bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Shadow Perspective on Equivariant Hochschild Homologies
Authors: Adamyk Katharine , Gerhardt Teena , Hess Kathryn , Klang Inbar , Kong Hana Jia
Published: August 2022

Shadows for bicategories, defined by Ponto, provide a useful framework that generalizes classical and topological Hochschild homology. In this paper, we define Hochschild-type invariants for monoids in a symmetric monoidal, simplicial model category $\mathsf V$, as well as for small $\mathsf V$-categories. We show that each of these constructions extends to a shadow on an appropriate bicategory, which implies in particular that they are Morita invariant. We also define a generalized theory of Hochschild homology twisted by an automorphism and show that it is Morita invariant. Hochschild homology of Green functors and $C_n$-twisted topological Hochschild homology fit into this framework, which allows us to conclude that these theories are Morita invariant. We also study linearization maps relating the topological and algebraic theories, proving that the linearization map for topological Hochschild homology arises as a lax shadow functor, and constructing a new linearization map relating topological restriction homology and algebraic restriction homology. Finally, we construct a twisted Dennis trace map from the fixed points of equivariant algebraic $K$-theory to twisted topological Hochschild homology.
Object classification on video data of meteors and meteor-like phenomena: algorithm and data
Authors: Sennlaub Rabea , Hofmann Martin , Hankey Mike , Ennes Mario , Müller Thomas , Kroll Peter , Mäder Patrick
Published: August 2022

Every moment, countless meteoroids enter our atmosphere unseen. The detection and measurement of meteors offer the unique opportunity to gain insights into the composition of our solar systems’ celestial bodies. Researchers therefore carry out a wide-area-sky-monitoring to secure 360-degree video material, saving every single entry of a meteor. Existing machine intelligence cannot accurately recognize events of meteors intersecting the earth’s atmosphere due to a lack of high-quality training data publicly available. This work presents four reusable open source solutions for researchers trained on data we collected due to the lack of available labelled high-quality training data. We refer to the proposed data set as the NightSkyUCP data set, consisting of a balanced set of 10 000 meteor- and 10 000 non-meteor-events. Our solutions apply various machine-learning techniques, namely classification, feature learning, anomaly detection, and extrapolation. For the classification task, a mean accuracy of 99.1 per cent is achieved. The code and data are made public at figshare with DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.16451625.
SDSS IV MaNGA - star-formation driven biconical outflows in face-on galaxies
Authors: Bizyaev D , Chen Yan-Mei , Shi Yong , Roy Namrata , Riffel Rogerio , Riffel Rogemar A , Fernández-Trincado José G
Published: August 2022

We find 132 face-on and low inclination galaxies with central star formation driven biconical gas outflows (FSFB) in the SDSS MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) survey. The FSFB galaxies show either double peaked or broadened emission line profiles at their centres. The peak and maximum outflow velocities are 58 and 212 km s−1, respectively. The gas velocity dispersion reveals a mild dependence on the central star formation surface density compatible with models of gas dispersion powered by the Jeans instability in gas clumps or by gas turbulence dissipation. We estimate the gas outflow rate and conclude that the central gas depletion time does not depend on galactic mass. In turn, the ratio of the gas outflow rate to the gas consumption rate by the star formation is low in massive galaxies and high in low mass objects, while the star formation is a more rapid process of the gas consumption. We compare properties of the FSFB galaxies with a control sample of 375 comparison galaxies and find that the FSFB objects have high central concentration of star formation and also younger central stellar population with respect to their periphery. We analysed the environment of the galaxies and identified nearby satellites and elements of low surface brightness structure. We see that many tidal-enhanced features that can be assigned to early and intermediate stages of galactic interaction are much more frequent in the FSFB galaxies with respect to the comparison sample. We conclude that the gas should be replenished via the accretion from small satellites.
The androgen receptor couples promoter recruitment of RNA processing factors to regulation of alternative polyadenylation at the 3' end of transcripts
Authors: Caggiano Cinzia , Pieraccioli Marco , Pitolli Consuelo , Babini Gabriele , Zheng Dinghai , Tian Bin , Bielli Pamela , Sette Claudio
Published: August 2022

Prostate cancer (PC) relies on androgen receptor (AR) signaling. While hormonal therapy (HT) is efficacious, most patients evolve to an incurable castration-resistant stage (CRPC). To date, most proposed mechanisms of acquired resistance to HT have focused on AR transcriptional activity. Herein, we uncover a new role for the AR in alternative cleavage and polyadenylation (APA). Inhibition of the AR by Enzalutamide globally regulates APA in PC cells, with specific enrichment in genes related to transcription and DNA topology, suggesting their involvement in transcriptome reprogramming. AR inhibition selects promoter-distal polyadenylation sites (pAs) enriched in cis-elements recognized by the cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor (CPSF) complex. Conversely, promoter-proximal intronic pAs relying on the cleavage stimulation factor (CSTF) complex are repressed. Mechanistically, Enzalutamide induces rearrangement of APA subcomplexes and impairs the interaction between CPSF and CSTF. AR inhibition also induces co-transcriptional CPSF recruitment to gene promoters, predisposing the selection of pAs depending on this complex. Importantly, the scaffold CPSF160 protein is up-regulated in CRPC cells and its depletion represses HT-induced APA patterns. These findings uncover an unexpected role for the AR in APA regulation and suggest that APA-mediated transcriptome reprogramming represents an adaptive response of PC cells to HT.
(Dis)taste of Race
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: August 2022

This chapter analyzes the phrase “Taste is a social relationship made flesh,” which were the final words of the postscript of Pierre Bourdieu’s five-hundred-page monumental study, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. It describes the “flesh” as a figure in the treatment of the judgments of high and low culture, the criteria of consumption, and the rankings of approval and disdain. It also points out how the flesh’s portals, hues, porosities, and receptors are alive to the demands of taste. The chapter cites Bourdieu’s words that taste is a social relationship that is embodied and has literally become second nature. It considers “made flesh” as a symptom of difference between languages or locating a word situated within the measurable differences among languages.
Colonial Diffractions in (Il)liberal Times
Authors: Stoler Ann Laura
Published: August 2022

This chapter introduces popular mobilizations and occupations of public space that come up against right-wing retrenchment and xenophobias. It mentions calls for the restitution of colonially procured and stolen objects to join managerial performances of colonial apology by European and North American heads of state. It also highlights burgeoning initiatives and mandates to decolonize classrooms, public institutions, disciplines, speech, and behavior that exceed confines of academic worlds. The chapter pursues an unwieldy set of propositions, identifying two radical shifts in how colonialism is politically positioned and temporally framed. It reviews colonial invocations that cover ground than ever before as the archive stretches across the academe, public education, indigenous communities, activist blogs, and the mainstream press.
Forms
Authors: Spelke Elizabeth S.
Published: August 2022

Until recent times, human survival depended on our ability to identify and categorize the living kinds that provided our food and shelter, as well as those who threatened us with poisoning or predation. Most children who are alive today, in contrast, get their food from packages in stores and kitchens, and most research on infants’ knowledge of object kinds focuses on their learning about artifacts. Here the author focuses on research probing the shape properties by which infants categorize objects and learn their functions. She suggests that infants are endowed with core knowledge of the abstract forms and functions shared by all living kinds. Equipped with this knowledge, infants are prepared to learn about the forms and functions of the particular living kinds that surround them, through cautious exploration and observation of other people’s actions. These learning processes also allow infants living in industrialized cultures to begin learning about the forms and functions of factory-produced artifacts, but core knowledge captures these objects poorly. Learning about artifacts begins to accelerate later in childhood.
Origins
Authors: Yaden David B. , Newberg Andrew B.
Published: August 2022

Where do spiritual experiences come from? There is, of course, a theological/philosophical level as well as a more practical level to this question. But as shown time and again in the preceding chapters of this book, the Jamesian approach of setting aside theological questions can be taken so as to instead focus on scientifically tractable subjects, such as the conditions that seem to make these experiences occur. This chapter describes how scientific research has established a number of circumstances, dispositions, mindsets, rituals, practices, psychoactive substances (such as psychedelics), and, perhaps in the near future, other neurotechnologies that make spiritual experiences more likely to occur.
Types of Spiritual Experience
Authors: Yaden David B. , Newberg Andrew B.
Published: August 2022

There are different types of spiritual experience. This chapter provides a data-driven typology of spiritual experience. This typology of spiritual experiences organizes the chapters in Part II of the book. The goal of this part of the book is to provide a kind of scientific guide to the varieties of spiritual experience using a 21st-century scientific approach. This approach, using statistical tools not available to James, allows for a better understanding of the varieties of spiritual experiences. In each particular type of experience, as well as with spiritual experience in general, there are relatively reliable clusters of subjective qualities. The belief is presented that this data-driven factor analysis of types will help to drive some progress in the scientific study of spiritual experience.
Mystical Experiences
Authors: Yaden David B. , Newberg Andrew B.
Published: August 2022

Mystical experiences are among the most well-studied spiritual experience. This chapter defines mystical experience as inner experiences involving an intensely felt fading of the sense of self and/or feelings of increased connectedness, up to and including the sense of complete unity. These kinds of feelings go well beyond our normal day to day sense of self-awareness. In ordinary consciousness, there is generally the impression that there is a me on the one hand and then, on the other hand, everything else. Under some circumstances, however, this sense of self can be inverted––during such moments, one’s sense of self can fade into the background and become a part of, rather than apart from, everything else. Neuroimaging of meditators and nuns has shown that brain regions that differentiate one’s self from the rest of the world are inhibited during these kinds of experiences.
The Middle East after the Fall of Ur
Authors: Wagensonner Klaus
Published: August 2022

The weak reign of the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, left space and opportunity for local rulers to establish their own dynasties in Mesopotamia at the end of the third millennium bc. In Isin, Išbi-Erra, one of Ibbi-Sin’s generals, rose to power, and he and his successors saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of the kings of Ur. Sumerian remains the language of the administration and economy and is also employed for most of the royal inscriptions and the extant literature, which is highly reminiscent of court poetry composed for the kings of Ur. The peace and prosperity achieved under the early Isin kings was short-lived, as soon another player joined the political game: the kings of Larsa, who traced back their origins to earlier ancestors than those of Isin. The rulers of the two rival kingdoms took advantage of any weakness in their opponents, and in the first two centuries of the second millennium bc, the size of their territories and their rule over the Mesopotamian cities were in constant flux. The peak of Larsa’s rule is reached with a new dynasty established by Kudur-mabuk, who installed his two sons successively onto the throne of Larsa. The last king of Larsa, Rim-Sin, eventually conquered Isin, and the kingdom of Larsa thus reached its largest extent. Judging from the year names of the second half of his reign, Rim-Sin appears to have rested on his laurels, as no further military activities are recorded. He ended his reign as the prisoner of Hammurabi of Babylon, who conquered Larsa and integrated all its territories into his realm.
Peer Groups and (In)equality
Authors: Sabbagh Clara
Published: August 2022

Chapter 11 investigates how children’s and young people’s peer groups can promote either equality or inequality through everyday interaction. Using ethnographic evidence to illustrate these processes, the chapter focuses on the furthering of distributive justice norms in various cultural settings. These norms underlie two primary forms of social exchange: balanced and generalized reciprocity. Moreover, the chapter operates with Opotow’s notion of the scope of justice, which refers to the applicability of justice to individual groups. This framework is applied to examine the ways through which children and young people negotiate their group boundaries in everyday life, creating moral inclusion and exclusion in a given community. These processes either enhance or discard as irrelevant ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities that characterize the wider society. Hence, peer group interaction does not necessarily imply equal relationships but rather the reproduction of existing social inequalities.
Moratorium and Political Justice
Authors: Sabbagh Clara
Published: August 2022

Chapter 12 focuses on common non-formal educational practices and elaborates how they embody and instill contested views of citizenship and political justice. The issue of what constitutes a just distribution of power or the ability to influence is highly contested in democratic societies. The chapter discusses different political justice values underlying the operation of youth councils, community service, and youth activism. Youth councils embed a rights-based notion of political justice, through which children and young people learn about aspects of procedural justice, such as the right to have a voice and actively participate in decision-making. However, in youth councils, opportunities for experimentation are limited due to adults’ control. In contrast, community service instills a duty-based perspective on political justice, stressing active contribution to enhancing community or national welfare. Finally, youth activism furthers political justice as praxis, whereby justice is not just learned, but its meanings are (re)interpreted, (re)created, and enacted.
The Ballad and the Sea
Authors: Daub Adrian
Published: August 2022

This chapter traces the relationship of the German ballad to the sea. In the early nineteenth century, Germany’s coast was understood as ultimately exotic and regionally specific. By the late nineteenth century, through an upsurge in tourism, through cultural reinterpretation, but also due to the excitement the Kaiserreich managed to generate for the German fleet, the seashore had become nationalized. During the same period, the ballad was increasingly positioned (among its popularizers as much as among the poets themselves) as a national form, and poets from Detlev Liliencrohn to Arno Holz used the form to reconcile what was regional and what was national in life on the shore, and by extension in the ballad. This chapter focuses on how issues of language, dialect, memory, and politics became entangled as writers, both in “high” German and in regional dialects, were forced to grapple with the reality that the nation to which the ballad was thought to belong suddenly was an actual country.
Only Natural
Authors: Antony Louise
Published: August 2022

This volume brings together sixteen essays by Louise Antony that reflect her distinctive approach to issues at the intersections of feminist theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Antony proceeds from the Quinean precept that we treat knowledge as a natural phenomenon. This approach offers feminists and other progressive theorists vital tools with which to expose and dismantle ideological conceptions of knowledge, human nature, and objectivity. Naturalism’s focus on the actual (as opposed to hypothetical) circumstances under which human beings acquire knowledge illuminates and responds to feminist calls for a “situated” account of human knowledge. At the same time, Antony defends a number of views that have been the object of feminist criticism: psychological individualism, cognitive nativism, and the autonomy of semantics. These views are in no way incompatible with feminist commitments, which is good, because they enjoy broad empirical support. This volume also addresses a number of practical issues of concern to feminists: Does pornography silence women? Are we ethically entitled to moral partiality? Is legitimate authority possible? Why are there so few women in philosophy? Finally, Antony argues that genders are socially constructed and multiply realized categories that bring into concordance sets of properties that have no natural or rational connection to each other. Genders must not be identified with the categories “female” and “male,” but human sexual difference is the material, explanatory basis of gender systems: But for the existence of differences in reproductive role between females and males, gender regimes would not exist.
Could the Romans Do Strategy?
Authors: Lacey James
Published: August 2022

The overwhelming historical consensus is that the Romans were incapable of thinking in strategic terms. This chapter explores reasons historians have offered in reaching that conclusion and demonstrates in no uncertain terms the fallacies behind them. It then builds a case that proves beyond doubt that the Romans could not only think, plan, and execute at the strategic level, but they could also do so at a level of sophistication not seen again until the late nineteenth century. To accept that Rome was incapable of strategic-level thinking means one must also accept that Rome for five hundred years paid for a huge military force without ever being able to articulate a practical justification for its maintenance. Moreover, Rome somehow, by some act of supreme serendipity, managed to post this force along the frontiers, where they were most needed.
How Dangerous Were the Barbarians?
Authors: Lacey James
Published: August 2022

An idea that has gained currency recently is that the barbarians, on the other side of the Roman frontiers, were not truly as dangerous as the ancients made them out to be. If this is true, then for fifty decades Rome wasted vast sums of money securing itself from enemies that rarely raised themselves above the nuisance level. But is it true? This chapter uses many examples, starting with how barbarians collapse the Bronze Age, to disprove this spreading myth. Rome had good reason to fear the northern barbarian tribes, as from their earliest days the Gauls were the greatest threat to the city’s survival. In 390 bce, a Gallic force, led by their chieftain, Brennus, defeated a hastily assembled Roman army at the Battle of the Allia and entered the city itself. The story of the ensuing sack and Rome’s revival may be more myth than reality, but myths such as this endured as an objective reality for the Romans well into the late Empire. The impact on Roman attitudes was so great that the date of the Battle of the Allia—July 18—was viewed until the end of the Empire as accursed. This chapter also explores how these tribes became increasingly powerful over the years, to the point where in 406 CE they were able to overrun most of the Western Empire.
Conclusion
Authors: Lacey James
Published: August 2022

This chapter ties together all of the book’s central themes while marking lessons that today’s policymakers should learn if we are to avoid Rome’s final fate. It provides a roundup of the crucial reasons explaining how Rome managed to maintain its empire for five hundred years. This boils down to three key elements: securing the economic foundations of the Empire, maintaining a military force second to none, and having a seemingly inexhaustible supply of soldiers. Rome fell only after it was unwilling or unable to obtain the resources and sustain the strategies that had maintained the Empire’s power and glory for all that time. Rome offers great lessons to modern strategists. If a great power neglects any one of these elements—maintaining a large and productive population, substantial economic power, and a large and effective military establishment—or even prioritizes one far above the others, it has set itself upon a path of strategic irrelevance and possible ruin.
What does the SJT test?
Authors: Dev Harveer , Metcalfe David
Published: August 2022

This chapter outlines the professional attributes of the Y1 role that are examined by the SJT. These include commitment to professionalism, coping with pressure, effective communication, patient focus, and working effectively as part of a team. It also discusses that the SJT is a knowledge-based examination, and a test of whether you know the ‘correct’ action and not whether you would act correctly if working as a doctor.
Does it work?
Authors: Dev Harveer , Metcalfe David
Published: August 2022

This chapter explores the efficacy of the SJT as a means of examination, including internal reliability, correlation of SJT performance with personal characteristics, and performance as measured by the EPM.
How are SJT questions created?
Authors: Dev Harveer , Metcalfe David
Published: August 2022

This chapter outlines how questions are created for the SJT, including question writing and two-part review processes, focus groups, concordance panels, and pilots of the SJT.
What We Do
Authors: Armstrong Isobel
Published: August 2022

Chapter 5 discusses the occlusion of the aesthetic and politics and the reasons for this in a number of twenty-first century critical texts advocating depthless reading—surface reading, postcritique, formalism, historical poetics, distant reading (Section 1). It argues, through a reading of Virginia Woolf that challenges Moretti, that the displacement of our discipline’s central concern with words leaves no protection against Fascist language. A social and civic linguistic praxis comes about through shared discourse—in particular the aesthetic comes into being because it is discussable (Section 2). The African novel (Section 3) is an ostensive definition of a crisis of discourse, an extreme example of today’s dilemma—when colonial language destroys indigenous speech—Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Emecheta, Dangaremba, Adiche, Forna, Makumbi.
Aesthetic Criticism and the Postcolonial
Authors: Mukherjee Ankhi
Published: August 2022

Chapter 8 examines the fraught relationship between the discourse of aesthetics and postcolonial discourse. In the process, it redefines the meaning of “aesthetics” as it applies to the sense, sensibility, and “dissensus” (Rancière’s term) of postcolonial literature and theory. The chapter argues that this is crucial to reclaim postcolonial studies as either a Bloom-ian school of resentment or what Felski and Anker disparagingly call the “ethos of critique.” The chapter dwells also on what “postcolonial” might mean in this aesthetic reckoning, which acknowledges its political contexts and imperatives without arresting the play and performativity of the literary.
“Whose Eye Darted Contagious Fire”
Authors: Eldridge Richard
Published: August 2022

Human beings as possessors of self-consciousness and the power of choice tend by nature toward courses of prideful action that enable them to display and satisfy their distinct, individual powers and desires. This tendency is exacerbated in modernity, where technology enhances human powers of instrumental control, with both good and bad effects. This tendency and its chastening are Milton’s great subject in Paradise Lost. By soliciting readers to exercise and become aware of their powers of self-assertion in the interpretation of his diction and authorial voice, Milton offers us a chance to acknowledge more fully who we are and to take more apt responsibility for our own responses to our world.
Tennyson’s Tears, Brooks’s Motivations
Authors: Wolfson Susan J.
Published: August 2022

To Cleanth Brooks’s signature argument in The Well Wrought Urn (1947) that “The language of paradox is the language of poetry” and that “paradox” is the expression of a dramatic tension in thinking, experience, and feeling, Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears posed a limit case: “Tennyson is perhaps the last English poet one would think of associating with the subtleties of paradox and ambiguity.” A chapter for this Studies in the Structures of Poetry (The Well Wrought Urn’s subtitle), “The Motivation of Tennyson’s Weeper,” looms as critical dramatic monologue about Brooks’s attachment to a lyric of unaccountably arresting power. At once provoking and resisting his professional management, the chapter’s deep humanity stirs in the fissures of the well wrought urn.
Flavor symmetries and the quark models
Authors: Terranova Francesco
Published: August 2022

This chapter provides a modern interpretation of the historical quark model. This interpretation is based on the flavor symmetry of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) used as a classification tool to provide the main features of all hadrons. It starts from the two-quark model based on SU(2)f because students are already acquainted with this group (Clebsch–Gordan coefficients and spin composition rules). The chapter also describes the experiment that discovered the first baryon heavier than the neutron: the δ(1232). The chapter then generalizes the flavor symmetry to three quarks classifying meson and baryons. It goes beyond quark models qualitatively introducing lattice-QCD, the modern technique to deal with QCD in the non-perturbative regime. Lattice-QCD offers a more profound explanation of the hadron masses and a straightforward way to compute their values. It also includes states never considered in quark models: tetraquarks, pentaquarks, and glueballs.
Signs of Genre and Sexual Identity Conveyed by Costume
Authors: Piqueux Alexa
Published: August 2022

The third chapter of the book focuses on the signs of sexual identity conveyed by costume, what they are, how they are deciphered by the audience, and how the poets and vase-painters play with these codes in order to underline the artificiality of the bodies staged by the comedy. Exploring signs of femininity and masculinity such as clothing, accessories, skin colours, and hairiness, the chapter examines an essential aspect of the characterization through costume, which obeys codes proper to comedy but also reflects cultural, social, and aesthetic Athenian norms. On the other hand, studying the staging of figures which have both masculine and feminine traits, such as Agathon and Dionysus, and analysing cross-dressing scenes which expose the construction of the character’s identity through costume, leads to a re-examination of the modalities of the comic mimesis and the engagement of the audience in comic fiction.
Honoré de Balzac
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: August 2022

A personal account of coming to terms with Balzac: how I moved from more classical and restrained authors (Stendhal, Laclos) to the highly-coloured melodramatic novels of The Human Comedy, which give us the dynamics of a new and challenging world on the threshold of modernity. “The father of us all,” Henry James called Balzac. This is a book about how to read Balzac, to love reading him, and to engage his vast work.
Balzac: Reading for More
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: August 2022

How I moved from more “classical” works, of music and literature, to Balzac: why Balzac came to matter, and how reading individual works of his Human Comedy leads the reader to want more, to move on to further reading. The technique of “returning characters” that Balzac discovered while writing Père Goriot leads us from one notlve to another, and gives the fictional persons who reappear from novel to novel a new weight from the stories they carry with them. Main example in this chapter is Eugène de Rastignac, one of the best known and most important characers in the Human Comedy.
Reconciliations
Authors: Frank Arthur W.
Published: August 2022

Act IV offers two scenes of reconciliation, with which we wish the story could end. Edgar, as Poor Tom, leads his father to Dover, where the blinded Gloucester intends to jump. Edgar stages a charade, leading Gloucester to believe he has jumped but survived. The idea of the grotesque describes this scene. Lear is now in the custody of Cordelia with her army. Awakening, he begs her forgiveness. Cordelia’s reply that she has ‘No cause’ against him is one of the emotional pinnacles of the play. Gloucester and Lear meet on the heath. Gloucester describes himself as now able to ‘see feelingly’, and Lear speaks of the falseness of authority. The final battle looms between the party of Lear and the evil sisters.
Tragic Sharing
Authors: Frank Arthur W.
Published: August 2022

The effect of tragedy as a literary genre is understood to depend on people first experiencing the tragic as a form of human relationship, in which hurts are fully acknowledged and shared. After briefly discussing tragedy as tragic sharing, this final chapter seeks to enact an initiatory gesture of that sharing. To hear characters talking back to us, we must first learn to speak directly to them. The chapter comprises a series of letters, addressed to each of the major characters, speaking directly, to inviting their response, however that might come. Each letter expresses appreciation for what that character has brought to the reader; many letters acknowledge how both Shakespeare and the author may have used the character badly; and some letters ask how far companionship with that character can go. These letters initiate an unpredictable future of dialogue with that character who has become a companion.
The Pragmatic Grammar of William James
Authors: Davis Philip
Published: August 2022

Chapter 2 is about learning to read William James, his language, his grammar, and its relation to a radical world-view. Together these two initial chapters try to show why the author thinks of William James as a ‘literary’ thinker, in whom you can see thought not finished and aloof, but in the very act of its making. His friend, John Jay Chapman said that William James was not articulate in the exact way that a thinker should be. He had the gift of ‘suggestion’, rather than well-defined expression. His thought came out of his ‘nature’ rather than his ‘intellect’, and was never quite in sharp focus. It exhilarated but also exasperated Chapman that ‘James was always throwing off sparks that were cognate only in this, that they came from the same central fire in him’. But that is just how the author of this book reads James’s writings and ideas, as if they were expressions of a warm and fiery person. And he does so in the way that, as James himself says, a psychologist tries to get inside a complex person, to gain some sense of ‘the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone’.
Charles Dickens
Authors: Federico Annette
Published: August 2022

Dickens’s first concern in all his fiction is with people’s feelings and their imaginations. How does a person learn to enter vividly into the life he or she has been given, and into the lives of others? How does someone change, how do they love, give their trust, look forward to the future? These questions make their way into all of Dickens’s novels, including the four discussed in this contribution to the My Reading series: Oliver Twist (1837–39), David Copperfield (1849–50), Little Dorrit (1855–57), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Consistent with the aims of the series, Annette Federico takes a personal approach to Dickens’s art. A chronology of her life as a reader of Dickens runs parallel to her life as a daughter, a spouse, a teacher, a scholar—though she does not let that last role loom too largely. In a letter from January 1859, Dickens outlined his desired legacy: “I hope I have done my part to make the rising generation ‘more childish,’ in rendering them a little more imaginative, a little more gentle, and a little less conceited and hard, than they would have been without me. I desire to do nothing better.” To grow more childish is a reverse education, a pilgrimage away from mere intellectual knowingness toward another kind of knowledge. It is to see the world more believingly and imaginatively, with a little less guile, perhaps, and less reliance on other people’s opinions. This book also attempts that backward journey.
A Question of Standing
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones Rhodri
Published: August 2022

This book presents an overview of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) origins, successes, and failures, and looks at key events, such as the Bay of Pigs episode. It highlights the CIA’s effectiveness, which depended on its standing in the White House, Congress, and public opinion. It also explains how the CIA’s success depended on the ability of a president to understand intelligence briefings and his willingness to heed them, which is a function of personality and political priorities. The book looks at the significance of the CIA’s standing abroad and affirms that its covert actions were the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the post-World War II era.
RETHINKING MOTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Authors: Darrigol Olivier
Published: August 2022

The seventeenth-century renewal of our basic concepts of space, time, and motion brought facts, principles, and theorems of relativity. In his defense of the Copernican universe, Galileo introduced the nondetectability of a uniform translation of the reference of motion as a fact of experience. In parallel, Beeckman and the young Descartes assumed this relativity and used it in derivations of the laws of free fall. Descartes later reduced matter to geometry, in a manner that implied the full relativity of motion. In his Principia, Newton derived Galilean relativity as a theorem from his laws of motion. He also derived another kind of relativity, with respect to a rectilinear acceleration of the reference of motion. In his studies of collisions and free fall, Huygens pioneered Galilean relativity as a principle of theory construction.
Realism and the Structures of Fantasy
Authors: Attebery Brian
Published: August 2022

When we look at realism through the lens of fantasy rather than as a contrast with it, its constructed nature becomes more evident. The notion of what is realistic changes continually, but it is generally restricted to stories that are not merely possible but probable. What we consider to be realistic narratives are those we recognize from our previous experience of fiction, which also means stories that are in accord with ideological norms. Looking at the work of children’s writers who cross between fantastic and realistic modes, such as Edward Eager and Elizabeth Enright, we see that theirs is a consciously arranged version of realism closely related to their understanding of fantasy. Enright referred to this as “edited reality”; Eager called it “daily magic.”
Neighbors, Myths, and Fantasy
Authors: Attebery Brian
Published: August 2022

Fantasy’s primary sources lie in myth, legend, and fairy tale; when it does not borrow directly from these, it imitates them. The chapter sets out definitions of myth (as deployed in the literary and academic fields) and of fantasy, Contemporary fantasy writers have begun to explore what happens when mythic systems collide. Just as modern cities jam together diverse populations and practices, fantasies such as Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni show different cultural traditions and mythic systems confronting one another. Two theoretical concepts are especially helpful in showing what happens next: Peter Berger’s idea of cognitive minorities and Donna Haraway’s idea of situated knowledges.
Young Adult Dystopias and Yin Adult Utopias
Authors: Attebery Brian
Published: August 2022

The most political form of fantasy is utopian fiction. Literary fashion sometimes favors dystopian critique and sometimes utopian ideals; currently young adult dystopia is riding high. However, Ursula K. Le Guin’s metaphor of yin and yang invites us to look inside each of these for seeds of its opposite: the dream hidden in the nightmare and vice versa. Utopian theorist Tom Moylan posits a third category that is neither blithe blueprint nor dystopian warning: what he calls the “critical utopia.” Critical utopias are conditional, limited, and changeable, rather than absolute, worldwide, and immutable. When we add both yin and critical utopias to our thinking, we find more cautiously hopeful fiction than expected, or at least more paths leading toward utopia.
The Politics of Fantasy
Authors: Attebery Brian
Published: August 2022

Although fantasy’s connection with current events is indirect, it is produced and consumed by people who are necessarily immersed in political struggles. Rather than reproducing those struggles literally, fantasy uses its mythic, metaphoric, and structural ways of signifying to create new narratives—and thus new cognitive scripts—for change and resistance. Other forms are better suited than fantasy for representing structures of governance and methods of indoctrination—those are not among its affordances. What fantasy does especially well is to explore the politics of innocence and otherness, which is one reason it has been taken up by groups traditionally excluded from power, including women, Indigenous writers, and writers of color. Some of the issues they have explored through fantastic fictions include speech and silence, zones of exceptionality and hybridity, and the subversive transformation of cultural metanarratives.
Painting and Presence
Authors: Rudd Anthony
Published: August 2022

This book is concerned with why (or whether) paintings have value: why they might be worth creating and attending to. I start from the challenge expressed in Plato’s critique of the arts generally according to which they do not lead us to what is true and good, and may take us away from them. I try to show that this Platonic challenge can be answered in its own terms, that painting is good because it does lead us to truth. What paintings can give us is a non-discursive ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ in which the essence of the painting’s subject matter is made present to the viewer. I trace this understanding of painting as ontologically revelatory from the theology of the Byzantine icon to classical Chinese appreciations of landscape painting, to the work of Merleau-Ponty and other Phenomenologists inspired by European Modernist art. I argue that this account of painting as disclosing the essences of things can also take up what is right about expressive and formalist theories of painting and that it can apply as much to abstract as to representational painting. But disclosing the reality of things can only be of value if the reality disclosed is itself of value, and in the concluding part of the book I argue that the value of painting can only be properly understood in the context of a wider metaphysics or theology in which value is understood not as a human projection but as a basic characteristic of reality as such.
Modernity
Authors: Duttlinger Carolin
Published: August 2022

Around 1900, the findings of experimental psychology were echoed by cultural commentators. Historians, sociologists, and psychiatrists coalesced around the same core argument: that rapid social and technological modernization was eroding sustained concentration, overloading mind and senses and leading to individual suffering and societal decline. This chapter looks at the debate around neurasthenia as one of the most dramatic (yet puzzling) manifestations of this perceived crisis of attention, contrasting this debate with the writings of Sigmund Freud. Freud was very familiar with psychological theories of attention but deems them insufficient to explain phenomena such as trauma and parapraxis. In his own therapeutic practice, he employs an ‘evenly suspended attention’ to pick up on unexpected clues in his patients’ utterances; in his writings, he emphasizes the multi-shaded nature of human experience in everyday life and the role of distraction as a literary theme.
Musical Listening between Immersion and Detachment
Authors: Duttlinger Carolin
Published: August 2022

The ideal of contemplative listening emerged around 1800, in the context of the Romantic notion of Kunstreligion (art religion); this model was cemented and invested with a moral dimension in Eduard Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically Beautiful (1854), which emphasized the need to listen attentively rather than in a passive and ‘culinary’ fashion. In the early twentieth century the perceived gradual decline of sustained listening diagnosed by Hanslick turned into a full-blown crisis as new, popular and casual musical formats took hold in modern culture. However, responses to this shift were far from uniform. While some music critics and practitioners tried to restore contemplative listening in their audiences and bring classical music to new social groups, the musicologist and Heidegger pupil Heinrich Besseler pursued a different route. An advocate of Gebrauchsmusik, which breaks down the divide between performers and listeners, he turned to examples of embodied, only semi-attentive listening practices in the early modern period as a model for musical culture in the twentieth century.
Fracture
Authors: Zapperi Stefano
Published: August 2022

Understanding how materials break is still a fundamental problem of science and engineering that has long been empirically investigated, starting from the pioneering works of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. Besides the engineering aspects of the problem, the statistical properties of fracture have attracted a wide interest in the statistical physics community. In this context, fracture is considered an irreversible process ruled by long-range interactions and disorder. Several experiments have revealed that fracture is indeed a complex phenomenon, described by scale invariant laws. Examples notably include the acoustic emission activity prior to fracture, which typically displays an intermittent character and a power law amplitude distribution. This observation suggests the presence of an internal avalanche dynamics possibly ruled by some non-equilibrium critical point. To address this problem, it is conventional to start from the theory of elasticity and consider the elastic stresses associated with a crack. In this context, a single crack propagating through a disordered medium undergoes a depinning transition. Whenever damage is diffusive, however, studying a single crack is not adequate and one usually resorts to lattice models, from simple mean-field like fiber bundles to more complicated and realistic models of disordered elastic media. We conclude making direct analogies between fracture and phase transitions.
Writing Memory
Authors: Bodenheimer Rosemarie
Published: August 2022

Chapter 1 considers two late works, the performance piece That Time and the prose work Company, which avoid the pronoun “I” by assigning sets of memories to external voices who address the subject of the memories as “you.” It seeks to describe Beckett’s ambivalence about memory and autobiography, and the forms he invented to highlight the impossibility of reviving the past except as malleable fiction. Nonetheless, those forms do manage, under the radar, to create the illusion of a single subject with emotional connections to his past. The act of writing itself comes to the fore in Company, which offers a moving portrait of author Beckett’s personal mergers with his several narrative voices, and his need for writing as company.
Belacqua and Mr. Beckett
Authors: Bodenheimer Rosemarie
Published: August 2022

Chapter 2 focuses on the early fictions Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks, and Murphy, alongside Beckett’s letters from his period of youthful turmoil. It connects Beckett’s refusal to conform to his family’s bourgeois standards with his satirical resistance to older novel forms. His first self-enclosed heroes are named after Belacqua, an indolent figure from Dante who eludes definition and defies the path of improvement or redemption. The chapter includes Beckett’s resistance to conventional notions of fictional character which, he implies, should be unknowable in fiction and in life. The challenge is extended in Beckett’s refusal to conform to conventional literary boundaries between character, narrator, and author. In Murphy, his London novel, Beckett engages more playfully with earlier writers, creating a more sympathetic story of aspiration, love, and loneliness.
First-Person Singular
Authors: Bodenheimer Rosemarie
Published: August 2022

Chapter 3 offers a detailed appreciation of Beckett’s great postwar novel trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, in the context of Beckett’s experiences during the German occupation of France, and his mother’s gradual decline from Parkinson’s disease. His turn to writing in French first-person narration coincided with the birth of the Beckettian character, who wanders or waits for death in states of physical deterioration and mental inventiveness. The mixture of comedy and pathos in these novels comes from the characters’ humanly adaptive responses to the bizarre circumstances in which Beckett places them, and from the perpetual motion of their minds as they assert, doubt, have second thoughts, or reject what they had embraced in a previous sentence. Like Beckett himself, his writer-protagonists tell their own stories by projecting them onto characters they invent, while calling attention to the ever fluid boundaries between themselves and their fictions.
The Metaphysics of Laws of Nature
Authors: Ott Walter
Published: August 2022

That we live in a world governed by laws of nature can seem obvious. But it was not until the seventeenth century that the concept of a law came to the fore. Ever since, it has been attended by controversy: what does it mean to say that Boyle’s law governs the expansion of a gas, or that the planets obey the law of gravity? Laws are rules that permit calculations and predictions. What does the universe have to be like, if it is to play by them? This book sorts the most prominent answers into three families. Laws first arise in a theological context: they govern events only because God enforces them. Those wishing to reverse the order of explanation, and argue that the powers of objects fix the laws, struggled to claim for themselves the results of the new science. The stand-off between these two bred a third family, which rejects any kind of enforcer for the laws. On this view, laws summarize events; they do not govern anything. The book traces the fortunes of the three families, from their origins to the present day. It uses objections—and the revisions needed to answer them—to produce the best representative of each. Along the way, it tries to settle the rules of this game, the debate over laws of nature. What should we expect from an account of laws? The book aims to help readers develop their own desiderata and judge the merits of the competing positions.