bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Nationalization of Confucianism: Academism, Examinations, and Bureaucratic Governance in the Late Tokugawa State
Authors: Paramore Kiri
Published: February 2012

This article examines the causes and effects of the shogunate’s establishment of a state academy and examination system from 1788 onward. It concentrates on the role of state academicians in reforming Tokugawa processes of governance, suggesting that they effected the creation of a new structural engagement between knowledge and power which had surprisingly “modern” characteristics. Countering arguments that Neo-Confucian political thought encouraged social stasis and authoritarianism in early modern East Asia, I argue that reforms advanced by Confucians in the late Tokugawa state were usually designed to open government structures to bottom-up input in an attempt to make government more socially responsive.
Monitoring Health and the Body: Anthropometry, Lifestyle Risks, and the Japanese Obesity Crisis
Authors: Manzenreiter Wolfram
Published: February 2012

The 2008 introduction of the special health checkup ( tokutei kenkō shinsa ) signaled a major shift in Japan’s health policy away from a high-risk approach toward a population approach based on the epidemiological probability of contracting a disease. This article places the government’s concern with mapping obesity within its longstanding interest in surveying the national physique and sociological debates on risk in late modernity. The empirical case study outlines the making of the obesity crisis, its main actors, and their interests. Far from being an objective risk, obesity emerges as a social construct and a major apparatus of neoliberal politics through which individuals are encouraged to engage in self-regulation.
Separate and Unsanitary: African American Women Railroad Car Cleaners and the Women's Service Section, 1918–1920
Authors: Muhammad Robin Dearmon
Published: February 2012

The Women's Service Section (WSS) investigated federally controlled railroad stations and yards at the end of World War I. Few women worked in car cleaning before the war, and railroad management preferred to block women workers, especially African Americans, from gaining any kind of foothold in railroad work. African American women were the single largest group of railroad car cleaners during this period but they were routinely denied adequate facilities, including toilets, locker rooms, and dining facilities throughout the railroad system. By raising the issues of facilities, workers' rights, and public health, these women shaped federal policy and widened the agenda of the WSS to include a direct attack on segregated workplaces. This article argues that African American women car cleaners launched an industrial campaign that wove together concerns about racism, sexism, and health issues, and successfully removed barriers to women working in a predominately male industry.
Forgetting the Women: Debates over Female Patriotism in the Aftermath of America's Civil War
Authors: Clarke Frances M.
Published: February 2012

Northern women were mobilized in unprecedented numbers during America's Civil War. In its aftermath, it looked like their efforts would be celebrated long into the future, a possibility signaled by the publication of Frank Moore's Women of the War in 1866. Instead, this unique flourishing of female volunteerism was largely forgotten by the turn of the century. This article explains this erasure by analyzing the letters women sent to Moore as he set about memorializing their war work. It demonstrates that women were deeply divided over how to articulate an ideal of patriotic womanhood, and these divisions undermined their ability to advance a coherent story about their efforts. Moreover, most adhered to a standard of humility that worked against remembering women's wartime participation. As a result, memories of the Civil War quickly came to focus solely on the battlefield.
Writing Sex and Sexuality: Archives of Colonial North India
Authors: Gupta Charu
Published: February 2012

This article focuses on disparate sites and subjects to reflect on and problematize the relationship between sexuality and the archives in colonial north India. I dwell on how ‘recalcitrant’ and hidden histories of sexuality can be gleaned by not only expanding our arenas of archives, but also by decentering and recasting colonial archives. I do so by specifically investigating some of the “indigenous” writings in Hindi, through texts concerning homosexuality, sex manuals, the writings of a woman ayurvedic practitioner, didactic literature and its relationship to Dalit (outcaste) sexuality, and current popular Dalit literature and its representations of the past. The debate for me here is not about the flaws of archival uses but rather of playing one archive against another, of appropriating many parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously to shape a more nuanced and layered understanding of sexuality.
The Messianism of Shukr Kuḥayl II: Two New Letters
Authors: Gaimani Aharon
Published: February 2012

Shukr Kuḥayl II was one of the last pseudo-messiahs who appeared in Yemen, and his movement, which lasted from 1868 to 1875, was the best known of them all. He took his name from, and sought to build his reputation after that of Shukr Kuḥayl I, who had been active a few years previously and was killed by Muslims. Although he was not as pious or learned as his namesake, Shukr Kuḥayl II achieved public notice through the many epistles that he wrote and circulated both within and outside of Yemen. The main purpose of these flyers, in which he preached repentance, was to enlist support for and contributions to his cause. This paper presents two new letters that testify to his publicity in the distant rural areas of Yemen. The first is the message from the Jews of the village of Ghulah in northern Yemen to Shukr and his response to them, from which it appears that they had declined his request for donations. The second reports the arrival of an agent sent by a community leader in southern Yemen to investigate the activities of a person who was campaigning in Shukr's name in three villages. From this report we learn that the activist had been exposed as an impostor and that he had pleaded with the agent not to be tried before the community leader.
A New Version of the Ereṣ Israel Haggadah Liturgy and the Evolution of the Ereṣ Israel Miqraʾ Bikkurim Midrash
Authors: Rovner Jay
Published: February 2012

Nicholas de Lange published four fragmentary Haggadah manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah containing Greek rubrics and Babylonian-style blessing formulas, two of which share further intriguing features. First, those Babylonian blessings have been grafted onto a Haggadah text that resembles the Ereṣ-Israel Seder liturgy in both contents and formulation. Secondly, the midrash on Deut 26:5-8 is slightly more elaborated in those fragments than in the more widely known EI versions. A Babylonized EI form is known from another Genizah fragment, in which, inter alia , the original EI blessing formulas were also eclipsed by Babylonian texts. Moreover, the elaborated midrash may also be found in a distinctively EI Haggadah, MS JTS ENA 2856.2-4 + ENA 3222:2. This Haggadah is undoubtedly the form of exemplar that was subsequently Babylonized and ultimately appeared with Greek rubrics in de Lange's fragments. The EI text is of unusual interest because it documents the progressive elaboration of the midrash to Deut 26:5-8. The nature and evolution of the passage are explored in this paper and in an appendix.
In Search of Jewish Musical Antiquity in the 18th-Century Venetian Ghetto: Reconsidering the Hebrew Melodies in Benedetto Marcello's Estro poetico-armonico
Authors: Seroussi Edwin
Published: February 2012

Ten of the fifty Psalm settings comprising the Estro poetico-armonico by Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739), employ as melodic inspiration eleven melodies adopted by the composer from the liturgical repetoires of the synagogues of the Venetian Ghetto. Musical transcriptions of the original Hebrew melodies (printed from right to left) appear at the top of the piece in which they are quoted. These Hebrew melodies comprise one of the earliest, tangible documents of traditional synagogue music and as such they stimulated the interest of scholars of Jewish music and Jewish studies, as well as of Western music historians. This study treats the origin, meaning and reception in the scholarly literature of Marcello's Hebrew melodies. It stresses the fascinating ethnomusicological side of the work carried by Marcello in Venice, as well as the impact of interfaith relations in 18th-century Venice on this work, the identification of Marcello's Jewish sources and the intellectual roots of his fascination with the Jewish religious music of his time. After a survey of how the Hebrew melodies by Marcello became emblematic specimens of "Hebrew" music to many generations of scholars, the historical and methodological aspects of Marcello's fieldwork are discussed. The introductory texts that Marcello wrote for his Estro are read in the context of the Arcadia movement in Venice and its renewed consciousness of the classic Hebrew and Hellenic contributions to Christianity. Finally, the melodies are analyzed in the light of the surviving oral traditions as a source for historical study of Italian Jewish music traditions.
Does Spinoza Think the Bible Is Sacred?
Authors: Levene Nancy
Published: February 2012

Does Spinoza think the Bible is sacred? One does well at first to notice the obvious, that it is Spinoza himself who asks the question in what sense the terms "sacred" and "divine" should "be applied to Scripture and to any inanimate thing." Yet his reply is considerably less obvious. Readers of Spinoza know that he contests God's authorship of the Bible, seems to find indifferent much of its contents, disparages rabbinic and medieval Jewish philosophical interpretations, relegates biblical commandments to the ancient world, and locates the Bible among things inanimate. Yet he also argues that the Bible is divine, grounding this judgment in the hermeneutical principle that "nothing is sacred or profane or impure in an absolute sense apart from the mind, but only in relation to the mind." My paper considers the structure and implications of Spinoza's argument relating the divinity of a text, of this text, to the mind, taking seriously the multiple stakes involved in his day and in ours, as well as the sheer complexity of and tensions in Spinoza's view. While there are many dimensions to Spinoza's attitude towards Judaism, Jewish thought, religion, and the politics of religion, I claim that there is something fundamental about his concept of the Bible and his question concerning the sacred that grounds all of these regions of interest and that renders the Theologico-Political Treatise a single, complexly balanced work, albeit one whose measure we are still assessing.
Respect for Other Selves
Authors: Edwards Craig
Published: February 2012

Philosophers have mostly advocated that advance directives should bear the same authority, with regard to refusal of life-extending treatment, as a patient's contemporaneous consent or refusal. Such authors typically support this position through a theory of persistent personal identity. I agree that the loss of mental competence does not render someone a moral stranger to their prior goal but argue that equating advance direction with consent is to ignore the capacity of nonpersons to attribute and withhold moral value. A distinction should be drawn between advance directives that seek to pursue deeply held goals and those that express contempt for the mentally incompetent.
Health Researchers' Ancillary Care Obligations in Low-Resource Settings: How Can We Tell What Is Morally Required?
Authors: Merritt Maria W.
Published: February 2012

Health researchers working in low-resource settings often encounter serious unmet health needs among participants. What is the nature and extent of researchers' obligations to respond to such needs? Competing accounts have been proposed, but there is no independent standard by which to assess them or to guide future inquiry. I propose an independent standard and demonstrate its use. In conclusion I recommend two areas of focus for future inquiry: what makes an account of researchers' obligations reasonable from the standpoint of both participants and researchers and how general duties of rescue apply to researchers' resource-allocation decision making in low-resource settings.
A quantitative investigation of the imperative-and-declarative construction in English
Authors: Scontras Gregory , Gibson Edward
Published: February 2012

The imperative-and-declarative (IaD) construction in English (e.g. Study hard and you will pass the class ) has two distinct readings: one that has the semantics of a conditional and additionally the meaning of an imperative, and one that has only the semantics of a conditional, with no imperative meaning. There are two general kinds of syntactic approaches in the literature for analyzing this construction: one that treats the two interpretations as underlyingly syntactically the same, and one that treats them as two distinct syntactic constructions. This short report presents the results of an acceptability-judgment experiment that was designed to inform the debate between the two kinds of approaches. The two types of IaDs were observed to behave differently with respect to two phenomena we evaluated, suggesting either that they should be treated as grammatically distinct, or that a theory that treats them as grammatically the same must give a pragmatic account of the differences. Furthermore, because the pattern of data that we observed was a statistical interaction between two factors—a pattern of data that is not detectable without quantitative measurements—the results provide compelling evidence for the need for quantitative evaluations of linguistic hypotheses.
Owatonna (Minnesota) Builds a Library
Authors: Pepper Simon
Published: February 2012

Although Owatonna, Minnesota, enjoyed a limited amount of social library provision from the mid-nineteenth century onward, it was not until the 1890s that pressure mounted for a public library to be established under the terms of the State Library Act of 1879. The opportunity to provide a public library arose with a bequest from Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Hunewill, who had run a hardware business in the town. Attached to the money they left in their wills for a library building and books were conditions not greatly different from those imposed by Carnegie, but without the detailed design guidance that was later pioneered by Carnegie’s organization. This paper focuses on the way that the leaders of the community went about planning and building the new library, with the services of an able architect, but also with a determination to learn lessons from the users of earlier buildings that was to prove sadly unusual in the architectural history of a building type that combined to a high degree both functional requirements and cultural values.
“New Beauties”: The Design of British Public Library Buildings in the 1960s
Authors: Black Alistair
Published: February 2012

In 1960 the architectural correspondent of London’s Times newspaper praised contemporary architects for having evolved what he called “new beauties”: attractive, modernist buildings created out of new techniques and approaches to style and structure. This study features a particular set of these “new beauties”: public library buildings of the 1960s, both large and small. In the 1960s, public library design finally broke free from its Victorian heritage. The new library buildings that appeared in this decade, clothed as they were in the architectural modernism of the time, reflected an age of optimism and intended modernization, when faith in the postwar welfare state was at its height, when hopes for technological and economic renewal were running high, and when the outlook of professional librarians was becoming increasingly progressive.
The Dark Side of Library Architecture: The Persistence of Dysfunctional Designs
Authors: Schlipf Fred
Published: February 2012

One of the most disappointing aspects of library architecture is the endless repetition of the same two or three dozen dysfunctional design ideas. Bad design ideas come from many sources, not only architects and interior designers, but also librarians, library consultants, and various governmental bodies. This article describes some of the most commonly repeated design errors in library architecture and provides suggestions on how to prevent them in advance or deal with them after they are committed.
A Framework for Analyzing and Comparing Information Literacy Policies in European Countries
Authors: Basili Carla
Published: February 2012

Information literacy was conceived originally as a policy goal in 1974, when Paul Zurkowski expressed the need for establishing a major national program to achieve universal information literacy. Despite such early recognition of its political imprinting, the policy dimension of information literacy has been given scant attention in the academic literature. In order to pave the way toward concrete and coordinated policy measures, this article proposes a stratification of the information literacy discourse into three different perspectives of analysis: (a) sociopolitical perspective: analysis of information literacy as a policy goal (Education to Information); (b) disciplinary perspective: analysis of information literacy as a form of study of information (Culture of Information); (c) cognitive perspective: analysis of information literacy as a form of personal competence (Information Skills). Focusing on the sociopolitical perspective, this article moves on to discuss the view that information literacy is a policy goal crossing the borders of both information and education domains, in that it is an information policy issue that also enters the sphere of influence of education policies. The next sections propose a framework for analyzing and comparing information literacy policies in European countries. The overall aim is to apply a grid of analysis based on a set of variables, suitably defined in order to give a measure of what we call the IL-readiness of a country. Finally, the application of the proposed analysis framework leads to the identification of different policy axes for information literacy.
Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel
Authors: Chaney Michael A.
Published: February 2012

In “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel” Michael A. Chaney analyzes Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and David B.’s Epileptic for the way each graphic novel represents animal-human characters and themes and for the way these texts engage, more broadly, with a recent set of theories regarding the animal as a critique of the human. American Born Chinese appropriates and updates Chinese mythology and uses various representations of monkey-human character hybrids in order to foreground animality and race (or animality as race) in its psychic splittings. Like American Born Chinese , the graphic novel Epileptic also exemplifies the graphic novel’s inimitable capacity to articulate visual systems for cognizing the human by resorting to illustrations that pit the human in close proximity to the animal and the monster. The character of Master N is particularly intriguing in this regard, being one of the only characters in the graphic novel that is visually animalistic but also socially interactive with characters other than the author-protagonist alone. Ultimately, the animal in Epileptic becomes the grotesque icon of the Deleuzean becoming of the human, its proliferating transpirations and expirations.
From “Having it all” to “Away from it all”: Post-feminism and Tamara Drewe
Authors: Ho Elizabeth
Published: February 2012

This paper focuses on Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe (2007) as a post-feminist text that negotiates the contradictions of the eponymous heroine’s desire to get “away from it all” in order to “have it all.” Despite its twenty-first century concerns, Tamara Drewe also alludes to nineteenth-century forms in its loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Simmonds’s mimicry of Victorian landscape painting for the background of her text. This anachronistic approach enables Tamara Drewe to resist the totalizing efforts of the “post” and dismantle the singularity implied by “feminism.” Specifically, Simmonds exploits the graphic novel’s scopic regime to critique the presumed irrelevance of issues coded as “feminist,” such as “the gaze” to post-feminist culture. Finally, Tamara Drewe represents the experience of feminism as itself necessarily anachronistic, consisting of simultaneous and often conflicting histories.
Cry No More For Me, Palestine—Mahmoud Darwish
Authors: Marrouchi Mustapha
Published: February 2012

In the Palestinian imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land, it is also a metaphor for the loss of the home that never was. Mahmoud Darwish, who is widely considered the national poet of Palestine, has developed this metaphor to richly lyrical effect. His voice is that of the silenced lamentation for the loss of Eden. In his poetry, the ever present dispossessed subject introduces himself or herself as a foreigner who is twice exiled. As in the case of the late Edward Said, another Palestinian exile who died in exile, the search is for the "logic of irreconcilables." Like a jealous child, Darwish is reluctant to share his homeland with anyone, let alone with a ruthless occupier. Having set down for Pasletine perhaps the saddest, most beautiful and enduring lines, he reacts: "I want, both as a poet and as a human being, to free myself from Palestine. But I can't. When my country is liberated, so shall I." The intention (and method) is to paint the suffering of a people while offering a direct approach to doubt, desire, and the isolation of human existence. In contrast to his lyric and epic poetry, Darwish's mas ra (predicament) tell, by some other way of telling, of dislocation, rootlessness, and the practice of everyday life in a harsh environment. To do so, he uses high language to paint the plight of a people struggling to come to terms with a desolate reality on the ground. Suffice it to add that the poet consumes his Self in the "we" of the "I" before leaping toward a new freedom. This emancipation helps him create a flexible margin between the patriotic, the political, the national, the daily, the cultural, and the literary. In the meantime, will he be able to write a book of love when color falls on the ground in autumn? Maybe. For now, though, the wordsmiths strike with iron in his soul, and the metal bars ring out to dismantle all the words to construct a single one: a watán (homeland). It is in this sense that his poetry travesties the idea of a single narrative. It is founded and built in the language he uses to describe the exile's most private anguish, hopes, impediments, dreams, nightmares, and surroundings. From which mysterious perennial does he draw his endless energy? How to carry the "I" of the "We" without betraying one perception for the other? How are we to answer the question posed by Darwish: "Am I another you / And you another I?" are questions that "Cry No More" will attempt to answer.
The Literal American: Rereading Graham Greene in an Age of Security
Authors: Steigman Karen
Published: February 2012

Inspired by the events of September 11th, the US literary academy reframed its persistent and recurrent anxieties about reading "the other" with a new or newly revived attention to security. This essay outlines the post-9/11 security humanities by reading Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American as a particularly useful engagement with the relationship between security and institutional reading practices. I show how the allegory of reading and insecurity in Greene's novel offers a crucial pedagogical response to the current re-emergence of the role of security in the humanities, particularly with respect to the figure of the American reader in a global moment.
Joycean Lice and the Life of Art
Authors: Ramey James
Published: February 2012

This essay offers an analysis of the problem of literary 'parasitism' in James Joyce's work. Joyce's recurrent use of parasitism as a trope for the absorptive properties of literary texts, and of his own art in particular, illuminates various issues important in Joyce studies today, including recent scholarship on Joyce's work as metatextual commentary on its own extreme allusiveness, the evolution of his thinking about aesthetics, his vision of the relation between art and the body, his intense focus on life's quotidian details, his attitude toward Catholicism and the Jesuits, his perceived relationship to his time and his colonized people, and the function of cultural and individual memory in Ulysses . Joyce the aesthetician and Joyce the lover of the minutiae of everyday life find common ground in his earthy, ironic conception of words and ideas as contagious parasites, entities to be both coveted and dreaded for their stealthy, propagatory power.
Transgresiones ecfrásticas: El texto y la imagen en Los herederos de Segismundo de Schmidhuber de la Mora
Authors: Whittingham Georgina J.
Published: February 2012

The role images play in relation to the verbal medium that produces them constitutes the object of analysis of Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora's Los herederos de Segismundo (1982) as literary text and theatrical performance. The play begins 20 years after the conclusion of Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño and dramatizes 30 years in the lives of Segismundo, his son Américo and their servants. The servants' appropriation of the proscenium, the ekphrastic descriptions of the masterpieces by the royal palace's sculptor and of the scenes inspired by a photograph titled El arado are designed to revise the seventeenth century's socio-economic and theatrical conventions, so that future generations of workers may enjoy the opportunities previously reserved for the nobility.
Tiranicidios de papel: Teatro y oposición al trujillato
Authors: Gallardo Saborido Emilio J.
Published: February 2012

This essay studies how some specific authors supported the movement building against Trujillo's dictatorship (1930-1961) in the Dominican Republic in his last years. To do so, the plays Espigas maduras by Franklin Domínguez and Creonte by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo are thoroughly examined. Moreover, Héctor Incháustegui Cabral's contribution to the topic is also analyzed. The unbearable power of the dictator and his opposition against freedom forces are subtly suggested in these works. The playwrights joined the alternative voices who called for a rebellion by using different dramatic tools.
Las dos caras del patroncito de El Teatro Campesino y su adaptación al Ecuador
Authors: Ruiz José Salvador
Published: February 2012

This article studies Las dos caras del patroncito and its adaptation to Ecuador by the Ollantay theatre group. It argues that the humorous and socio-political elements of Las dos caras del patroncito make this chicano piece a "continental" play, one that transcends California and that can be adapted to other countries in Latin America. This article compares both adaptations of the social and political contexts in which they were created as well as the influence of Brecht in the plays.
Representación del personaje sexodiverso en la dramaturgia mexicana
Authors: Rivera Octavio , Guerra Humberto
Published: February 2012

This is an analysis of the representation of the gay-lesbian theme, as well as the portrayal of non-heteronormative characters (including lesbians, homosexuals and gays) in Mexican dramatic literature. The article examines various publications, including a text from the eighteenth century, another from the nineteenth century, and various representative selections of dramaturgy from the twentieth century. These selected texts of Mexican dramaturgy offer a wide variety of representations of "sexodivirsity," which sometimes affirm stereotypes and at other times offer new representations of sexual identity. In the latter group, that of new sexual representations, sexual identity sometimes seems to lose its importance or its efficiency as an identifying sign, while in other texts it recovers the status of the core dramatic element.
Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice
Authors: Pasi Marco
Published: February 2012

This article argues that Aleister Crowley’s desire to understand his own occultism in naturalized and psychologized terms was in tension with his view of himself as the leader and founder of a new religion. Crowley’s attitudes towards spiritualist phenomena are here examined together with his views on yoga and magic, showing how Crowley saw himself as leading a life of continuous and consistent spiritual development. Even as Crowley worked to naturalize and psychologize traditional interpretations of occult practices in a modern framework, absorbing the influence of authors such as William James and Henry Maudsley, nevertheless he did not go all the way to a complete naturalization and psychologization of magic.
Knowing Satan from God: Demonic Possession, Witchcraft, and the Lutheran Orthodox Church in Early Modern Denmark
Authors: Kallestrup Louise Nyholm
Published: February 2012

A 1617 royal ordinance against witches and intensified witch-hunting in early 17th-century Denmark, have been seen as manifesting rigor against witches in Danish Lutheranism. But Lutheran theologians were more concerned with popular practice and lay discipline than with trials for diabolical witchcraft. Witch trials were held in secular courts. Parish priests testified as to the reputation of suspects, prayed for them, and may at times have served as their consultants. Churchmen played a more active role in cases of possession. Children of Niels Munk were said to be possessed, leading to witch trials in which Bishop Hans Wandal was an important force for moderation. The diary of Bishop Hans Mikkelsen shows similar moderation. Bishop Morten Madsen resorted to admotions and injunctions rather than judicial action in response to “false prophecies.” Only in the case of Maren Splids, executed at Ribe in 1641, did a bishop encourage prosecution for witchcraft.
Crushing the Canon: Nicolas Jacquier’s Response to the Canon Episcopi in the Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum
Authors: Champion Matthew
Published: February 2012

Nicholas Jacquier’s Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum, along with other works of the fifteenth century, attacks the canon Episcopi and its denial of witches’ flight. It argues that the sect of witches (or fascinarii) is new and unlike the women mentioned in the canon: they are conscious and awake while participating in “synagogues”; they have direct bodily communication with demons; faithful witness report on these meetings, giving dates and other signs of trustworthiness; and the fascinarii worship demons. Jacquier undermines the source of the canon, the Council of Ancyra: it was a local and not universal council, and it makes theologically problematic claims. Jacquier draws on contemporary reform of women’s piety of inwardness. He shows particular concern with the trampling of consecrated hosts, a deeply charged symbolic act.
Le Supplice d'une femme : " MM. XX " Spelling Double Trouble For Paternal Authority
Authors: Whidden Seth
Published: February 2012

The present study considers the fi gure of authority, troubled by literary collaboration, through the metaphor of paternity, as it relates to Le Supplice d'une femme, a play that premiered on 29 April 1865, without any authorial attribution whatsoever. The striking parallel between, on the one hand, a play disowned by its two fi gures of paternal authority and, on the other, a daughter who is caught between two manifestations of paternity is a useful object lesson that speaks to issues of literary authority during the Second Empire. This article thus adds to the recent scholarship on collaboration in nineteenth-century French literature, treating seriously the often maligned and "popular" genre of theater to show precisely the fundamental tensions at play therein.
La Question sociale et la recherche de soi dans Lucien Leuwen de Stendhal
Authors: Amoss Benjamin McRae
Published: February 2012

The motif of social unrest underlies the action of Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen. The appellation "Saint-Simonian" haunts young Lucien in the drawing rooms he frequents. Society is preoccupied by the old political battles of the revolutionary period and by the unseemly pursuit of money and the derisory favors of a July Monarchy government lacking gravity and direction. Lucien's suspected Saint-Simonism underlines a continual questioning that seeks to situate the different characters in the range of political and social positions that existed in the 1830s. The incipient labor movement and the claims of the working class become an aspect of society against which the sensitive individual in search of his social identity must define others as well as himself.
Maeterlinck et le théâtre pour marionnettes: Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, La mort de Tintagiles
Authors: Kwon Hyun-Jung
Published: February 2012

Maurice Maeterlinck's volume Alladine et Pallomides, Intérieur, La Mort de Tintagiles (1893) has the sub-heading "trois petits drames pour marionnettes," but this does not mean that marionettes were to replace human actors. Maeterlinck used marionettes as a theatrical tool and metaphor to challenge the psychological and realistic dramas that were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. While marionettes do not have the individuality of human physical and psychological characteristics, they can convey complex meanings, both negative and positive. Using such characteristics, Maeterlinck commonly lifts his characters from personal, daily, anecdotal and historical contexts and expresses them as spiritual entities controlled by essential forces such as fate, love and death. He describes various static forms (characters asleep or in faint silhouette in the dark) like real marionettes. Through this unique method, he creates a new dramaturgy focusing on feelings and circumstances, rather than on plot or action. Maurice Maeterlinck 's volume Alladine et Pallomides, Intérieur, La Mort de Tintagiles (1893) has the sub-heading "trois petits drames pour marionnettes," but this does not mean that marionettes were to replace human actors. Maeterlinck used marionettes as a theatrical tool and metaphor to challenge the psychological and realistic dramas that were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. While marionettes do not have the individuality of human physical and psychological characteristics, they can convey complex meanings, both negative and positive. Using such characteristics, Maeterlinck commonly lifts his characters from personal, daily, anecdotal and historical contexts and expresses them as spiritual entities controlled by essential forces such as fate, love and death. He describes various static forms (characters asleep or in faint silhouette in the dark) like real marionettes. Through this unique method, he creates a new dramaturgy focusing on feelings and circumstances, rather than on plot or action. (In French).
Philosophical Perspectives on Fictional Characters
Authors: Livingston Paisley , Sauchelli Andrea
Published: February 2012

This paper takes up a series of basic philosophical questions about the nature and existence of fictional characters. We begin with realist approaches that hinge on the thesis that at least some claims about fictional characters can be right or wrong because they refer to something that exists, such as abstract objects. Irrealist approaches deny such realist postulations and hold instead that fictional characters are a figment of the human imagination. A third family of approaches, based on work by Alexius Meinong, seeks an alternative to the realist/irrealist dilemma. Neo-Meinongian theories rely upon a distinction between being and existence, the key contention being that unlike human beings, fictional characters have only the former. Having surveyed relevant work by contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of language, this paper discusses issues related to the distinction between characters and other aspects of the content of fictions, including the relation between personality theory and literary conceptions of character.
Invoking Derrida: Authorship, Readership, and the Specter of Presence in Film and Print
Authors: Guthrie Bernadette
Published: February 2012

This article investigates how questions of presence intersect with those of readership and authorship in Derrida's work. Through an examination of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida alongside several of Derrida's own texts, most importantly "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," the article contends that Derrida uses differing rhetorical techniques to underscore his authorial "absent presence" in person and in print—drawing attention to distances within the first context and intimacies within the latter. In order to demonstrate the interdependency of these questions of authorship with those of readership, I root this investigation in my own singular position as a "third generation" reader of Derrida. As a reader who came to Derrida's work after his death, I demonstrate the unique way in which his "absent presence" functions for readers who have only encountered him through his texts.
An-sky's The Dybbuk through the Eyes of Habima's Rival Studio
Authors: Tolstoy Helen
Published: February 2012

The Dybbuk , written by An-sky in Russian, staged by Vakhtangov in Hebrew triumphantly in Moscow in 1922, subsequently a seminal work of Israeli national theater, often attracted harsh criticism and was a subject of many controversies. While under fire from Jewish Communists for its choice of “bourgeois” Hebrew rather than “proletarian” Yiddish Habima became a cult with the Russian intellectual audience not only out of reverence for the language of the Bible but also in the face of the Bolshevik persecutions of religion. It was natural for the artistic public to feel solidarity with the spiritual drama on the stage, made universal by the genius of Vakhtangov — given that was the only place in Moscow where one spoke of the spirit at all. And yet it was not without reservations that the play was received by fellow actors and directors. One piece of evidence to this is a parody review that originated in Moscow Art Theater’s First Studio. This paper is an attempt to interpret the review and explain what in the production of The Dybbuk could irritate fellow Russian artists.
Reflections on the History and Ethics of the Proper Attribution and Misappropriation of Merit
Authors: Gans Henry
Published: February 2012

One would expect that the first to arrive at a new observation, discovery, or concept would be properly acknowledged as such. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that someone else receives the credit. This is not just unfair and unethical, but it also distorts the history of science. In addition, the victims of misattribution are deeply affected by losing not only the recognition of being first, but also the credit, kudos, and other benefits that derive from their contribution. This issue deserves far more attention than it currently receives. It continues to cause much mischief in the most unexpected places and under circumstances that should not be tolerated. This article looks at the consequences of some instances of misattribution in the history of science and argues that researchers should make a stronger effort to expose and rectify such cases. In most instances, all that is required is to double-check the data.
The Rise of Fibromyalgia in 20th-Century America
Authors: Grob Gerald N.
Published: February 2012

At the beginning of the 21st century, fibromyalgia syndrome (FM) has become a diagnostic category that includes extremely large numbers of people, predominantly women. Yet only a few decades ago, FM (and its predecessor fibrositis) was of little interest or concern to either physicians or the general public. What, then, were the origins of the FM diagnosis, and why did its boundaries expand so rapidly during and after the 1980s? The answers to such questions are complex. Broad social and intellectual currents, internal developments within medicine, the appearance of a self-conscious women's movement, and the rise of an increasingly important pharmaceutical industry all converged to elevate the importance of FM. Yet the diagnosis has remained highly contested, and there are competing etiological theories and therapies.
Fritz Jahr: The Invention of Bioethics and Beyond
Authors: Rinčić Iva , Muzur Amir
Published: February 2012

Since the discovery of his work in 1997, Fritz Jahr (1895-1953) has slowly become recognized as the author of the term and concept of bioethics . Jahr's ideas on bioethics were partly different from those shaped by Van Rensselaer Potter in the 1970s and, therefore, might be helpful for the further reform and broadening of modern bioethics. In this article, the authors elucidate ideas from lesser-known works by Jahr, especially those considering animal protection and teaching.
Tobacco Habit: Historical, Cultural, Neurobiological, and Genetic Features of People's Relationship with an Addictive Drug
Authors: Russo Patrizia , Nastrucci Candida , Alzetta Giulio , Szalai Clara
Published: February 2012

This article reviews the cultural history of man's relationship with tobacco and the steps in the discovery of tobacco addiction. Nicotine dependence (ND) or nicotine addiction (NA), among other forms of drug addiction, continues to be a significant public health problem in the world, as it is associated with major severe diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Evidence for a genetic influence on smoking behavior and ND has prompted a search for susceptibility genes. Proof has recently accumulated that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the genetic region encoding the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) subunits α5, α3, and β4 are associated with smoking and ND. In this review, we consider tobacco as the archetype of substance addiction and describe the evolution of the tobacco habit from elite users to lower socioeconomic abusers (by mass marketing and specific targeting of vulnerable groups by the tobacco industry) to exemplify detrimental behavior with major threats to public health. Finally, we discuss the reasons for the difficulty of quitting addictions/habits and highlight possible solutions.
Naturalizing Mencius
Authors: Behuniak James
Published: February 2012

Responding to Donald J. Munro’s recent challenge regarding the importance of “Heaven” in the philosophy of the Mencius, this article asks whether or not Mencius’ theories of “human nature” ( renxing 人性) and tian 天 can be retained and interpreted along more naturalistic lines. The thought of John Dewey is presented as a resource for helping us to think more naturalistically about each of these notions. It is argued that a more naturalistic reading of the Mencius is possible, and that such a reading provides a nuanced account of Mencius’ intentions, allows a flexible interpretation of his attitude towards tian, and illuminates both the normative and the religious dimensions of his philosophy. In fact, it is argued that readings that ascribe a more transcendent “human nature” and tian to Mencius do not provide as coherent an account in these respects.
A Genealogy of Early Confucian Moral Psychology
Authors: Nichols Ryan
Published: February 2012

This essay tentatively develops a genealogical interpretation of Early Confucian moral psychology by informing close readings of Early Confucian texts, in particular the Mencius and the Analects , with research in the mind sciences. This includes examinations of the discussions of emotions and their morality. First the relationship is analyzed between Confucian filial piety, genetic kinship, and moral emotions, then the relationship between Early Confucian ethical principles for interaction with non-kin, empathy, and reciprocal altruism. These two issues are framed by a description of the variance between the (high) usage and importance of emotions in the moral philosophy of Early Confucianism and the (low) usage and importance of emotions in the moral philosophy of competing Western moral theories.
The Writing is on the Wall
Authors: Mieszkowski Jan
Published: February 2012

This essay argues that a demand to be written on is intrinsic to architectural constructs. Beginning with the debates that surrounded the renovation of the Berlin Reichstag and the decision to preserve the graffiti left on it by conquering Soviet soldiers in 1945, wall writing is shown to be a profoundly unstable medium that fractures the historicity of its host surfaces even as it highlights their authority as systems of protection or exclusion. In Brassaï's photographs of the streets of modernist Paris, graffiti is understood as a uniquely auto-exhibitive discourse, a script that constantly exposes the limits of writing. In Walter Benjamin's study of Bertolt Brecht's poetry, this lapidary style is characterized as a kind of ex-scription that counters the formative, singularizing force of inscription with a trace logic that disarticulates the very schemas of surface and display that appear to ground it. Benjamin continues this discussion in his Arcades Project , revealing architecture and poetry to be two dimensions of a broader dynamic in which any sentence is a gesture toward the wall it will mark, if not render ephemeral, while any wall is a gesture toward the sentence that it will put on display and thereby potentially evacuate of its expressive or performative power.
Listening to Nothing in Particular: Boredom and Contemporary Experimental Music
Authors: Priest eldritch
Published: February 2012

"Listening to Nothing in Particular" examines contemporary boredom through the lens of recent experimental composition. While boredom is typically treated in the arts as a conceit of transcendence or radical indifference, this essay argues that the mood in contemporary post-Cagean compositional practices articulate a much more ambivalent feeling of being unjustified, a feeling whose low-level intensity is largely indistinguishable from the spins and stalls of everyday life. Drawing on Sianne Ngai's notion of the "stuplime," a stilted and undecidable response to expressions of an infinitely iterated finitude, and evoking alternative ways of suffering the passion of waiting, "Listening to Nothing in Particular" focuses the scattered rays of boredom on a conflict between contemporary culture's shrunken curiosity and its imperatives for constant individual self-invention.
Son Preference in China: Why is it Stronger in Rural Areas?
Authors: Lei Lei , Pals Heili
Published: February 2012

The imbalanced sex ratio of the population in China has become a serious problem for the society. In recent decades considerably more male babies than female babies have been born in China due to people's preference for having male children. This trend is more prominent in rural areas than in urban areas. In this paper, we try to understand why rural areas have stronger son preference than urban areas. We hypothesize that the relationship between residential location and son preference is mediated by education, son's economic and cultural utilities, gender role beliefs, and patriarchal beliefs. To test these mediation effects we use the data from Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2006. The results indicate that the stronger son preference in rural areas is explained by lower educational level and the perception of son's economic and cultural utilities. It is not explained by gender role beliefs or patriarchal beliefs. In concluding remarks we offer suggestions for policy makers.