bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A single case of MRI-guided focused ultrasound ventro-oral thalamotomy for musician’s dystonia
Authors: Horisawa Shiro , Yamaguchi Toshio , Abe Keiichi , Hori Hiroki , Sumi Masatake , Konishi Yoshiyuki , Taira Takaomi
Published: September 2018

Musician’s dystonia (MD) is a type of focal hand dystonia that develops only while playing musical instruments and interferes with skilled and fine movements. Lesioning of the ventro-oral (Vo) nucleus of the thalamus (Vo-thalamotomy) using radiofrequency can cause dramatic improvement in MD symptoms. Focused ultrasound (FUS) can make intracranial focal lesions without an incision. The authors used MRI-guided FUS (MRgFUS) to create a lesion on the Vo nucleus to treat a patient with MD. Tubiana’s MD scale (TMDS) was used to evaluate the condition of musical play ranging from 1 to 5 (1: worst, 5: best). The patient was a 35-year-old right-handed man with involuntary flexion of the right second, third, and fourth fingers, which occurred while playing a classical guitar. Immediately after therapeutic sonications of FUS Vo-thalamotomy, there was dramatic improvement in the MD symptoms. The TMDS scores before; at 0 and 1 week after; and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after MRgFUS Vo-thalamotomy were 1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, and 5, respectively. No complications were observed. Focused ultrasound Vo-thalamotomy can be an effective treatment for MD.
The implications of intradural extension in paraspinal malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors: effects on central nervous system metastases and overall survival
Authors: Gilder Hannah E. , Puffer Ross C. , Bydon Mohamad , Spinner Robert J.
Published: September 2018

OBJECTIVE

In this study, the authors sought to compare tumors with intradural extension to those remaining in the epidural or paraspinal space with the hypothesis that intradural extension may be a mechanism for seeding of the CSF with malignant cells, thereby resulting in higher rates of CNS metastases and shorter overall survival.

METHODS

The authors searched the medical record for cases of malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNSTs) identified from 1994 to 2017. The charts of the identified patients were then reviewed for tumor location to identify patients with paraspinal malignancy. All patients included in the study had tumor specimens that were reviewed in the surgical pathology department. Paraspinal tumors with intradural extension were identified in the lumbar, sacral, and spinal accessory nerves, and attempts were made to match this cohort to another cohort of patients who had paraspinal tumors of the cranial nerves and lumbar and sacral spinal regions without intradural extension. Further information was collected on all patients with and without intradural extension, including date of diagnosis by pathology specimen review; nerve or nerves of tumor origin; presence, location, and diagnostic date of any CNS metastases; and either the date of death or date of last follow-up.

RESULTS

The authors identified 6 of 179 (3.4%) patients who had intradural tumor extension and compared these patients with 12 patients who harbored paraspinal tumors that did not have intradural extension. All tumors were diagnosed as high-grade MPNSTs according to the surgical pathology findings. Four of 6 (66.7%) patients with intradural extension had documented CNS metastases. The presence of CNS metastases was significantly higher in the intradural group than in the paraspinal group (intradural, 66.7% vs paraspinal, 0%; p < 0.01). Time from diagnosis until death was 11.2 months in the intradural group and approximately 72 months in the paraspinal, extradural cohort.

CONCLUSIONS

In patients with intradural extension of paraspinal MPNSTs, significantly higher rates of CNS metastases are seen with a reduced interval of time from diagnosis to metastatic lesion detection. Intradural tumor extension is also a poor prognostic factor for survival, with these patients showing a reduced mean time from diagnosis to death.
Intracranial hypertension following sacrifice of occipital and marginal sinuses during posterior fossa decompression for Chiari I malformation: case report
Authors: Champagne Pierre-Olivier , Cayouette Florence , Lortie Anne , Decarie Jean-Claude , Weil Alexander G.
Published: September 2018

The occipital and marginal sinuses, when present, must be sacrificed in order to open the dura in most posterior fossa surgeries in the pediatric population, including posterior fossa decompression for Type I Chiari malformation (CM-I) with duraplasty. Apart from the immediate risk of hemorrhage, the voluntary occlusion of this structure is almost universally well tolerated. The authors report a case of intracranial hypertension following the sacrifice of occipital and marginal sinuses following posterior fossa decompression with duraplasty for CM-I. The specific draining pattern variant of the occipital and marginal sinuses leading to this complication as well as avoidance and management strategies of this condition are discussed.
Internal Consistency Over Time of Subjective Cognitive Decline: Drawing Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease Trajectories
Authors: Ávila-Villanueva Marina , Maestú Fernando , Fernández-Blázquez Miguel A.
Published: September 2018

Background:

Early intervention to prevent, or delay, the transition from healthy cognition to cognitive impairment in older adults is an important goal. In this way, it is critical to find sensitive, reproducible, and early markers to use low cost methods for the detection of that transition. One of those early markers for symptomatic manifestation of AD is subjective cognitive decline (SCD).

Objective:

To examine the internal consistency of the concept of SCD and to evaluate its clinical significance on the progression through the continuum of AD.

Methods:

1,091 cognitively healthy individuals from the Vallecas Project cohort were followed for three years. Cognitive complaints were systematically collected and analyzed along with clinical data. All participants were classified in three groups at every visit based on specific features of their complaints.

Results:

Concordance analyses showed a good agreement in longitudinal classification of SCD. The Multi-state Markov Model highlighted a unidirectional transition from the status of no cognitive complaints to SCD. Interestingly, a more severe condition of SCD, namely SCD Plus, showed the highest risk of progression to mild cognitive impairment.

Conclusions:

The concept of SCD is stable over time when it is operationally defined and consistently assessed. It provides not only a fast identification of individuals at higher risk of future mild cognitive impairment, but also it allows us to track longitudinal trajectories.
Feasibility and Safety of Multicenter Tissue and Biofluid Sampling for α-Synuclein in Parkinson’s Disease: The Systemic Synuclein Sampling Study (S4)
Authors: Chahine Lana M. , Beach Thomas G. , Seedorff Nicholas , Caspell-Garcia Chelsea , Coffey Christopher S. , Brumm Michael , Adler Charles H. , Serrano Geidy E. , Linder Carly , Mosovsky Sherri , Foroud Tatiana , Riss Holly , Ecklund Dixie , Seibyl John , Jennings Danna , Arnedo Vanessa , Riley Lindsey , Dave K.D. , Mollenhauer Brit ,   on behalf of the Systemic sSynuclein Sampling study
Published: September 2018

Background:

α-synuclein is a lead Parkinson’s disease (PD) biomarker. There are conflicting reports regarding accuracy of α-synuclein in different tissues and biofluids as a PD biomarker, and the within-subject anatomical distribution of α-synuclein is not well described. The Systemic Synuclein Sampling Study (S4) aims to address these gaps in knowledge. The S4 is a multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study evaluating α-synuclein in multiple tissues and biofluids in PD and healthy controls (HC).

Objective:

To describe the baseline characteristics of the S4 cohort and safety and feasibility of this study.

Methods:

Participants underwent motor and non-motor clinical assessments, dopamine transporter SPECT, biofluid collection (cerebrospinal fluid, saliva, and blood), and tissue biopsies (skin, sigmoid colon, and submandibular gland). Biopsy adequacy was determined based on presence of adequate target tissue. Tissue sections were stained with the 5C12 monoclonal antibody against unmodified α-synuclein. All specimens were acquired and processed in a standardized manner. Adverse events were systematically recorded.

Results:

The final cohort consists of 82 participants (61 PD, 21 HC). In 68 subjects (83%), all types of specimens were obtained but only 50 (61%) of subjects had all specimens both collected and evaluable for α-synuclein. Mild adverse events were common, especially for submandibular gland biopsy, but only 1 severe adverse event occurred.

Conclusion:

Multicenter tissue and biofluid sampling for α-synuclein is feasible and generally safe. S4 will inform understanding of the concurrent distribution of α-synuclein pathology and biomarkers in biofluids and peripheral nervous system in PD.
Olive oil addition to the high-fat diet reduces methylglyoxal (MG-H1) levels increased in hypercholesterolemic rabbits
Authors: Simón Layla , Saez Lancellotti Tania E. , Cortese Leandro , Veisaga Maria-Luisa , Chantarasinlapin Preaw , Barbieri Alejandro , Fornés Miguel
Published: September 2018

BACKGROUND:

Methylglyoxal (MG) is a highly reactive compound derived from sugar metabolism, precursor of cytotoxic products named Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs). Increased MG levels and MG-related AGEs have been long associated with diabetes and its complications. The association between MG and hypercholesterolemia – induced by high-fat diets- has not been studied previously, neither the effect of olive oil addition to this diets.

OBJECTIVE:

To analyze the variations of MG and cholesterol levels under the effect of high-fat and olive oil-enriched diets.

METHODS:

Sixteen healthy male adult (New Zealand White, 6 months old) rabbits were fed with commercial pellets (control, four rabbits), or with 14% of bovine grease added to the pellets (high-fat diet, twelve rabbits). After six months, bovine grease was reduced to 7% (half fat diet, eight rabbits). Then, 7% of olive oil was added to the pellets (protective diet, four rabbits). Glycaemia, cholesterolemia, HDL-cholesterolemia, triglyceridemia, fructosamine and MG-H1 levels were assessed in all experimental conditions ( n = 4).

RESULTS:

The high-fat diet promoted a hypercholesterolemia associated with increased MG-H1 levels ( p < 0.05) in non-diabetic and non-obese rabbits. Replacement of the high-fat diet with olive oil decreased significantly the cholesterolemia and MG-H1 levels ( p < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS:

Our data indicates that the replacement of a high-fat diet with olive oil can recover normal blood cholesterol values and can decrease MG-H1 levels.
Mexico: Introduction
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

This introductory section acts as a platform for the director-centred film analyses of chapters 1, 2 and 3. As well as looking at Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro’s ongoing connections to Mexico’s national film culture and ‘industry,’ the section offers an account of their beginnings in feature filmmaking in Mexico and the industrial, political, legislative and production model changes propelled by neoliberalism (North American Free Trade Agreement, ticket price de-regulation, private production models) that have been instrumental in shaping both the failures (reduction in production numbers, exhibition crisis) and successes (1999-2002 critical renaissance) in Mexican cinema from 1990 to the present moment. These changes are key to understanding both Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro’s early features and the circumstances that propelled these directors’ periods of deterritorialized filmmaking in the United S+tates and Europe.
Alejandro González Iñárritu: Mexican Director Without Borders
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

Chapter 1 analyses the cinematic transnationality of Iñárritu through an auteurist lens suggesting that his Mexican-produced Amores perros, US-produced 21 Grams, and Babel, and Spanish/Mexican co-produced Biutiful, problematise the notion of industrial and national borders and (for the deterritorialised productions) the assumption of political co-optation by a hegemonic mainstream cinema (Hollywood) because they share the same radical and alternative aesthetics and ideologies. The chapter traces continuities and critiques across the production contexts of Iñárritu’s films from Mexican independent (privately funded) cinema in Amores perros, to a complex institutional position including US independent distributors, European Government bodies, Spanish and Mexican production companies and Spanish and Catalan television companies in Biutiful. The chapter argues that the films’ ‘independent’, non-hegemonic funding structures and presence of a mostly unchanging core creative team facilitates the singular vision at the heart of the auteurist endeavour. The chapter’s analysis of Iñárritu’s first four transnationalised film projects (Birdman and The Revenant are analysed in the Epilogue) suggests that rather than purely imitate Hollywood or US traditions (as some scholarship suggests) his films embody a perspective aligned with Mexico, Latin America and more broadly the peoples of the Global South.
Revolutionary Road Movies: Walter Salles’ Diarios De Motocicleta (Motorcycle Diaries 2004) and On The Road (2012)
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores how Walter Salles’ Diarios de motocicleta and On the Road use road movie conventions to forward their political agendas. It establishes the interconnectedness of the near contemporaneous journeys recounted in the two films by Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and author of the seminal novel On the Road (1957) Jack Kerouac and how these are linked to the genesis of the road movie genre. It goes on to analyse how both films use the political strategies of the road movie (rebellion) to (re)explore and update the beginnings of the interconnected social, cultural and political revolutions (the Cuban Revolution, the Beat Generation and their links to the counter culture in the United States). In keeping with the broader aims of the book, this chapter is also about defending the political potential of the genre film and how it is used to address rather than ‘gloss over’ the political history of the continent.
‘Happy the people whose God is the Lord’ (Psalm 32:12)
Authors: Márkus Gilbert
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the evidence for very early Christianity among British, Gaelic and Pictish societies, and the conversion of Anglo-Saxons. It explores the limited evidence for the beliefs and practices that preceded Christianity – the notion of ‘paganism’ is examined and rejected. Christianity grew in a process of both continuity and change with respect to pre-Christian practices and beliefs. The process of ‘conversion’ (or ‘conversions’) is discussed through the writings of early medieval Christians who sought to ‘save’ the pre-Christian past, or aspects of it. Some aspects of pre-Christian thought shaped early Christianity in ways that distinguished it from Christianity elsewhere. The respective roles of monastic (abbatial) and pastoral (episcopal) authority in the Church are explored, rejecting the idea that there was something unusually monastic about ‘Celtic’ Christianity. Indeed, the idea of a distinctive ‘Celtic church’ or ‘Celtic Christianity’ is also found to be an illusion. Christianity brought about changes in the understanding of space, and time itself was re-imagined, making the dispute over the date of Easter of profound significance – a dispute treated here in new ways.
‘Gird your sword upon your thigh’ (Psalm 44: 3)
Authors: Márkus Gilbert
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces developments of the ninth century. We examine the Viking raids, and subsequent Norse occupation and settlement in some parts of the country. This process happened in different ways in different places, and archaeology, place-names and historical sources can help us to see some of the finer detail. An argument is made for a mid-ninth century turn to Christianity by some Norse settlers, along with their Gaelicisation in some areas and their alliances with native rulers in Scotland and Ireland. Other Norse polities – in Scotland, Ireland and northern England – remained a serious threat. Following destruction of the British kingdom of Alclud (Dumbarton) by the Dublin Norse, the re-location of Strathclyde power to Govan may witness a new British-Norse cohabitation and possible alliance. Meanwhile, the Gaelicisation of Pictland continued throughout the Viking period, until by the end of the ninth century ‘Pictland’ had become the Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Alba/Scotia – a re-branding exercise rather than a conquest. The implications of this new Gaelic identity are discussed through new readings of the sources for the ninth century (especially Pictish king lists and the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba).
A Tale of Two Narrators: Some Historical, Geographical and Cultural Considerations
Authors: Holtzman Livnat
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a combined literary-historical approach to ḥadīth
al-ruʾya (‘the ḥadīth of the beatific vision’). The chapter examines the alleged origins of this ḥadīth in seventh century Medina, and follows the circulation of this text until it became one of the foremost iconic texts of Islamic traditionalism. The chapter examines two versions of ḥadīth
al-ruʾya attributed to the Prophet’s companions, Jarir al-Bajali and Abu Razin al-ʿUqayli, and highlights the role of Abu Razin and Jarir’s family members and tribesmen in shaping the two narratives of ḥadīth al-ruʼya. Although the two narratives were almost identical, Jarir’s narrative was admitted into the traditionalistic canon, while Abu Razin’s narrative was cherished only by a few traditionalists. This chapter considers the various factors that led to the iconisation of Jarir’s narrative, and identifies the miḥna, the formative event of Islamic traditionalism that occurred in ninth century Baghdad, as the turning point in the history of this text. During the miḥna, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) was harshly interrogated by the caliph’s vizier about his belief in the beatific vision. By citing Jarir’s narrative as the ultimate textual evidence of his belief, Ibn Hanbal contributed to this text’s iconisation.
The Diversified Solution to the Challenge of Islamic Traditionalism: Aḥādīth al-Ṣifāt and Bi-Lā Kayfa
Authors: Holtzman Livnat
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the challenges that aḥādīth al-ṣifāt posed to the traditionalists, and the way the traditionalists met these challenges through the implementation of the bi-lā kayfa formula. According to the traditionalists, this formula meant ‘without asking further questions’. The Ashʿarites used this formula to dissociate any improper description from God. They named this concept tanzīh. The chapter presents the traditionalistic understanding of bi-lā kayfa through the work of Ibn Qutayba (d. 889). The Ashʿarite understanding of bi-lā kayfa is presented through the work of Ibn Furak (d. 1015). The lion’s share of this chapter presents the case-study of what is undoubtedly the most extreme text in the repertoire of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt, namely ḥadīth ḥaqw al-raḥmān, ‘the ḥadīth about the loin of the Merciful’. The chapter examines the transmission process of this text and focuses on several techniques that enabled the acceptance of this text in the Islamic canon. The chapter in particular considers the creative three-stage hermeneutical solution to ḥadīth ḥaqw al-raḥmān in the writings of Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani (d. 1449), Badr al-Din al-ʿAyni (d. 1451), and Shihab al-Din al-Qastallani (d. 1517). Their hermeneutical solution added a new dimension to the Ashʿarite tanzīh and was inspired by Muʿtazilite thinkers.
Iconic Books and Gestures: Aḥādīth al-Ṣifāt in the Public Sphere
Authors: Holtzman Livnat
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the ubiquitous presence of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt in the public sphere by focusing on four iconic texts: the caliphal Qadiri Creed, Ibn Khuzayma’s (d. 924) Kitāb al-Tawḥid, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s (d. 1210) Asās al-Taqdīs and Ibn Taymiyya’s (d. 1328) al-Ḥamawiyya al-Kubrā. These iconic texts, which offer various discussions of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt, stood at the centre of public attention, and were revered as objects of political power. This chapter fully unfolds the connection between these four texts, and the role that they played in political events that took place in different venues from tenth century Nishapur to fourteenth century Damascus. Both the extremely popular Asās al-Taqdīs and al-Ḥamawiyya al-Kubrā ignited a public controversy about the performance of two iconic gestures that were linked to the recitations of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt: pointing the index finger heavenward and raising both hands in prayer. The chapter highlights al-Ḥamawiyya al-Kubrā’s iconicity by addressing the derogative name ḥashwiyya (vulgar anthropomorphists) which was central to this public controversy. The iconic books and gestures that are discussed in this chapter underscore the interface between theology and politics, and reveal a layer as yet unknown of the controversy between the ultra-traditionalists (Hanbalites) and the rational-traditionalists (the later Ashʿarites).
Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema
Authors: Wang Qi
Published: September 2018

This book provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, postsocialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique postsocialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film and culture.
Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye
Authors: Wang Qi
Published: September 2018

Chapter 3 approaches the cinema of Jia Zhangke from two angles: first, a complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the cinematic frame compels the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of taking up history and image critically; second, it proposes the concept of “surface” to highlight Jia’s cinematic texture through various figurations of superficial time and superficial space in Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Lou Ye’s highly expressionist and kinetic works conflate screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. An analysis of two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, demonstrates that, despite the two auteurs’ difference in style, they share a highly comparable epistemological interest in the relationship between history, representation and subjectivity.
Digital Film Production Representations
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the various modes, tools and types of film industry representation, whereby film is the conduit through which we see film production, and is subject to its own representational modes, aesthetics and practices.
A genealogy of different types of mediated films and their making are presented. The chapter details how Ginger & Rosa communicated and embedded its Production Aesthetic in a number of different ways.
The chapter presents the inherent paradox which is innate to these modes of representation where the film production attempts to make itself visible whilst simultaneously rendering itself invisible. This leads to a conflicting aesthetic of ‘pseudo-visibility’ and ‘hyper-invisibility’ – the simultaneous openness and foreclosure of film production practice obscuring people, histories and practices.
Drawing on themes of invisible labour, invisible economies, politics of invisibility and aesthetics of erasure, the chapter then turns to considerations where aesthetics of production are made manifest in modes of resistance – where the tools, iconography and aesthetics of production are subverted for moments of protest by film industry practitioners.
Wartime Literature between Tradition and Modernity
Authors: Rosenmeier Christopher
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a broad overview of popular Chinese literature during the wartime years, including relevant historical context, such as the attempt at reconciliation between different factions and groups of writers in October 1936. Several authors are discussed, including Zhang Henshui, Ping Jinya, Jin Yi, Wang Dulu, Qin Shou’ou, Zhang Ailing, Cheng Xiaoqing, and Yu Qie. It demonstrates that the popular literature of the time was highly diverse and frequently explored aspects of tradition, modernity, nationalism, character psychology and various narrative styles. Tradition and history were freed from being seen as the enemies of progress and were now used for playful entertainment as well as fostering national pride. Overall, the wartime period saw a collapse of the formerly sharp distinction between “new” and “old” literature and this allowed numerous authors to straddle such divides in novel ways.
Social Systems on the Cross
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

While early 20th century Social Darwinism has been discredited, post-WW2 theories have re-emphasized Darwin's notion of the environment. On this basis, and substituting social systems for natural species, society has been analyzed as a system-in-evolution, a machinery that, reflexively or self-referentially, produces itself at every moment anew. Modern society, according to social systems theory, continuously makes itself, thanks to countless simultaneous communications taking place at once. There are two equally disquieting lessons here. On the one hand, modern law, understood as the communicative system that applies the distinction lawful/unlawful to everything that gets in its way, is placed within an environment constituted by other communicative social systems (the economy, politics, religion, art etc) and the conditions created by those. On the other hand, social systems at large are separated from the realm of human consciousness, i.e. of collective or individual identity (the ‘psychic systems’). While ‘social' and ‘psychic’ systems never meet, they rely on absolute indifference with respect to their other side, as only this indifference enables especially social systems to assure their (superior) fact-creating potential. Our own project consists in spelling out the implications of this scissile sense of ‘meaning’, at once understood as a shorthand for what is actually happening (fragmented communications) and as consciousness-as-identity (imaginary unity).
Political Theology beyond Schmitt
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

This chapter takes off from the discovery that Western Christianism does not fit into the paradigm of one ‘religion’ among many and should, instead, be considered as offering a meta-paradigm governing the modern understanding of politics in all its elements, religious as well as anti-religious. As a discovery, this is generally traced back to Carl Schmitt's re-appraisal of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt — as well as some contemporaries such as, in our narrative, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy — dared to heed the fact that the main axis of the transmission of Western Christianism had not been ‘religious’ in the sense of the particulars of the Christian Faith. Rather, its key stake was a success-program of trans-disciplinary nature that had as its centre of gravity the administration of power and the institutions and doctrine of government. Comparing Schmitt's attempts of capturing the claims of his medieval theological sources with recent relevant scholarship, we try to show that Schmitt lacked the depth of focus required to deal with such decisive issues as, inter alia, specific doctrinal evolutions between Eastern and Occidental versions of Trinitarianism between the first and second millennia CE or, the 13th and 14th century Franciscan debates concerning subjection and rule.
From Jerusalem to Rome via Constantinople
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

The globalisation of the Western-Christian institutional order in its manifest legal aspects, but not necessarily of its latent religious aspects, puts a supplement of importance onto the need of grasping its genesis. The most decisive note is located — or so we argue — in unfolding the classical division between polis and politics on the one hand, and the household and the art of handling it (management or oikonomia) on the other, in Christian times. These divides delivered the blueprint for the divide that would differentiate, over more than a millennium, the public power of the Roman Empire in its Eastern and Western re-embodiments from that of the Church. We also refer, by way of contrast, to the pre-Christian biblical model of the divide. Further, by contrast to Giorgio Agamben, we specify that while the today thoroughly studied occidental West, availing of a simplified trinitarian creed, instituted legitimate public power as subject to on-going conflictual competition between the so-called ‘two powers’, the still much less studied East struggled to preserve the unity, or as the Byzantines called it, 'symphony', of the Whole in line with its (original) version of Trinitarianism.
Deeds without Words
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

Following on from the previous chapter we first point out how a number of current politico-intellectual programs continue, in different ways, to believe in, and postulate as unquestionable, a ‘glorious’ intervention to end managerialism. Ways and steps ‘forward’ are proposed with enthusiasm while silencing the numerous unmistakable signs to the contrary, in the name of Hegelian philosophy, of Leninist revolution, of neo-constitutionalism, of human rights, to name just some examples of "fiat’-credit institutions" of political innovation. Secondly, we point to philosophical works that are not trying to provide communities with a portion of Good News or founding optimism, but, more modestly, seek to make further headway in the inquiry of some of the structural problems inherent in the Western tradition. Giorgio Agamben's multi-volume Homo Sacer, written between 1995 and 2015, presents its readership with the tentative formula of inclusive exclusion (with the thesis, in other words, that, in the West, the flourishing of a universal human community is necessarily predicated on the existence of those abandoned within it). If bare life underlies and accompanies political or any form of "supplemented life", political history is given the chance of describing a state of things that does not exhaust itself in nourishing political meetings with the necessary quanta of confidence to ‘overcome’ tradition.
Towards a Genealogy of Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Chapter One charts a genealogy of the sentimental mode, from the sentimental literary cultures of 18th century Europe through to the widespread success of popular melodrama in Europe and America. It draws connections between the sentimental novel, ‘Moral Sense’ philosophy of the 18th century ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, and 19th century melodrama, as discourses and traditions each bound up with questions relating to affect, the subject and society. While textual analysis of specific texts seeks to draw out the continuities and problematics of sentimentalism as a literary and theatrical genre, a focus remains on establishing the critical contours of the term’s cultural history. The section’s particular aim is to trace the term’s fall from grace while nevertheless establishing its full theoretical significance to film theory. It will also review influential literary scholarship on the cultural gendering of sentimentalism of the period, whether discerned in the ideological consolidation of bourgeois society, the continuance of sentimental narrative in theatrical melodrama and the novel (Stowe, Dickens) or in the various periodicals, guidebooks and assorted paraphernalia that make up a feminizing culture for theorists like Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins and Lauren Berlant.
Sentimental Aesthetics and Classical Film Theory
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Explores how classical film theorists of the early-to-mid 20th century were able conceive of cinema as a sentimental medium alongside the sociocultural and intellectual backdrop of modernity and modernism respectively. Theory is selected from formalist and realist traditions, both familiar and less well-known texts, using a critical lens attuned to the representation of individual virtue, the face, the sympathetic ‘auteur’, and cinematic pedagogy. Key work by such theorists as Sergei Eisenstein, the writers of 'Close-Up' magazine, André Bazin and Béla Balázs, are examined in terms of a revisionist understanding of modernist emotion and intimacy. Such theory is aligned in turn with sentimental principles introduced in the first chapter; for instance, in relation to the face in close-up (Balázs on Dreyer’s Joan of Arc), ‘sentimental humanism’ (Eisenstein on Dickens), the importance of a virtuous hero or heroine (Balázs’ critique of avant-garde film) and notions of ‘sympathetic’ filmmaking (Bazin on Chaplin and De Sica).
Affect, or Postmodern Sentimentalism
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Chapter Four provides a wider theoretical basis for the ‘sophistication’ and self-consciousness that characterises post-classical or postmodern forms of sentimentality in US film culture, with particular attention paid to notions of ‘excess’ and distanciation. It accounts in particular for the influence of key modernists like Adorno, Benjamin and Brecht on taste categories that persist in contemporary film studies, with particular reference to the ‘ideological stoicism’ that is alleged to predominate in critical film culture. The discussion will provide context for a discussion of the ‘affective’ turn in film theory, around which the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell loom large in their centralisation of a film-as-thought paradigm.
Women’s Movements in 1968 and beyond
Authors: Valk Anne M.
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the formation and achievements of feminist organizations in the late 1960s and beyond, including the National Organization for Women and emerging local women’s liberation organizations. It focuses particularly on the ideological and political intersections that link second-wave feminism to other activist causes. It highlights the importance of coalitions and alliances and looks at the raft of ideological stances that separated distinct strands of feminism and separated feminist organizing from other causes. Focusing on specific issues in feminist activism, including campaigns against sexual violence, the movement for abortion rights, and the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, the chapter examines the distinctions activists made between liberal, radical and cultural feminism, and charts the intellectual shifts from second-wave to third-wave feminism.
Locke and Hutcheson: Indians, Vagabonds and Drones
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on Locke, and on the question of how we give slavery a history and think about it as a political relation. It investigates the colonial reading of Locke, his personal involvement in the slave trade and the connections between slavery and civil society. It argues that Locke’s justification of limited slavery needs to be linked to his view of civil society and the state of nature. This helps to explain the Carolinian context of his theory of slavery and the ways in which Native Americans were understood to stand outside the polite and civil world, unable to cultivate their land or their reason. The chapter develops the book’s argument that there are many different kinds of slaveries, rather than one transhistorical pattern. It looks in particular at the scheme for enslaving the English poor put forward by Francis Hutcheson in 1755, and at the status of vagabonds and begging drones. What did it mean to argue that the few were enslavable for the good of the many? The chapter explores the differences between the enslavement of the English poor and slavery in the Caribbean and the salience of race and racialization in understanding seventeenth-century slavery as a historical process and a political relation.
Posthumous News: The Afterlives of Georges Perec
Authors: Clemens Justin , Wilken Rowan
Published: September 2018

Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.
UnSearching for Rue Simon-Crubellier: Perec Out-of-Sync
Authors: Tofts Darren
Published: September 2018

Is it possible to bring something that does not exist into existence by searching for it? This is the ‘pataphysical’ question posed by artists Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda in relation to their 2004 work Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier. These Australian artists play at tourists abroad, reading George Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. Via a series of recorded meanderings through the streets of Paris, interviews with passers-by, civic officials and eventually Marcel Bénabou, the artists come close to tricking the world of actuality into believing in the existence of an imaginary place. The collision of the apparent ‘truth’ of video testimony and the fabulation of Perec’s fictional world is central to this work. This chapter proposes to dis-engage Neumark’s and Miranda’s Perec-inspired exploration of the real and imagined relations to location. Through a series of imposed constraints, inspired by the formalist construction of Searching for Rue Simon-Crubellier itself, this chapter will postulate leaving only a rhetorical that is the antithesis or dark matter of Perec’s novel: Is it possible to dematerialize something that does exist by unsearching for it?
Perec and the Politics of Constraint
Authors: James Alison
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that Perec’s engagement with the Oulipo at a crucial moment in the group’s history crystallizes the political potential of the Oulipian project, and determines the continuing significance of the group for today’s writers. Perec develops a mode of formal experiment that is perhaps ‘not so very anti’ when compared to the radically oppositional stance of the avant-garde, but which burrows beneath surfaces, exposing hidden determinisms and unexpected coincidences in the fabric of social life. Oulipian constraint thus operates, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s expression, as a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ that opens up the possibility of new forms of life.
‘An Attempt at Exhausting an Augmented Place in Paris’: Georges Perec, Observer-Writer of Urban Life, as a Mobile Locative Media User
Authors: Licoppe Christian
Published: September 2018

This chapter describes a thought experiment in which a modern-day Georges Perec, equipped with a smartphone and actively committed to the use of mobile locative media such as Foursquare, would make an Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris today. The chapter argues that the initial project epitomized the way the neutral gaze of the onlooker is constitutive of urban public place and the way in which behavior in urban public places could thereby be described and accountable in generic terms intelligible to readers, themselves framed as strangers (in the sense of strangers in public places). This analysis is used as a baseline to show how a fictive, connected Perec would have to cope with the dual accessibility of places and people, both in the physical world and on screen, and especially the ‘parochialisation’ of place and individualization of digital personae online, in a way which would radically transform the initial literary project. This shows how the city augmented with mobile locative media might not be available to description in the same terms as the 20th century metropolis, and how a square in the augmented city might not be a public place in the same sense.
The Devil in the Slum: American Urban Gothic
Authors: Loman Andrew
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on the emergence of American urban gothic in literature of the late Antebellum. From roughly 1840 to 1860 a community of writers organized an extant urban gothic vocabulary into a popular and influential subgenre, city-mysteries, which ostentatiously announced their link to the gothic novel. These mysteries were intimately intertwined with urban reportage of the so-called ‘flash press’ among other art forms, especially the stage.
American Gothic Art
Authors: Grunenberg Christoph
Published: September 2018

This essay surveys the gothic in American art from its earliest influence by 18th- and 19th-century British culture to gothic boom in late 20th- and early 21st-century culture. The gothic links not only to goth subculture of the 1980s but also to multiple expressions in film, music, fashion, design and architecture. This cross-pollination between art, literature and more ephemeral forms of gothic popular culture is a a typical product of postmodernism. American gothic has become a ubiquitous signifier for dark moods in times of change and crisis as expressed in a contemporary mordant mindset, the liberal indulgence in horror, macabre images and flirting with disaster.
Talkies, Road Movies and Chick Flicks
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

The representation of gender in film remains an intensely debated topic, particularly in academic considerations of US mainstream cinema where it is often perceived as perpetuating rigid, binary views of gender, and reinforcing patriarchal, dominant notions of masculinity and femininity. While previous scholarly discussion has focused on visual or narrative portrayals of gender, this book considers the ways that film sound – music, voice, sound effects and silence – is used to represent gender. Taking a socio-historical approach, Heidi Wilkins investigates a range of popular US genres including screwball comedy, the road movie and chick flicks to explore the ways that film sound can reinforce traditional assumptions about masculinity and femininity, impart ambivalent meanings to them, or even challenge and subvert the notion of gender itself. Case studies include Mildred Pierce, Aliens and The Deer Hunter.
Introduction
Authors: Wilkins Heidi
Published: September 2018

This book examines a range of so-called ‘male’ and ‘female’ film genres in order to uncover the ways in which film sound conveys meanings about gender. The notion of genre has played a key role in the writing of this book, partly because genre and gender are frequently so inextricably linked: action or science fiction films seem to be so often categorised (both inside and outside of academia) as ‘male’, while romantic comedies or melodramas are deemed ‘female’. Rick Altman, in Film/Genre, highlights that genre is linked to the recognition of repeated semantic codes or conventions, leading to the categorisation of film texts based on common features. Genre conventions allow filmmakers to work to particular ‘formulas’ and realise the expectations of film distributors and consumers.
The Ashrafīya Catalogue: Translation and Title Identification
Authors: Hirschler Konrad , Hirschler Konrad , Hirschler Konrad , Hirschler Konrad
Published: September 2018

Chapter 4 provides an annotated translation of each entry in the Ashrafiya catalogue identifying the titles. Each translated entry provides brief information on the author (who is sometimes named in the catalogue), the modern edition (if existing), the book’s thematic field as well as further information that is occasionally provided (e.g. multiple copies, number of quires, illustrations, name of copyist).
Decadence and Institutions of Modernism in the American Literary Field of the 1910s and 1920s
Authors: MacLeod Kirsten
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the tensions between ‘make it new’ modernists and ‘decadent modernists’. These tensions are traced through a detailed account of the institutions of publishing in Britain and American. Attention is given to the elaborately decorated books associated with fin-de-siècle culture. Evidence is also provided to show that at this time it was decadent writers who were enjoying greater success, in terms of book sales, than modernists.
Catholicism and the Fin de Siècle
Authors: Burstein Miriam Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

This chapter revisits the role of faith, and specifically Catholicism, at the fin de siècle. It gives a survey of the historical contexts for British and French Catholic practice at the turn of the century, highlighting the main anxieties and interests of literary fin-de-siècle Catholics on both sides of the channel. These include a critique of realism and materialism, the role of nostalgia in envisioning Catholicism’s future, as well as the arts of suffering, sacrifice and penance.
Information in the 1890s: Technological, Journalistic, Imperial, Occult
Authors: Menke Richard
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the impact of new communication technologies on the meaning of ‘information’, and the fears and fantasies it generated, in the late nineteenth century. It looks specifically at technologies like the telegraph, telephone, cinema and wireless, and how they seemed to de-materialize knowledge. This new, disembodied form of knowledge in turn is shown to be particularly important to empire and late nineteenth-century imperialism.
Aestheticism in Italy: A New Sense of Place
Authors: Evangelista Stefano
Published: September 2018

This chapter focusses on British writers’ engagement with Italy at the fin de siècle, and the cross-cultural fertilization that ensued. Attention is given to how the development of English Aestheticism was shaped through encounters with Italy, as well as how that Italian-inflected English Aestheticism was then exported back to Italy itself. The chapter traces a shift in English attitudes to Italy, from seeing it as sepulchral, to embracing its modernity, and to taking a greater interest in the lives of modern Italians. Italy is shown to have represented to English writers much more than a simple refuge from or opposition to a declining or corrupt Britain.