Dentro de la historiografía centroamericana, el erotismo ha sido un tema que, en contraposición con otros como la reinterpretación del discurso histórico, no cuenta con una cantidad considerable de estudios comparativos que permitan comprender su desarrollo y sus diferentes acercamientos. Con este indicio, el artículo, en aras de enriquecer las discusiones académicas, se centra en dicha temática en cuentos centroamericanos escritos por mujeres, aspecto que en las últimas décadas ha venido tomando un lugar trascendental dentro de los estudios literarios. Específicamente, (...) el análisis parte de textos publicados en el presente siglo y que no han sido estudiados a profundidad por la crítica literaria: “La primera vez” (2002) de la costarricense Linda Berrón, “Diosas decadentes” (2001) de la guatemalteca Jessica Masaya Portocarrero y “Bicho raro” (2012) de la nicaragüense María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra. (shrink)

This is a book about how William James and Milton Erickson have helped shape the modern conceptualization of human consciousness and its care. With both men cast from the archetypal mold of a wounded healer and a coming-of-age odyssey, it should not surprise us that James and Erickson converge on the central idea that "...the secret to the care of human consciousness is the utilization of who we are toward some practical end." It does not matter if you are (...) a serious student of James and Erickson or someone who is freshly introduced to their work; this book offers clarity and a deeper understanding of what Jamesean psychology looks like when masterfully applied to clinical care. While numerous books have been written about Erickson, they often revolve around spectacular success stories-making Erickson somewhat of a myth and therefore inaccessible. By learning more about the stories and principles that informed young Erickson, we are better able to appreciate and learn from the common sense nature of his work. (shrink)

In American ethnic literature of the last three decades of the 20th century, recurrent themes of mobility, travel, and “homing in” are emblematic of the search for identity. In this essay, which discusses three short stories, Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Louise Erdrich’s “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,” and Daniel Chacon’s “The Biggest City in the World,” I attempt to demonstrate that as a consequence of technological development, with travel becoming increasingly accessible to ethnic Americans, their search for identity assumes (...) wider range, transcending national and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

In this paper we explore how some of the largest US-newspapers linguistically frame immigrants to the USA in articles about Mexican and Central American immigrants. Specifically, it is a corpus-assisted discourse study which examines the frequency of different semantic predicate-types with migrant subjects and migrant by-agents in the quest for underlying positive or negative biases. We wish to ascertain what activities migrants are presented as taking part in, principally as agents. The analysis shows that more than half of (...) the migrant/predicate-pairings reflect the dictionary definitions of migrant. However, immigrants are described as illegal 66% of the times that their location is mentioned with an immigrant/predicate-pairing. The non-definition-confirming pairings also show evidence of a negative framing of immigrants, but not of migrants. Furthermore, immigrants are more often than migrants cast as agents of activities that do not simply reiterate their status as migrants. Finally, we found evidence of the Negation Bias in the immigrant/predicate-pairings. (shrink)

In this book, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff explores short stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, written between 1943 and 1968, with a post-Jungian approach. Drawing upon archetypal theories of myth from Joseph Campbell, James Hillman and their forbearer C. G. Jung, Ellerhoff demonstrates how short fiction follows archetypal patterns that can illuminate our understanding of the authors, their times, and their culture. In practice, a post-Jungian ‘mythodology’ is shown to yield great insights for the literary criticism of (...) class='Hi'>short fiction. Chapters in this volume carefully contextualise and historicize each story, including Bradbury and Vonnegut’s earliest and most imaginatively fantastic works. The archetypal constellations shaping Vonnegut’s early works are shown to be war and fragmentation, while those in Bradbury’s are family and the wholeness of the sun. Analysis is complemented by the explored significance of illustrations that featured alongside the stories in their first publications. By uncovering the ways these popular writers redressed old myths in new tropes—and coined new narrative elements for hopes and fears born of their era—the book reveals a fresh method which can be applied to all imaginative short stories, increasing understanding and critical engagement. Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut is an important text for a number of fields, from Jungian and Post-Jungian studies to short story theoriesand American studies to Bradbury and Vonnegut studies. Scholars and students of literature will come away with a renewed appreciation for an archetypal approach to criticism, while the book will also be of great interest to practising depth psychologists seeking to incorporate short stories into therapy. (shrink)

I relate the story of how matrix mechanics grew out of the treatment of optical dispersion in the old quantum theory, paying special attention to the contributions of the American theoretical physicists John H. Van Vleck and John C. Slater. Van Vleck shares the credit with Max Born for being the first to publish a full derivation of the crucial Kramers dispersion formula using Bohr’s correspondence principle. Slater was one of the architects of the short-lived but influential (...) Bohr-Kramers-Slater (BKS) theory that helped popularize the so-called Ersatz- or virtual oscillators central both to the treatment of dispersion in the old quantum theory and to the transition to matrix mechanics. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, (...) grounding his phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

This essay contends that while Nancy and Esposito have strikingly similar concepts of the place of the political in post-metaphysical community, their respective articulations of these concepts noticeably diverge. Because of his commitment to excavating the political project of immunity as central to the Western political tradition in and through the category of the legal person, Esposito announces community as impolitical, as the interruptive spacing, and thus alternating displacement, of the political conceived as the site of emancipatory agency. In (...) contrast, in the work of Agamben and in the recent work of Nancy, an articulation of the person and the political in more agential terms can be found. This divergence presents interpretive difficulties insofar as Esposito's discussion of community as impolitical could be read as advancing ontological neutrality or passivity that threatens to separate political activity from its liberating potential. I argue that such ontological neutrality is a product of Esposito's confrontation with the political as dominated by both the logic of immunity and an engagement with the complex legacy of Heidegger's problematic political trajectory. To this extent it is an open question whether Esposito's project leaves room for a new vision of the political and for political agency. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

In this paper, I explore the connection between certain metaphysical views of time and emotional attitudes concerning one’s own death and mortality. I argue that one metaphysical view of time, B-theory, offers consolation to mortals in the face of death relative to commonsense and another metaphysical view of time, A-theory. Consolation comes from three places. First, B-theory implies that time does not really pass, and as a result one has less reason to worry about one’s time growing short. Second, (...) B-theory entails that there is a real sense in which one’s death does not result in one’s annihilation, and this fact can temper feelings of existential distress. Third, B-theory has the consequence that the benefits one has lost have concrete existence, and this fact can mitigate the emotional significance of the losses of death. (shrink)

The following paragraphs were written not for print publication but for oral delivery on a celebratory occasion; their many unsupported assertions, some commonplace and some controversial, were made not to prove a thesis but to suggest a point of view—a perspective on Peirce's thought that might be taken, or not, as one wishes. The suggestion is that some difficulties are resolved and some things fall into place if we view his philosophy in its several relations to modern science. For that (...) purpose, his idea of science is of central importance and it is that idea only that I discuss here. Although drawn from the historical fact of modern science, Peirce's concept of science is unusual, radical, and difficult. In... (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the term used for our ability to predict and explain the behaviour of ourselves and others. Accounts of this theory have so far fallen into two competing types: Simulation Theory and 'Theory Theory'. In contrast with Theory Theory, Simulation Theory argues that we predict behaviour not by employing a model of people, but by replicating others' thoughts and feelings. This book presents a novel defence of Simulation Theory, reviewing the major challenges against it and positing (...) the theory as the most effective method for exploring how we know each other and ourselves. Drawing on key research in the field, chapters reopen the debates surrounding Theory of Mind and cover a variety of topics including schizophrenia with implications for experimental social psychology. In the past, one of the greatest criticisms against Simulation Theory is that it cannot explain systematic error in Theory of Mind. This book explores the rapidly developing heuristics and biases programme, pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky, to suggest that a novel bias mismatch defence available to Simulation Theory explains these systematic errors. Simulation Theory: A psychological and philosophical consideration will appeal to a range of researchers and academics, including psychologists from the fields of cognitive, social and developmental psychology, as well as philosophers, psychotherapists and practitioners looking for further research on Theory of Mind. The book will also be of relevance to those interested in autism, since it offers a new approach to Theory of Mind which explains central symptoms in autistic subjects. (shrink)

In May 1867, when he was twenty-seven years of age, Charles Peirce read a paper to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that was published in the next year under the title ‘On a New List of Categories’ (EP 1:1–10).1 It is remarkable for anticipating major features of his later thought: three categories relationally defined (bracketed, however, by two additional categories); a theory of signs, triadically conceived and triadically sub-divided, applied to thinking; the idea that every predicate is (...) an hypothesis; a form of abstraction named ‘prescision’; and a bold reconception of the Roman/medieval trivium. Prescision was used here to distinguish the categories and it was put to similar use much later in the.. (shrink)

For forty years, American priest and friar Reginald Foster, O.C.D., worked in the Latin Letters office of the Roman Curia’s Secretary of State in Vatican City. As Latinist of four popes, he soon emerged as an internationally recognized authority on the Latin language—some have said, the internationally recognized authority, consulted by scholars, priests, and laymen worldwide. In 1986, he began teaching an annual summer Latin course that attracted advanced students and professors from around the globe. This volume gathers contributions (...) from some of his many students in honor of his enduring influence and achievements. Its chapters explore a wide range of linguistic and literary evidence from antiquity to the present day in a variety of theoretical perspectives. If the motivation for putting together this collection has been to reflect (and reflect upon) Foster’s influences on Latin scholarship and pedagogy, its title alludes—via the medieval folk etymology of the word labyrinthus (“quasi labor intus”)—to its theme: ambiguity in Latin literature. (shrink)

War and Border Crossings brings together renowned scholars to address some of the most pressing problems in public policy, international affairs, and the intercultural issues of our day. Contributors from widely varying disciplines discuss cross-cultural ethical issues and international topics ranging from American international policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq to domestic topics such as immigration, the war on drugs, cross-cultural bioethics and ethical issues involving American Indian tribes. The culture clashes discussed in these essays raise (...) serious questions about what principles ought to inform the negotiating of conflicts in order to achieve, or at least approach, outcomes that are fundamentally just, fair, responsible, and ethical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dracula and Carmilla:Monsters and the MindBenson Saler and Charles A. ZieglerFollowing the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, vampire narratives proliferated in Britain and the United States.1 While many twentieth century short stories, novels, plays, and films in both countries depart from Dracula in various ways, it is our impression that that workand its close derivatives retain pride of place in the popular imagination. Yet Dracula was (...) but one of several well-known vampire stories published in English during the nineteenth century, and scholars deem certain of the other tales to be of literary merit.In noting that, we raise this question: What is it about the plot and the characterization of vampires in Dracula that make it the most famous example of vampires in English fiction? Why, in particular, has it been more influential than Le Fanu's Carmilla which preceded it in time and is of equal or perhaps greater literary distinction?2 We address that question, and by doing so we hope to gain some insight into the attraction and persistence of vampire tales across time and cultures.We begin by sketching our approach to conceptualizing the category "vampire." Nina Auerbach, a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that "There is no such creature as 'The Vampire'; there are only vampires."3 That declaration is in keeping with her demonstration that in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American vampire novels, short stories, plays, and films, vampires vary greatly in behavior, in apparent motivation, and in cultural significance. Different social orders and different culturally supported sensibilities [End Page 218] and sensitivities, she persuasively argues, find expression in different sorts of vampires.We deem Auerbach's literary nominalism preferable to an essentialism that would govern vampiric class inclusion by insisting on some conjunction of necessary features or conditions. At the same time, however, we think that there is a better way of allowing for differences in conceptualizing vampires and in understanding their multi-faceted significance in British and American imaginings of the last two centuries. That way combines the recognition of family resemblances with insights derived from prototype theory in the cognitive sciences.A family resemblance approach can be quite liberal in what it includes as instantiations of the category "vampire." It can encompass not only such familiar (albeit different) figures as Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, Dracula, and Lestat, but also others, including so-called "psychic vampires," who flourish not by sucking blood but by draining vitality, will, and even experience from their victims. Some may ask, does this not create a category that is so promiscuous in what it includes as to render the category analytically useless? No, we reply, once you couple family resemblance with insights from prototype theory.Prototype theory, narrowly described, attempts to account for "prototype effects." These "effects" are differences in the judgments that people render about how well different instances of a category exemplify the category. Thus, for instance, some people may judge apples and oranges to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "fruit" than olives. Similarly, some may judge robins and sparrows to be clearer or better exemplars of the category "bird" than penguins. Judgments can be explicitly given, or they can be inferred from the order of examples that people give or from their responses to lists of examples furnished by others. Prototype theorists call the adjudged clearest or "best" examples of categories "prototypes" or "the most prototypical exemplars."4 This approach celebrates centrality and periphery rather than essence and boundary in conceptualizing categories.5 It allows that some instantiations of a category may be deemed more central to the category than others. Thus in the case of vampires, Dracula is more central to the category than, say, the shape-shifting space alien who extracts salt from victims in an episode of Star Trek, First Generation. Auerbach recognizes that centrality when she refers to "Dracula's dominance in our century" (p. 111). We contend, moreover, that while Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire Carmilla is more prototypical—that is, an adjudged better exemplar of the category—than vampiric space aliens [End Page 219] and legions of psychic vampires, she is less... (shrink)

In the second half of the 20th century, Latin American poetry has had to deal with representing the phenomenon of forced disappearance in its various poetic productions. Some of those have incubated in the Central American civil wars, the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone and even in countries with supposed democratic stability such as Mexico and Colombia. Memorial de Ayotzinapa, by the Mexican poet Mario Bojórquez, and Carta de las mujeres de este país, by the Colombian (...) poet and activist Fredy Yezzed, experiment with the discursive forms of the long poem and the letter poem, respectively, to construct collective memories around a phenomenon that continues to take lives to this day. Bojórquez's text is concerned with constructing a testimony, apparently in situ, of the disappearance of the forty-three Mexican teacher trainees; Yezzed's work, for its part, refrains from referring to a specific event or place in order to provide a more complete testimony of the Colombian armed conflict, nearly seventy years old. The article analyzes the forms of the text, the subjects and their spaces of enunciation, as well as the memory strategies that are seen in both works. Thus, the testimonial status of poetry is confirmed, sometimes overshadowed by genres such as the novel and the short story. (shrink)

The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black,” cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because “Pantaloon in Black,” seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses, which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating “Pantaloon (...) in Black” into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere.More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish’s idea that interpretations are produced by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class? is that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish’s idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school—bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What is, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet: what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale school, endures, or prevails?The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument of communication used by professor speaking to other professors. But in “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner has formed a text in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County. Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities is akin to an idealist’s dream of an integrated South. John Limon is assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science, on the history of the American novel in relation to the history of science and science philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 379 the minister of a very influential and liberal congregation. In 1860 he began publication in Cincinnati of The Dial, successor to the New England transcendentalist journal, and used its pages to promote religious liberalism, philosophical transcendentalism, and social reform. In 1863 he went to London where he became the head of the Ethical Society. Under the influence of Feuerbach and "left-Hegelians" he travelled widely in the (...) interests of "free thought." The most amazing of these four, however, is August Willich: an East Prussian soldier, ready to fight again to restore the 1848 revolution in Germany, discouraged by Marx from doing so, emigrating to Cincinnati to raise funds among the German 1848 refugees there and urging them to continue the lost cause in Germany, then wholeheartedly fighting for the Union Cause as a General in the Civil War, and finally joining the Populist revolt. As Easton points out, these four all illustrate the close relation between Hegel and the spirit of 1848. In addition to the stories of these men and their ideals, the volume contains a hundred pages of excellent specimens of their writngs, and copious references to obscure source-materials. The book is both a valuable reference work and an entertaining set of short stories. I--IERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, CaliJornia Theory of. Man. By Francisco Romero. Translated from the Spanish by William F. Cooper, with an Introduction by William J. Kflgore. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pp. xxix + 324. $8.00.) The late Argentinian philosopher Francisco Romero, who died unexpectedly in 1962 after a brilliant career of more than thirty years of teaching and writing, was by common acclaim of his fellow-philosophers in Latin America their most distinguished philosopher in recent years. He received many honors and distinctions both at home and abroad, including the grand award of honor of the Argentinian Society of Writers. The most eminent philosophers in Latin American prepared a notable Festschri]t in honor of his 70th birthday, whose publication was unfortunately delayed and, therefore, could not be presented to him personally in his life time.1 Franci~o Romero was in fact as well as in acclaim the "Dean of Latin American Philosophy." It was high time that his central work Teorga del Hombre 2 should be translated. It is his magnum opus and represents the most comprehensive and systematic development of his philosophy. Romero was fortunate in having as his translator William F. Cooper who knew Romero personally, and was intimately acquainted with his philosophy. In addition, he had the unusual privilege of doing much of the translation in Romero's own library in Buenos Aires. In short, the translation is a labor of love and esteem.8 I myself had the privilege of coming to know Professor Romero in 1943, when as secretarygeneral of our Philosophical Association I was commissioned to make contact with our Latin American fellow-philosophers with a view to exploring the possibility of organizing InterAmerican congresses of philosophy and of forming an Inter-American society of philosophy, both of which projects, in due season, were accomplished. Romero welcomed these undertakings with characteristic enthusiasm and offered his fullest cooperation and support. He had always been a most active and indefatigable promoter of better understanding between North and South America and, especially, of closer cooperation between the philosophers of 1Homenaje a Francisco Romero, Faculdad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1952. 8In further attestation of Professor Cooper's special qualification for this translation it should be mentioned that he prepared for the Homenaje, already referred to, the most complete, up-to-date bibliography of Romero's extensive publications as well as an inventory of Romero's many works still in progress at the time of his death. 380 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the two Americas. All members of our association who came to know him in Buenos Aires were warmly welcomed, and no doubt also experienced, as I did, the warm and generous hospitality of Professor Romero and his wife in their home in Martinez. Francisco Romero was not only professor of philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires and La Plato, but was also... (shrink)

Storytelling is a central device in cultures of resistance, which enables us to trace back such cultures to precedents in the history of literature that in turn can furnish new strategies of resistance by providing narrative tactics. This paper argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper develops narrative tactics of resistance which can be fruitful for contemporary Mad Pride activism and poetic practices. To do so, I borrow a Foucauldian approach to account for how (...) Gilman challenges the psychiatric industrial medical complex in her writing. First, the story is contextualized in nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and some critical warnings on the writer’s position concerning liberation movements are offered. Subsequently, I focus on three narrative tactics of resistance deployed in The Yellow Wallpaper: (1) an indetermination of genre, (2) a tension between form and dementia, and (3) a double subjectivity in the oscillation between the pronouns “one” and “I”. Finally, the reassessment of Gilman’s writing from the lens of Disability Justice is summarized in two results: first, it strengthens the grounds of Mad Pride by imbricating it in American literary and philosophical canons and, second, it provides tactics to open spaces of resistance for contemporary authors in the movement. (shrink)

This collection of short stories and essays call into question the medical-scientific narrative, its understandings of psychoanalysis and madness, and the identity, purpose and ethics that flow from and sustain its narrative. These stories are gathered from meetings with people on in-patient units and in private practice. Emphasis is placed on the centrality of the Freudian unconscious in the process of listening, understanding and responding in the analytic discourse. Collectively, they reintroduce the identity of the analytic practitioner as the (...) shaman of contemporary times, a mind-poet who sees the world through a magical--as opposed to a scientific--visionary experience. "With a wry humour and piercing intellect, Dr. Kavanaugh's Stories from the Bog... evokes the Celtic legacy of story-telling in psychoanalysis."--David L. Downing. "A scintillating book that dances on edges of the human mind. At once, challenging, reflective and enriched by details of therapeutic work."--Michael Eigen, author, Contact with the depths. "Dr. Kavanaugh captures the essence of the psychoanalytic enterprise.... this book is a work of psychoanalytic art by one of its most creative practitioners."--Marvin Hyman. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and (...) terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

*North American Society for Social Philosophy (NASSP) Book Award 2019.* -/- *International Studies Association (ISA) - International Ethics Section Book Award 2021.* -/- Although military mores have relied primarily on just war theory, the ethic of cooperation in warfare (ECW)—between enemies even as they are trying to kill each other—is as central to the practice of warfare and to conceptualization of its morality. Neither game theory nor unilateral moral duties (God-given or otherwise) can explain the explicit language of (...) cooperation in developing and enforcing principles of military ethics and the law of armed conflict. -/- The ethic of cooperation is borne of various motivations: reciprocity, self-preservation, and efficiency, to be sure, but also a sense of warrior honor and concern with human rights. This shared morality can persist despite making it more difficult for one side or the other to win and, unfortunately, its well-meaning motivations often lead to unintended tragic consequences. -/- This book explores three manifestations of this significant yet overlooked ethic of cooperation in warfare: (1) for a “fair fight,” (2) to protect classes of individuals (e.g., non-combatants or prisoners of war), and (3) to end the war quickly. Such cooperation can take unexpected forms, from ad hoc decisions on the battlefield to institutionalization in international law, and is the source of some critical tensions in one of the most significant developments in warfare in recent years: namely, how to handle terrorism or other forms of warfare that lie outside the purview of international law. -/- Each type of ECW raises questions internal to that ethic, such as inconsistencies in the concept of “parity” across different weapons bans, contradictions within the warrior ethic that heavily influence—and therefore confuse—notions of the “fair fight,” the disconnect between what protections a person receives and his responsibility for the war (e.g., political leaders), or the limited decisiveness of outcomes generated by very short wars. -/- Their simultaneous application also generates significant tensions and raises questions about the proper relationship of ECW to the immediate goal of war itself, which is to win, and thus yield either a political settlement or a justicial decision. For example, the ECWs for a “fair fight” and to protect classes of individuals can make it harder to win the war, but even more concerning is that they can also kill more people, which in the latter case contravenes its very purpose. -/- Human history is in some ways the story of trying to concurrently wage and tame war, and the architecture of warfare itself is informed by the ECW, in particular: (a) the political nature of war, (b) the abdication from jus ad bellum judgments in order to concentrate on justice within war (jus in bello), and (c) the ways in which modern nation-states collude to define “legitimacy” in war. -/- The combination of these three features leave questions of justicial right and responsibility for war disturbingly unresolved, it also generates new challenges in a geopolitical context in which cooperative and non-cooperative (e.g. contemporary terrorism) forms of warfare clash. (shrink)

The 93rd annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, in Chicago, April 26–29, 1995, had two papers that related to Hegel directly, and one that related to him indirectly. The first, given by Robert Wallace, entitled “Mutual Recognition and Ethics,” claimed that Hegel in the mutual recognition sections of Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit replies to Kant’s argument that someone, in order to be autonomous, must be moral. Hegel responds to Kant’s position by showing (...) that self-conscious autonomy is a feature of two processes. The first process Wallace called “vertical integration,” in which an agent seeks unity and identity through the recognition of the self by another, and the second process he called “horizontal individuation,” in which the unity of the individual is a product of desire satisfaction. Kant speaks of autonomy only on the basis of rational autonomy, which ignores the dual processes of self-consciousness. Hegel, by showing how autonomy truly comes about, demonstrates both the deficiency of Kant’s argument and how morality could be based on the satisfaction and recognition of the individuals. In reply to Wallace, William Schroeder commented that Wallace’s argument is not Hegel’s argument. Hegel’s argument must be viewed in relation to the conditions of life, which Hegel discusses in the preceding section of “Self-Certainty,” and to the condition of master and slave, which succeeds those sections of recognition. Schroeder also pointed out that in Wallace’s account the notion of “mutual” recognition was strangely absent. Wallace believed that the “other” could be oneself, and that the recognition may occur in only one direction. Schroeder noted that Hegel’s argument clearly holds to the notion that two self-conscious individuals are present, and the recognition is reciprocal. The comments from the audience echoed Schroder’s comments. Robert Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago gave a short appraisal of Hegel’s argument, and contended that Wallace had not done it complete justice. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 379 the minister of a very influential and liberal congregation. In 1860 he began publication in Cincinnati of The Dial, successor to the New England transcendentalist journal, and used its pages to promote religious liberalism, philosophical transcendentalism, and social reform. In 1863 he went to London where he became the head of the Ethical Society. Under the influence of Feuerbach and "left-Hegelians" he travelled widely in the (...) interests of "free thought." The most amazing of these four, however, is August Willich: an East Prussian soldier, ready to fight again to restore the 1848 revolution in Germany, discouraged by Marx from doing so, emigrating to Cincinnati to raise funds among the German 1848 refugees there and urging them to continue the lost cause in Germany, then wholeheartedly fighting for the Union Cause as a General in the Civil War, and finally joining the Populist revolt. As Easton points out, these four all illustrate the close relation between Hegel and the spirit of 1848. In addition to the stories of these men and their ideals, the volume contains a hundred pages of excellent specimens of their writngs, and copious references to obscure source-materials. The book is both a valuable reference work and an entertaining set of short stories. I--IERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, CaliJornia Theory of. Man. By Francisco Romero. Translated from the Spanish by William F. Cooper, with an Introduction by William J. Kflgore. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pp. xxix + 324. $8.00.) The late Argentinian philosopher Francisco Romero, who died unexpectedly in 1962 after a brilliant career of more than thirty years of teaching and writing, was by common acclaim of his fellow-philosophers in Latin America their most distinguished philosopher in recent years. He received many honors and distinctions both at home and abroad, including the grand award of honor of the Argentinian Society of Writers. The most eminent philosophers in Latin American prepared a notable Festschri]t in honor of his 70th birthday, whose publication was unfortunately delayed and, therefore, could not be presented to him personally in his life time.1 Franci~o Romero was in fact as well as in acclaim the "Dean of Latin American Philosophy." It was high time that his central work Teorga del Hombre 2 should be translated. It is his magnum opus and represents the most comprehensive and systematic development of his philosophy. Romero was fortunate in having as his translator William F. Cooper who knew Romero personally, and was intimately acquainted with his philosophy. In addition, he had the unusual privilege of doing much of the translation in Romero's own library in Buenos Aires. In short, the translation is a labor of love and esteem.8 I myself had the privilege of coming to know Professor Romero in 1943, when as secretarygeneral of our Philosophical Association I was commissioned to make contact with our Latin American fellow-philosophers with a view to exploring the possibility of organizing InterAmerican congresses of philosophy and of forming an Inter-American society of philosophy, both of which projects, in due season, were accomplished. Romero welcomed these undertakings with characteristic enthusiasm and offered his fullest cooperation and support. He had always been a most active and indefatigable promoter of better understanding between North and South America and, especially, of closer cooperation between the philosophers of 1Homenaje a Francisco Romero, Faculdad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1952. 8In further attestation of Professor Cooper's special qualification for this translation it should be mentioned that he prepared for the Homenaje, already referred to, the most complete, up-to-date bibliography of Romero's extensive publications as well as an inventory of Romero's many works still in progress at the time of his death. 380 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the two Americas. All members of our association who came to know him in Buenos Aires were warmly welcomed, and no doubt also experienced, as I did, the warm and generous hospitality of Professor Romero and his wife in their home in Martinez. Francisco Romero was not only professor of philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires and La Plato, but was also... (shrink)

Buddhism-influenced essays, stories, and reviews by National Book Award winner Charles R. Johnson. This wide and varied collection of essays, reviews, and short stories by the renowned author Charles Johnson offers incisive views on politics, race, and Buddhism. Johnson notes that in his life the two activities that have anchored him and reinforce each other are creative production and spiritual practice. This book is a crystallization of what he has learned during his passage through American literature, the visual (...) arts, and the Buddha dharma. Essays include: "And if Peace Is Their Goal" on the principles of enlightened politics, "The King We Need" on the deep and sophisticated moral philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and why King's teachings and example are important to all Americans, "Why Buddhists Should Vote"--Johnson posits that voting can be seen as a way to reduce suffering, "The Meaning of Barack Obama"--an appreciation of the man who became one of the most historic US presidents, even before his first 100 days were through, "Why Buddhism for Black America Now?"--what Buddhism can offer the African-American community in the post-MLK era. (shrink)

Death is the destiny we all share, and this will not change. Yet the way we die, which had remained the same for many generations, has changed drastically in a relatively short time for those in developed countries with access to healthcare. For generations, if people were lucky enough to reach old age, not having died in infancy or childhood, in childbirth, in war, or by accident, they would take to bed, surrounded by loved ones who cared for them, (...) and fade into death. Most likely, they would have seen their parents and grandparents die the same way, and so this manner of dying would be familiar: it was part of the natural cycle of life. Now less than 25 per cent of Americans die at home, having reached much older ages than people would have dreamed of in past generations, often after surviving many illnesses and even diseases that would have been terminal for their grandparents. We are fortunate to live (and die) today, supported by myriad scientific, medical, and technological advancements, however we also face new problems as a result of the new way in which we die. We can no longer anticipate a peaceful waning at home with family. We know our lives will likely end in hospitals likely after we have endured grueling treatments to prolong life. We have to decide what decisions we want our loved ones, or care-givers, to make when we cannot choose for ourselves. We have to think about whether in any circumstances we would seek physician-assisted death. We know we face other questions as well, but we may not even know where to start. In the face of these decisions, we can feel daunted and afraid. The best remedy is information and planning. In this book, Gregory Eastwood - a physician who has cared for dying patients, served as an ethics consultant, and taught end of life issues to medical and other health profession students - draws from his substantial experience with patients and families to provide the information that will help us think clearly about the choices and issues we will face at the end of our own lives, and when faced with the deaths of our loved ones. With sensitivity and profound insight, Eastwood guides us through all the important questions about death and dying in straightforward, clear language, enhanced by real-life stories. Throughout, he shows us how we can take ownership of the way we want to die, when we must die, and feel more in control as death approaches. (shrink)

This book collects some 75 texts from the history of American thought, starting with the colonial religious background, and arranged into 6 historically oriented chapers. Each chapter has a general introduction and ends with suggestions for further readings; and each of the texts is prefaced by a short explanatory paragraph. Overall, the book provides an historical introduction to central ethical themes of American thought.

This article considers why individuals take beyond their own needs at the cost of others. Within the context of negotiations, a story is employed in framing an examination of the advancement of self–interest over connections of interdependence and civic membership. Forces of natural predisposition and environment are juxtaposed to formulate an understanding of the struggle involved in acting ethically. Notions of distributive and procedural justice are discussed with respect to claims of American citizenship, religious right, and the centrality (...) of happiness, resulting in a call for the substantive justice of interest–based negotiation. (shrink)

This overview of the life and career of Charles S. Peirce identifies the central factors that shaped this seminal American intellect, and describes the dramatic events that turned the final decades of his professional existence into a tragedy. The purpose of this short article is to serve as a first biographical introduction to Peirce.