The cyclic GMP-gated channel responds to changes in free intracellular cGMP, and as a result, it plays a central role in the phototransduction process in rod and cone photoreceptor cells. Recent biochemical, immunochemical, and molecular biology studies indicate that this channel consists of a complex of two distinct subunits and one or more associated proteins. Primary structural analysis indicates that the a and (3 subunits contain a cGMP-binding domain, an even number of membrane-spanning segments, a voltage sensor motif and a (...) pore region. The latter two features are found in voltage-gated channels and suggest that these two classes of channels have evolved from the same ancestral channel protein. A working model for the membrane topography of the channel subunits is proposed based on immunogold labeling studies and sequence analysis. Recent studies also indicate that calmodulin binds to the 240 kDa protein of the channel complex and modulates the sensitivity of the channel for cGMP in a Ca2+-dependent manner. The molecular properties of the channel complex and the possible role of Ca2+-calmodulin modulation of the channel during photoactivation and photorecovery are discussed in relation to the current mechanism of phototransduction in photoreceptor cells. (shrink)

The Tannhäuser Gate. Architecture in science fiction films of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century as a component of utopian and dystopian projections of the future. -/- The films of science fiction genre from the second half of the 20th and early 21st century contained many visions of the future, which were at the same time a reflection on the achievements and deficiencies of modern times. In 1960s, cinematographic works were dominated by optimism (...) and faith in the possibility of never-ending progress. The disappearance of political divisions between the blocs of states and the joint exploration of the cosmos was foreseen. The designers undertook cooperation with scientists, which manifested itself in showing cosmic constructions far exceeding the real technical capabilities. Starting from the 1970s, pessimism and the belief that the future will bring, above all, the intensification of negative phenomena of the present began to grow in films. Fears of the future were connected with indicating various possible defects and insoluble contradictions between them. When, therefore, some dystopian visions illustrated the threat of increase in crime, others depicted the future as saturated with state control mechanisms and the prevalence of surveillance. The fears shown on the screens were also aroused by the growth of large corporations, especially by their gaining political influence or staying outside the system of democracy. The authors of the films also presented their suspicions related to the creation of new types of weapons by corporations, the use of which might breach the current legal norms. Particular objections concerned research on biological weapons and the possible spread of lethal viruses. The development of robotics and research into artificial intelligence, which must have resulted in the appearance of androids and inevitable tensions in their relations with humans, also triggered fear. Another problem for film-makers has become hybrids that are a combination of people and electronic parts. Scriptwriters and directors likewise considered the development of genetic engineering, which led to the creation of mutant human beings. A number of film dystopias contemplated the possibility of the collapse of democratic systems and the development of authoritarian regimes in their place, often based on broad public support. This kind of dystopia also includes films presenting the consequences of contemporary hedonism and consumerism. The problem is, however, that works critical of these phenomena were themselves advertisements for attractive products. (shrink)

The prefrontal cortex is widely believed to play an important role in facilitating people's ability to switch performance between different tasks. We present a biologically‐based computational model of prefrontal cortex (PFC) that explains its role in task switching in terms of the greater flexibility conferred by activation‐based working memory representations in PFC, as compared with more slowly adapting weight‐based memory mechanisms. Specifically we show that PFC representations can be rapidly updated when a task switches via a dynamic gating mechanism based (...) on a temporal‐differences reward‐prediction learning mechanism. Unlike prior models of this type, the present model develops all of its internal representations via learning mechanisms as shaped by the demands of continuous periodic task switching. This advance opens up a new domain of research into the interactions between working memory task demands and the representations that develop to meet them. Results on a version of the Wisconsin card sorting task are presented for the full model and a number of comparison networks that test the importance of various model features. Furthermore, we show that a lesioned model produces perseverative errors like those seen in frontal patients. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is a field of research that concentrates on the design, construction, and modification of new biomolecular parts and metabolic pathways using engineering techniques and computational models. By employing knowledge of operational pathways from engineering and mathematics such as circuits, oscillators, and digital logic gates, it uses these to understand, model, rewire, and reprogram biological networks and modules. Standard biological parts with known functions are catalogued in a number of registries (e.g. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Registry of Standard (...) Biological Parts). Biological parts can then be selected from the catalogue and assembled in a variety of combinations to construct a system or pathway in a microbe. Through the innovative re-engineering of biological circuits and the optimization of certain metabolic pathways, biological modules can be designed to reprogram organisms to produce products or behaviors. Synthetic biology is what is known as a “platform technology”. That is, it generates highly transferrable theoretical models, engineering principles, and know-how that can be applied to create potential products in a wide variety of industries. Proponents suggest that applications of synthetic biology may be able to provide scientific and engineered solutions to a multitude of worldwide problems from health to energy. Synthetic biology research has already been successful in constructing microbial products which promise to offer cheaper pharmaceuticals such as the antimalarial synthetic drug artemisinin, engineered microbes capable of cleaning up oil spills, and the engineering of biosensors that can detect the presence of high concentrations of arsenic in drinking water. One of the potential benefits of synthetic biology research is in its application to biofuel production. It is this application which is the focus of this entry. The term “biofuel” has referred generally to all liquid fuels that are sourced from plant or plant byproducts and are used for energy necessary for transportation vehicles (Thompson 2012). Biofuels that are produced using synthetic biological techniques re-engineer microbes into biofuel factories are a subset of these. (shrink)

The prefrontal cortex is widely believed to play an important role in facilitating people's ability to switch performance between different tasks. We present a biologically‐based computational model of prefrontal cortex (PFC) that explains its role in task switching in terms of the greater flexibility conferred by activation‐based working memory representations in PFC, as compared with more slowly adapting weight‐based memory mechanisms. Specifically we show that PFC representations can be rapidly updated when a task switches via a dynamic gating mechanism based (...) on a temporal‐differences reward‐prediction learning mechanism. Unlike prior models of this type, the present model develops all of its internal representations via learning mechanisms as shaped by the demands of continuous periodic task switching. This advance opens up a new domain of research into the interactions between working memory task demands and the representations that develop to meet them. Results on a version of the Wisconsin card sorting task are presented for the full model and a number of comparison networks that test the importance of various model features. Furthermore, we show that a lesioned model produces perseverative errors like those seen in frontal patients. (shrink)

Mammalian synthetic biology holds the promise of providing novel therapeutic strategies, and the first success stories are beginning to be reported. Here we focus on the latest generation of mammalian transgene control devices, highlight state‐of‐the‐art synthetic gene network design, and cover prototype therapeutic circuits. These will have an impact on future gene‐ and cell‐based therapies and help bring drug discovery into a new era. The inventory of biological parts that are essential for life on this planet is becoming increasingly complete. (...) The postgenomic era has provided encyclopedic information on gene‐function correlations and systems biology is now delivering comprehensive details on the dynamics of biochemical reaction networks in living organisms. The time has come to reassemble these catalogued items and design new biological devices and systems with novel and useful functionality in a rational and systematic manner. This is the premise of synthetic biology, a constructive systems biology discipline likely to become the life science revolution of the 21st century. (shrink)

This article explores the scientific fraud case of the South Korean stem cell scientist Woo-Suk Hwang, which represents a struggle over political identity. The South Korean state supported Hwang’s research hoping to establish Korean scientific-technological leadership in biotechnology, but it combined this globalization strategy with an identity politics built around the Korean people. The emerging bionationalism exceeded traditional ethnic nationalism insofar as the traditional ethnicity marker of ‘‘blood’’ was displaced by biologically scientifically grounded notions such as the stem cell or (...) the oocyte. These new biological markers defined national identity and embedded the transformative potential of modern biomedicine to be put into the service of Korean bodies and the nation’s economic future. Bionationalistic mobilization became hegemonic in South Korea in 2000 and undermined the democratic process, giving rise to violations against core principles of good governance. This bionationalistic narrative was challenged by an attempt to define political identity through the ideas of political citizenship, liberal democracy, and participation. The South Korean government has terminated its bionationalistic mobilization, but the struggles over Hwang and Korean identity linger. (shrink)

The “dynamic developmental” theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has come full circle from Wender's (1971) reinforcement hypothesis. By specifying the principle of time constraints on reinforcement and extinction, the present theory allows for empirical validation. However, the theory implies, but does not discuss, implications for the neurophysiology of comorbidity in ADHD. The authors' attribution of comorbid oppositional behavior to parental and societal reinforcement leaves out biological factors.

Special purpose service robots have already entered the market and their users’ homes. Also the idea of the general purpose service robot or personal robot companion is increasingly discussed and investigated. To probe human–robot interaction with a mobile robot in arbitrary domestic settings, we conducted a study in eight different homes. Based on previous results from laboratory studies we identified particular interaction situations which should be studied thoroughly in real home settings. Based upon the collected sensory data from the robot (...) we found that the different environments influenced the spatial management observable during our subjects’ interaction with the robot. We also validated empirically that the concept of spatial prompting can aid spatial management and communication, and assume this concept to be helpful for Human–Robot Interaction design. In this article we report on our exploratory field study and our findings regarding, in particular, the spatial management observed during show episodes and movement through narrow passages. Keywords: COGNIRON, Domestic Service Robotics, Robot Field Trial, Human Augmented Mapping, Human–Robot Interaction, Spatial Management, Spatial Prompting. (shrink)

Biomedical and social scientists are increasingly calling the biological sex into question, arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait. Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts. While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender‐diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex. On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions (...) species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species. We argue that the biological definition of the sexes remains central to recognising the diversity of life. Humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender are different from non‐human animals and plants in this respect. Denying the concept of biological sex, for whatever cause, ultimately erodes scientific progress and may open the flood gates to “alternative truths.”. (shrink)

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

The transmission of electrical impulses in nerve and muscle cells depends fundamentally on the operation of specific ion channels in their membranes. Recent technical advances in electrical recording from cell membranes have permitted the analysis of the properties of single ion channels and the measurement of gating currents. The results have revealed considerable complexities, in particular in the operation of voltage‐gated sodium channels, and in the relationships between the several open and closed states of the channels. An important new development (...) is the cloning and analysis of the structural genes for the acetylcholine receptor and sodium channel protein, which promises to yield fresh insights into the functioning of these proteins. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus by Allen VerheyMandy Rodgers-GatesThe Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus By Allen Verhey GRAND RAPIDS: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, 2011. 423 PP. $30.00When Allen Verhey, my former adviser, learned that I would be writing this review, he warned me (with characteristic modesty) that I ought to be careful to critique something about his book, or people might become suspicious. It (...) seems fitting now that this piece is being published after his death, which gives me permission to praise the book without reserve.Over the last few decades, the topic of death and dying has garnered renewed interest among Christian ethicists, and Verhey has been at the center of these conversations. Such conversations have brought into focus the reality that death is not merely the cessation of a life lived well (the “true” subject of ethics) but also that “dying well” is a legitimate subject within ethics. Dying offers unique opportunities for practicing virtues and for loving God, self, and neighbor, and care for the dying and grieving represents an important test of the faithfulness of Christian communities.After beginning with his own assessment of death in the modern West—acknowledging the benefits and triumphs of medicine, along with the pitfalls of medicalized death and the failure of the Church to resist medicalization—Verhey moves to the heart of his book: a retrieval of the Ars Moriendi tradition. Verhey engages a fifteenth-century abridged manual on the art of dying that appeared within the wider genre, one accompanied by wood-block prints (whose images appear alongside Verhey’s text). Placing the little book within its historical context, Verhey describes the view of death presented in it, a “commendacion” of death. He then moves on to the Ars Moriendi’s presentation of temptations faced by the dying person (“Moriens”), the virtues required, and questions, instructions, and prayers for the dying. Along the way, Verhey offers some of his own analysis; but he reserves the bulk of his critique and reformulations for the third section of his book, “Toward a contemporary Ars Moriendi.”Verhey’s articulation of a contemporary Ars Moriendi begins with a “commendacion” of life, in contrast to the medieval commendation of death. He demonstrates how the lens of Jesus’s resurrection serves to illuminate a proper Christian view of death: life is a good—though not the ultimate good—and death and suffering per se ought not to be considered good. At the same time, we need not fear death. Death and suffering are not the greatest evils, and [End Page 191] sometimes they must be risked or accepted “for the sake of God’s cause in the world” (215). Taking its cue from the Ars Moriendi tradition of remembering Jesus, the next chapter traces some of the details of the Passion narratives, including the seven final words of Jesus, and comments on these as they pertain to a modern context of dying. This remembering is then brought to bear on a contemporary retelling of the virtues necessary for dying well—again, relying upon and yet transforming the earlier tradition in nuanced ways. Verhey’s final section, on Christian communities’ care for the dying, includes sustained reflection on the practices of those communities and the resources they offer, focusing particularly on prayer. It offers critiques and additions—for example, recognizing the value of increased silence at funerals, “instead of rushing to fill the silence of death with our words” (348).Verhey’s engagement with the Ars Moriendi literature offers a creative and exemplary use of tradition for a contemporary concern. Our age—one that often refuses to face death—is brought into conversation with another era, when people took their dying seriously. At the same time, Verhey is free with his critique of the tradition and the need to reshape it, primarily on theological grounds. The strength of this book, like all his work, lies in its attention to scripture and its theological nuance and depth. At the same time, he knew and understood people, and that knowledge and pastoral concern are evident throughout. Ultimately, he accomplishes what he expresses in the introduction: “I hope... (shrink)

In 2006 the Government issued a White Paper in which it proposed a ban on human-animal embryo research pending greater clarity on its potential. The Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology initiated an Inquiry and concluded that such research was necessary and should be permitted immediately. The Government agreed and this is reflected in revised legislation. The Government has issued guidelines on the gathering and use of scientific advice and evidence, designed to ensure that these are “credible, reliable and (...) objective.” This article tests the Committee’s approach in the light of its remit and these, and other, relevant guidelines and concludes that it failed to meet these standards. Rather, it effectively ceded to an interest group the regulation of its own activities. The article ends by suggesting alterations to the Committee’s remit and composition designed to ensure that the public interest is better protected in future. (shrink)

Highlights popular debates about the contribution of reflection to teacher education and emphasizes the role of the mentor in facilitating teachers' professional development. Each chapter is concerned with exploring the concept of reflection and considering its contributions to teacher education.

In this paper I apply an old problem of Quine's (the inscrutability of reference in translation) to a new style of theory about mental content (causal/nomological/informational accounts of meaning) and conclude that no "naturalization" of content of the sort currently popular can solve Quine's "gavagai" enigma. I show how failure to solve the problem leads to absurd conclusions not about one's own mental life, but about the non-mental world. I discuss various ways of attempting to remedy the accounts so as (...) to avoid the problem and explain why each attempt at solving the problem would take the information theorists further from their self-assigned task of "naturalizing" semantics. (shrink)

The study of identity crosses all disciplinary borders to address such issues as the multiple interactions of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, postcolonialism and globalization, and the interrelation of nationalism and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies. Identities will help disrupt the cliche-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity. Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy explore such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization (...) of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas. This collection of twenty articles brings together the special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "Identities" (Summer 1992), two other previously published essays, and five previously published critical responses and rejoinders, all of which is interrogated in two new essays by Michael Gorra and Judith Butler. Contributors include Elizabeth Abel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Judith Butler, Hazel V. Carby, Xiaomei Chen, Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Avery Gordon, Michael Gorra, Cheryl Herr, Saree S. Makdisi, Walter Benn Michaels, Christopher Newfield, Gananath Obeyesekere, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, Katie Trumpener, and Joseph Valente. (shrink)

I examine critically the application of information‐theoretic ideas to biological communication during embryonic development and in the functioning central nervous system (CNS). I show that intercellular communication relies mostly on simple signals whose role is to effect a selection among predetermined cellular states. Hence, a crucial role is played by cellular memory, which stabilizes such states. Memory in cells is partly located in the nuclear DNA; no less important however is (phenotypic) memory lying in the cell's organelles and compartments. Because (...) of combinatorial effects in gene expression patterns, cell memory is an enormously powerful mechanism, which also underlies plasticity, and thus constitutes the factor unifying genetic determination, plasticity and learning. Communication in the CNS is analyzed in some detail: here, cellular memory is embodied in anatomy (i.e., cell shape) and neurochemistry. These are the major, relatively “static” factors affecting the routing of neural impulses in the adult CNS. In addition, however, faster channeling is also required: action potentials must be directed to their targets along a few of exponentially many paths, and this dynamic routing is crucial for proper operation. I suggest that collective oscillatory modes may play a role in solving this addressing problem, in the same way that the clock signal gates the operation of man‐made computers. BioEssays 25:699–708, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The translocation of proteins across membranes is a central problem in biology. Regardless of the system in question, delivering proteins across a given membrane relies on many of the same basic themes. At the same time, however, each membrane translocation system, beit signal‐gated or signal‐assembled, makes use of components unique to that system. The latest findings on protein translocation across a variety of biological membranes have been presented in a recent review article.1 BioEssays 25:1154–1157, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

When someone hosts a party, when governments choose an aid program, or when assistive robots decide what meal to serve to a family, decision‐makers must determine how to help even when their recipients have very different preferences. Which combination of people’s desires should a decision‐maker serve? To provide a potential answer, we turned to psychology: What do people think is best when multiple people have different utilities over options? We developed a quantitative model of what people consider desirable behavior, characterizing (...) participants’ preferences by inferring which combination of “metrics” (maximax, maxsum, maximin, or inequality aversion [IA]) best explained participants’ decisions in a drink‐choosing task. We found that participants’ behavior was best described by the maximin metric, describing the desire to maximize the happiness of the worst‐off person, though participant behavior was also consistent with maximizing group utility (the maxsum metric) and the IA metric to a lesser extent. Participant behavior was consistent across variation in the agents involved and tended to become more maxsum‐oriented when participants were told they were players in the task (Experiment 1). In later experiments, participants maintained maximin behavior across multi‐step tasks rather than shortsightedly focusing on the individual steps therein (Experiment 2, Experiment 3). By repeatedly asking participants what choices they would hope for in an optimal, just decision‐maker, and carefully disambiguating which quantitative metrics describe these nuanced choices, we help constrain the space of what behavior we desire in leaders, artificial intelligence systems helping decision‐makers, and the assistive robots and decision‐makers of the future. (shrink)

Prisoners signify: a political discourse analysis of mental illness in a prison control unitIncreasingly, US prisoners diagnosed with mental illness are housed in control units, the most restrictive form of confinement in the US prison system. This situation has led to intense debate over the legal, ethical and clinical status of mental illness. This is a semiotic struggle with profound effects, yet most related work treats mental illness as a neutral, individual variable. Few analyses locate mental illness within a larger (...) sociopolitical context. Fewer still focus on discursive practice. None critically analyze the accounts of control unit prisoners, who talk about extreme marginality and risk for victimization. This paper has two aims: (i) to develop a systematic method of analysis that accounts for signification as discourse‐in‐action; and (ii) to show how prisoners’ signification of mental illness articulates agency through and against marginalizing discourse. Political discourse analysis demonstrates how control unit prisoners with psychiatric diagnoses signify mental illness, and articulate safer identifications in the process. (shrink)

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

What importance does “race” have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, (...) race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot, after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, “the human condition” and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision. And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions, certain canonical works do seem to transcend value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other in the proper study of “literature,” “Western literature,” or “comparative literature” has, until recently, remained an unasked question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence.This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century, “national spirit” and “historical period” had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature and function of literature which argued that the principal value in a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois considered a culture’s formal social institution as the repository of its “guiding spirit,” while Giambattista Vico’s principi di una scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather deftly to bring “both national spirit and historical period” to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W. Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made the implicit explicit by postulating “race, moment, and milieu” as positivistic criteria through which any work could be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine’s History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which subsequent nineteenth-century notions of “national literatures” would be constructed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is professor of English, comparative literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The Signifying Monkey. (shrink)

Originally published in 1923, this title is a critical examination of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. A contemporary of Freud, the author sets out to evaluate his theories in a scientific manner, searching for evidence. The result is a rather scathing review of where this is lacking.

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

The extremely well-known holiday television special Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is deconstructed to expose an underlying philosophical paradigm towards people, especially children, with disabilities that is mechanistic and utilitarian. This paradigm includes a static and over-determined view of any disability a person may have, and can be erroneously supported by a philosophy of “radical freedom.” Examples of this philosophy of disability as applied to the K-12 realm of special education are also provided, showing how the lessons learned from the (...) children’s movie are mirrored in the static conceptualization of the notion of disability in the general society and educational system. (shrink)