bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Roots of Human Shared Reality
Authors: Higgins E. Tory
Published: November 2019

Human evolution has been described as the development of our special intelligence. From Homo erectus, we evolved into Homo sapiens (archaic sapien) around 200,000 years ago, then into Homo sapiens sapiens (modern sapien) around 30,000 to 50,000 years ago—human beings becoming “wise” (sapiens) and then “the wisest of the wise” (sapiens sapiens). But human evolution is also a story about evolving motivation and, especially, evolving shared realities. Around a million years ago, Homo erectus learned to control fire that extended the day and changed the social interactions that were possible at night. In addition, learning to cook with fire led to division of labor and new shared coordinated roles. More generally, the new tools, practices, and technologies became sufficiently complex that they needed to be taught by an expert to a learner—shared reality creation from the teacher–learner relationship. Fast forward to modern sapiens who lived in organized settlements and traded with other communities over long distances. This required trust, which required shared beliefs (e.g., common gods). The ability to share myths is also found when a language community agrees upon the (arbitrary) names for things. Finally, in the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 years ago, domestication of animals and plants increased the food supply that allowed great civilizations to emerge. For cooperation and coordination to succeed in such large populations, there needs to be laws and religions—shared realities—that support a hierarchical organization of rulers, craftsman, and commoners. Thus, the shared realties needed by great civilizations created social classes.
Our Attitudes and Opinions
Authors: Higgins E. Tory
Published: November 2019

Humans want our attitudes and opinions to be shared realities with others and prefer to interact with others who share them. To create shared realities, we are also open to learning from others and being influenced by others about what our attitudes and opinions should be. And, once we have created these shared realities, we treat them as if they were objective facts. Even subjective preferences, such as liking pistachio ice cream, become objective facts: pistachio ice cream is wonderful. We learn from others what to like and dislike and can even learn to like something, such as eating sour and spicy food, that is not natural to like. Agents of attitude change can have their influence through their audience wanting to have a relationship or common identity with them or their being perceived as experts or credible, which directly relates to the social relational and epistemic motives for creating shared reality. A group can also be used as a guide for individuals’ attitudes and opinion—a positive reference group—even when those individuals do not belong to the group, such as “the rich and famous.” Given this, as we move from one group to another, such as living with family and then living far away from home in a college community, our political attitudes and moral opinions can change. And having attitudes or opinions emerge from group conversations can make them more extreme while also increasing their experienced objectivity. Such polarization and “false objectivity” contributes to group conflicts.
Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics
Authors: Pierson Ryan
Published: November 2019

How can movements in animated films be described? Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics introduces a powerful new method for the study of animation. By looking for figures—arrangements that seem to intuitively hold together—and forces—underlying units of attraction, repulsion, and direction—it reveals startling new possibilities for animation criticism, history, and theory. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt psychology, the book offers a wide-ranging comparative study of four animation techniques—soft-edged forms, walk cycles, camera movement, and rotoscoping—as they appear in commercial, artisanal, and avant-garde works. In the process, through close readings of little-analyzed films, the book demonstrates that figures and forces make fertile resources for theoretical speculation, unearthing affinities between animation practice and such topics as the philosophy of mathematics, scientific and political revolution, and love. Beginning and ending with the imperative to “look closely,” Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a performance in seeing the world of motion anew.
Soft Edges
Authors: Pierson Ryan
Published: November 2019

This chapter examines the use of soft edges in animation practice. Unlike hard-edged forms, such as the contour-based characters found in studio cartoons, figures with patchy forms often appear to not hold together strongly. Consequently, when these forms change shape, their metamorphoses appear passive, coming from without—as opposed to the active, self-directed metamorphoses of cartoon figures. Through a history of cloudy forms in animation, focusing especially on Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker’s 1933 short film Night on Bald Mountain, this chapter argues that soft-edged forms provoke a special kind of engagement called “exposure,” which makes concrete our vulnerability to the world of forces that undergirds us.
Walk Cycles
Authors: Pierson Ryan
Published: November 2019

This chapter examines the use of walk cycles in animation practice. Walk cycles—frames of characters’ actions that can be repeated in loops—have been important in animation not only for portraying coordinations of moving parts to convey lifelike movement but also for saving labor. However, if a cycle is noticed by the viewer, the figure’s movement will appear imposed and not self-directed, leaving the figure lifeless. Through a study of Norman McLaren and Grant Munro’s film Canon (1964), this chapter further argues that cycles can be layered to create a living, open system of cyclical parts.
Rational Bourbons and Radical Comuneros
Authors: Penry S. Elizabeth
Published: November 2019

Many town-based civil practices helped bind comuneros to their town, most importantly mita duty and tribute payment, both organized by ayllu. Gathering for mita and paying tribute were highly ritualized events that frequently became contentious as comuneros challenged caciques. Libations were poured, feasts were shared, and masses were said to ask the saints to protect mita workers before they traveled to the Potosí silver mines. Tribute was paid twice a year, requiring the whole town to line up by ayllu so each adult male, and sometimes females, could come forward pay their tribute and share a cup of chicha. Other civil duties that helped bind comuneros to their towns included gathering for a padrón or census, the cabildo’s annual walking of the town borders (the mojones), carrying the royal mails, and annual elections for cabildo office. The cabildo had expanded to include alcaldes (officers) for each ayllu and annex.
Why Does Frege Care Whether Julius Caesar is a Number? Section 10 of Basic Laws and the Context Principle
Authors: Weiner Joan
Published: November 2019

In Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Frege defines numbers as value-ranges of functions. But what are value-ranges? Although he introduces the notion in §§3 and 9, in §10 he argues that these introductions are unsatisfactory. They do not determine, for each object, whether or not it is a value-range of a function. The worry sounds familiar: Frege earlier criticized a strategy for defining the numbers on the grounds that it will not tell us whether Julius Caesar is a number. But what comes next in §10 is notoriously mysterious. Frege claims to solve the problem of what the value-ranges are by stipulating that two particular value-ranges are truth values. There are three apparently intractable problems here. 1) How can we be entitled to stipulate that a particular value-range is a truth-value? Presumably, either the value-range in question already is a truth-value or not. 2) There are two truth-values but many more value-ranges. How could the two stipulations of §10 tell us what any of the other value-ranges are – or what, in general, the notion of the value-range of a function is? 3) Supposing these stipulations determine the value-ranges, what about Frege’s claim that the later introduction of a new function further determines the value-ranges? These apparent problems, I argue, are artifacts of the standard interpretation. They are easily solved once we understand the role Frege’s context principle is meant to be playing in this work.
Frege’s Little Theorem and Frege’s Way Out
Authors: Cook Roy T.
Published: November 2019

Shortly before the second volume of Basic Laws went to press, Frege appended an Afterword, analyzing the Russell paradox and suggesting an alternate formulation of basic law V. This attempted ‘way out’ has been characterized as “the wrong guess of a man in a hurry” and has been accused of leading to either paradoxes or absurd consequences. The former claim is wrong, and the latter, although correct, has until now been misunderstood. The bulk of the paper works though a new series of proofs—ones that pay closer attention to whether we are working in Frege’s original formalism or modern higher-order logic, and which do not consist merely of un-illuminating reductios—that highlight exactly where Frege’s attempted solution goes wrong. As a result, it becomes clear that Frege’s ‘way out’, although failing in the end to avoid Russellian problems, is far from merely a “guess” or the result of haste. On the contrary, the amended principle results from a natural application of theorems about, and insights into, abstraction provided by Frege himself in the Afterword. Ironically, however, natural generalizations of these theorems and insights (ones not noticed by Frege) point to precisely the problems that were later found to besiege the amended law V.
A Brief History of English Translations of Frege’s Writings
Authors: Beaney Michael
Published: November 2019

In this chapter I outline the history of English translations of Frege’s writings, focusing on the translation of his main work, the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.
The Reinvention of Society?
Authors: Morieux Renaud
Published: November 2019

War is not just destruction and coercion: new ‘social spaces’ are invented and reproduce themselves in wartime. In captivity zones and prison camps, pre-existing social categories might not be seen as relevant or did not operate in the same way as other contexts, and different conceptions of the social order could clash. This is not to say, however, that durable social differences did not exist, and that war captivity permitted a free-flowing and constant reinvention of society. There were limits to the redefinition of social categories, which need to be examined more closely. The extreme cases of prisoners on parole on the one hand, and of the black combatants who were enslaved on the other, show that people’s ability to play with labels ascribed by the state was socially differentiated.
Epilogue: Napoleon the Prisoner of Peace
Authors: Morieux Renaud
Published: November 2019

This epilogue sheds new light on a famous case. Napoleon was labelled in 1815 as a permanent prisoner of war, an individual at war against the civil society of European nations, even though France was then at peace with the rest of Europe. This status of the prisoner of the international community was a novelty. It also drew on eighteenth-century discussions, and it established a precedent. The status of Napoleon in St Helena was never settled, because the famous captive always refused the label that was assigned to him. Around Napoleon, a miniature and inverted society of prisoners took shape on St Helena, a society that was structured by his presence and that of his small retinue.
Stage-structured models
Authors: Botsford Louis W. , White J. Wilson , Hastings Alan
Published: November 2019

This chapter moves to models in which developmental stage is the individual state variable, and abundance at each stage is the population variable. Stage is a period within an individual life history (e.g. juvenile, adult); organisms may survive within a stage or “grow” to other stages. This movement and survival is represented by a projection matrix that describes the transitions between stages over time. The projection matrix is similar to the Leslie matrix for age-structured models (Chapter 3), except it has entries other than just those in the first row and the sub-diagonal. Stage models are conceptually problematic because real population dynamics ultimately depend on the age distribution within each stage category. Stage-based models obscure that age structure, thus stage is not an adequate expression of state (Chapter 1). This chapter demonstrates how this introduces artifacts in model analysis, particularly of transients, and presents some ways to avoid those artifacts.
Age-structured models in a random environment
Authors: Botsford Louis W. , White J. Wilson , Hastings Alan
Published: November 2019

Most ecological populations exist in a randomly fluctuating environment, and these fluctuations influence vital rates, thus changing population dynamics. These changes are the focus of this chapter. The primary practical concern about environmental variability is the possibility that it could cause a population to go extinct, so the chapter describes several approaches to estimating the probability of extinction. The first is the small fluctuations approximation (SFA) to describe the growth of a population with a randomly varying Leslie matrix. The results reveal that randomly varying populations grow more slowly on average than the equivalent deterministic population. Further applications of the SFA examine how correlated variation in different vital rates affects the probability of extinction, when variability is too large to use the SFA, and how it has been applied to population time series. Finally, several other approaches to estimating extinction risk—also known as population viability analysis—are compared.
Spatial population dynamics
Authors: Botsford Louis W. , White J. Wilson , Hastings Alan
Published: November 2019

This chapter considers populations structured in a different dimension: space. This begins by representing population dynamics with a spatial continuity equation (analogous to the M’Kendrick/von Foerster model for continuity in age or size). If organisms move at random, this motion can be approximated as diffusion. This proves useful for modeling spreading populations, such as the expansion of sea otter populations along the California coast. Adding directional advection represents a population in a flowing stream. Metapopulation models are then introduced using a simple model of the fraction of occupied patches; these are made more realistic by accounting for inter-patch distance using incidence function models. The next level of complexity is models with population dynamics in each patch. These are used to examine how metapopulations can persist as a network even if no patch would persist by itself. Finally, the consequences of synchrony (or lack thereof) among spatially separated populations is described.
Introduction
Authors: Stray Christopher , Pelling Christopher
Published: November 2019

This introductory chapter provides a background of Eric Robertson Dodds. Missing Persons was the title eventually chosen by E.R. Dodds for his autobiography, published just two years before the end of his long life (1893–1979). The title was intended to bring out the disconnections and discontinuities of his life and the range of his interests. His deep engagement with modern poetry makes it unsurprising that his Bacchae commentary is still unsurpassed for bringing out the beauty and artistry of the Greek. The earnestness with which he took political issues and any public role matches his choice of the Gorgias as a subject, a dialogue that wrestles with the fundamental issue of ‘how one should live’. Ultimately, the fascination with human psychology is seen across the whole range of his interests. Indeed, through all his work runs that overwhelming interest in the people and their minds, not just their words.
An Irishman Abroad
Authors: Stray Christopher
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses E.R. Dodds’s life in Oxford. To understand what Dodds did in Oxford, an analysis of what he brought to it is needed. One way to look at this is to compare him with his teacher Gilbert Murray, who, like him, combined profound knowledge of Greek with an awareness of areas beyond language and the classical world. Dodds’s wider interests were perhaps not as wide-ranging as Murray’s, but his linguistic scholarship was more rigorous, and moreover integrated with his literary interests in a way that Murray’s was not. Dodds could also be compared with his colleague in Oxford for seventeen years, Eduard Fraenkel, whose impact on Oxford scholarship was at least as great as Dodds’s, and who—as a German Jew—was even more of an outsider. What both men brought to Oxford was the stimulus of ideas and traditions foreign to a local culture of scholarship whose very success had made it complacent.
The Battle for the Irrational
Authors: Gagné Renaud , Henrichs For Albert
Published: November 2019

This chapter examines how the historiography of Greek religion renewed itself between 1920 and 1950. This period invested a great deal of effort in the answers that could be sought from the celebrated old sources. As the former certainties were battered from all sides, the revered voices from the past often resonated with the intensity of a battle call for renewal. Greek religion, one of the most contested domains in the reception of ancient culture, was to be solicited again and again to help imagine a new future. The chapter then considers the great changes that saw the Belle Époque study of ancient religion thoroughly transformed after the Great War, and the stakes of some of the fundamental disagreements that set influential scholars of the Interwar years against each other. Ultimately, the battle for the Greek Irrational was a search for the new foundations of modernity.
The Rational Irrationalist
Authors: Lowe N.J.
Published: November 2019

This chapter looks at E.R. Dodds’s engagement with the paranormal. Dodds’s career in psychic research had three distinct phases: before, during, and after his tenure of the Oxford chair. His own paranormal beliefs, however, solidified early and remained consistent over his long career in the field. Telepathy was real, an innate part of human development, and a default explanation for other forms of clairvoyance and mediumship. On the other hand, disembodied intelligences—including demons, ghosts, and spirit guides—were a delusion. Though marginalized in modern histories of psychic studies, Dodds’s long and active association with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) made him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research in Britain, and one of the most thoughtful and hard-nosed embedded observers of its journey from the Victorian parlour to eventual extinction in the laboratory environment he had spent his adult life advocating.
Pagans and Christians
Authors: Morgan Teresa
Published: November 2019

This chapter studies E.R. Dodds’s lectures published in 1965 as Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, which marked a pivotal moment in the modern study of late antiquity. By 1963, Dodds had a long history of combining his scholarly and other interests to create new fields of study. Pagan and Christian draws both on his non-academic interests and on his past research into Neoplatonism, Greek literature, Greek religion, and the ‘irrational’, encompassing the supernormal or paranormal in antiquity. Dodds argued for seeing common ground between pagan and Christian mentalities in a way which can now be taken for granted but was anything but typical at the time. In the process, he created a new field of study and, if not many scholars have followed him in studying the whole breadth of the field, there has been much more serious discussion since of many of its elements.
The Deaths of Tragedy
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2019

This chapter focuses on Louis MacNeice’s translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936), which is often cited by classicists as well as by admirers of MacNeice’s own poetry as one of the most important twentieth-century versions of Greek tragedy that exists. The enthusiasm of classicists for MacNeice’s achievement seems to point to a fusion of Greek fidelity with poetic originality. The chapter then argues that the meaning of MacNeice’s Agamemnon is bound up closely with certain creative tensions that energized both his own writing in the 1930s and after and, more generally, informed the direction of Irish literature of the mid-century. In trying to identify and define these tensions, it helps to bring MacNeice alongside two figures of central importance: the classical scholar and poet E.R. Dodds, and the poet and classical enthusiast W.B. Yeats.
Genetic rescue resulting from gene flow
Authors: Frankham Richard , Ballou Jonathan D. , Ralls Katherine , Eldridge Mark D. B. , Dudash Michele R. , Fenster Charles B. , Lacy Robert C. , Sunnucks Paul
Published: November 2019

Inbreeding is reduced and genetic diversity enhanced when a small isolated inbred population is crossed to another unrelated population. Crossing can have beneficial or harmful effects on fitness, but beneficial effects predominate, and the risks of harmful ones (outbreeding depression) can be predicted and avoided. For crosses with a low risk of outbreeding depression, there are large and consistent benefits on fitness that persist across generations in natural outbreeders. Benefits are greater in species that naturally outbreed than those that inbreed, and increase with the difference in inbreeding coefficient between crossed and inbred populations in mothers and zygotes. Crossing between populations also enhances the ability to evolve. Outbreeding depression result primarily from populations belonging to different taxa, having fixed chromosome differences, being genetically adapted to different environments, having a long history of isolation, or to combinations of these, and can be avoided by screening out population combinations with these characteristics.
The Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory
Authors: Iriye Heather , Jacques Peggy L. St.
Published: November 2019

Recent advances in neuroimaging techniques have led to significant progress in our understanding of how the personal past is represented in the brain. A key insight has been the degree to which autobiographical memory (AM) is structured according to self-related processes. This chapter addresses the role of the self in organizing AM in three key areas: (1) processing of self-related information, (2) awareness of the self in time (i.e. autonoetic consciousness), and (3) the centrality of egocentric visual perspective. There are exciting areas for future research that capitalize on the benefits of recent advances in fully immersive virtual reality technologies.
Venice's Secret Service
Authors: Iordanou Ioanna
Published: November 2019

According to conventional wisdom, systematized intelligence and espionage are ‘modern’ phenomena. This book overturns this academic orthodoxy, recounting the arresting story of the world’s earliest centrally organized state intelligence organization, created in Renaissance Venice. Headed by the infamous Council of Ten, Renaissance Venice’s intelligence service resembled a public sector institution that operated with remarkable corporate-like complexity and maturity, serving prominent intelligence functions, which included operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography, steganography, cryptanalysis, and even the development of lethal substances such as poison. The book details Renaissance Venice’s systematic attempts to organize and manage a central intelligence service made up of innumerable state servants, official informants, and amateur spies, who, dispatched across Europe, Anatolia, and Northern Africa, conducted Venice’s stealthy intelligence operations. Exploring secrecy as a vehicle of knowledge exchange that fostered identities, alliances, and divisions, the book also reveals Venice’s fabled department of professional cryptology, and recounts some of the extraordinary measures deployed by the Venetian authorities in their ongoing effort to maintain the security of the Venetian state. These included tortures, assassinations, and chemical warfare. Overall, the book not only reveals a plethora of secrets, their keepers, and their seekers but explores the social and managerial processes that enabled their existence and furnished the foundation for an extraordinary intelligence organization. For this reason, Renaissance Venice’s central intelligence apparatus is explored and analysed as an organization rather than as the capricious intelligence enterprise of a group of state dignitaries, as was the case for other Italian and European states.
State Secrecy
Authors: Iordanou Ioanna
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses the culture of secrecy that the Council of Ten distilled within and beyond the walls of the Doge’s Palace. This culture was perpetuated through a slew of formal regulations on the instrumentality of secrecy, especially official state secrecy, for the affairs and, by extension, the security of the Venetian state. The demand for secrecy spread across the dominion and permeated all echelons of Venetian society. Using social theorizations of secrecy, the chapter shows how secrecy, as the ongoing process of intentional concealment, enabled social interactions amongst individuals of diverse social standing who, without the shield of concealment, would not have been able to interact. In this respect, secrecy functioned as a vehicle of knowledge exchange, creating a dynamic and enduring relationship between the government and the governed. Ultimately, official state secrecy became a vital tool of statecraft and political control for the Council of Ten.
Venice’s Department of Cryptology
Authors: Iordanou Ioanna
Published: November 2019

The chapter discusses the fully fledged, state-controlled and regulated department of cryptology that the Council of Ten developed and oversaw. This was housed in the Doge’s Palace and annexed to the ducal chancery. In full operation since 1543, this department comprised several cryptology functions, including the creation of ciphers, deciphering encrypted messages, training chancery staff in the use of cipher keys, breaking enemy ciphers, and even the development of a distinct training and development regime for Venetian state cryptologists. Due to the instrumentality of ciphers for Venice’s intelligence pursuits, this department was ring-fenced with harsh regulations that included the death penalty when ciphers or their keys were mishandled. In an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of Venice’s cryptology department, the chapter advances the argument that, because of Renaissance Venice’s central intelligence organization, cryptology evolved into a distinct, stand-alone profession.
Camera Movements and Motor Cognition
Authors: Gallese Vittorio , Guerra Michele
Published: November 2019

This chapter addresses the role of camera movement in generating the spectator’s immersion in the narrated film plot. The subheadings are “Style,” in which the origins of the notion of style are explained, with a review of how filmic style has been addressed by film scholars; “Moving the camera,” addressing the stylistic role of camera movements in film history; “Intermezzo,” dedicated to a discussion from the authors’ perspective of a selection of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces, including Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, and introducing the Steadicam; and “Moving mirrors,” in which the empirical results concerning the role of camera movements in generating the spectators’ immersion, empathy, and identification with film characters are presented.
Towards a Minimalist Machine
Authors: Fong Sandiway , Ginsburg Jason
Published: November 2019

This chapter describes a machine that efficiently generates syntactic structure using fundamental Set and Pair Merge operations beginning with a pre-ordered Lexical Array (LA) of heads. The machine also implements Probe-Goal agreement and Phase theory to correctly converge on a variety of syntactic constructions discussed in the linguistics literature. Displacement is driven by Edge features. The machine state consists of a current syntactic object (SO) and the input (LA). It also incorporates a goal stack that effectively short-circuits the need to search inside the current SO. The machine is capable of locally deciding on the appropriate Merge and Probe operations at each Merge step by considering the Label and features of the current SO and the LA head, without the need for (temporary) over-generation or lookahead. Non-determinism, i.e. multiple convergent SOs, is also possible in cases where theory demands it
Parsing with Minimalist Grammars and prosodic trees
Authors: Yu Kristine M.
Published: November 2019

Advances in the syntactic parsing of written language have proceeded apace in the last few decades, but much less progress has been made in the syntactic parsing of spoken language. Here, we address one question important for such progress: how can we bring prosody in to inform syntactic parsing of spoken language? We identify and take on two key challenges: (i) explicitly defining aspects of the syntax–prosody interface, including prosodic trees, and (ii) modeling distinct contributions of syntax to conditioning prosodic events, including aspects other than relations between syntactic and prosodic domain edges, such as prosodic reflexes of spell-out. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation of simultaneous (post-)syntactic and prosodic parsing of a Samoan utterance, with syntactic parsing informed by prosody, and prosodic parsing informed by syntax.
Parsing ellipsis efficiently
Authors: Kobele Gregory M.
Published: November 2019

This chapter shows how a transformational account of ellipsis allows for a sound and complete parsing algorithm which allows for the efficient processing of discourses containing elliptical sentences. In the context of this implementation, two approaches to ellipsis in the transformational community are naturally seen as equivalent descriptions at different levels: the LF-copying approach to ellipsis resolution is best seen as a description of the parser, whereas the phonological deletion approach is a description of the underlying relation between form and meaning. The parsing algorithm result described in this chapter relies not just on formal properties of the grammar formalism (formal universals) but also, crucially, on linguistic assumptions (substantive universals).
Romantic Encounters with Homer in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles
Authors: Stoker Polly
Published: November 2019

Elizabeth Cook’s novella, Achilles (2001), offers a meditation on the eponymous hero and the lives with which his own life intersects, charting the blossoming of the aristos Achaion, from Skiros to Troy, and his immortalization in epic song. The closing section, ‘Relay’, maps points of literary contact between Achilles and the Romantic poet, John Keats, for whom appreciation of the Iliad and its receptions translates to physical sensation. In Cook’s novella, Keats’s historic expression of fellow feeling for Achilles (‘According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches’) becomes a catalyst to explore the pleasures of reading and the cultivation of meaningful encounters across time and place. With Achilles, Cook plays with a Keatsian poetics of physicality, sensuousness, and desire, exposing the ways in which Homer’s Iliad is a text not altogether untouched by eroticism.
Female Homers
Authors: Burke Catherine
Published: November 2019

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have been inspiring a tradition of writers since their inception. Yet while this tradition comprises men and women, the associated literary criticism focuses almost exclusively on the male response. If the female response is addressed, it is subjected to a disproportionate consideration of gender. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff each rewrite the Iliad during World War II yet neither writer responds through the prism of feminism. This paper proposes that through their adaptations Weil and Bespaloff illustrate that the female response is not always one of gender and that they act as precursors to a contemporary wave of female writers transforming Homer’s texts in innovative and subversive ways. With their twentieth-century reworkings of Homer, Weil and Bespaloff set in motion the process of restoring to women the recognition afforded them by Homer and due to them by their peers.
Kate Tempest
Authors: Spiers Emily
Published: November 2019

This chapter explores the reworkings of Homeric epic narrative and ancient classical myth by the British poet Kate Tempest, including the epic poem Brand New Ancients (2013) and the poem sequence Hold Your Own (2014). It demonstrates how Tempest uses the poetic medium to formulate future possibilities for those excluded from the political and economic processes shaping the future. By urging readers and audiences to view themselves not as passive citizen-consumers veering towards an open future being shaped by everyone but them, but, instead, as profoundly mythical beings capable of ‘everyday odysseys’, Tempest’s work constitutes a call for people to become invested in a world they can help to develop. This, in turn, points the way to a creative future that re-establishes literature as an urgent, socially relevant practice and a potentially transformative tool for social and political change.
Rereading Penelope’s Web
Authors: Richards Jasmine
Published: November 2019

Feminist readings of the Odyssey often cast Penelope’s weaving and unravelling of Laertes’ shroud as an act of resistance against the suitors and the threat they pose to her independence, and as a signature or allegory for female authorship. In The Penelopiad (2005), Margaret Atwood uses a similar set of critical approaches and interpretive strategies in her feminist refiguration of Penelope and the twelve maids hanged at the end of the Odyssey as literary representations of female authors. In this, Atwood can be seen to play on the oral origins of the androcentric primary epic and the negative cultural associations of weaving with a dubious and inauthentic female oral tradition in order to explore, challenge, and confront the anxieties of female authorship.
Excavations in Homer
Authors: Paul Georgina
Published: November 2019

The essay offers a comparative examination of Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), which re-works material from the Iliad, and the German poet Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife, 2007), which responds to the Odyssey. I argue that in dissolving the narrative line that characterizes Homer’s epics, both poets perform ‘speculative archaeologies’. Oswald’s treatment brings to the fore traces of lament and pastoral lyric forms that may have predated Homer’s narrative organization, recollecting the function of formal poetry in social rituals of mourning. Through her handling of the similes in particular, Oswald draws out of Homer’s text those moments in it which encapsulate connectivity and collectivity. Köhler’s differential treatment of grammatical gender likewise highlights connectivity, encapsulated in the female figures in the Odyssey and their complex interrelations (also a figure for poetic speech), which contrasts with linear narrative as projected by the male hero’s story.
Iberian Sibyl
Authors: Reuter Victoria
Published: November 2019

Winner of Spain’s national poetry prize, Francisca Aguirre is the author of the long poem Itáca (1972), a reconceptualization of the island home of Penelope and Odysseus. Aguirre’s engagement with myth is both reactionary and revisionary as it responds to the idea of Ithaca as symbolic homeland and as the impetus for a liberating, life-changing journey. Inspired by the poetry of Greek writer C. P. Cavafy, Itáca is also in dialogue with the mythology of place, exile, recognition, and the restructuring of identity. However, as a woman encountering his work decades later in Francoist Spain, Aguirre found that Cavafy, like Homer, promised a journey that was not accessible to her. Thus, her poem becomes an investigation of how narratives of the self are limited by social expectations and how divergent subjectivities are silenced, and reborn.
‘Cut down to size’
Authors: Richards Francesca
Published: November 2019

Adèle Geras’s Ithaka (2005) is a nuanced, multi-vocal depiction of events of the Odyssey, told through the eyes of Penelope and her (invented) young maid Klymene. The adventures of Odysseus are recounted, but in abridged form, and separated from the rest of the narrative as the subject of Penelope’s weaving. As a result, Geras not only highlights a perceived fallibility of the Odyssey in its privileging of the masculine voice (the idea of the poem as a flawed memorializer), but also helps us to understand how our own childhood literary encounters with the poem, filtered by this privilege, influence the way in which we have received the Odyssey. We are forced to view Ithaka not as a derivative, but as a powerful text in its own right that deftly navigates both the demanding conventions of writing for children and the politics of female representation.
‘Health isn’t making everybody into a Greek ideal’
Authors: MacDonald Ruth
Published: November 2019

Presented as a variation of Homer’s Odyssey rewritten from the perspective of a cancer patient’s spouse, Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey (2010) has its roots in her husband’s real-life diagnosis with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In thus reconfiguring the hero’s homecoming as a wife’s quest to find and cure her sick husband, the poet is able to chart her journey in coming to terms with her husband’s condition and treatment. Although the voyage towards healing and marital reconciliation is at times difficult and fraught with danger, the poem’s protagonist is buoyed along her way through a series of affirming encounters with other characters. Reading the text alongside Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the chapter considers the ways in which Lewis interrogates contemporary attitudes towards the sick, as well as what it means to care for someone diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.
‘Thinking through our mothers’
Authors: Cox Fiona
Published: November 2019

Hélène Cixous has been at the forefront of women writers engaging with classical myth from the 1970s and the publication of her seminal article ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’. Her work shifted closer to third-wave concerns in the 1990s, as evidenced in her play La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes, where once again she was one of the earliest women writers to deploy classical allusion to explore the contemporary political scene. It is, therefore, unsurprising to find her setting the trend for a new and emerging trend in classical reception, which is the use of classical myth to document illness and dying (other writers exploring this theme include Jo Shapcott, Gwyneth Lewis, and Helen Dunmore). This chapter analyses Cixous’s reworking of Homer as her mother embarks on the final journey to the underworld, examining both the ways in which Homer continues to shape Cixous’s sense of self and the ways in which Cixous teaches us to read Homer anew.
Epilogue
Authors: Wilson Emily
Published: November 2019

This chapter discusses the author’s own 2017 verse translation of the Odyssey as a feminist project. It argues that the injunctions by Lawrence Venuti and Antoine Berman to ‘foreignize’ in translation are more questionable in the case of male-authored and androcentric texts translated by women. Seven different strategies for feminist translation practices are proposed, and three passages from the Odyssey are discussed in detail: Helen’s ‘dog-face’ (Book 4), the hanging of the slave women (Book 22), and the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus (Book 23). In each case, the author’s translation is contrasted with those by male translators. The chapter ends with a discussion of the presentation of Robert Fagles’s Odyssey as a ‘politically correct’, proto-feminist translation, arguing that it is anything but.
Introduction
Authors: Wellwood Alexis
Published: November 2019

This chapter sets up the main thesis of the book, and provides an overview of how each chapter contributes to that thesis. The overarching theme of the book is that expressions of different lexical categories interact semantically with comparative morphology in a uniform fashion, unlike on extant accounts. Any felt differences in the meaning of cross-categorial comparatives (in particular, differences in the selection of measure functions) are attributed to differences in what is talked about (e.g., objects, substances, events, processes, states, etc.) rather than deep dissimilarities in the semantic type of the lexical categories targeted in the construction.
Measurement and degrees
Authors: Wellwood Alexis
Published: November 2019

This chapter reviews the motivations (both conceptual and formal) for the degree-based analyses of comparatives generally, and in this way presents the basic details of the semantic framework that the book presupposes. In particular, this chapter establishes the vocabulary of measure functions, degrees, and scales, and sets up the book’s answer to the central question of which expressions introduce measure functions into the compositional semantics. By establishing the central distinction between “measurable” and “non-measurable” domains for predication, this chapter initiates the comparison between standard, lexically-based theories of degree introduction, from the book’s theory in which degrees are uniformly introduced by the comparative morphology itself.
Measuring states
Authors: Wellwood Alexis
Published: November 2019

This chapter extends the theory developed in the previous chapter in which an expression like “much” (implicitly as part of “more”, explicitly as part of phrases like “too much” when combined with nouns and verbs) uniformly introduces measure functions into the compositional semantics of comparatives. The present focus is on adjectival comparatives, which are typically analyzed as involving lexical specification of measures by the adjectival target. Exploring both novel and familiar data, drawn from the morphosyntactic and semantic literatures, this chapter suggests that the balance of evidence diagnoses the relevance of order-theoretic properties at the lexical level rather than the presence of lexically-specified measures. The positive proposal offered is that adjectives express properties of states, and the distinction between gradable and non-gradable is on a par with that between mass and count nouns: the former introduce non-trivial ordering relations while the latter do not.
Measuring occasions
Authors: Wellwood Alexis
Published: November 2019

While much of the tradition in degree semantics has focused on the distribution and interpretation of comparatives targeting adjectives, this chapter discusses a class of adjectival comparatives that appears to have gone unnoticed. That is, traditional accounts focus on the interpretation of phrases like “more patient”, while the present chapter considers how such phrases differ from minimally different targets like “patient more”. Probing the meaning of the latter sort of case, this chapter suggests an analysis in which they are interpreted rather like plural verbal comparatives—i.e., as comparisons between numbers of events. This proposal includes a novel approach to the distinction between stage-level and individual-level adjectival predications, such that the former allows for its (base) stative property to be mapped to a plurality of discrete (i.e., maximal and non-overlapping) occasions during which the relevant state(s) hold.
Beyond semantics
Authors: Wellwood Alexis
Published: November 2019

The preceding chapters of the book focused on the traditional sorts of data motivating formal semantic treatments of comparatives: productive patterns of inference, judgments of truth/falsity in context, etc. In this concluding chapter, the book connects the formal analysis with recent work in language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science more broadly. Considering a number of observations in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive development, the chapter considers how the formal theory can (or cannot) be leveraged in order to predict or explain such observations. The chapter argues that, even given the same foundational assumptions about how the formal theory relates to conceptualization, the uniform compositional theory of comparatives offered in the book provides the tools for better explanations of such data than its competitors. In the end, the chapter considers the prospects for resolving the indeterminacy of MUCH in terms of a domain-general concept of measurement.
Geographical Texts
Authors: Stock Paul
Published: November 2019

Chapter 1 explains the characteristics and significance of the book’s principal source material: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British geography books. These works have been largely neglected by historians, but their popularity and summative nature means that they can reveal the formative, commonplace ideas circulating in British literate culture. However, due to their opaque authorships, plagiaristic contents, and complex publication histories, geographical texts pose specific methodological challenges. The chapter therefore argues that we need to adopt different conceptual and procedural priorities in order to discern popular mentalities from these works.
The Natural Environment
Authors: Stock Paul
Published: November 2019

Chapter 4 shows that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books frequently posit a causal relationship between environmental conditions and social development. Europe’s beneficial natural environment is often presumed to be at the heart of its advanced societal achievements, although a rival theory suggests that Europeans have thrived by overcoming specific environmental adversities. At the root of these debates are questions about determinism and human agency, and uncertainty about whether to define Europe in terms of natural conditions or social accomplishments.
The State
Authors: Stock Paul
Published: November 2019

Chapter 6 discusses late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books’ sustained focus on the political states of Europe. The books present states both as organic communities with multi-faceted jurisdictions, and as increasingly centralized governmental authorities. They usually specify that monarchy is the definitive form of European government, and that European states share a propensity for ‘liberty’, broadly defined as respect for law and property, and the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Some geographical texts talk about ‘nations’, but ideas about European polities remain reliant on established notions of governmental structures.
Centres and Peripheries
Authors: Stock Paul
Published: November 2019

Chapter 8 examines the questions and complications surrounding apparent ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ of Europe. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geographical texts appear to regard certain states or regions as especially significant to overall conceptions of the continent, thanks either to their reputed importance or their supposed fringe status. The chapter focuses on Russia, France, the Italian states, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, the German states, and Britain. Analysis shows, however, that it is problematic to distinguish too sharply between core and periphery areas of Europe as regions can instead be both central and marginal simultaneously.