bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Age-Related Changes in the Inhibitory Response Properties of Dorsal Cochlear Nucleus Output Neurons: Role of Inhibitory Inputs
Authors: Caspary Donald M. , Schatteman Tracy A. , Hughes Larry F.
Published: November 2005

Age-related hearing loss frequently results in a loss in the ability to discriminate speech signals, especially in noise. This is attributable, in part, to a loss in temporal resolving power and ability to adjust dynamic range. Circuits in the adult dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) have been shown to preserve signal in background noise. Fusiform cells, major DCN output neurons, receive focused glycinergic inputs from tonotopically aligned vertical cells that also project to the ventral cochlear nucleus. Glycine-mediated inhibition onto fusiform cells results in decreased tone-evoked activity as intensity is increased at frequencies adjacent to characteristic frequency (CF). DCN output is thus shaped by glycinergic inhibition, which can be readily assessed in recordings from fusiform cells. Previous DCN studies suggest an age-related loss of markers for glycinergic neurotransmission. The present study postulated that response properties of aged fusiform cells would show a loss of inhibition, resembling conditions observed with glycine receptor blockade. The functional impact of aging was examined by comparing response properties from units meeting fusiform-cell criteria in young and aged rats. Fusiform cells in aged animals displayed significantly higher maximum discharge rates to CF tones than those recorded from young-adult animals. Fusiform cells of aged rats displayed significantly fewer nonmonotonic CF rate-level functions and an age-related change in temporal response properties. These findings are consistent with an age-related loss of glycinergic input, likely from vertical cells, and with findings from other sensory aging studies suggesting a selective age-related decrement in inhibitory amino acid neurotransmitter function.
Separate Face and Body Selectivity on the Fusiform Gyrus
Authors: Schwarzlose Rebecca F. , Baker Chris I. , Kanwisher Nancy
Published: November 2005

Recent reports of a high response to bodies in the fusiform face area (FFA) challenge the idea that the FFA is exclusively selective for face stimuli. We examined this claim by conducting a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment at both standard (3.125 × 3.125 × 4.0 mm) and high resolution (1.4 × 1.4 × 2.0 mm). In both experiments, regions of interest (ROIs) were defined using data from blocked localizer runs. Within each ROI, we measured the mean peak response to a variety of stimulus types in independent data from a subsequent event-related experiment. Our localizer scans identified a fusiform body area (FBA), a body-selective region reported recently by Peelen and Downing (2005) that is anatomically distinct from the extrastriate body area. The FBA overlapped with and was adjacent to the FFA in all but two participants. Selectivity of the FFA to faces and FBA to bodies was stronger for the high-resolution scans, as expected from the reduction in partial volume effects. When new ROIs were constructed for the high-resolution experiment by omitting the voxels showing overlapping selectivity for both bodies and faces in the localizer scans, the resulting FFA*ROI showed no response above control objects for body stimuli, and the FBA*ROI showed no response above control objects for face stimuli. These results demonstrate strong selectivities in distinct but adjacent regions in the fusiform gyrus for only faces in one region (the FFA*) and only bodies in the other (the FBA*).
Neural Activity Controls the Synaptic Accumulation of α-Synuclein
Authors: Fortin Doris L. , Nemani Venu M. , Voglmaier Susan M. , Anthony Malcolm D. , Ryan Timothy A. , Edwards Robert H.
Published: November 2005

The presynaptic protein α-synuclein has a central role in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the mechanism by which the protein contributes to neurodegeneration and its normal function remain unknown. α-Synuclein localizes to the nerve terminal and interacts with artificial membranesin vitrobut binds weakly to native brain membranes. To characterize the membrane association of α-synuclein in living neurons, we used fluorescence recovery after photobleaching. Despite its enrichment at the synapse, α-synuclein is highly mobile, with rapid exchange between adjacent synapses. In addition, we find that α-synuclein disperses from the nerve terminal in response to neural activity. Dispersion depends on exocytosis, but unlike other synaptic vesicle proteins, α-synuclein dissociates from the synaptic vesicle membrane after fusion. Furthermore, the dispersion of α-synuclein is graded with respect to stimulus intensity. Neural activity thus controls the normal function of α-synuclein at the nerve terminal and may influence its role in PD.
Upregulation of the Voltage-Gated Sodium Channel β2 Subunit in Neuropathic Pain Models: Characterization of Expression in Injured and Non-Injured Primary Sensory Neurons
Authors: Pertin Marie , Ji Ru-Rong , Berta Temugin , Powell Andrew J. , Karchewski Laurie , Tate Simon N. , Isom Lori L. , Woolf Clifford J. , Gilliard Nicolas , Spahn Donat R. , Decosterd Isabelle
Published: November 2005

The development of abnormal primary sensory neuron excitability and neuropathic pain symptoms after peripheral nerve injury is associated with altered expression of voltage-gated sodium channels (VGSCs) and a modification of sodium currents. To investigate whether the β2 subunit of VGSCs participates in the generation of neuropathic pain, we used the spared nerve injury (SNI) model in rats to examine β2 subunit expression in selectively injured (tibial and common peroneal nerves) and uninjured (sural nerve) afferents. Three days after SNI, immunohistochemistry and Western blot analysis reveal an increase in the β2 subunit in both the cell body and peripheral axons of injured neurons. The increase persists for >4 weeks, although β2 subunit mRNA measured by real-time reverse transcription-PCR andin situhybridization remains unchanged. Although injured neurons show the most marked upregulation,β2 subunit expression is also increased in neighboring non-injured neurons and a similar pattern of changes appears in the spinal nerve ligation model of neuropathic pain. That increased β2 subunit expression in sensory neurons after nerve injury is functionally significant, as demonstrated by our finding that the development of mechanical allodynia-like behavior in the SNI model is attenuated in β2 subunit null mutant mice. Through its role in regulating the density of mature VGSC complexes in the plasma membrane and modulating channel gating, the β2 subunit may play a key role in the development of ectopic activity in injured and non-injured sensory afferents and, thereby, neuropathic pain.
Aging-Dependent and -Independent Modulation of Associative Learning Behavior by Insulin/Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Signal inCaenorhabditis elegans
Authors: Murakami Hana , Bessinger Karalee , Hellmann Jason , Murakami Shin
Published: November 2005

Mutations in the insulin/IGF-1 neuroendocrine pathway extend lifespan and affect development, metabolism, and other biological processes inCaenorhabditis elegansand in other species. In addition, they may play a role in learning and memory. Investigation of the insulin/IGF-1 pathway may provide clues for the prevention of age-related declines in cognitive functions. Here, we examined the effects of the life-extending (Age) mutations, such as theage-1(phosphatidylinositol 3-OH kinase) anddaf-2(insulin/IGF-1 receptor) mutations, on associative learning behavior called isothermal tracking. This thermotaxis learning behavior associates paired stimuli, temperature, and food. Theage-1mutation delayed the age-related decline of isothermal tracking, resulting in a 210% extension of the period that ensures it. The effect is dramatic compared with the extension of other physiological health spans. In addition, young adults of various Age mutants (age-1,daf-2,clk-1, andeat-2) showed increased consistency of temperature-food association, which may be caused by a common feature of the mutants, such as the secondary effects of life extension (i.e., enhanced maintenance of neural mechanisms). Theage-1anddaf-2mutants but not the other Age mutants showed an increase in temperature-starvation association through a different mechanism. Increased temperature-food association of thedaf-2mutant was dependent on neuronal Ca2+-sensorncs-1, which modulates isothermal tracking in the AIY interneuron. Interestingly, mutations in thedaf-7TGFβ gene, which functions in parallel to the insulin/IGF-1 pathway, caused deficits in acquisition of temperature-food and temperature-starvation association. This study highlights roles of the Age mutations in modulation of certain behavioral plasticity.
Reversal of Maternal Programming of Stress Responses in Adult Offspring through Methyl Supplementation: Altering Epigenetic Marking Later in Life
Authors: Weaver Ian C. G. , Champagne Frances A. , Brown Shelley E. , Dymov Sergiy , Sharma Shakti , Meaney Michael J. , Szyf Moshe
Published: November 2005

Stress responses in the adult rat are programmed early in life by maternal care and associated with epigenomic marking of the hippocampal exon 17glucocorticoid receptor (GR) promoter. To examine whether such epigenetic programming is reversible in adult life, we centrally infused the adult offspring with the essential amino acidl-methionine, a precursor toS-adenosyl-methionine that serves as the donor of methyl groups for DNA methylation. Here we report that methionine infusion reverses the effect of maternal behavior on DNA methylation, nerve growth factor-inducible protein-A binding to the exon 17promoter, GR expression, and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal and behavioral responses to stress, suggesting a causal relationship among epigenomic state, GR expression, and stress responses in the adult offspring. These results demonstrate that, despite the inherent stability of the epigenomic marks established early in life through behavioral programming, they are potentially reversible in the adult brain.
Downstream Regulatory Element Antagonist Modulator Regulates Ca2+Homeostasis and Viability in Cerebellar Neurons
Authors: Gomez-Villafuertes Rosa , Torres Begoña , Barrio Jorge , Savignac Magali , Gabellini Nadia , Rizzato Federico , Pintado Belen , Gutierrez-Adan Alfonso , Mellström Britt , Carafoli Ernesto , Naranjo Jose R.
Published: November 2005

The Na+/Ca2+exchangers NCX1, NCX2, and NCX3 are vital for the control of cellular Ca2+homeostasis. Here, we show that a doublet of downstream regulatory element sites in the promoter of theNCX3gene mediates transcriptional repression of NCX3 by the Ca2+-modulated transcriptional repressor downstream regulatory element antagonist modulator (DREAM). Overexpression of a DREAM EF-hand mutant insensitive to Ca2+(EFmDREAM) in hippocampus and cerebellum of transgenic mice significantly reduced NCX3 mRNA and protein levels without modifying NCX1 and NCX2 expression. Cerebellar granules from EFmDREAM transgenic mice showed increased levels of cytosolic Ca2+and were more vulnerable to increased Ca2+influx after partial opening of voltage-gated plasma membrane Ca2+channels induced by increasing K+in the culture medium but survived better in the conditions of reduced Ca2+influx prevailing in low extracellular K+. Overexpression of NCX3 in EFmDREAM transgenic granules using a lentiviral vector restored the normal survival response to high K+observed in wild-type granules. Thus, the downregulation of the regulator of Ca2+homeostasis NCX3 by Ca2+-regulated DREAM is a striking example of the autoregulatory property of the Ca2+signal in neurons.
B-b-british Objects: Possession, Naming, and Translation in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon
Authors: Brittan Alice
Published: November 2005

Imported material forms were central to the settlement of Australia as a penal colony, beginning with the “discovery” of the continent by James Cook, who took possession of New South Wales in 1770 by naming Possession Island. The first part of this article traces the intersection in early journals and legal records between material instability and naming, arguing that as Aboriginal peoples and convicts challenged the social meaning of objects, the ability to refer to those objects became essential. The second part explores failed naming in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon (1993), set on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, whose central character calls himself a “B-b-british object,” stuttered words that evoke the historical importance and the vulnerability of imported goods during colonization and settlement in Australia.
A Twice-Told Tail: Reinaldo Arenas's “El Cometa Halley”
Authors: Olivares Jorge
Published: November 2005

This essay analyzes the articulation of transgressive desires in Reinaldo Arenas's “El Cometa Halley,” a parodic continuation of Federico García Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba. I argue that by moving the Alba sisters from Spain to Cuba and liberating their repressed sexualities, Arenas pursues his fantasies of sexual freedom. Linking his rewriting of García Lorca to the historically significant arrival of Halley's comet in 1910, Arenas relies on the comet's phallic tail to set the story in motion. More specifically, “El Cometa Halley” sketches a preoedipal fantasy of mother-son incest that recurs in Arenas's life and work.
Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject
Authors: Marshall Cynthia
Published: November 2005

But look more carefully […]. [T]here is something other, some strewn matter, that does not absorb […].

—Adam Thorpe,Ulverton

Declaring Psychoanalysis “Finally Dead and buried” is “one of the seasonal rituals of our intellectual life” (Žižek 7). In the latest salvo of this battle, Lee Patterson rehearses the argument that debunking the scientific base of Freudianism renders the theory useless to the humanities, and he objects particularly to the application of psychoanalytic models to medieval texts—an exercise, for him, in anachronistic reasoning. Patterson's claim recalls earlier rounds led by Stephen Greenblatt and, a decade before that, in a more totalizing vein, by Frederick Crews. My title indicates my interest in the dispute: where Patterson calls psychoanalysis an “ambulance” or “hearse” (656), I argue that the theory is less a vehicle to be abandoned or replaced and more something organic and renewable—an evolving body of ideas that provides techniques for reading. However, in this short essay I will not construct an apologia for psychoanalytic theory generally but take on the more limited task of characterizing recent uses of the theory in critical engagements with early modern texts. Salient qualities of this work have been overlooked by those who demonize psychoanalysis (a habit suggested by Žižek's image) or are allergic to anything linked to Freud.
What Is a Text Today?
Authors: Mowitt John
Published: November 2005

At the risk of seeming peevish, i should begin by noting that the title “what is a text today?” is not mine. this point strikes me as important, perhaps even urgent, but not because the title must be discarded. On the contrary, it has become all the more important to retain because it contains today, a word that in denoting the interval between yesterday and tomorrow used to call up that which is simply now but which in the wake of 11 September 2001 has come to connote the rupture that separates “America” from the world it thought it had been contracted to police. Thus, if one were to rephrase “my” title, would it not make sense to write, “Is there a text after 11 September 2001?” (to evoke yet again Theodor Adorno's still-haunting question concerning the link between poetry and the Holocaust)? Put this way—and why not begin by raising the stakes as high as possible?—the query tempts one to reply, “Even if there is a text that belongs to this state of exception, who could possibly care?” Are there not more pressing matters? If there are, if the matter at hand is as clear as all that, then neither you nor I have any business persisting beyond this point.
Frank O'Hara's Open Closet
Authors: Herring Terrell Scott
Published: November 2005

This essay explores the relays of publicity and privacy structuring Frank O'Hara‘s “Personism: A Manifesto” and his personal poetry. Though these works have recently been celebrated for their candid expression of homosexual desire during a cultural moment set on silencing queer voices, I argue the inverse. Focusing on O'Hara‘s ambivalent relation to a calcified poetics of impersonality promoted by New Critics and confessional poets, I suggest that O'Hara does not simply reject the New Critical creed of public poetry. He instead reformats New Critical tenets to create a fantastic space of closeted openness that successfully depersonalizes himself and his audience. Apparent in poems such as “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) and “Personal Poem,” this project enables the poet to fashion an intimately imagined queer community that facilitates impersonal identifications. Through personism, that is, O'Hara fabricates an alternative public sphere in which public individuals paradoxically become visibly invisible.
Two Worlds
Authors: Naipaul V. S.
Published: November 2005

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that i have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I amhardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will-with luck-come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I amdoing-which is never an easy thing to do.
Rethinking the Place of Spanish
Authors: Lipski John M.
Published: November 2005

One of my favorite sayings——SITUated on the tenuous interface between humor and seriousness—is “Money isn't everything, but it's way ahead of whatever is in second place,” which is cynical and materialistic but impossible to completely reject. In our profession, one could plug in the word Spanish and derive the same results. At colleges and universities across the country, enrollments in Spanish language courses are growing out of proportion, while programs in other languages often struggle to attract students; some small language offerings have in fact become endangered species, and comparisons to the laws of natural selection permeate the discourse. To the many acronyms that pepper the jargon of our profession has been added LOTS—that is, languages other than Spanish—a disclaimer used whenever language programs and language enrollments are being discussed. This acronym is troubling, since it categorically removes Spanish from the discussion of language programs as being too big to handle or—even more sinister—as somehow constituting an obstacle to the teaching and appreciation of the remaining languages, that is, of the LOTS. Even more troubling are the constant references to the “Spanish problem,” heard among university administrators and language program directors, and the downright offensive comparisons between Spanish enrollments and gorillas of varying dimensions and body weight, depending on who is offering the simile. Why should one facet of the disciplines we hold most dear become a problem akin to a threatening beast escaped from the menagerie? I am aware of no global demonization of other trends found in the humanities (sarcastic and often politically incorrect backroom comments notwithstanding); we had no structuralist, deconstruction, feminist, Marxist, or postmodern problem, and the current attractiveness of such areas as applied linguistics, gender studies, and cultural studies is not seen as problematic except by a small group of professors whose own courses are perceived as losing enrollment to these upstart newcomer fields. Across universities no one speaks of the math problem, the science problem, the physical education problem, or even the English problem, despite the fact that all students are required to take courses in these areas and that staffing and resource issues often cause the shoe to pinch in many places simultaneously. To face these issues squarely, we need to examine facts and fantasies, pride and prejudice, public virtues and private vices, and reject the fratricidal vivisection of our profession in favor of a stance that is both ethically defensible and logistically realistic.
A Shared Fate or a Common Destiny?
Authors: Mitchell J. Lawrence
Published: November 2005

Robert burns, an astute student of human nature, wryly observes in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gi'e us / To see oursels as others see us.” What we may learn is not always palatable. It is no secret that, in the eyes of many of our colleagues in disciplines outside language and literature, English too often appears as a bewilderingly undisciplined discipline—irresistibly drawn to the latest fashionable theory, riven by tiresome factionalism, and shamelessly encroaching on the disciplinary territory of others. The view from within is not always rosy either, on the evidence of satirists such as David Lodge in Small World and Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. In our own eyes, of course, we are stable, responsible, hard-working, and absolutely central to the humanities. It is our colleagues in foreign language departments, we sometimes insist, who are the fractious and feckless ones, and who give the humanities a bad name. But these, our closest colleagues, see us—institutionally, if not individually—as arrogant and imperialistic, and ill content to tend our own gardens, as Voltaire urged. The heart of the matter is that we deem ourselves qualified to teach and to write about works of literature in translation, sometimes without adequate knowledge of the language, culture, or relevant literary tradition. Moreover, in many institutions, world literature is the exclusive—and zealously guarded—province of the English department. How can we reconcile this disciplinary imperialism, not to mention our suspicions about the effectiveness of often balkanized foreign language departments, with the fact that for more than thirty years the most influential theorists have been French, German, and Russian (Auerbach, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Iser, Jakobson, Kristeva, et al.) and that, for the most part, we read them in translation too? Occasionally, of course, English faculty members have been the translators.
The Cold War and Beyond in East Asian Studies
Authors: Field Norma
Published: November 2005

Just before coming to the conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy, I saw an exhibit at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe titled Who Stole the Teepee? Combining historic with contemporary objects, the exhibit probed not only the theft of tradition announced in its title but the possibility that “we” (Native Americans) or “our ancestors” had been more than willing to sell it. Such speculative reflection resonates with the way in which we who study East Asia have dealt with our relatively stable isolation: while complaining of language and literature colleagues' indifference, if not contempt, toward our endeavors, we have also prided ourselves on the difficulty of our languages and the ancientness of our civilizations, the source of an arcane body of knowledge requisite for even basic literacy. If all foreign language and literature scholars feel subordinate to the empire of English, East Asianists are not only beyond the pale but are often proud of it. Underlying this orientation is an important historical feature: even allowing for the mixed case of China, this region was not colonized by Great Britain. This has meant that it lacks a bourgeoisie that grew up speaking English. I shall return to colonial history below.
E Pluribus Unum?
Authors: kirkpatrick susan
Published: November 2005

Forty years ago, when my department was established as one of the first departments of the new San Diego campus of the University of California (UCSD), its founders had a free hand to construct a new model for literary study by recasting the institutional infrastructure that traditionally divided the field by language or language group. The initial vision, as summarized in the introduction to an early graduate program review, was relatively abstract:

The Department of Literature was founded […] on the uncommon but quite logical assumption that there are habits of mind and methods of inquiry peculiar to literary study, whatever the language, and that the literatures of the world have more in common than the usual departmental divisions acknowledge. […] From the standpoint of research and teaching interests, [its structure] runs counter to the provincialism that afflicts many departments of single national literatures.

(“Graduate Program Review”)
What's Foreign and What's Familiar?
Authors: Pratt Mary Louise
Published: November 2005

One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots:

At one point she stopped short in mid-tale and asked, “Does this kind of thing happen in your country?” I laughed. Hoping to reassure her, I said that Americans committed adultery much more often than Ilongots. […] A look of shock spread over her face as she asked, “You mean it's spread?” (101)
A Moratorium on Suspicion?
Authors: Bell David F.
Published: November 2005

One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature. Another colleague buttonholed me at about the same time to tell me he could no longer imagine teaching literature in any context other than cultural studies-that is, in a setting in which the literary text was at most an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoretical theme, no different from any other cultural manifestation. No wonder undergraduates demonstrate dwindling interest in taking a major in literature. For a host of reasons, they come to the university less interested in studying literature than previous generations of students were, only to encounter on their arrival professors who are more than occasionally apathetic toward or suspicious of literary texts. Student disenchantment can only grow in such circumstances.
You Can Always Teach
Authors: de Naples Frederick L.
Published: November 2005

Sometimes a question has been answered in so many creative ways that we overlook the assumptions underlying such responses. When students ask, “What can I do with a degree in literature?” the answers suggest that instructors hear a second, unasked part of the question: “-besides a career in teaching.” That PMLA has reserved space to address a related question-“Why major in literature-what do we tell our students?”-suggests a professional interest not merely in the careers available to literature majors but more broadly in testing what MLA members say about our profession. One answer is that literature majors, like other majors in the liberal arts and humanities, have a wide selection of career choices. The knowledge students gain from modern and classical languages, history, social and political sciences, philosophy, and literature serves graduates by giving them a breadth of experiences and ideas, by developing creative thinking, and by providing skills in communication that make BAs and MAs attractive to employers in business, technology, industry, government, and research, to name a few. But these options omit the one career, sometimes considered a clichéd choice, often left unsaid: literature majors make-or ought to make-excellent teachers.
Being in Love
Authors: Hadda Janet
Published: November 2005

Recently, a gifted undergraduate came to me with some urgent questions: Should he major in literature? And if he did, what practical benefits might he realize? I asked one question: “Are you in love?” By this I meant, “Are you in love with literature?” Then I inquired, “Does your heart skip a beat when you encounter your love? Do you ache when the two of you are separated? Do you resent anything that intrudes on you and your love?”
Why Literature Now?
Authors: Newman Karen
Published: November 2005

Not being an evangelist, i wasn't sure how to respond to the question “Why major in literature-what do we tell our students?” In over twenty years of teaching and advising, I have never sought to persuade students to major in any field. Occasionally, when a woman advisee who came to Brown to major in physics or engineering has decided to shift to literature, I have tried to talk about the difficulties women face in the sciences, the science classroom's chilly climate, and gender competition to persuade her to stick it out and become the engineer or physicist she wanted to be. But proselytize? Never.
Why Major in Literature—What Do We Tell Our Students?
Authors: Pope Randolph D.
Published: November 2005

The progression from language instruction or composition to the higher discipline of literature is no longer the only or even preferred path everywhere. For example, MIT stresses that its literature program goes beyond the traditional:

The program in Literature leading to the degree of Bachelor of Science in Literature is equivalent to the curricula in English (or literary studies) of the major liberal arts universities. The Literature curriculum is notable also for its inclusion, along with traditional literary themes and topics, of materials drawn from film and media, from popular culture, and from minority and ethnic culture. (“Major”)
Terrorism, Culture, and Literature
Authors: Shirane Haruo
Published: November 2005

On the morning of tuesday, 11 September 2001, not far from my classroom, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan were hit by two jet airliners hijacked by terrorists from the Middle East. The towers subsequently collapsed, killing almost three thousand people. Those who originated the attack were apparently of the Islamic faith and spoke Arabic. Those who died were not just Americans but working people from around the globe.
Citizenship, Language, and Modernity
Authors: Chambers Iain
Published: November 2005

This article explores the space that emerges between language and citizenship when language can no longer be assumed to be the direct expression of a precise national, cultural, and geopolitical identity. In the modern uncoupling of identities from fixed homelands, the sense of belonging finds itself caught up in a continual process of translating and being translated. In an emerging configuration that interrogates the subject-centered perspective of occidental humanism, we are invited to consider the transit of language, whether in literary expression, television realism, or musical rhythm, as the site of an ongoing elaboration that is irreducible to a single point of view or to the transparency desired by a unilateral politics. Where no culture, history, or identity remains immune to the interruptions and interrogations of a multiple modernity that no longer merely mirrors the First World, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship need to be reconsidered radically.
Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization
Authors: Kaplan Caren
Published: November 2005

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility. References to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport—applied to information, business, and self—and the benefits of surveillance and tracking. More and more in this context, the concept of a person or of human beings appears to depend on the attenuated possibilities of cyberspace. If the heavy, even immovable, facts of embodied existence can be ameliorated or discharged through the creation of new identities on the Internet, for example, or through new collective personas or communities, then what or who counts as a person becomes transformed.
Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Five-Worlds Theory
Authors: Foster Thomas
Published: November 2005

In the study of postmodern technocultures, including computer-mediated communication and popular narratives about cyberspace, the status of embodiment has emerged as a key question, especially in the context of popular rhetorics that imagine the Internet as a site of freedom from embodied particularity. But while analyses of gender bending and sexual performance on the Internet abound, the future of race in cyberspace has been relatively neglected. This essay traces recent developments in the work of the Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose earlier interests in immigration, transnationalism, and border-crossing art have increasingly led him to reflect on the promises and dangers cyberspace poses for racially minoritized groups, to the extent that people who use or study the Internet fantasize cyberspace as a site of subjective border crossing and identity play. The essay looks at the theme of virtual reality in specific performances and at Gómez-Peña's incorporation of new technologies into his work.
The Sweatshop Sublime
Authors: Robbins Bruce
Published: November 2005

There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 Novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor.

Factories, shops, offices, schools, beginning the working day. People crammed into rush-hour buses and trains, or sitting at the wheels of their cars in traffic jams, or washing up breakfast things in the kitchens of pebble-dashed semis. All inhabiting their own little worlds, oblivious of how they fitted into the total picture. The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action possible: the building and maintenance of the power station that produced the electricity, the mining of coal or pumping of oil to fuel the generators, the laying of miles of cable to carry the current to her house, the digging and smelting and milling of ore or bauxite into sheets of steel or aluminum, the cutting and pressing and welding of the metal into the kettle's shell, spout and handle, the assembling of these parts with scores of other components—coils, screws, nuts, bolts, washers, rivets, wires, springs, rubber insulation, plastic trimmings; then the packaging of the kettle, the advertising of the kettle, the marketing of the kettle, to wholesale and retail outlets, the transportation of the kettle to warehouses and shops, the calculation of its price, and the distribution of its added value between all the myriad people and agencies concerned in its production and circulation. The housewife gave no thought to all this as she switched on her kettle.
“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand
Authors: Lokke Kari
Published: November 2005

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-centuryKünstlerromaneby Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility.Corinne,Valperga, andConsuelorepresent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.
Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination
Authors: Goodlad Lauren M. E.
Published: November 2005

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference.Discipline and Punishoffered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than doesDiscipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.
Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead Matter
Authors: Fay Elizabeth
Published: November 2005

I tell every body it [the Life] will be an Egyptian Pyramid in which there will be a compleat mummy of Johnson that Literary Monarch.

—James Boswell (qtd. in Wendorf 105)

Michel de Certeau thinks about reading as an archaic practice: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else … despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as endlessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Friedrich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many “conceptual mummies” (35). Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death—not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's “now” and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost “now” and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyptianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can unearth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.
Transatlantic Translations
Authors: Ortega Julio
Published: November 2005

When the last Inca emperor and the conquistador from Extremadura, Spain, met in Cajamarca, Peru, on Saturday, 16 November 1532, a world separated them, but they had one thing in common: neither knew how to read. In Andean popular culture and historical analysis, Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro remain the protagonists of that formidable collision of worlds, in which the most powerful man of the Tawantinsuyo, the Inca empire, which stretched from Ecuador to northern Argentina, confronted a Spanish adventurer who was seeking an easy fortune, well aware that this encounter was his last and greatest opportunity. Beyond a mnemonic system of colored knots called quipus, which registered population numbers and other types of numerical accounting, the Incas did not know writing. Pizarro was an illegitimate child from a rich family and apparently had been a swineherd as a boy. It has been repeated that despite his illiteracy, he belonged to the “civilization of the sign” while Atahualpa, despite his power, was condemned for belonging to “the culture of orality.” However, according to legend, during his months of prison, out of curiosity the Inca learned some Spanish words and wrote on the fingernail of his thumb the wordDios(“God”). It is said that he showed it to Pizarro, asking him what it meant, and found that his rival could not read it. From the prison cell of a condemned man and the site of his punishment, Atahualpa engaged in what might have been the first critical reappropriation of the Castilian language (Garcilaso,Historia98; bk. 1, ch. 33).
Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality
Authors: Rowe John Carlos
Published: November 2005

The term transnationalism is used frequently in reference to the rapid circulation of “capital, labor, technology, and media images” in the global economy governed by postindustrial capitalism (Sharpe 110). When incorporated into such phrases as transnational capitalism, the term implies a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends. By the same token, transnationalism is often used to suggest counterhegemonic practices prompted by or accompanying the migrations and diasporas occasioned by these new economic processes of globalization. Thus, Homi Bhabha's privileging of “cultural hybridity” as a way to resist global homogenization is often traceable to his emphasis on “migrant workers,” who are “part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world” and thus “embody […] that moment blasted out of the continuum of history” (8). If these new, exploited cosmopolitans experience every day their dislocation from the familiar boundaries of nation, first language, and citizenship, they may also be particularly able to comprehend how to negotiate transnational situations, even in some cases turning such circumstances to their advantage.
This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself
Authors: Ween Lori
Published: November 2005

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.
Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution
Authors: Mallory Anne
Published: November 2005

A rich critical literature explores the relation between Edmund Burke's theatrical style and his counterrevolutionary argument. Redirecting this line of inquiry, the essay treatsReflections on the Revolution in France(1790) as a histrionic literary performance, arguing that to appreciate its significance we must recover a neglected subtext: a preoccupation with boredom and restlessness. Burke's loyalties are divided: defending England, he counsels against extremes of torpor and excitement. He works to preserve England in a state of settled “repose,” yet his rhetoric reveals a baseline of boredom. Indulging in fantasies of reform and utopia and deploying strategies of tragic hyperbole and self-parody, he mobilizes conventional associations of boredom and revolution to negotiate a new position from which to exercise cultural authority. Textual histrionics do more than contain a revolutionary threat; they establish an alternative theater of boredom.
Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish's Romance, Milton's Masque
Authors: Schwarz Kathryn
Published: November 2005

This essay takes up the issue of chaste intentionality in John Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. Each of these narratives presents a female protagonist who simultaneously embodies and theorizes sexual virtue, creating a problem of will: when women intentionally participate in the ideological structures that constrain their acts, whose agency is at stake? The essay locates this question in the context of early modern conduct manuals and other prescriptive codifications of feminine sexuality, in which the performance of chastity, even as it is idealized, often involves actual or potential acts of violence against patriarchal structures and the male subjects who inhabit them. Milton and Cavendish raise the stakes by creating characters whose chastity is militant even as it tends toward marriage, identifying intentional virtue as a profoundly social problem.
Comparative Literature?
Authors: Damrosch David
Published: November 2005

In recent years, North American literary studies has been marked by a double movement: outward from the Euro-American sphere toward the entire globe and inward within national traditions, in an intensified engagement with local cultures and subcultures. Both directions might seem natural stimuli to comparative study—most obviously in the transnational frame of global studies but also in more local comparisons: a natural way to understand the distinctiveness of a given culture, after all, is to compare it with and contrast it to others. Yet journal articles and job listings alike have not shown any major growth in comparative emphasis in recent years. Is the comparatist doomed to irrelevance, less equipped than the national specialist for local study and yet finding the literary globe expanding farther and farther out of reach, accessible only to a multitude of, again, local specialists?
Theory 911
Authors: Rabaté Jean-Michel
Published: November 2005

It was inevitable that the events of September 2001 and the rapidly shifting world picture they have generated should force us to reexamine our programs, methods, orientations, and presuppositions. Having set out to address the role played by theory in comparative literature programs, I find myself caught between a wish to anticipate this fast-changing history we half live, half dream, in front of television screens and a need to take more distance, to survey a longer history. Besides, since I completed a book entitled The Future of Theory just weeks before these events, I feel the urge to check the relevance of some of my analyses and predictions.