bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fluorescent Probes for Chemical Transformations on the Single‐Molecule Level
Authors: Jung Gregor , Schmitt Alexander , Jacob Michaela , Hinkeldey Babette
Published: July 2008

We highlight our recent achievements in the design of fluorescent dyes for the investigation of chemical reactions on the single‐molecule level. These fluorophores are tailored to undergo changes in their photophysical properties upon chemical transformations. Three examples are presented: electrophilic aromatic substitution, phosphoester cleavage, and oxidation of double‐bonds. Thin‐layer chromatography and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy are used to separate and characterize the different reaction products, respectively. We are planning to develop more fluorescent synthons which enable us to perform single‐molecule chemistry of various reactions.
Which Are You Watching, an Individual Reactive Oxygen Species or Total Oxidative Stress?
Authors: Maeda Hatsuo
Published: July 2008

The fluorometric measurement of an individual reactive oxygen species (ROS) provides useful biological and biochemical information on ROS as important mediators for the pathological conditions of various diseases and yet requires a highly specific probe toward the target ROS. To design such a specific ROS probe, this report proposes a new strategy based on protection–deprotection chemistry between fluoresceins and their derivatives protected with benzenesulfonyl groups. The strategy has allowed developing new fluorescent probes toward extra‐ and intracellular hydrogen peroxide or superoxide. Herein, I outline the strategy used for the design of these ROS probes and their probe performance with high selectivity toward hydrogen peroxide and superoxide, which could not be achieved until a simple deprotection, namely, a nonredox reaction, was used as a fluorescing process.
Photon Upconversion in Homogeneous Fluorescence‐based Bioanalytical Assays
Authors: Soukka Tero , Rantanen Terhi , Kuningas Katri
Published: July 2008

Upconverting phosphors (UCPs) are very attractive reporters for fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)‐based bioanalytical assays. The large anti‐Stokes shift and capability to convert near‐infrared to visible light via sequential absorption of multiple photons enable complete elimination of autofluorescence, which commonly impairs the performance of fluorescence‐based assays. UCPs are ideal donors for FRET, because their very narrow‐banded emission allows measurement of the sensitized acceptor emission, in principle, without any crosstalk from the donor emission at a wavelength just tens of nanometers from the emission peak of the donor. In addition, acceptor dyes emitting at visible wavelengths are essentially not excited by near‐infrared, which further emphasizes the unique potential of upconversion FRET (UC‐FRET). These characteristics result in favorable assay performance using detection instrumentation based on epifluorometer configuration and laser diode excitation. Although UC‐FRET is a recently emerged technology, it has already been applied in both immunoassays and nucleic acid hybridization assays. The technology is also compatible with optically difficult biological samples, such as whole blood. Significant advances in assay performance are expected using upconverting lanthanide‐doped nanocrystals, which are currently under extensive research. UC‐FRET, similarly to other fluorescence techniques based on resonance energy transfer, is strongly distance dependent and may have limited applicability, for example in sandwich‐type assays for large biomolecules, such as viruses. In this article, we summarize the essentials of UC‐FRET, describe its current applications, and outline the expectations for its future potential.
Fluorescent Studies on Cooperative Binding of Cationic Pheophorbide‐a Derivative to Polyphosphate
Authors: Ryazanova Olga , Voloshin Igor , Dubey Igor , Dubey Larisa , Zozulya Victor
Published: July 2008

The cooperative binding of a novel water‐soluble cationic derivative of pheophorbide‐a (CatPheo‐a) to inorganic polyphosphate (PPS) in buffered aqueous solutions was studied by means of polarized fluorescence spectroscopy in a wide range of molar phosphate‐to‐dye ratios (P/D). Under low P/D values, CatPheo‐a forms extended stacking associates on the PPS matrix, while under high P/D the dye binds to PPS in the dimer form. The CatPheo‐a self‐association is accompanied by 40‐fold dye fluorescence quenching and a substantial increase in the fluorescence polarization degree. The fluorescent titration data were used for determination of cooperative binding parameters by Schwarz's method.
Fluorescence Interferometry
Authors: Bilenca Alberto , Cao Jing , Colice Max , Ozcan Aydogan , Bouma Brett , Raftery Laurel , Tearney Guillermo
Published: July 2008

The use of fluorescence radiation is of fundamental importance for tackling measurement problems in the life sciences, with recent demonstrations of probing biological systems at the nanoscale. Usually, fluorescent light–based tools and techniques use the intensity of light waves, which is easily measured by detectors. However, the phase of a fluorescence wave contains subtle, but no less important, information about the wave; yet, it has been largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the concept of fluorescence interferometry to allow the measurement of phase information of fluorescent light waves. In principle, fluorescence interferometry can be considered a unique form of optical low‐coherence interferometry that uses fluorophores as a light source of low temporal coherence. Fluorescence interferometry opens up new avenues for developing new fluorescent light–based imaging, sensing, ranging, and profiling methods that to some extent resemble interferometric techniques based on white light sources. We propose two experimental realizations of fluorescence interferometry that detect the interference pattern cast by the fluorescence fields. This article discusses their measurement capabilities and limitations and compares them with those offered by optical low‐coherence interferometric schemes. We also describe applications of fluorescence interferometry to imaging, ranging, and profiling tasks and present experimental evidences of wide‐field cross‐sectional imaging with high resolution and large range of depth, as well as quantitative profiling with nanometer‐level precision. Finally, we point out future research directions in fluorescence interferometry, such as fluorescence tomography of whole organisms and the extension to molecular interferometry by means of quantum dots and bioluminescence.
Acoustically Levitated Droplets
Authors: Leiterer Jork , Grabolle Markus , Rurack Knut , Resch‐Genger Ute , Ziegler Jan , Nann Thomas , Panne Ulrich
Published: July 2008

Acoustic levitation is used as a new tool to study concentration‐dependent processes in fluorescence spectroscopy. With this technique, small amounts of liquid and solid samples can be measured without the need for sample supports or containers, which often limits signal acquisition and can even alter sample properties due to interactions with the support material. We demonstrate that, because of the small sample volume, fluorescence measurements at high concentrations of an organic dye are possible without the limitation of inner‐filter effects, which hamper such experiments in conventional, cuvette‐based measurements. Furthermore, we show that acoustic levitation of liquid samples provides an experimentally simple way to study distance‐dependent fluorescence modulations in semiconductor nanocrystals. The evaporation of the solvent during levitation leads to a continuous increase of solute concentration and can easily be monitored by laser‐induced fluorescence.
Size Distributions of Cadmium Sulfide Nanoparticles Obtained from Templating Methods
Authors: Coutinho Paulo J. G. , Mendes Candido A. G. , Reis Teresa S. V.
Published: July 2008

Cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanoparticles were obtained by soft templating methods using either an already established revered micelle route or a new procedure based on gel electrophoresis. The UV‐Vis absorption or the photoluminescence excitation spectra were fitted using the CdS electronic structure available in the literature together with a size distribution. The obtained results indicate that the amount of sodium dodecyl sulphate as a component of the agarose gel formulation has a profound effect on the resulting nanoparticle population.
Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence in Fullerenes
Authors: Baleizão Carlos , Berberan‐Santos Mário N.
Published: July 2008

This report reviews the thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) displayed by fullerenes. From the analysis of the steady‐state data, time‐resolved data, or by a combination of both, it is possible to determine several important photophysical parameters of fullerenes. Herein we also cover the development of temperature and oxygen sensors based on the TADF effect exhibited by fullerene C70. Despite the work already carried out, knowledge of the photophysics of fullerenes and derivatives is still incomplete, and much remains to be done in this area and in the improvement of sensor systems based on fullerenes.
Preparation and Characterization of Nanocrystalline ZrO2:Yb3+,Er3+ Up‐conversion Phosphors
Authors: Hyppänen Iko , Hölsä Jorma , Kankare Jouko , Lastusaari Mika , Pihlgren Laura
Published: July 2008

Nanocrystalline up‐converting phosphors with zirconium oxide (ZrO2) as the host lattice were prepared with combustion and sol–gel methods. Impurities were analyzed with Fourier transform infrared (FT‐IR) spectroscopy. Yb3+ absorption was studied in the wave number region 10,000–11,500 cm−1 at room temperature and at 10 K. The whole‐blood absorption was measured in the region 9100–41,600 cm−1 at room temperature. Up‐conversion luminescence was excited at room temperature with an IR‐laser at 977 nm. The up‐conversion luminescence spectra showed red (650–685 nm) and green emission (520–560 nm) due to the 4F9/2 → 4I15/2 and (2H11/2, 4S3/2) → 4I15/2 transitions of Er3+, respectively. The materials prepared with combustion synthesis were found to yield the most efficient up‐conversion intensity and the longest luminescence decay.
Structural Effects of Biologically Relevant Rhodamines on Spectroscopy of Fluorescence Fluctuations
Authors: Ferreira José A. B.
Published: July 2008

Exciton coupling in π–π complexes between the indole ring and other π systems is known to enhance the efficiency of energy and electron transfer. Rhodamines' xanthylium rings allow the formation of weakly or nonfluorescent complexes with the amino acid tryptophan. Thus, because of the short distance of the participating electronic clouds, intrinsic electron transfer–induced fluorescence quenching occurs. In solution, the rate constant of electron transfer is known to be limited by collision interactions at the contact distance. By contrast, in protein local environments tryptophan residues can be either exposed or buried in hydrophobic regions. Herein, I report on the properties of aromatic derivatized rhodamines, among which is one with a bound phenylalanine amino acid group. Encompassed is the spectroscopic and kinetic information in bulk and at the single‐molecule levels both in free solution and in the presence of human serum albumin. Spectroscopic characteristics are focused with special emphasis on enhanced fluorescence that is addressed considering optimized geometries and electronic spectra. The importance of the probes associated with peptides and metal ions both in condensed phase or interfaces and as substrates with proteins is put into perspective.
Human Serum Albumin‐flavonoid Interactions Monitored by Means of Tryptophan Kinetics
Authors: Rolinski Olaf J. , Martin Andrew , Birch David J. S.
Published: July 2008

A nonextensive model of decay kinetics has been used to describe fluorescence behavior of tryptophan in human serum albumin on binding two flavonoids, quercetin and morin. We demonstrate that this approach, alternative to multiexponential representation of usually complex decays of tryptophan, is more adequate and can be beneficial in noninvasive lifetime sensing based on intrinsic fluorescence.
Growth Hormone Treatment on Atherosclerosis: Results of a 5-Year Open, Prospective, Controlled Study in Male Patients with Severe Growth Hormone Deficiency
Authors: Colao Annamaria , Di Somma Carolina , Spiezia Stefano , Savastano Silvia , Rota Francesca , Savanelli Maria Cristina , Lombardi Gaetano
Published: July 2008

Background: Severe GH deficiency (GHD) is associated with, increased cardiovascular risk and intima-media thickness (IMT) at major arteries.

Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate the 5-yr effects of GH replacement on common carotid IMT and insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) (at least two of the following: triglycerides levels ≥ 1.7 mmol/liter, high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol levels ≤ 1.0 mmol/liter, blood pressure above 130/85 mm Hg, fasting glucose 6.1–7 or 2 hr after glucose 7.7–11.1 mmol/liter).

Design: This was an interventional, open, prospective, controlled study.

Patients: Patients included 35 men with severe GHD and 35 age-matched healthy men as controls.

Intervention: All patients received standard replacement therapy; GH replacement was added in 22 patients (group A) and refused by 13 others (group B).

Measurements: Five-year changes in IMT and IRS prevalence were measured.

Results: At baseline, IMT was higher in the patients with (P < 0.001) and without IRS (P = 0.004) than in controls. Eighteen patients (51.4%) and two controls (5.7%; P < 0.0001) had IRS. At study end, use of lipid-lowering drugs (92.3, vs. 13.6 and 34.3%, P < 0.0001), glucose-lowering drugs (69.2 vs. 31.4 and 22.7%; P = 0.016), and antihypertensive drugs (61.5 vs. 20.0 and 4.5%; P < 0.0001) was higher in group B patients than controls and group A patients. IGF-I levels normalized in all group A patients and remained lower than −1 sd score in 77% of group B patients. IMT significantly decreased only in group A and significantly increased in controls and nonsignificantly in group B patients. IRS prevalence significantly reduced only in group A patients.

Conclusions: Severely hypopituitary GHD men have more frequently increased IMT at common carotid arteries and IRS than controls. After 5 years, only in GH replaced patients, IMT and prevalence of IRS decreased.
Inventory Models for Substitutable Products: Optimal Policies and Heuristics
Authors: Nagarajan Mahesh , Rajagopalan S.
Published: July 2008

In this paper, we examine the nature of optimal inventory policies in a system where a retailer manages substitutable products. We first consider a system with two products 1 and 2 whose total demand is D and individual demands are negatively correlated. A fixed proportion of the unsatisfied customers for an item will purchase the other item if it is available in inventory. For the single-period case, we show that the optimal inventory levels of the two items can be computed easily and follow what we refer to as “partially decoupled” policies, i.e., base stock policies that are not state dependent, in certain critical regions of interest both when D is known and random. Furthermore, we show that such a partially decoupled base-stock policy is optimal even in a multiperiod version of the problem for known D for a wide range of parameter values and in an N-product single-period model under some restrictive conditions. Using a numerical study, we show that heuristics based on the decoupled inventory policy perform well in conditions more general than the ones assumed to obtain the analytical results. The analytical and numerical results suggest that the approach presented here is most valuable in retail settings for product categories where the level of substitution between items in a category is not high, demand variation at the aggregate level is not high, and service levels or newsvendor ratios are high.
Mikhaïl Bakhtine et Pavel Medvedev face aux formalismes russe et ouest-européen
Authors: Vauthier Bénédicte
Published: June 2008

Une relecture des travaux de Mikhaïl Bakhtine à la lumière de La Méthode formelle dans la science de la littérature (Leningrad, 1928) de Pavel Medvedev permet de réouvrir le débat au sujet des fondements formalistes (russe et ouest-européen), matérialistes et idéalistes qui sous-tendent la réflexion du “Cercle” sur l’esthétique de la création verbale.
Shapes of Things
Authors: Motte Warren
Published: June 2008

The members of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle put literary form on stage and direct it to perform as theme. Form is what fires the Oulipian imagination, whether it be a question of a jigsaw puzzle, or of a particularly puzzling text, or of that most pleasingly complex of puzzles, a life.
Le Formalisme dans la Nouvelle Critique française
Authors: Pennanech Florian
Published: June 2008

L’article caractérise la façon dont la Nouvelle Critique française a envisagé la notion de forme à partir du modèle romantique de la totalité organique, et s’interroge sur les présupposés d’une herméneutique des formes, ce qu’une comparaison de la critique et la poétique chez Gérard Genette permet de mettre en évidence.
Entre Oulipo et Nouveau Roman Textuel: pour une approche transformelle du texte contraint
Authors: Sirvent Michel
Published: June 2008

Le commun recours à la réécriture transformationnelle de textes existants rapproche deux pratiques associées à des courants distincts (Oulipo/Nouveau Roman): celles de Georges Perec et de Jean Ricardou. Mais si leurs œuvres illustrent diverses formes de littératures à contraintes, elles procèdent aussi de conceptions fort dissemblables. L’on opposera ainsi des productions strictement formalistes à celles issues d’une pratique s’imposant des contraintes supplémentaires de réécriture et que l’on dira trans-formelle .
Classical and/or Postclassical Narratology
Authors: Prince Gerald
Published: June 2008

Less formalist than classical narratology, postclassical narratology brings together poetics and hermeneutics, studying narratives as contextually situated practices. Yet postclassical narratology does not represent a negation of its predecessor but its extension. Whether classical or postclassical, narratology maintains its commitment to elaborating the best model of narrative possible and, at least in this sense, it should continue to be formalist.
Jean-Marie Gleize's Poetic Pics
Authors: Thomas Jean-Jacques
Published: June 2008

This essay takes the direction of visual studies to propose a reading of the contemporary French post-poetry of Jean-Marie Gleize. It explores the redefined aspect of “form” in French prose and poetry. Gleize’s work engages with plasticity in order to enhance accessibility to the real, while bypassing the usual step of proposing a new art poétique based on textual formalism and neo-rhetorical poetics.
Malet's Maps and Butor's Bleston: City-Space and Formal Play in the roman policier
Authors: Goulet Andrea
Published: June 2008

This essay explores the cartographic and narrative representations of the city in Léo Malet’s Les Nouveaux mystères de Paris (1954-59) and Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du temps (1956). Through the “open closure” of Malet’s Paris arrondissements and Butor’s fictional Bleston, the authors use maps to play with generic conventions of the detective novel while marking the paradoxes of an emergent spatiality marked by urban dispersal and criminal containment.
La Discipline du refus : sur le formalisme des écrivains
Authors: Panaïté Oana
Published: June 2008

On examinera les usages littéraires du formalisme à partir d’un faisceau de traits, dont certains sont présents dès les formalistes russes (la littérarité, la matérialité des textes), alors que d’autres, plus tardifs (l’opposition à l’art engagé, l’éthique de la forme), manifestent les tensions internes de cette pensée composite et plurielle.
Grids and Transparencies
Authors: James Alison
Published: June 2008

Even as the ideological quarrels of the twentieth century fade away, critical discourse continues to pit partisans of mimesis against devotees of literary form. Challenging this dichotomy, this article explores the fascination with realism and representation among writers and theorists often considered to be formalists. It considers some narrative beginnings which thematize and enact the emergence of form from perception.
The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota
Authors: Pressman Jessica
Published: June 2008

A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.
Surfing the Long Waves of Global Capital with Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker : Ethnic Branding and the Humanization of Capital
Authors: Narkunas J. Paul
Published: June 2008

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker probes how ethnicity can operate as a commodity to fuel corporatized cultural difference in US liberal democracy. The normalization of “ethnic informants” in Native Speaker creates specific individuals whose existence function as cultural capital, or “brands” of human difference, conducive for both state management and market exploitation of ethnic humans. Lee’s Native Speaker thinks through what I call the humanization of capital, whereby capital is “humanized” and personified as human and ethnic to challenge the hegemony of global capital and political liberalism and offer a concept of belonging through the perpetual substitution of figurations.
The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In The Ruins of The Future,” “Baader-Meinhof,” and Falling Man
Authors: Kauffman Linda S
Published: June 2008

In three post-9/11 texts, DeLillo contrasts America’s self-image with its image in the eyes of the world. One can map history’s coordinates in these interrelated texts, which lead back inexorably to Mao II, and World War II. What happens when the U.S. becomes the world’s policeman? What happens when the State becomes as lawless as those it seeks to repress? DeLillo illustrates that the function of art in times of global upheaval is to challenge totalitarian impulses – at home and abroad. His themes are the repression of memory and the memory of repression.
Deconstruction, Radical Secrecy, and The Secret Agent
Authors: Segal Alex
Published: June 2008

Relating the exploration of secrecy in Conrad’s The Secret Agent to Derrida’s engagement with secrecy reveals a striking proximity: Derrida and Conrad both evoke what might be called a secret without secret, a depthless secret beyond the secret, and thereby displace the secret with content. It also reveals a striking divergence. Not sharing Derrida’s passion for the secret without secret, Conrad – at least in this text – does not bear witness to what Derrida describes as “democracy to come,” nor exemplify the attempt to loosen “the sway of the Author” that Barthes affirms.
Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
Authors: Schoene Berthold
Published: June 2008

This essay carries out an expressly gender-specific analysis of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho , showing how the novel pathologizes modern masculinity by identifying its most characteristic traits as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments. Traditional masculinity is read as a residual, ideologically motivated gender construct that – by endorsing and legitimizing the realization of certain, possibly genetic, male dispositions as a fixed set of behavioral norms and imperatives – promotes the genesis a type of male subjectivity that displays conspicuous similarities particularly to Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioning autism.
The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom
Authors: Crangle Sara
Published: June 2008

Boredom is widely considered a subjective malaise best gauged in twentieth-century literature. Woolf’s preoccupation with boredom is evident throughout her work—particularly Orlando—but comes to fruition in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection.” This story pits the perception of boredom as a form of self-affirmation against a rejection of the inherent dullness of continually acknowledging the self, a process elucidated via examinations of Heidegger’s visionary ennui and Levinas’s reworking of bored subjectivity. Additionally, “Lady in the Looking-Glass” participates in a relatively unexamined aspect of boredom theory: namely, the treatment of time as a spectre haunting the bored.
Human Rights, Social Justice, and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Authors: Anker Elizabeth S.
Published: June 2008

In its engagement with the relative successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explicitly invokes the concept of human rights only to expose the many limitations of rights as vehicles for approaching social justice. Disgrace first juxtaposes its protagonist’s “rights of desire” with human rights, thereby exposing significant liabilities of rights talk. At the same time, it contemplates a communitarian mode of interpersonal solidarity as an alternative to the rights paradigm. However, in the end, its insistence upon the indeterminate status of justice is paradoxically what enables its ethical and political force.
Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay , and the Framing of Comics
Authors: Chute Hillary
Published: June 2008

This essay explores the connection between contemporary fiction and contemporary graphic narrative by examining how two novels—E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)—share the concerns (both formal and thematic) of graphic narrative: namely, an abiding interest in the narrativization of history. Both novels, works of historical fiction that are about the rise of popular, visual media in the twentieth-century, suggest the political value of popular forms that are innovative and yet widely accessible, and thus give us a way to think about the import and invention of graphic narrative.
A Tale of Autistic Experience: Knowing, Living, Telling in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Authors: Freißmann Stephan
Published: June 2008

Taking its starting point from Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , a novel featuring an autistic first-person narrator, this paper explores the capabilities and limits of narrative as a cognitive instrument with special attention to the connection between knowing, living, and telling. In the novel the impairments connected with autism, affecting social interaction and the understanding of other persons as beings with minds of their own, influence both the narrator's style of telling his story and his way of using narrative thinking to plan the future and conceive of the past. The discussion focuses on both these issues, arguing that narrative is not only a cultural technique which enables orientation in time and space as well as the understanding of other agents as intentional —that it is a highly social art, of vital importance for everyday action and interaction in a web of social relations.
Towards a Post-Levinasian Approach to Narrativity: Facing Baudelaire's "Eyes of the Poor"
Authors: Korhonen Kuisma
Published: June 2008

In spite of Emmanuel Levinas's famous criticism of narratives as artistic representations, the essay argues that we should construct a "post-Levinasian" approach to narrativity that would both respect the ethical priority of the Other, and go beyond Levinas by taking into account narrative techniques, as well as the historical and political contexts. As an example, the essay analyzes different encounters that take place in Baudelaire's prose poem "The Eyes of the Poor." In the narrator's inevitable failure of reading the face of the Other we can perhaps hear the singular way in which, to quote Levinas, "across all literature the human face speaks —or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature."
Giving Form to Life: Cloning and Narrative Expectations of the Human
Authors: Jerng Mark
Published: June 2008

The essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novel Never Let Me Go in the context of both fictional representations of cloning and the contemporary debates on the ethics of cloning. In certain debates human cloning has been framed primarily in terms of its effects on the parent-child relation and the family. But an investigation of arguments both for and against cloning reveals how this scenario privileges a specific normative narrative of individuation that prescribes the proper form for life. The conventions of cloning narratives highlight the role of this normative narrative in our constructions of the human. From movies like The Island to science fiction classics like Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang , these narratives betray anxieties over individuation. Never Let Me Go , on the other hand, reflects on the narrative modes that shape what it means to be human. It measures the human not in terms of some narrative of internal or immanent development but rather through the process of relating to another.
A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated: Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie
Authors: Karttunen Laura
Published: June 2008

The "disnarrated" (Gerald Prince) means textual elements that consider (in a negative or hypothetical mode) what did not happen but could have. The scope of the term is inconveniently wide at present, ranging from explicit denials to lengthy passages of imagined or otherwise hypothetical events. This essay seeks to clarify the concept by relating it to the pragmatic and rhetorical functions of negatives in language and literature. A statement of what could have happened but did not may often be rephrased as what should have happened but did not. Negatives reveal what is expected in a given situation and of a particular person or ethnic group. They thus render social and literary norms visible and subject to resistance, which makes them valuable for feminist and postcolonial criticism. Negatives do not record a neutrally observable reality but must be attributable to a narrative agent with her own set of cultural and individual norms. In Jhumpa Lahiri's bicultural story "Interpreter of Maladies", the descriptive focus inhering in (negative) phrases sometimes conflicts with the focalization indicated by contextual cues. Salman Rushdie frequently evokes the voice of local gossips but renders their narrative hypothetical by using negatives. This may be regarded as one way of standardizing the expectations of a multicultural readership. Both Rushdie and Arundhati Roy invite the reader to make certain kinds of inferences concerning the events only to disappoint them by switching to disnarration at a climactic juncture. In making the reader conscious of the cultural stereotypes guiding her inferencing, negatives and the disnarrated serve ethical and political ends. They direct the reader's attention to the discursive context of the text, urging her to read metonymically.
Austerlitz's Memory
Authors: Brockmeier Jens
Published: June 2008

The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricoeur has called human time.
Knowing More Than We Can Tell: The Cognitive Structure of Narrative Comprehension
Authors: Flanagan Joseph
Published: June 2008

This article proposes a cognitive approach to narrative that moves away from a "representational" paradigm – one concerned with exploring the fictionalized representation of conscious experience – to a conceptualist paradigm – one concerned with the functional organization of the mental structures that underlie our ability to comprehend a narrative in the first place. Stated blandly, my argument is that literary narratologists in particular need to jettison the remnants of traditional criticism that conceives of narrative in the form of a mimetic textual artifact and to adopt a method that systematically explicates the explicitly mental structures than underlie narrative comprehension. What kinds of categories, distinctions, and relations must be realized in the mind-brain in order to effect narrative comprehension? I suggest that this emphasis upon what we can characterize as the "content" of the mental structures that underlie narrative comprehension (rather the content of the narrative text) offers a paradigm for narratological research that respects the need for both disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Narratives and Counter-Narratives —Quixotic Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century England: Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Authors: Uddén Anna
Published: June 2008

At the time of publication, The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox was received on the terms announced by its title: as a Cervantine, parodic novel. Modern critics read it either as a reflection of the historical forces that restricted writers at that time, or as a failed Cervantine novel. Read as a true inheritor of Cervantine narrative strategies, The Female Quixote is a "metarepresentation" that highlights the creative agency of its source, inviting readers to a hermeneutic game. In contrast to modern accounts of the novel that focus on the historical author and her relationship with Samuel Johnson, to whom parts of the novel have been attributed, I argue that the novel parodies Johnson's style and literary norms. Through an investigation of the novel's interpretive history, the essay demonstrate that a novel's point, if a metafictive one, may be lost if we enter through a historical anteroom of little relevance to its concern.
Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance
Authors: Herman David
Published: June 2008

Drawing on treatments of the problem of intentionality in fields encompassed by the umbrella discipline of cognitive science, including language theory, psychology, and the philosophy of mind, this paper explores issues underlying recent debates about the role of intentions in narrative contexts. To avoid entering the debate on the terms set by antiintentionalists, my analysis shifts the focus away from questions about the boundary for legitimate ascriptions of communicative intention, the tipping-point where those ascriptions become illicit projections of readerly intuitions onto an imagined authorial consciousness. Instead, I propose a two-part strategy for examining how storytelling practices are bound up with inferences about intention. The first part uses Hemingway's 1927 short story "Hills Like White Elephants" to argue that narrative interpretation requires adopting the heuristic strategy that Daniel Dennett has characterized as "the intentional stance." In other words, it makes sense to assume that stories like Hemingway's are told for particular reasons, in the service of communicative goals about which interpreters are justified in framing at least provisional hypotheses. This first part of my analysis is tantamount to grounding stories in intentional systems . The second part, which draws on work on folk psychology (and research in the philosophy of mind more generally), describes narrative as a means by which humans learn to take up the intentional stance in the first place, and later practice using it in the safe zone afforded by storyworlds. This part of my analysis involves grounding intentional systems in stories . Here I argue that narrative constitutes in its own right a discipline for reading for intentions, a primordial basis for making the ascriptions of intentionality that lie at the heart of folk psychology, or everyday reasoning concerning one's own and others' minds.
"Life as Narrative" Revisited
Authors: Hyvärinen Matti
Published: June 2008

The article reconsiders Jerome Bruner's famous article "Life as Narrative" (1987), and in particular its thesis about those who "become" the autobiographical narratives they are telling. Galen Strawson's recent criticism of narrativity is used as one perspective to weigh Bruner's thought. Autobiography is, for Bruner, a cognitive achievement, yet he challenges the understanding of narrative as simply following and imitating life. He foregrounds the ways in which life imitates narrative, and the manner in which narrative cognition precedes and organizes experience. However, the key idea about the merger of autobiographical narratives and lived life privileges autobiography vis-à-vis the continuous process of the reception of narratives. Autobiography is never the sole cognitive resource used in organizing experience. The article argues that Bruner's later emphasis on "folk psychological," canonical narrativity and the "breaches" of these expectations as a cause of real narratives marks a change in his thought. The function of narration is to contain, solve, or deal with the "uncanniness" of life and shattered expectations. Experience is thus, to some extent, at odds with the preceding autobiographical narratives, and thus calls for revision of the preceding narratives rather than being dominated by them.
Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives
Authors: Mikkonen Kai
Published: June 2008

The paper deals with the presentation of minds in the mixed media environment of graphic narratives, inspired by the notion of narrative experientiality as it is defined in recent narratology. Focusing specifically on three interrelated medium-specific issues, it examines the way graphic narratives can also be said to stimulate the viewer'sengagement with the minds of characters and narrators: the mimetic aspect of the graphic image; the problem of the narrative agent; and the interaction between visual focalization, verbal focalization and verbal narration. Graphic narratives pose a challenge to common narratological analytical categories concerning narratorial authority, enunciation and control in that they display diverse and shifting relationships between verbal narration and visual presentations. The analysis of the graphic means of thought and mind presentation aims to illuminate some of the challenges that narrative theory meets in its transmedial extension. The main examples include first-person autobiographical narratives as well as third-person historical fiction that uses various focalizers and "behaviorist" graphic narratives that are structured around dialogue and action.
Narrative as Experience: The Pedagogical Implications of Sympathizing with Fictional Characters
Authors: Sklar Howard
Published: June 2008

Last year, guided by theories that regard sympathy as an imaginative capacity that can bridge divisions between people of different backgrounds, I conducted an experiment with nearly 200 Finnish secondary school students, in order to determine the extent to which particular texts would generate their sympathy for characters who seem unattractive, undesirable, or generally outside of the accepted norms of the societies in which they live. The present paper builds on my findings in that study by suggesting some of the pedagogical implications of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and particularly to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals toward whom they ordinarily might feel aversion or uncertainty. It examines some of the ways in which experiences with narrative fiction can be used to help develop emotional and conceptual structures in adolescent readers. In Education and Experience John Dewey contends that “the conditions found in present experience should be used as sources of problems”; indeed, the present paper shows how narrative experience can help form the basis for a problem-solving, emotionally-rich curriculum that takes as its primary aim the development of students’ capacities for emotional awareness and ethical reflection.
Thought Presentation and Constructed Dialogue in Oral Stories: Limits and Possibilities of a Cross-Disciplinary Narratology
Authors: Mildorf Jarmila
Published: June 2008

The disciplinary rapprochement between various disciplines across the arts and social sciences that have had an interest in narrative forms and functions has been slow and is still far from being completed. An area which has not been extensively covered yet is the question whether certain forms of third-person consciousness, i.e. the representation of the consciousness of a third party, are at all possible in oral narratives. One mode of depicting third-person consciousness in literary narratives is free indirect discourse (FID), which is commonly viewed as a dual-voiced narrative technique that entails both a reference to the thinking subject and to the narrating instance. The evaluation of FID as a literary narrative technique that is deemed less possible in oral stories results from the attribution of qualities of fictionality and factuality to the respective narrative genres and modes, whereas claims of truth-commitment and sincerity are made for spoken language. This paper discusses the methodological implications of FID for a cross-disciplinary narratology by looking at oral narratives from a sample of illness narratives on the UK’s DIPEx website. While FID can hardly be found in the spoken data, third-person consciousness is still made possible through the use of hypothesizing discourse markers and through devices such as constructed dialogue, which can be used to ascribe thoughts and feelings to other people in an indirect way. The paper demonstrates how third-person consciousness is used by speakers to come to terms with the motives behind other people’s actions. On a more abstract level, the paper explores the limits of a crossdisciplinary narratology when it comes to rigid methodological frameworks while at the same time arguing for a re-conceptualization of defining criteria such as fictionality and truth-commitment that allows for more flexibility.
Desdemona and the Role of Women in the Antebellum North
Authors: Kahn Edward
Published: June 2008

This essay examines critical, theatrical, and popular attitudes toward Desdemona in the Northern United States during the half-century before the Civil War. It argues that the actions and purported essence of the character were embedded within cultural debates, not only concerning questions of miscegenation, but also issues surrounding the social construction of womanhood, the equality of women, and women's participation in anti-slavery societies. The Desdemona of this era is seen as both a product of changing attitudes and a participant in these debates, inasmuch as she served as an interventionary presence in political and social discourse.
The Location of Shakespeare in Korea: Lee Yountaek's Hamlet and the Mirage of Interculturality
Authors: Im Yeeyon
Published: June 2008

The concept of New Asia is based on the belief that global capitalism has displaced the boundary between the First and Third worlds, redrawing the world map according to the distribution of capital. This essay examines the implication of interculturalism in New Asia and ultimately the relationship between West and East, focusing on Lee Yountaek's production of Hamlet that premiered in Seoul in 1996. The analysis of Lee's Hamlet in the context of Korean history showcases the dilemma and delusion of intercultural theatre in New Asia, whose political independence and economic growth allow only a passive postcolonial resistance to Western cultural hegemony that is subsumed by a desire to elevate the cultural status of Asia in the West without denying or resisting Western culture. Lee Yountaek's Shakespeare reflects the impasse of contemporary Korean society, whose postcolonial reality is obscured by an optimistic idea of interculturalism.
Suzan-Lori Parks's Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus
Authors: Warner Sara L.
Published: June 2008

This essay offers a transnational exploration of Suzan-Lori Parks's dis(re)memberment of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa who was displayed in Europe in the 1800s under the appellation "The Hottentot Venus." Juxtaposing two simultaneous events—post-apartheid south Africa's efforts to repatriate baartman's remains, and the volatile American reception of Parks's play Venus —reveals the ways in which Parks's aesthetic, defined here as a "drama of disinterment," calls into question the notion that historical trauma is a wound that must be healed in the name of unity, the idea that reconciliation necessarily entails the establishment of an objective truth, and the assumption that the restoration of dignity is the goal of the recovery process.
"That a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness": Woman versus woman in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre
Authors: Murphy Paul
Published: June 2008

This essay engages with dramatic representations of womanhood in the Irish context
during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Lacanian theory is used in conjunction
with Irish women’s studies scholarship in order to inform the analysis of plays
by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C.
Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible
task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife and Mother, and how this
situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre.
"But this will be a mere confusion": Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage
Authors: West William N.
Published: June 2008

In Elizabethan England, play after play took confusion, disguise, or madness as
a central subject. This thematic interest in confusion followed a concern, prevalent
during the 1570s, 1580s, and early 1590s, that drama was genuinely confusing to its
audiences. Whereas plays and interludes from the middle decades of the sixteenth
century frequently expressed a desire to make their performances clear to their audiences,
performances of the later decades began to suggest that confusions are an unavoidable
part of the experience of playgoing, and even perhaps a necessary part of
theatre’s ability to inform and instruct. Accounts of early performances, like a 1594 Inns
of Court Comedy of Errors , also hint that a play’s impact could be enhanced through a
deliberate attempt to produce confusion among audiences and actors. Uncovering a
dramaturgy of confusion implicit in Gascoigne’s Supposes and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy ,
this essay argues that during this period, a practical recognition that drama relies on
disorder to affect its audience supplemented a theory of didactic drama. By the late
1590s, though, the thematizing of confusion familiar from later plays replaced this
real confusion.