a focus of the text. Cha challenges her readers to search beyond their Western knowledge of Greek mythology, and to learn from the images she provides in order to read a text of Korean and Western tradition. Focusing on the mother and daughter relationship, rather than the cultural context of the story, I argue, is the key to understanding Dictee's structure and elicits a Korean as well as a Western perspective. My analysis of Dictee, therefore, follows Cha's metaphor of mother and daughter relations found in her theme of concentric circles, thereby emphasizing the Korean tradition of this text.
What's In a Coin? Reading the Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities
Authors: Holly Donald H , Cordy Casey E
Published: July 2007

Several people accused of being vampires are buried in southern Rhode Island. Their legends are well known, and as a result some of the places where these people are buried are sites of considerable activity. Drawing primarily on material culture left behind by visitors, we attempt to identify activities that are taking place at these gravesites. Our observations suggest that vandalism, partying, legend tripping, tourism, and perhaps even magic and sorcery occur at the gravesites, presumably long after dark. Such activities speak to a wide range of intentions, beliefs, and experiences on the part of visitors. Taking a material culture approach to the study of graveyard practices, this article documents activities that would otherwise be difficult to observe.
Euphemism, Parody, Insult, and Innuendo: Rhetoric and Ethnic Identity at the Mexican Periphery
Authors: Loewe Ronald
Published: July 2007

Ethnic identity in Yucatán can best be understood within the context of regional politics and the promulgation of a regional folk culture. While Yucatecan communities contain several named groups—mayero, catrin, blanco, ts'ul—and their share of ethnic enmities, members of these groups are also always "mestizos" or "Yucatecos," a regional identity that is fostered through poetry, dance, and humor. In exploring this phenomenon, I focus on the jarana, a popular folk dance that is thought to epitomize the unity of Maya and Hispanic culture and has become a familiar feature in political campaigns and tourist venues, as well as in the perennial village fiesta. While in theory the jarana is open to all residents, in practice it has become a spectacle in which well-to-do Yucatecans don the traditional folk costume and re-present themselves as cultivated mestizos, the first among equals.
"Flying Home": Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Black Folk During World War II
Authors: Lucy Robin
Published: July 2007

This article examines the theories of the black folk (those African Americans understood to constitute a folk group) as an economic, cultural, and literary category in the wartime writing of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. It rereads this work within the context of current scholarship that historicizes and contests the construction of the folk in folklore and literary theory and their applications. This article has a particular focus on the numerous and uncollected articles by Ellison and on the oral history narratives he recorded for the Federal Writers' Project. While both writers initially adopted a Marxist perspective on the folk, as defined by Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), the work of Ellison and Wright diverged from this platform, though in radically different ways. Ellison's perspective developed to encompass a cultural nationalist position that was, in turn, deeply embedded in a pluralist and syncretic vision of American culture. In African American folk culture, Ellison limned a political agenda for activism. Wright, in contrast, aligned himself with the views of Gunnar Myrdal, which Ellison disputed. Recovering and delineating the ways in which Ellison's construction of the black folk ultimately diverges from that of Wright is a key element in the rereading of the cultural politics of wartime African American writing.
Performing al-Andalus, Remembering al-Andalus: Mediterranean Soundings from Mashriq to Maghrib
Authors: Shannon Jonathan Holt
Published: July 2007

This article examines how the concepts of "al-Andalus" and "Andalusian music" serve as touchstones for cultural identity in contemporary Syria and Morocco. I investigate how the performance of Andalusian music promotes ideologies of communal, national, and transnational identity in these diverse contexts. Attention to the trans-Mediterranean links among performers and consumers of Andalusian music reveals the often contradictory ways that expressive culture orients complex flows of ideologies and peoples across the boundaries of the contemporary Mediterranean.
"The Best Army that Can Be Put in the Field in the Circumstances": The U.S. Army, July 1951–July 1953
Authors: Donnelly William M.
Published: July 2007

Between July 1951 and July 1953 the U.S. Army found itself attempting to support both a field army in Korea and the NSC 68 military buildup. During these years, however, the Army suffered from a crippling manpower dilemma, both in quantity and in quality, the result of a limited national mobilization and President Harry S. Truman's decision to cut the Army's budget without cutting its missions. This dilemma adversely affected combat effectiveness, readiness, and morale. For some career soldiers, the stresses of this period exposed aspects of the Army's institutional culture that they found disturbing.
The Earliest Shipboard Gunpowder Ordnance: An Analysis of Its Technical Parameters and Tactical Capabilities
Authors: Guilmartin John Francis
Published: July 2007

Few technological developments in the history of warfare have been as portentous as the appearance around the turn of the sixteenth century of effective heavy gunpowder ordnance on shipboard, which began a new era in sea warfare. Employed on Mediterranean war galleys and Portuguese caravels, the weapons marked the solution of a series of daunting technological problems discussed in this article, beginning with the appearance of gunpowder in Europe about 1300. Unlike developments on land, change was at first gradual, but shortly after 1400 the pace of development sharply accelerated to culminate in what may legitimately be termed a revolution in firepower at sea.
British Lend-Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941–June 1942
Authors: Hill Alexander
Published: July 2007

The historiography of Allied assistance to the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) has paid little attention to deliveries made during the First Moscow Protocol period to the end of June 1942, during which Britain was the primary provider of aid. Whilst aid shipped during this period was limited compared to that for subsequent U.S.-dominated protocols, its significance has to be understood in the context of the military and economic situation faced by the Soviet Union during the first year of the war.
Illuminating Strange Defeat and Pyrrhic Victory : The Historian Robert A. Doughty
Authors: Kiesling Eugenia C
Published: July 2007

"Illuminating Strange Defeat and Pyrrhic Victory: The Historian Robert A. Doughty" is the first of a new genre of Journal of Military History articles designed to explore particular historiographical areas by focusing on the contributions of their most distinguished historians. In surveying the scholarship of Brigadier General (Rtd.) Robert A. Doughty as well as his role in shaping the History Department at the United States Military Academy, this article explores the evolution of English-language interpretations of the fall of France in 1940 and the French effort in the Great War while highlighting Doughty's efforts to teach the U.S. Army how to harness historical study in the interest of doctrinal development.
Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge: Patterns of Restraint in Native American Warfare, 1500–1800
Authors: Lee Wayne E.
Published: July 2007

Discussions of the escalation in the intensity and lethality of European–Native American warfare lack a systematic catalog of Indian restraints on war, in contrast to the extensive literature on European warfare. This article surveys eastern Native American societies at war from roughly 1500 to 1800 for limits on destructive potential and intent. Although Indian societies were willing to seek to destroy an enemy, including indiscriminate killing, patterns of restraint inherent to their social authority, cultural values, and methods of warfare tended to limit escalation and the overall level of violence. The dissonance of patterns of restraint in Indian and European warfare contributed to Euro-Indian escalation.
Styles of Command in Seventeenth-Century English Armies
Authors: Manning Roger B. (Roger Burrow)
Published: July 2007

The introduction of the military revolution into armies of the British Isles by officers and soldiers who had served in mainland European armies during the religious and dynastic wars of the seventeenth century was retarded by a martial culture shaped by a chivalric revival characterized by an aristocratic preference for edged weapons over gunpowder weapons and tactics. Aristocratic officers were reluctant to accept the idea that military hierarchies had superseded social hierarchies or that in warfare they should pursue military objectives rather than personal honour. Except for the New Model Army, English military forces before 1688 were backward in developing styles of command and leadership appropriate to the changed conditions of modern warfare.
The French and the British Field Force: Moral Support or Material Contribution?
Authors: Philpott William , Alexander Martin S
Published: July 2007

This article examines how the French viewed British military preparations for a war against Germany in the 1930s. It focuses on declining French expectations of the effectiveness of British military support as the reality of Britain's small and ill-prepared Field Force became apparent as war approached. Nevertheless, France continued to place a high moral value on immediate British participation in the common fight, as a token of her commitment to the alliance and long-term potential. For that reason, careful monitoring of British military developments and strategic intentions remained central to France's preparations for a future war with Germany.
Still a Mystery? General Grant and the Historians, 1981–2006
Authors: Rafuse Ethan Sepp
Published: July 2007

In 1879 General William T. Sherman remarked that, although he had known Ulysses S. Grant for years, "to me he is a mystery, and I believe he is a mystery to himself." Over the last quarter-century many authors have claimed to have solved or at least shed fresh light on the mystery of Grant. For the most part, they have portrayed Grant as a great general and good man, dissenting strongly with the highly negative portrayal of Grant contained in William S. McFeely's 1981 Pulitzer Prize–winning study. This essay traces the evolution of Grant scholarship since 1981 and suggests possible lines of inquiry for future Grant scholars.
The Long-Lost Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases (1936)
Authors: Ulbrich David J
Published: July 2007

Until 1998, the Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases was lost at the National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. Originally published in 1936 by the U.S. Marine Corps Schools, this document resurfaced at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., when Marine Corps records were being shifted among archival facilities. The Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases represented the culmination of decades of doctrinal thinking in the Marine Corps about the defense of island bases against enemy amphibious, naval, and aerial assaults. The passages excerpted in this research note demonstrate that the far-sighted marines correctly conceived of effective ways to defend American bases on Wake Island, Midway, Guadalcanal, and other islands in the Pacific War.
When Semantics Meets Phonetics: Acoustical Studies of Second-Occurrence Focus
Authors: Beaver David I. , Clark Brady , Flemming Edward Stanton , Jaeger T. Florian , Wolters Maria
Published: July 2007

A second-occurrence (SO) focus is the semantic focus of a focus-sensitive operator (e.g. only), but is a repeat of anearlier focused occurrence. We report onthe first systematic productionan d perception experiments to show that SO foci occurring after a nuclear accent are, as Rooth (1996b) has claimed, prosodically marked. We find that (i) there is no mean pitch rise on SO foci, (ii) SO foci are marked by longer duration and greater energy, and (iii) listeners are able to detect the difference between SO foci and nonfoci. On the basis of these results, we argue that SO focus is compatible with theories of focus interpretationthat it has beenclaimed to contradict.
Functional Compositionality and the Interaction of Discourse Constraints
Authors: Birner Betty J , Kaplan Jeffrey P. , Ward Gregory L
Published: July 2007

We argue for the existence of functionally complex constructions whose elements compositionally impose discourse-functional constraints on the use of the whole. In particular, we examine th-clefts (as in That’s John who wrote the book), equatives with epistemic would and demonstrative subjects (as in That would be John), and simple equatives with demonstrative subjects (as in That’s John). We show that, contra previous approaches, the latter two constructions need not be analyzed as truncated clefts. Rather, the properties that these constructions share with th-clefts can be straightforwardly accounted for as the sum of the constraints on their shared elements—that is, the equative construction, the demonstrative subject, and the presence of a contextually salient open proposition. The convergence of these elemental properties in each of these three constructions results in the possibility of the demonstrative being used to refer to the instantiation of the variable in the open proposition, which in turn predicts a complex of distributional behaviors shared by precisely the constructions that share these properties. Because these distributional behaviors can be straightforwardly explained in terms of this functional compositionality, the motivation for a truncated-cleft analysis disappears. These results support the view that not all functional properties must be learned on a construction-by-construction basis; instead, the discourse functions of an utterance are built up compositionally from those of its parts.
Phoneme inventory size and population size
Authors: Hay Jennifer , Bauer Laurie
Published: July 2007

This short report investigates the relationship between population size and phoneme inventory size, and finds a surprisingly robust correlation between the two. The more speakers a language has, the bigger its phoneme inventory is likely to be. We show that this holds for both vowel inventories and consonant inventories. It is not an artifact of language family.
Transmission and Diffusion
Authors: Labov William
Published: July 2007

The transmission of linguistic change within a speech community is characterized by incrementation within a faithfully reproduced pattern characteristic of the family tree model, while diffusion across communities shows weakening of the original pattern and a loss of structural features. It is proposed that this is the result of the difference between the learning abilities of children and adults. Evidence is drawn from two studies of geographic diffusion. (i) Structural constraints are lost in the diffusion of the New York City pattern of tensing short-a to four other communities: northern New Jersey, Albany, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. (ii) The spread of the Northern Cities Shift from Chicago to St. Louis is found to represent the borrowing of individual sound changes, rather than the diffusion of the structural pattern as a whole.
The Role of Phonetic Knowledge in Phonological Patterning: Corpus and Survey Evidence from Tagalog Infixation
Authors: Zuraw Kie
Published: July 2007

INSERT ABSTRACT A current controversy in phonological theory concerns the explanation of crosslinguistic tendencies. It is often assumed that crosslinguistic tendencies are explained by mental bias: a pattern is common because it is favored by learners/speakers. But work by Blevins and colleagues in EVOLUTIONARY PHONOLOGY has argued that many crosslinguistic tendencies can be explained without positing such bias. This would mean that crosslinguistic tendencies cannot be unproblematically used as evidence about the mental machinery that humans bring to learning and using language. In response, many researchers have looked at different types of data, such as processing, learning of real and artificial languages, and literary invention. This article presents another type of data: extension of native-language phonology to words with novel phonological structure, in this case infixation in Tagalog into loanwords with novel initial consonant clusters. The data come from a written corpus and a survey. Tagalog speakers’ treatment of these clusters parallels Fleischhacker’s crosslinguistic findings of cluster splittability. This article argues that explaining the data requires attributing to Tagalog speakers phonetic knowledge and a bias about how to apply that knowledge.
"Something Else": Gendering Onliness in Elizabeth Bowen's Early Fiction
Authors: Cullingford Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

Within the last twenty years, precipitous declines in fertility have begun to reverse the population explosion. Women's access to contraception, education, and employment is reflected in the falling birthrate, and even in Ireland the single-child family is an expanding demographic group. Yet despite the advantages for working women and the health of the planet, having or being an only child is still perceived as a misfortune. Sociologists contend that only children are no more lonely or selfish than their peers, but they cannot shake the old diagnosis: "Being an only child is a disease in itself." In this paper I analyze Elizabeth Bowen's literary representations of the only child, showing how she negotiates negative popular stereotypes through gendered aesthetic techniques. I argue that in Bowen's first three novels, The Hotel, The Last September, and Friends and Relations, onliness is the driving force of her creative process: it shapes her characterization and her formal structures, governs her choice of modernist high-cultural allusions, and, most importantly, enables her exploration of unstable gender identities and queer sexualities.
Virgins of Empire: The Last September and the Antidevelopment Plot
Authors: Esty Joshua
Published: July 2007

This essay argues that The Last September generates both historical meaning and stylistic originality by taking apart the basic progressive structure of the Bildungsroman. While Bowen may have imbued the novel's autumnal scene with a certain wistful appreciation for the civilization of the Anglo-Irish, the novel's plot, language, and characterization in fact tend to encode a deeper and more systematic narrative meaning in which the frozen, virginal fate of Lois Farquar indexes the structural contradictions of settler colonialism and the larger inevitabilities of postcolonial nationalism.
Elizabeth Bowen: A Selected Bibliography
Authors: Farrell Marcia
Published: July 2007

"Elizabeth Bowen: A Selected Bibliography" provides citation information on Bowen work and scholarship not previously included in the 1981 bibliography by J'Nan Sellery and William O. Harris. Citations show growing trends in Bowen scholarship, including studies in transnationalism, gender, and modernism.
"Expressive Objects": Elizabeth Bowen's Narrative Materializes
Authors: Inglesby Elizabeth C
Published: July 2007

Elizabeth Bowen paid particular attention to objects, endowing places and things with sentience and agency in her fiction in order to elucidate a hidden current of vitality in the physical world. After the destruction of World War II, she began to question her reasons for trusting in her earlier intuitions about the non-human realm and the epistemological premises that informed her literary sensibilities. In essays and radio broadcasts from the post-war period, and in her later fiction, she interrogated these notions, uncovering key complexities in her point of view concerning the inanimate.
The Impersonal Personal: Value, Voice, and Agency in Elizabeth Bowen's Literary and Social Criticism
Authors: Miller Brook
Published: July 2007

This essay intervenes in recent critical discussions of Elizabeth Bowen's literary writing by surveying her literary and social criticism. Bowen's literary values are grounded in a combination of Victorian and modernist aesthetics, described as the "impersonal personal." Bowen presciently examines realism's ability to foreground the linkage between power and interpersonal feeling, and she exhorts contemporary writers to realize this potential through the detached representation of personal experience. Bowen's eclectic literary values reflect ambivalence about the relation between literary production and the pressures of the market, and she views the feminine voice as a source of meliorative political and artistic possibilities.
Unstable Compounds: Bowen's Beckettian Affinities
Authors: Mooney Sinéad
Published: July 2007

Critics interested in viewing Bowen from a perspective other than that of mannered social realism have frequently resorted to suggesting points of similarity between her work and that of her fellow Irish Protestant writer, Samuel Beckett. This essay takes a survey of these suggested affinities as its starting point, and uses them as a basis for a comparison between Bowen's petrified ingénues and Beckett's moribunds, their shared interest in inertia, waiting and ritual, an imagery of ruination and syntactically contorted English, and an investment in cultural dislocation linked by many commentators to their shared lack of the "credentials" of Irishness.
"That Eternal 'Now'": Memory and Subjectivity in Elizabeth Bowen's Seven Winters
Authors: Stewart Victoria
Published: July 2007

More than a minor intertext to the contemporaneous Bowen's Court, Elizabeth Bowen's Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood displays an interest in issues of memory and representation that are also to be discerned in many of Bowen's essays from this period and these can provide a new context for the neglected memoir. Seven Winters is also a meditation on the development of subjectivity within a specific historical and cultural context, charting the development of a writerly sensibility and this aspect of the text can also shed new light on the rest of her oeuvre.
Engaged Humanities: moral work in the precincts of medicine
Authors: Carson Ronald A.
Published: July 2007

The medical humanities emerged in the late 1960s in response to shared concerns among a group of hospital chaplains, academic clinicians, and moral theologians and philosophers about the growing power of a technological imperative and a perceived trend toward depersonalization in medicine. Gathering themselves originally under the rubric of "health and human values," these reformers launched a new field of intellectual work and practice reminiscent of the revival of liberal learning spawned by the Renaissance humanists, who endeavored to link humanistic ideals to professional practice in the workaday world of their time. The task of appropriating and adapting the studia humanitatis to our time and circumstances is crucial to defining the evolving identity of the medical humanities field.
Between Health and Illness
Authors: Davies Peter G
Published: July 2007

This essay explores the connections between health and illness, and the processes of salutogenesis, pathogenesis, and homeostasis. Written from an understanding of human embodiment and the consequences this has for our experiences of health and disease, this essay moves towards a positive definition of health, as an on-going outcome from the processes of a life lived well. "Well" here is measured in terms of wealth, relationships, coherence, fitness, and adaptability. Mencken's criticism that "Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality" is answered; the search for health is, in part, a moral as well as a biological enterprise. Both generative processes and remedial measures contribute to health. The patients in my consulting room usually need remedial medicine, but they would also like to flourish as human beings. Doctors should be able to provide a balance of measures towards this end.
Five Dramas of Illness
Authors: Frank Arthur W
Published: July 2007

First-person narratives of illness experience are dramatic: the narrator, who is also the sufferer, is caught in conflicts of forces that permit understanding more than control. Among the dramas of illness, five occur frequently in autobiographical accounts of illness. These dramas overlap and have varying emphases in different people's stories. They are the drama of genesis (what instigated the illness); the drama of emotion work (what emotional displays are required or prohibited); the drama of fear and loss; the drama of meaning; and finally, the drama of self. This five-drama framework can focus critical and clinical attention on which conflicting forces the ill person is working to reconcile, what makes that work difficult, and how conceiving of one's illness as a drama can be a source of meaning and value.
Ending in Wonder: replacing technology with revelation in Margaret Edson's Wit
Authors: Jones Therese
Published: July 2007

Margaret Edson's play W;t (1999) serves both as a guide to apprehending the dangers of a perspective that privileges the technological over the aesthetic and as a model for appreciating the magic of yielding to a performance. Inspired by William F. Pinar's (1995) examination of the place and value of the aesthetic in contemporary American education, this article considers Edson's play in relation to theory, teaching, learning, and art, in order to resituate the humanities—with their emphasis on imagination, transformation, and wonder—within the medical arena.
A Picture of Health?: unmasking the role of appearance in health
Authors: Jutel Annemarie , Buetow Stephen
Published: July 2007

Evaluating health requires visual assessment. From the meticulous self-scrutiny of a worried woman in front of the looking glass to the doctor's reaction at the sight of a patient in the examining room, external appearance plays an important role in appraising health above and beyond clinical assessment. However, this dominance of the visual in our image-driven culture has assumed a disproportionately prominent position. Media, businesses, and health care commonly misrepresent appearance as the reality of health. Industry mongers beauty-promoting wares and services as health-protecting products, and physical appearance contributes to clinicians' imperfect heuristics. An explanation for this focus on appearance is persistence of the ancient belief that looks indicate inner character. In this article we unmask the historical origin of this belief and reveal how it contaminates contemporary approaches to health assessment and maintenance.
The Soul of Medicine
Authors: Kuczewski Mark G
Published: July 2007

This article considers contributions that the medical humanities have made to biomedical ethics. Philosophy has contributed methods of ethical justification to case analysis and has given birth to the New Professionalism movement. Taking biography as its paradigmatic resource, this movement has refocused medical education on the formation of physicians who not only have certain responsibilities to their patients, but also a regard for the role of the medical profession in working toward social justice. However, reliance on biography is now giving way to a renewed emphasis on autobiography, as educators seek to support medical students through the personal and spiritual journey that confrontation with death, disease, and injustice naturally entails. Reflective methods and techniques characterize this emerging era as educators and students try to preserve and reinvigorate the soul of medicine.
High Theory/Mass Markets: Newsweek magazine and the circuits of medical culture
Authors: Lewis Bradley
Published: July 2007

Medicine is driven by much more than science and reason (ethics); it is also driven by the circuits of culture within which it operates. This article examines how postmodern theory deconstructs standard ideals of science and reason and allows medical humanities scholars to better contextualize the world of medicine. As such, postmodern theory provides an invaluable tool for understanding the circuits of popular culture and medicine's place within these circuits. Using a recent issue of Newsweek magazine devoted to health and technology to illustrate the main points, this essay argues that contemporary popular influences on medicine are deeply problematic, and that through an appreciation of the dynamics of culture, medical humanities scholars can join the struggle over medical culture. This perspective allows medical humanities to make important contributions toward alternative circuits of medical representation, consumption, and identification.
"Our Options Have Changed. .. We Will Not Call You Back": communicating with my primary care physician
Authors: Messikomer Carla M
Published: July 2007

With the rise in managed care and the changes in the organization and delivery of health care, the medical literature is rife with expressions of doctors' discontent. Less is known about how these changes have affected patients in the course of everyday interactions with their doctors. As an efficiency measure, many physician practices rely on voice mail to screen and direct calls to the appropriate party. This simple, low-tech alteration in communication between patient and doctor has the potential to interfere with the development and maintenance of a constructive doctor-patient relationship. This paper describes the author's experience communicating with her physicians. It focuses on making an appointment via voice mail and offers a perspective on how the process of appointment making through an electronic third party can have a negative impact on the doctor-patient relationship.
Beyond Nescience: the intersectional insights of health humanities
Authors: Squier Susan Merrill
Published: July 2007

Through a comparison of two graphic novels concerned with the experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment, Brian Fies's Mom's Cancer (2006) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's Our Cancer Year (1994), this essay suggests some of the strengths and limitations of the medical humanities in responding to the experience of illness. It demonstrates how the graphic medium enables us to generate a new set of reading strategies and thus to articulate a more complex and powerful analysis of illness, disability, medicine, and health. Finally, the essay considers the question raised by the comparison of the graphic novels: whether the term "health humanities" might not be preferable to its predecessor, "medical humanities."
Creating Difficulties Everywhere
Authors: Wear Delese , Aultman Julie M
Published: July 2007

In this essay we link the rationale for the medical humanities with radical hermeneutics, a move that infuses the medical humanities with incredulity and suspicion. This orientation is particularly important at this historical moment, when the evidence-based and competency blanket is threatening to overpower all aspects of medical education, including the medical humanities discourse itself. Radical her-meneutics works relentlessly against the final word on anything, and as such, it provides a critically provocative way of thinking about doctors, patients, illness, health, families, death—in short, the experience of being human. We use three literary examples to illustrate the complex, contradictory, perplexing, and disturbing questions related to a life in medicine: Rafael Campo's "Like a Prayer," Irvin Yalom's "Fat Lady," and Richard Selzer's "Brute."
Development of Information Search Expertise: Postgraduates' Knowledge of Searching Skills
Authors: Chu Samuel Kai-Wah , Law N. (Nancy)
Published: July 2007

This paper reports on a study of the development of information searching expertise by 12 postgraduate research students. Six of the students were studying education, and six were studying engineering. The paper focuses on the students' perception of the importance of searching skills and the growth of their knowledge with these skills as they progressed through their studies. The study takes a longitudinal approach, using surveys, interviews, direct observations of students' searching behavior, as well as analysis of their thoughts over a one-year period. Findings reveal that, in the beginning, students performed more questionable subject searches and fewer keyword searches; later, as they understood more about subject searching and the power of keyword searches, they performed fewer subject searches but with greater accuracy and more keyword searches. The study also found that education students tended to use more complex keyword searches and formed more sophisticated search queries than did engineering students and that students' perception of the importance of searching skills increased as these skills became more familiar; this, in turn, led to more frequent use of the skills.
Doctoral Students' Engagement with Information: An American-Australian Perspective
Authors: Green Rosemary , Macauley Peter
Published: July 2007

This paper centers on doctoral-level education candidates in the United States and Australia and their realms of engagement with information. On the basis of in-depth interviews with American and Australian doctoral students and academic librarians, we pose a critical reflection upon the two doctoral pedagogies as they relate to experiences of doctoral candidates as intentional learners, doctoral students' engagement with information, and information literacy learning. Rather than viewing commencing doctoral students as information deficient, we prefer to value their experiences, their profiles, and the ways that existing understandings about information shape their information engagements.
Kiyo Journals and Scholarly Communication in Japan
Authors: Kamada Hitoshi,
Published: July 2007

Kiyo are journals published by Japanese academic institutions. As a scholarly communication medium, they have inherent problems such as limited accessibility and lack of quality control. Despite these problems, they have evolved to comprise the majority of academic journals published in the humanities and social sciences in Japan because they fit well within the culture of Japanese academia. Recent developments in digitization and open access to kiyo will help mitigate their limited accessibility. The increased availability of kiyo articles in electronic format to a wider range of scholarly readers may encourage improvements in quality.
Investing Wisely: Citation Rankings as a Measure of Quality in Library and Information Science Journals
Authors: Via Barbara J , Schmidle Deborah J
Published: July 2007

The library and information science field is currently confronted with difficult decisions about how best to allocate acquisition expenditures among increasingly expensive journals. This article measures the return-on-investment of serial expenditures through the use of citation analysis, which is a widely used approach to ascertaining journal quality. The frequency of citations to 116 library science journals in the bibliographies of 11 premier library journals over the period 2002–2005 is tabulated, and a price-per-citation figure (based on subscription prices) is also computed.
Comfort and Convenience? Why Students Choose Alternatives to the Library
Authors: Vondracek Ruth
Published: July 2007

Oregon State University (OSU) researchers surveyed 3,227 undergraduate students to identify how many students use or do not use the physical and virtual OSU libraries. Most importantly, we wanted to determine the alternatives to the library that students choose for typical library activities, such as studying, research, and research assistance, and why they prefer those alternatives. Two hundred seventy five (29 percent) of the 949 respondents identified themselves as infrequent or non-users of the physical and/or virtual library. The researchers conducted focus groups with both library users and non-users, and surveyed 95 (35 percent) of the infrequent and non-users. The results suggest that students seek comfort, convenience, and quiet in extra-library and library environments; rely on knowledgeable individuals for research assistance; and conduct the majority of their research online from home.
Taking Mentality Seriously: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Language of Addiction and Recovery
Authors: Mitchell Allison
Published: July 2007

In this paper, I argue that the thought and behavior involved in drug dependence is associated with a certain pre-theoretic conception of the self that finds philosophical expression as a grossly simplified form of materialism. Addicts tend not to take mentality seriously: They do not understand themselves as minded beings capable of self-awareness and development through intentional action. Recognizing the practical implications of accepting this philosophically unconvincing view, I argue, encourages a modification of self-conception that is instrumental to the process of recovery from addiction. Using a combination of philosophical analysis and close reading of a trio of narratives that describe drug dependence and recovery, I pursue the possibility that rehabilitation may involve the clarification and alteration of self-conception in such a way that emphasizes autonomous agency and certain values that have not yet been embraced by twelve-step programs, namely, integration, apprehension, moderation, and self-discipline. The rich and substantial history of analytic–philosophical thought about the self is of immense practical value to people impacted by drug dependence and/or engaged in recovery from it; philosophy offers us a set of investigative tools, terms, and concepts that may help to map the different cognitive routes to successful self-rehabilitation. A philosophical consideration of the use of self-related words and ideas within the context of narratives of addiction and recovery may bear directly and significantly on the improvement of the lives of those persons who struggle to overcome drug dependence.
Spiritual Relationships as an Analytical Instrument in Psychotherapy With Religious Patients
Authors: Schreurs A. (Agneta)
Published: July 2007

This article offers a relational approach for understanding and dealing with a patient's spiritual concerns. Insight into the relational structure of a particular patient's spirituality may help to (1) analyze in what way psychological and spiritual factors are interconnected and in what way the patient's "spiritual relationship" influences his mental health problems either positively or negatively, and (2) identify the latent opportunities for therapeutic and spiritual healing that are present within their spiritually minded patients' own religious frame of reference.
Why Treating Problems in Emotion May Not Require Altering Eliciting Cognitions
Authors: Whiting Demian
Published: July 2007

In this paper, I challenge the popular belief shared by cognitive-minded theorists and therapists that the treatment of "inappropriate" or "dysfunctional" emotion should primarily be about challenging the eliciting cognitions. Although I acknowledge that sometimes therapy should proceed in this way, I point out that in some cases it is clearly the case that therapy should not proceed in this way—namely, in those cases where there are no eliciting cognitions, or in those cases where our concern lies with the kinds of emotions that are being elicited, and not with the eliciting cognitions. I also consider, and reject, two responses that might be made to the arguments that I outline in the paper, and I conclude by describing what I believe to be some of the important practical or clinical implications of the arguments that I make.