bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character
Authors: Murphet Julian
Published: February 2012

In this essay, the return of character as a literary-critical concept is explored for what it tells us about the intricate relations between the one and the multiple in the long modern period. The contemporary resurgence of character studies stops short at the dawn of the twentieth century; and for good reason. It is with the modern novel that literary character begins to undergo, and rapidly develops, its most radical encounter with multiplicity—to the extent that its achieved unity gives way. At the same time, the emergence of commercial cinema, which typically regressed to a very primitive model of character in its narrative logic, stimulated these literary experiments with characterological erosion from within. However, the subsequent trend of novels being written for the screen, and of films beginning to do their own multiple-thinking, suggests a curious double chiasmus, whose logic might provide a key to the thinking of subjective constitution in the late modern period.
History, Poetry, and the Footnote: Cleanth Brooks and Kenneth Burke on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Authors: Vrijders Dries
Published: February 2012

In the summer of 1943, two critics were - unbeknownst to each other—finishing essays on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." One of these, Cleanth Brooks's History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats' Urn , would grow to become an icon of literary science; the other, Kenneth Burke's Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats , faded into relative obscurity. Today, one of the few traces that remain of the link between both essays is a footnote in which Brooks acknowledges the similarities between Burke's analysis and his own. My paper aims to recover the rhetorical dynamics of this footnote's moment of composition by framing it against the backdrop of the war of independence which the emergent field of literary criticism waged against historicist scholarship. Brooks, I will argue, sought in Burke a much needed ally that would help him recover and defend poetic language as a valid gateway into the historical real. This alliance, however, forced Brooks to exaggerate the convergence of their respective "dramatic" ways of reading: their superficial similarities mask substantial differences in opinion on the methods and evidence used to substantiate one's reading of a literary text—differences that have severe implications on the way literary texts are connected to, and can act upon, the past.
The Ends of New Americanism
Authors: Wiegman Robyn
Published: February 2012

This essay responds to the New Literary History editorial query to assess the "state of American Studies" by arguing that such efforts of assessment are the state of the field.  While scholars today applaud or lament the field's transnational turn, Wiegman contextualizes it in the context of long standing scholarly debate over the shape of Americanist knowledge.  By reading the discourse of the state of the field as a key characteristic of the New American Studies, Wiegman explores what is at stake for practitioners in a field devoted to self-description and perpetual reinvention.
Macbeth the Philosopher: Rethinking Context
Authors: Bristol Michael
Published: February 2012

Context is derived from a Latin verb for weaving together. It refers to the pattern of a work, the way its subordinate parts relate to its larger structure. In contemporary literary discourse, however, the term usually refers to the much narrower idea of "historical context," insisting that great works of literature are fully and finally determined by the social circumstances in which they were created. What is puzzling about this is why anyone working with the achievements of literary creativity would find notions of cultural determinism an appealing way to go about enjoying complex works such as a play by Shakespeare. If anything might be expected to resist determination by anonymous cultural forces you would think it would be individual works of art. This essay argues for a more spacious view of context that does not legislate a reader's response to the semantic ordering of great works of literature. It is preferable, in my view, to think of context as the enabling conditions for an understanding between an artist's achievement and a reader's competence. Context allows room for the creativity and the emotional engagement of the reader. This is what characterizes vernacular criticism, spontaneity of response based on acknowledging what is subjectively meaningful in a literary work
Four Exoskeletons and No Funeral
Authors: Harris Jonathan Gil
Published: February 2012

This essay considers the exoskeleton as a metaphor with which to understand the untimely duration of the past within the present, and in a fashion somewhat different from Jacques Derrida's "hauntology," which persists in figuring the past as a dead revenant that haunts the present. Building on Manuel de Landa's and Fredric Jameson's rather different uses of the metaphor, the essay offers close readings of both Byblos, an archaeological site in Lebanon, and Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis as exemplary exoskeletal narratives in which the past has agency within the present. In the process, the exoskeleton also allows us to retheorize "context" as more than simply synchronic or temporally coterminous "outside" to the inside: it is, rather, a polychronic assemblage in which the past is very much alive.
POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online
Authors: Greenhill Simon J. , Clark Ross
Published: February 2012

The Polynesian lexicon project, POLLEX, was initiated in 1965 by Bruce Biggs in order to provide a large-scale comparative dictionary of Polynesian languages. Since then, POLLEX has grown to include over 55,000 reflexes of more than 4,700 reconstructed forms in 68 languages. These data have enabled many fundamental advances in Polynesian linguistics and prehistory. At almost half a century old, POLLEX is one of the longest-standing databases of linguistic information, and has moved through various incarnations, from typewriter and edge-punched cards, through microfiche to mainframe computer. In the last few years, online databases of linguistic information have become increasingly more prevalent, representing a major shift in the way linguistics is conducted. Online databases provide many advantages over the older forms of data distribution, including high availability, more robust data storage, and easy data manipulation and searching, and they also facilitate the replication of previous studies. This paper announces the latest reincarnation of the POLLEX database as an online resource, POLLEX-Online ( http://pollex.org.nz ), and describes the technical implementation details.
The Problem of Doubleting in Austronesian Languages
Authors: Blust Robert
Published: February 2012

Historical linguists are familiar with the concept of doubleting, which comes in two causally distinct types. In the first type, here called “contact-induced doubleting,” borrowing from a related language or dialect gives rise to lexical pairs like English shirt : skirt or wine : vine. In the second type, called “system-internal doubleting,” traces of earlier morphology that have become synchronically opaque distinguish lexical pairs like English grass : graze , glass : glaze , weave : weft , or earlier stress contrasts produce lexical pairs like English one : an . In most cases, the result is a set of two phonologically and semantically similar forms that have the same etymology, but differ in meaning. Austronesian languages contain numerous examples of both contact-induced and system-internal doubleting. The former type closely resembles the phenomenon in other language families, but the latter is strikingly different, as it involves “word-families” with two, three, four, or in some cases more than four variants, nearly all of which appear to be semantically identical. How these variants arose remains a major theoretical challenge.
'Eye of the day': A Response to Urban (2010)
Authors: Blust Robert
Published: February 2012

It has been claimed that the expression 'eye of the day' = 'sun' is limited to Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages, and that within Austronesian it is absent from Taiwan and the Philippines. However, either direct or indirect evidence for this association is globally distributed (including examples from Taiwan and the Philippines). While the concentration of transparent cases seems higher in Southeast Asia and Oceania than elsewhere, this may simply be due to widespread retention of Proto-Austronesian *maCa nu qalejaw 'sun', along with the possibility that all three language families are distantly related. Rather than an areally distinctive phenomenon, 'eye of the day' = 'sun' is better treated as a language universal that, like many other language universals, shows a nonuniform distribution in space.
Theory and Comparison in the Discussion of Buddhist Ethics
Authors: Barnhart Michael G.
Published: February 2012

Comparisons between the ethical views of Western and non-Western thinkers have been a staple of comparative philosophy for quite some time now. Some of these comparisons, such as between the views of Aristotle and Confucius, seem especially apt and revealing. However, is it really so obvious that Western “ethical theory”—virtue ethics, deontology, or consequentialism—is always the best lens through which to approach non-Western ethical thought in general and Buddhism in particular? The existence of more indigenous accounts of Buddhist ethics raises other questions. Does Buddhism bring something unique to the table, perhaps stretching the way in which we think about ethics generally? Or, does Buddhism represent a variant, perhaps a unique and informative one, of a cluster of approaches? Does it stand alone or in a theoretical family? This essay attempts to answer these questions by examining some of Buddhism’s more unique elements as well as the nature of the various standard ethical theories to see whether they at least exhibit the same spirit of approach endemic to Buddhism. I argue that, by and large, they do not.
The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness
Authors: Kitarō Nishida
Published: February 2012

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the relationship between being and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera.
St Joseph's Foot Deformity in Italian Renaissance Art
Authors: Albury W. R. , Weisz G. M.
Published: February 2012

The depiction of St Joseph with a foot deformity is rare in Italian Renaissance art. During the period 1475-1525, however, it appears in paintings by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Raphael Sanzio, and Giulio Romano. Given the intensification of the cult of St Joseph in Italy during this half century, and the similar representation of his deformity in all three paintings, it is likely that this iconographic feature had some meaning for Renaissance viewers. The key to this meaning is found in the emphasis which St Joseph's cult placed on the hardships of his many travels, particularly the long journey from Nazareth to Egypt and back.
Resistance is Not Futile: Frederick Douglass on Panoptic Plantations and the Un-Making of Docile Bodies and Enslaved Souls
Authors: Nielsen Cynthia R.
Published: February 2012

Frederick Douglass describes vividly how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs . Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling to be classified as thing or property. As I engage key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics he performed complement Foucault's elaboration of power relations and resistance possibilities, as well as Bakhtin's notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.
Threshold Concepts and Information Literacy
Authors: Townsend Lori , Brunetti Korey , Hofer Amy R.
Published: February 2012

What do we teach when we teach information literacy in higher education? This paper describes a pedagogical approach to information literacy that helps instructors focus content around transformative learning thresholds. The threshold concept framework holds promise for librarians because it grounds the instructor in the big ideas and underlying concepts that make information literacy exciting and worth learning about. This paper looks at how this new idea relates to existing standards and posits several threshold concepts for information literacy.
The Role and Work Perceptions of Academic Reference Librarians: A Qualitative Inquiry
Authors: Bronstein Jenny
Published: February 2012

This study explores the perceptions that Israeli reference librarians have of their jobs and their academic environment. Fifteen academic reference librarians were interviewed over a period of four months and their answers were analyzed using the thematic analysis approach. The analysis resulted in five major themes: 1) elements in reference work such as its essence, rotation of duties, and changes in the type of questions asked at the reference desk; 2) the skills and personality traits required for work in the reference department; 3) the effects of technological change on reference services; 4) students as information users, and 5) the future of reference work. Findings show that the essence of reference work has not changed despite librarians' expanding roles and the changing nature of the questions asked at the reference desk. Participants believed that reference librarians should be empathetic and patient when dealing with users, and should have excellent teaching and communication skills and the ability to learn new material independently. Participants perceived technological change positively and felt empowered through the adoption of new technologies. They envision future academic reference librarians as guides and counselors who will develop flexible services to fit diverse users.
Reconceptualizing Academic Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age
Authors: Paulus Michael J.
Published: February 2012

This paper considers the concept of “the archive” in the digital age and the situation of libraries and archives within the lifecycle of information. After discussing the changing nature of books, records, scholarly communication, and the concept of “the archive,” this paper merges book and record lifecycle models into a new archival cycle. To avail themselves of the opportunities and to confront the challenges presented by digital materials, librarians and archivists are beginning to assume new roles and reposition themselves within this archival cycle. As professional trajectories converge, preservation can be linked with creation or distribution and it becomes easier to imagine a viable model for curating the archive in the twenty-first century.
Guiding Design: Exposing Librarian and Student Mental Models of Research Guides
Authors: Sinkinson Caroline , Alexander Stephanie , Hicks Alison , Kahn Meredith
Published: February 2012

This article details an open card sort study administered to undergraduate students, graduate students, and librarians at the University of Colorado at Boulder in order to reveal perceptions of library research guides. The study identifies user group preferences for organization and content of research guides, as well as themes emerging from the collected study data that contrast librarian and user mental models. Interested librarians will gain insights into student perceptions and use of research guides in academic libraries today as well as recommendations for guide design.
Misidentification's Promise: the Turing Test in Weizenbaum, Powers, and Short
Authors: Rhee Jennifer
Published: February 2012

In popular culture and in artificial intelligence, the Turing test has been understood as a means to distinguish between human and machine. Through a discussion of Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2: A Novel, Joseph Weizenbaum's computer program therapist ELIZA, and Emily Short's interactive fiction Galatea, this essay argues that our continued fascination with the Turing test can also be understood through Turing's introduction of the very possibility of misidentifying human for machine, and machine for human. This spectre of misidentification can open up potential recalibrations of human-machine interactivities, as well as the very categories of human and machine. Reading these literary and computational works alongside theoretical discussions of the Turing test, the essay attends to anthropomorphization as a productive metaphor in the Turing test. Anthropomorphization is a significant cultural force that shapes and undergirds multiple discursive spaces, operating varyingly therein to articulate conceptions of the human that are not reified and inviolable, but that continuously re-emerge through dynamic human-machine relations.
For and Against the Contemporary. An Examination
Authors: Düttmann Alexander García
Published: February 2012

This essay, a conversation setting different ideas against each other, is an examination of how the concept of the contemporary can be used meaningfully, especially in the context of art. Two forms of the contemporary are distinguished. On the one hand, there is the contemporary that remains subject
to constant change and falls prey to a passion of emptiness. On the other hand, there is the contemporary that penetrates into the very heart of metamorphosis.
The Multiple and the Unthinkable in Postmodern Thought: From Physics to Justice
Authors: Plotnitsky Arkady
Published: February 2012

Taking as its point of departure Jean-François Lyotard's inaugural argument concerning postmodernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , this article considers the character of postmodern thought, especially postmodern theoretical thought, and resistance to it, which has been and remains formidable. The article also offers an assessment of our theoretical thought now, thought after postmodern thought, as it moves from physics to justice, conjoined in my title. This conjunction is not so strange as it might appear. While we do customarily separate physics and justice, and have done so throughout modernity and then postmodernity, the relationships between them is unavoidable, beginning with the rise of modernity and the revolutionary developments in astronomy and physics that accompanied this rise. The article explores the profound significance of these relationships and their implications for thought and culture now, in the wake of postmodernity.
Personality Disorder and the Law: Some Awkward Questions
Authors: Peay Jill
Published: February 2012

Abstract:
This article raises five key problems for the law in its dealings with those with severe personality disorder. These problems are set in the context of a legislative agenda that has embraced the conflicting objectives of rehabilitation and incapacitation, while striving to improve treatment for those with severe personality disorder, and minimizing the risk that they are thought to pose to themselves or others. The problems are examined from the perspectives of legislators, realists, clinicians and courts, empiricists and, finally, normativists; in short, what should the law be doing in this arena? The article concludes by urging a cautionary adherence to issues of legal principle in preference to the, albeit starkly portrayed, alternatives: namely, the seductive attractions of therapeutic intervention, or the destructive effects of indeterminate containment.
Dependency Trends in the Globalization Era: Evidence from Export Partner Concentration
Authors: Babones Salvatore J. , Farabee-Siers Robin M. , Morales Francisco J.
Published: February 2012

Social scientists have long identified export partner concentration as a key indicator of dependency in relationships between countries, particularly between poor countries and rich countries. This study explores trends in export partner concentration in the age of globalization using IMF DOTS data. Four different measures of export partner concentration are tracked for a constant panel of 156 countries over the period 1981-2008. Results are also reported for sub-panels of rich countries, poor countries, and poor countries by region. Export partner concentration remains high among poor countries, but with some decline associated with the rise of China (and, to a lesser extent, India) as alternative export partners in the 2000s. The increasing prominence of China and India as a major export markets for poor countries implies a shift in the meaning of export partner concentration as a measure of dependency, since "dependency" in this sense no longer necessarily implies dependency on the rich countries of Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, even as the specific patterns of export partner concentration have shifted, the overall structure of the world-economy has remained the same throughout this period of massive economic change.
The Impact of Undergraduate Debt on the Graduate School Enrollment of STEM Baccalaureates
Authors: Malcom Lindsey E. , Dowd Alicia C.
Published: February 2012

While student loans provide college opportunity for many, undergraduate student debt resulting from typical and heavy borrowing hinders future investments in human capital. Propensity score matching analysis of the NSF’s 2003 National Survey of Recent College Graduates demonstrates that debt negatively affects the graduate school enrollment of bachelor’s degree holders in STEM fields, where debt is measured by a student’s cumulative undergraduate debt relative to the mean debt of his or her baccalaureate graduating cohort. The findings support recent changes in financial aid policy that seek to reduce undergraduate borrowing by increasing means-tested grant aid.
"Parquecito", de Aurora Arias: una cronotopía subversiva
Authors: De Maeseneer Rita
Published: February 2012

Recent Dominican literature produced within the island often deals with authoritarianism—not only with the Trujillo-dictatorship, but also the "democratic" regime of Balaguer, Trujillo's ex-minister, and even recent "neo-Trujillist" tendencies. In these works, usually by epigones of the famous Latin American dictator novels, spatial references are subordinated to history and often corroborate traditional and authoritarian structures. However, some female writers, such as Rita Indiana Hernández and Aurora Arias, have broken radically with this emphasis on history. They are considered urban writers (although they not always describe emblematic zones) with an innovative language. Moreover, they address issues and groups hitherto absent in Dominican literature. Arias's short story "Parquecito" (2007) offers a very significant illustration of this subversive approach to history and space. Arias focuses on a series of marginal persons who roam the "Parquecito," which is how young people call Parque Duarte. These marginal characters, now in a central location, question the social, political and generational foundations of Dominican society. Their subtle dialogue with history and hegemonic discourses reveals one of the central issues in contemporary Dominican literature: the struggle with the past and tradition in a postmodern context.
Grave Melodies: Literature and Afterlife in Manuel Ramos Otero
Authors: Rosa Luis Othoniel
Published: February 2012

Although Ramos Otero's literature has achieved a cult status among Puerto Rican intellectuals, his complete works are yet to be reedited. As a result of this, the writers and scholars that went to university during the 2000s read Ramos Otero in photocopies. How can a literary work reside and resist in a place as precarious as a photocopy? How is it that a book can generate enough interest to be obsessively photocopied by a whole generation of literature students, but not enough interest for it to be reedited by a publisher? This precarious afterlife is not only a quality of this writer's reception, but also a topic intrinsic to his work. The ghostly existence beyond the grave is one of the main topics within his work. Hence, through a revision of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature, Nietzsche's idea of Dionysian art, and the literary and scholarly response to Ramos Otero's work, I argue that his texts have the exceptional quality of reproducing in their reception the recurring topics intrinsic to his literature.
The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
Authors: Bishop Kyle William
Published: February 2012

Most scholars focus on the ambiguous meaning of the birds in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds , but this avian threat is little more than a MacGuffin, a catalyst used to further the film's real narrative. Rather than being a supernatural thriller, The Birds actually represents a dark exploration of the modern American Gothic: although the birds indeed prove a physical danger to Melanie's safety, she is ultimately destroyed as an independent subject by the imposing power of the Brenner family, a patriarchal structure metonymically represented by the ancestral house and its looming portrait of Frank Brenner.
The Evaluative Function as Part of the Hidden Pragmatic Meaning of Certain Expressions in English and Spanish
Authors: Alba-Juez Laura , Martínez-Caro Elena
Published: February 2012

In an attempt to demonstrate that a corpus-based analysis can reveal aspects of the evaluative function that native speakers' intuitions most often fail to pick up, we analyze the pragmatic meaning that is associated with the use of the expressions "No wonder" and "I wouldn't be surprised (if/to)" in English and their Spanish equivalents: "No me extraña (que)" and "No me sorprendería (que) / No me extrañaría (que)." Previous studies have pointed out that a given word or expression can take on an association with the positive or the negative, and that this association can be exploited by the users of the language in question to express evaluative meaning covertly, a phenomenon which has been given the name of "semantic prosody" by some authors. Following these scholars, we examine the evaluative function of these five expressions in English and Spanish and argue that even when -- from the strictly semantic point of view -- they do not have an inherent negative connotation, they occur most frequently in the context of other words or phrases that are predominantly negative in their evaluative orientation.
Musical Automata, La Règle du jeu , and the Cinema
Authors: Faulkner Christopher
Published: February 2012

This article offers an analysis of the function that a number of musical automata play in the representation of character and situation in Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Règle du jeu . In addition to its attention to the history and workings of specific automata, the article contends that these are mechanical marvels which reveal a great deal about the deepest feelings and unacknowledged desires of certain characters. Although the automata are the products of a rational Enlightenment world view, there are energies in the film which could be considered the return of the repressed of the technology itself. The article makes the argument that automata and film are cognate kinds of machines and that the cinematic apparatus finds its technological likeness in the film's mechanical instruments. Both the film and its automata offer us a critique of the failure of reason to order the world of European civilization as it collapses on the eve of World War II.
“The Sable Venus” and Desire for the Undesirable
Authors: Allen Regulus
Published: February 2012

This article examines Isaac Teale’s “The Sable Venus. An Ode,” first published in Jamaica in 1765 but later included in Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), as well as the illustration that subsequently accompanied it, Thomas Stothard’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus (1794). The essay places the poem and picture in the larger context of the “Black Venus” construction, a frequent eighteenth-century characterization of African women that invokes black beauty primarily to show the superior beauty of whiteness yet often registers an anxious desire for these “undesirable” women.
Dramatizing the Sexual Contract: Congreve and Centlivre
Authors: Davis Vivian
Published: February 2012

This essay interprets Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) as an implicit critique of the sexual contract as it is dramatized in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700). Congreve’s proviso scene adopts a masculine language of law in order to exert control over a highly theatrical female subject, establishing the male suitor as the play’s moral center. Contrarily, Centlivre’s comedy eschews strict legality in favor of a metatheatrical venture by the play’s pair of lovers. A Bold Stroke for a Wife , therefore, positively revalues theatrical performance and in so doing offers a new model of egalitarian marriage.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Jonathan Swift, and the Passion in Reading
Authors: Palumbo David M.
Published: February 2012

This essay traces Mary Wollstonecraft’s use of three texts by Jonathan Swift in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to develop a mode of analysis attentive to the effects of rhetoric within conventional approaches to women’s education. Challenging the complacency of an epistemological tradition that turns women into predictable clichés, Wollstonecraft deploys a mode of impassioned rhetoric that derives its power from disrupting gendered binaries and that creates a space in which women become active readers of the language that shapes their lives.
George Eliot's Interrogation of Physiological Future Knowledge
Authors: Claggett Shalyn
Published: February 2012

This essay tracks George Eliot's sustained interest in the epistemological problems surrounding the Victorian tendency to envision the future through the body's materiality. It argues that her nuanced criticism of phrenology in "The Lifted Veil" (1859) and "A Minor Prophet" (1865) addresses the delimiting psychological and social effects that attend an applied theory of physiological determinism. Returning to this problem in Daniel Deronda (1876), Eliot offers Mordecai's plan to posit Deronda's body as a living emblem as a radical alternative to racial iconography and typological meaning—a move that allowed her to reconcile the body's legibility with a future beyond socially inscribed possibilities.
Jim Crow, Civil Defense, and the Hydrogen Bomb: Race, Evacuation Planning, and the Geopolitics of Fear in 1950s Savannah, Georgia
Authors: Leib Jonathan , Chapman Thomas
Published: February 2012

En 1950, en las faces iniciales de la Guerra Fría, el Congreso de los EE.UU. pasó la Ley Federal de Defensa Civil con la meta de proteger la población civil en caso de un conflicto nuclear. Para mediados de los 1950s, los oficiales de defensa civil estaban ocupados desarrollando planes detallados de evacuación masiva para las ciudades estadounidenses que eran vistas como potenciales blancos de ataques con bombas de hidrogeno soviéticas. Los 1950s fueron también el clímax de la segregación racial de Jim Crow en el sur de los EE.UU. Utilizando estas importantes contingencias históricas como contexto político, social, y cultural, exponemos las implicaciones geográficas de los esfuerzos en planificación para la defensa civil de la Guerra Fría en la ciudad sureña segregada de los 1950s, Savannah, Georgia, a través de las visiones duales de raza y las geopolíticas del miedo. Hacemos esto al examinar el Plan de Evacuación de Bombas de Hidrogeno de 1955 de Savannah, particularmente en lo que se refería a la evacuación de los niños en las escuelas de la ciudad. En general, el plan que detalla la estrategia de los planificadores locales de defensa civil para evacuar los residentes de Savannah no hace mención específica a la segregación racial. Sin embargo, al examinarlo detenidamente, el plan sugiere que la preservación de la segregación racial de Jim Crow, como también la preservación de los mayores miedos geopolíticos de la Guerra Fría actuando a nivel local, eran preocupaciones claves en la ejecución de las estrategias de evacuación en Savannah.
Water, Water, Everywhere?: Toward a Critical Water Geography of the South
Authors: Meindl Christopher F.
Published: February 2012

Los geógrafos han estado interesados durante mucho tiempo ??en los estudios del Sur, y la justicia social es un tema común en esta literatura. Tradicionalmente, los trabajos sobre justicia social se han enfocado en la situación de los pobres y las minorías étnicas. Sin embargo, la interacción entre el humano y el medio ambiente, la sustentabilidad, y la Florida rara vez aparecen en los estudios del Sur de los Estados Unidos. Este trabajo aboga por el desarrollo de una geografía crítica del agua en el Sur, que amplíe los conceptos de justicia social / igualdad social para incluir lo que llamo “los residentes establecidos” de un lugar. Gran parte del Sur (y espacialmente la Florida) ha experimentado en los últimos años un crecimiento significativo de la población, y aunque tal crecimiento ha beneficiado a algunas personas, éste ha traído consecuencias negativas para muchos otros, tales como los crecientes costos del agua. Los líderes estatales y locales en la Florida y el resto del Sur siempre han pensado en términos de desarrollar suministros de agua adicionales para satisfacer la demanda del crecimiento de la población. Tal posición ya a menudo requiere inversión en infraestructura costosa y fuentes más caras de agua. En lugar de asignar estos costos a la fuente (los inmigrantes recientes y futuros de un lugar), tales gastos son generalmente distribuidos a través de regiones enteras en forma de tarifas más altas por el servicio de agua. Sugiero que los geógrafos interesados en los estudios del Sur construyan una geografía crítica del agua basada en la expansión de los conceptos de justicia social / igualdad social para incluir no sólo la gente de color y los más desfavorecidos económicamente, sino que también la difícil situación de muchos de los residentes establecidos de clase media que tienen que pagar más por el agua para acomodar el crecimiento continuo de la población.
The Bible Belt in a Changing South: Shrinking, Relocating, and Multiple Buckles
Authors: Brunn Stanley D. , Webster Gerald R. , Archer J. Clark
Published: February 2012

El término “Bible Belt”, una etiqueta familiar asociada con la religión del Sur, fue acuñado por el periodista H.L. Mencken luego de su cobertura sobre el juicio de los Scopes “monkey” en Dayton, Tennessee en 1925. El término se ha utilizado con regularidad desde entonces para referirse a una región religiosamente conservadora o fundamentalista en el Sur de los Estados Unidos, y en ocasiones el Medio-Oeste, aunque su extensión geográfica exacta sigue siendo debatible. Los geógrafos han tratado de definir la ubicación del cinturón de la Biblia (“Bible Belt”) en el pasado. Notablemente, Heatwole definió la extensión geográfica del Cinturón de la Biblia en un artículo en 1978 utilizando datos de 1971 del Glenmary Research Center. Nosotros replicamos su esfuerzo de 1971, además de añadir análisis cartográfico y estadístico de 1980, 1990 y 2000.Cambios en la ubicación del Cinturón se han producido como resultado de los nuevos inmigrantes en el Sur, así como cambios dentro de la propia región. El Cinturón de la Biblia actualmente se extiende desde el norte de Texas hasta el oeste de Carolina del Norte, y desde Mississippi hacia el norte de Kentucky. También, el núcleo de la región o “hebilla” se encontraba en el este de Tennessee en 1970, pero en 2000 se había trasladado al oeste, al norte-centro de Texas y suroeste de Oklahoma. Dinamismo y fluidez, así como tradición, siguen siendo fuerzas importantes moldeando los paisajes de las religiones de la región.
Revengers Tragedy : Jacobean Drama, Kenneth Branagh's Cinema and the Politics of the Not-Shakespearean
Authors: Wray Ramona
Published: February 2012

This essay argues that the film, Revengers Tragedy, an adaptation of Middleton's play of the same name, locates itself as a 'not-Shakespearean' undertaking. Director Alex Cox sees in the Jacobean provenance of Middleton's play an opportunity to parody the 'heritage model' Shakespeare film adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s popularized by Kenneth Branagh and his ilk. In particular, Cox develops his unique vision by deploying local registers that contest traditional sites of Shakespearean production and interpretation. Via specific settings which undermine expectations about the English Renaissance, the film shows itself acutely responsive to the challenges posed by globalization. Crucially, the essay argues that Cox's political vision is bodied forth in the film's cinematography, dark humour and original soundtrack. Music written especially for the film by the British band, Chumbawumba, for instance, draws energy from the band's status as a recalcitrant global phenomenon in the same moment as it puts into play disjunctive motifs vital to the film's political imperatives. Elsewhere in the film, the essay argues, Branagh's Shakespearean oeuvre is countered by scenes of post-apocalyptic urban blight, by resolutely postmodern camerawork, by pastiche versions of ceremonial occasions. And, perhaps most suggestively, the film's anti-capitalist orientation is conveyed in the representation of a country suffering from north-south divisions and a general malaise. The film's end, combining, as it does, images of implosion and suicidal revenge, brings its multiple elements into focus, highlighting in a politically resonant way the gulf that separates Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean categories.
Compulsion: A View from the Director's Chair
Authors: Harding Sarah
Published: February 2012

This article illuminates the perspective of Sarah Harding, the director of Compulsion , an adaptation by Joshua St Johnston of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling for Ray Winstone's production company, Size Nine, screened on ITV in May 2009. It considers the position, originated by Gary Taylor, of Thomas Middleton as 'our contemporary' to validate Harding's lifelong fascination with the complexity and ambiguity of morality and desire in The Changeling and explores the ways in which this might be mapped onto a contemporary prime-time television drama. The film's re-telling of the plot through the eyes of Anjika ( Compulsion's British-Asian rending of Beatrice-Joanna) and the navigation of her sexual relationship with De Flores (recast in the film as Anjika's family's English chauffeur, Don Flowers) are presented in relation to contemporary concerns surrounding the complexity of women's newfound autonomy and their sexual relations with men: concerns which resonate with the early modern source text. The article addresses the difficulties faced in adapting an early modern tragedy for a television audience which was likely to be largely unfamiliar with it, and highlights the creative care taken over the presentation of the play's troubling sexual politics in particular. Also under consideration is the film's complex interweaving of references to Shakespeare and the counter-cultural tradition of 'Jacobean' screen performance personified by Derek Jarman, which hope to continue a thread of conversation with dead Jacobean authors while addressing a twenty-first-century audience.
"What an Englishman in Parliament oughto be": The Politics of Dryden's "To My Honour'd Kinsman"
Authors: Wheeler David
Published: February 2012

John Dryden uses one of his final, original poems, "To My Honour'd Kinsman," published barely a month before his death, to define his political and poetic legacy. Couched in the guise of traditional verse forms—retirement poetry, panegyric, familiar verse epistle—"Kinsman" voices the oppositional politics of Country Party ideology. Dryden recognized fully that real political power had, by 1699, shifted from monarch to Parliament. With this poem, he seized the opportunity that his cousin's return to a Parliamentary seat afforded him to create a portrait of an ideal MP and the views that he should hold. Dryden's kinsman, however, is not that ideal, and the poem is about Dryden himself, rather than his namesake cousin. "Kinsman" articulates the tenets of the Country Party: the natural suitability of the landed gentry for governance; the necessity of individual integrity and virtue; an isolationist foreign policy; an emphasis on naval power, rather than land forces in Europe; and a nostalgic English chauvinism. For Dryden, writing "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a patriotic act, appropriate to the public role of the poet. At the end of his life, he employed the cultural power of oppositional poetry to dictate to Parliament the direction that he wished English politics to follow and to leave what he calls a "memorial" to himself.
Numeral Variation in New Zealand Sign Language
Authors: McKee David , McKee Rachel , Major George
Published: February 2012

Lexical variation abounds in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and is commonly associated with the introduction of the Australasian Signed English lexicon into Deaf education in 1979, before NZSL was acknowledged as a language. Evidence from dictionaries of NZSL collated between 1986 and 1997 reveal many coexisting variants for the numbers from one to twenty in NZSL. This article reports on an empirical investigation of how the use of variants for numerals is associated with social factors of age, region, and gender. Results confirm that age group is the strongest factor in variation and that region also plays a role. The analysis of illustrative cases of number variation reveals so-ciolinguistic processes of social differentiation and changing lexical usage in the NZSL community. Findings provide comparative data on aspects of number variation reported in the closely related British Sign Language.
How Teacher Mediation during Video Viewing Facilitates Literacy Behaviors
Authors: Golos Debbie B. , Moses Annie M.
Published: February 2012

There is increasing support for using media products as early intervention tools for deaf children. Because deaf children are visual learners, products such as interactive DVDs and videos can be an effective supplement in the teaching of ASL and literacy skills to deaf children. While adult mediation during literacy activities has been shown to have a positive impact on deaf children’s early literacy skills, little is known about the effects of adult mediation of preschool deaf children’s interactions with educational media. The current study investigated whether preschool teachers ( n = 3) fostered deaf children’s ( n = 9) engagement during their repeated viewing of a literacy-focused educational video (in ASL). Descriptive statistics and t-tests were conducted to examine teachers’ and students’ literacy-related engagement behaviors during each day of viewing. In addition, students’ behaviors in the current study were compared to those of students in a previous study to determine whether children’s literacy-related behaviors differed according to the presence or absence of teacher mediation during video viewing. Results indicate that while children’s engagement behaviors increased without adult mediation, viewings with teacher mediation elicited even greater literacy engagement behaviors. These findings support the use of research-based educational media in ASL that provide strong literacy and language exposure for young deaf children.
Machine-Age Communication: Media, Transportation, and Contact in the Interwar United States
Authors: Popp Richard
Published: February 2012

Many American intellectuals and business figures between the world wars envisioned modernity as an era of heightened spatial connectivity ushered in by a new array of mass-marketed communication technologies. Consistently paired in public discourse, media and transportation products and services were thought to be mechanizing everyday routines and rendering contact with faraway places a habitual part of modern life. Within this context, key events such as Richard Byrd’s polar expeditions and the New York World’s Fair were taken as metaphoric for a coming era of perpetual connectivity. For industry champions, communication devices offered users agency to live beyond their immediate environments. Critics—framing communicative contact in terms of contamination, imperialism, and escapism—saw the same technologies ensnaring leisure time and spaces within the domain of consumer capitalism. As a new round of communication technologies permeate everyday life, revisiting interwar debates offers historical grounding for contemporary discussions of mobility and connectivity.
Uncanny and In-Between: The Garage in Rural and Suburban Belgian Flanders
Authors: De Vos Els , Heynen Hilde
Published: February 2012

Starting in the 1950s, postwar Belgian Flanders was a site of emerging and complex relationships among the car, garage, house, street and users. This article explores the shifting meanings of the garage in connection with the concepts of “domestication” and “domesticity.” We question how the garage, as a newly configured spatial entity separated from or integrated within the home, is indicative of the gradual domestication of the automobile, and how its gendered use and meaning are co-productive with ongoing investments in domesticity. Studying the garage as a means to domesticate the automobile sheds light on many social and cultural aspects of recent history: the shift from rural to suburban lifestyles; upward social mobility; the transformation from the car and the garage as typically masculine areas to their appropriation by other family members; and the complicated ways in which the car itself modified house design.
Negotiating Nonalignment: Dilemmas Attendant on Initiating Pharmaceutical Production in India
Authors: Tyabji Nasir
Published: February 2012

This article discusses the processes typically underlying the Indian government’s technological choices in the mid 1950s, with a case study of the pharmaceutical industry. It argues that questions of the future development of India’s pharmaceutical industry were impacted by debates over placing it in the public or private sector, and over securing finance from the government’s own budget, from transnational corporations, or through Soviet aid. A close scrutiny of the trajectory of these debates reveals how the highly contested conception of the required scope of the production process finally emerged. This scope then determined why, when faced with an offer from the USSR for an integrated pharmaceutical complex also manufacturing dye intermediates; and from the German conglomerate Bayer for a standalone plant for chemical intermediates, both for drugs and dyes, the Indian government decided to accept the Bayer proposal.