Critical Disagreement Research Articles

The fourth ecology: Hikikomori, depressive hedonia and algorithmic ubiquity

In this article we expand upon the conceptual framework of Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay, The Three Ecologies. Here Guattari examines changes in subjectivity that have come about due to scientific and technological advances which, as he sees it, brought about an “ecological disequilibrium” ([1989]2000, 27) and deteriorated individual and collective modes of being. In response to this Guattari proposes a kind of holistic therapy or ‘ecosophy’ between three ecological registers: “the environment, social relations and human subjectivity” (ibid., 28). Guattari cautions that we not only take note of these macro determinations, but also heed the libidinal impulses of desire – what captures it, what directs it, and what shuts it down. Since the publication of The Three Ecologies, the rise of digital technologies has dramatically influenced the ways in which people think, live and communicate. Technological infrastructures, for instance, are used to spread disinformation at a vast speed and scale, and because social networks are often homophile many people infrequently encounter critical disagreement and debate. The increase in media and digital communications usage has also led to new forms of social inclusion and exclusion, the most exacerbated form of which is probably the phenomenon known as hikikomori – acute, prolonged social withdrawal. Taking hikikomori as our focus, we describe what we see as a general set of symptoms of society and trace its myriad intersections with an ever-increasing algorithmic ubiquity, which we posit as the new form of hyper-modulation following from Foucault’s disciplinary societies and Deleuze’s control societies.

Ms. Marvel and those Persian guys: unpacking Kamala Khan’s layers of crazy

ABSTRACT Upon her introduction as the new Ms. Marvel in 2013, the Pakistani-American superhero Kamala Khan was celebrated, by audiences and critics alike, as a welcome addition to the world of superhero comics. Familiar superhero tropes and ethical dilemmas were given an added twist for Marvel’s first Muslim protagonist as the teenage girl strives to reconcile her newfound powers with the moral authorities of her family and her faith. Many comics scholars reserved special praise for the nuanced and unobtrusive way in which the new Ms. Marvel introduces American readers to Muslim culture by following its eminently ‘relatable’ heroine on her search for moral guidance, whereas others were more sceptical of the extent to which the comic’s representation of Muslims can be considered progress. This article probes this ambivalence by analysing the cultural authorities invoked in the first eleven issues of the series. Instead of resolving the critical disagreement, a close reading of Kamala Khan’s implicit and explicit appeals to authority allows for a more complicated and richer understanding of the comic’s, as well as its eponymous intersectional superheroine’s, ambiguity.

Gothic Fault-Lines in Anne Brontë’s Social Fiction: The Case of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë’s second novel, has always been the object of much scholarly attention, particularly as regards what was originally thought to be a structural flaw: the use of a frame narrative within which the story of Helen Huntingdon’s flight from a disastrous marriage is embedded. The frame narrator, Gilbert Markham, tells a traditional courtship tale which abruptly turns into Helen’s metanarrative of domestic horror. Recent scholarship has concerned itself with this split in discourse which suggests that Brontë does not challenge the conventional idea that discursive authority is masculine, making it therefore difficult to read her novel as feminist. Studies alternately focus on Brontë’s bold enterprise (the vindication in the metanarrative of a woman’s right to leave an abusive husband) or on the limitations generated by her decision to resort to a male frame narrator. This paper addresses the implications of the novel’s apparently flawed structure, notably exploring the uncertainty surrounding the improvement of Gilbert’s moral character after his reading of Helen’s diary. It contends that critical disagreement on whether or not The Tenant is a feminist novel and the embedded narrative the instrument of Gilbert’s reformation, originates, at least partially, in the generic tension at work within Brontë’s novel, and the presence of Gothic fault-lines. Anne Brontë appears unwilling to espouse realism and social criticism which, if fully embraced, might imply forgoing valued (and cherished) Gothic modes of storytelling. The uneasy co-existence of social realism and Gothic remnants (prominent in the choice of structure and modes of characterisation) may then lie at the heart of the novel’s multi-faceted ambiguity.

명말(明末) 소설 『요해단충록』(遼海丹忠錄)과 사르후 전투

This article analyzes the Chinese novel, Liaohai Danzhong Lu (遼海丹忠錄), written in the early 17 century, focusing on the episodes related to the Battle of Sarhū. This novel is consisted of 40 chapters in 8 volumes as a novel of colloquial Chinese, supposed to be written by Lu renlong (陸人龍), who is well-known as the writer in late Ming China. It was about a life story of Mao Wenlong who was military commander, and deals with an incident that occurred in the Liaodong region.<BR> Although Liaohai Danzhong Lu is a novel, it contains many characters who actually existed in history, and this story is based on actual incidents. This article contrasts the descriptions of the Battle of Sarhü, which marked a watershed in the history of Northeast Asia, with the actual historical records of Manju Shilu (滿洲實錄).<BR> The description of Liaohai Danzhong Lu is mostly consistent with historical facts except for some errors. Of course, it is not clear exactly what data the author used to write this novel. However, as a result of contrast with official state documents such as Manju Shilu, the critical disagreement in narrative is not prominent. This will prove that Liaohai Danzhong Lu is not just fiction, but rather works based on materials with some credibility. Therefore, Liaohai Danzhong Lu is a novel that needs to be analyzed in relation to the history of Northeast Asia in the 17 century, and in this sense, analysis by historians as well as literature researchers is necessary.

Buckling of cylindrical shells under axial compression with loading imperfections: An experimental and numerical campaign on low knockdown factors

Abstract Thin-walled cylindrical shells are primary structures in aerospace, marine and civil engineering. A major loading scenario for these imperfection sensitive shells is axial compression. For this load case, there is a critical disagreement between the theoretical and experimental critical load. This difference is mainly contributed due to shape deviations of the shell middle plane which are commonly described as geometric imperfections. However, some deviations between theoretical and experimental buckling loads are sometimes so severe that other imperfection types are possibly to blame. This article describes experimental and numerical studies on the influence of loading imperfections on the buckling load of thin-walled cylinders. A global loading imperfection was applied by mistake during a buckling test of a thin-walled cylinder which led to a severe buckling load reduction and the corresponding load level was similar to the post-buckling load. Also, a series of experimental studies with localized loading imperfections is described which significantly reduced the buckling load of CFRP cylinders. The experimental results of this article represent an example for some of the very low buckling knockdown factors from early experimental campaigns and give insights in how to avoid these critical imperfections in experimental buckling campaigns.

On the development of shell buckling knockdown factors for imperfection sensitive conical shells under pure bending

Abstract Thin-walled conical shells are used as adapters between cylindrical shells of different diameters in launch-vehicle systems or as tailbooms in helicopters. A major loading scenario for conical shells is pure bending. The buckling moment of these shells is very sensitive to imperfections (geometry, loading conditions) which results in a critical disagreement between theoretical and experimental results for conical shells under pure bending. The design of these stability critical shells is based on classical buckling loads obtained by a linear analysis which are corrected by a single knockdown factor (0.41 - NASA SP-8019) for all cone geometries. This practice is well established among designers and hasn't changed for the past 50 years because the buckling behavior is till today not very well understood. Within this paper a reduced stiffness analysis for conical shells under pure bending is performed. Data of previous experimental testing campaigns are used to validate the new design criteria for different conical shell geometry configurations. The results show that the application of the new design recommendation for conical shell structures results in increased knockdown factors for the buckling moment which in turn may lead to a significant weight reduction potential. All ABAQUS-Python scripts and the results generated for this article are deposited in the Elsevier repository.

Towards robust knockdown factors for the design of conical shells under axial compression

Thin-walled conical shells are used as adapters between cylindrical shells of different diameters in launch-vehicle systems. Conical shells carry heavy payloads and are consequently subjected to axial compression. The buckling load of these shells is very sensitive to imperfections (geometry, loading conditions) which results in a critical disagreement between theoretical and experimental results for axially loaded conical shells.The design of these stability critical shells is based on classical buckling loads obtained by a linear analysis which are corrected by a single knockdown factor (0.33 - NASA SP-8019) for all cone geometries. This practice is well established among designers and hasn't changed for the past 50 years because the buckling behavior is till today not very well understood.Within this paper an analytical and numerical lower-bound procedure for conical shells under axial compression is proposed. Data of previous experimental testing campaigns are used to validate the new design criteria for different conical shell geometry configurations.The whole design concept is demonstrated by means of the Interstage 1/2 of the Vega launcher and it is concluded that a revision of the current design recommendation for conical shell structures may results in a significant weight reduction potential.

Effects of DNA Methylation on Progression to Interstitial Fibrosis and Tubular Atrophy in Renal Allograft Biopsies: A Multi-Omics Approach.

Progressive fibrosis of the interstitium is the dominant final pathway in renal destruction in native and transplanted kidneys. Over time, the continuum of molecular events following immunological and nonimmunological insults lead to interstitial fibrosis and tubular atrophy and culminate in kidney failure. We hypothesize that these insults trigger changes in DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns, which in turn could exacerbate injury and slow down the regeneration processes, leading to fibrosis development and graft dysfunction. Herein, we analyzed biopsy samples from kidney allografts collected 24 months posttransplantation and used an integrative multi-omics approach to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms. The role of DNAm and microRNAs on the graft gene expression was evaluated. Enrichment analyses of differentially methylated CpG sites were performed using GenomeRunner. CpGs were strongly enriched in regions that were variably methylated among tissues, implying high tissue specificity in their regulatory impact. Corresponding to this methylation pattern, gene expression data were related to immune response (activated state) and nephrogenesis (inhibited state). Preimplantation biopsies showed similar DNAm patterns to normal allograft biopsies at 2 years posttransplantation. Our findings demonstrate for the first time a relationship among epigenetic modifications and development of interstitial fibrosis, graft function, and inter-individual variation on long-term outcomes.

Pragmatism, Pluralism, and World Hypotheses:

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the ongoing debate between pluralistic and monistic approaches to dealing with critical disagreement. I return to the theory of world hypotheses advanced by Stephen C. Pepper, an understudied figure in aesthetics and pragmatism, to enunciate a version of pluralism that centers on the nature of critical evidence and its functioning in social settings of argument. I argue that Pepper's expansive philosophy holds interesting implications for what can be called the metaphysics of criticism, a point missed by partisans of standard views of pluralism and monism. Building on his analysis of equally autonomous (but noncommensurable) world hypotheses, this study enunciates an explicit notion of rhetorical pluralism that goes beyond simple relativism. This account can be labeled “evidentiary pluralism,” since it internalizes standards for evaluation to specific worldviews and recognizes their changeable nature in the context of critical disagreement.

‘It is not anyone's dream’: C. H. Sisson's Utopias

C. H. Sisson has proved a notoriously troublesome poet to position, or to ‘pin down’, and has been the subject of various ideological jousts among critics. While critical disagreement is, of course, a symptom of artistic longevity, in Sisson's case it is also – or, arguably, mainly – symptomatic of English cultural-political contestation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work has not received a great deal of critical attention, though recently there have been two special editions including essays on his work: an Agenda in 2010, and a PN Review, commemorating the poet's centenary last year in 2014, as well as a scholarly study due to be published by Carcanet. These indicate new stirrings of interest in Sisson's work, with a desire to evaluate it with the benefit of critical distance, apart from the ideological tugs of war which dominated writings on it in the last century. However, where Sisson's work is concerned, ideological contexts are rarely too far away. A prolific writer of literary and political essays, Sisson has been described both as ‘radical’1 and ‘reactionary’2 by crucial interlocutors in the debate on his work. Taking the measure of such conflicting characterisations, this essay will argue that it is precisely this indeterminacy, rather than a particular political or ideological position, which animates, complicates, and implicates Sisson's work.

‘... allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht’: Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust

Schumann was ahead of his time in choosing to set scenes from Part II of Goethe’s Faust, which was little appreciated at the time; but the theme of redemption held a particular attraction for him. Accordingly, he began by setting the final ‘Bergschluchten’ scene as a kind of oratorio, then worked back and added two prefatory sections in more dramatic style, based on scenes from Goethe’s Parts I (Gretchen scenes) and II (Acts I and V). The Overture was composed last of all. The Scenes are discontinuous and allusive, and the musico-dramatic nature of the whole and the relative merits of the three sections are still a matter of critical disagreement.

A logical redeemer: Kirillov in Dostoievskii’s Demons

The engineer Kirillov, an important character in Dostoievskii’s Demons, has provoked considerable critical disagreement. In a well-known section of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Albert Camus describes him as a figure who expresses the theme of ‘logical suicide’ with ‘the most admirable range and depth’. Other commentators have not always been so sanguine, some dismissing Kirillov as a madman in the grip of a mad theory. While dissenting from Camus’s analysis in certain respects, this article offers an interpretation consistent with his basic argument. Kirillov’s decision to commit suicide is based on a simple, if implacable, logic which convinces him that as long as he kills himself for the right reason, his death will be an act of redemption for all humanity. Kirillov is a wholly ‘metaphysical’ character – one of the earliest in modern fiction – whose ambition to become the ‘man-god’ is explored by Dostoievskii to its ultimate, desolate conclusion.

Trinity and Atheology: The Listening Self in Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe

Trinity and AtheologyThe Listening Self in Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe Ashok Collins The French novelist, playwright, biographer, essayist and musicologist Romain Rolland was born on 29 January 1866, in Clamecy, a small town in Burgundy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and became infamous for his pacifist stance during the First World War. He developed an interest in the non-resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism in the 1920s. Although he never became a member of the Communist Party, Rolland visited Russia in 1935 and became an advocate of the Soviet experiment despite his acknowledgement of its shortcomings. He died at the age of seventy-eight on 30 December 1944, in Vézelay, France. One of the aspects of Rolland’s work that has attracted perhaps the most sustained critical attention in past scholarship is his religious thought, which has usually been seen as an eclectic mixture of creeds based on an existential understanding of the divine (e.g., Cruickshank). The foundation of such a religious thinking was laid by what Rolland later described as three spiritual revelations, or éclairs, which provided a vivid, experiential counterpoint to the abstraction of the Catholic Mass that he attended during his childhood years.1 Rolland gives a detailed account of these flashes of intuition into the nature of existence in Le Voyage intérieur: a penetrating vision of the wide expanse of nature on a terrace in the town of Ferney; his reading of “les mots de feu de Spinoza,” which provided him with a direct taste of the divine life; and “l’éclair Tolstoyen,” which gave him the sensation of being one with the universe (28). In 1887, Rolland sketched out this new faith in a document he entitled “Credo quia verum,” which expressed a philosophy that would later become the “moteur de sa vie et de son œuvre” (Duchatelet, La Genèse 29). In the Credo, Rolland depicts a form of divinity that is not divorced in any way from the material realm but rather is encountered within human [End Page 113] experience. As Sipriot clarifies, for Rolland “[l]a vraie religion suit le rythme et les drames de la vie, de notre vie” (29). Such a unity between the divine and the human, and the importance placed on the natural world within his work, has led most scholars to define Rolland’s religiosity as a form of pantheism (Francis 253; Bonnerot 17), an interpretation that is certainly supported by Rolland’s own assertions on several occasions (Le Cloître 75; Chère Sofia 320). This understanding of the divine predominated for most of Rolland’s life, until a later re-engagement with the Catholic tradition through his friendship with Paul Claudel and various Catholic priests made a more personalized vision come to prominence within his interior life (see Paul Claudel, Romain Rolland; Au seuil). While most critics see a sharp divide between Rolland’s pantheism and his later rapprochement with the Christian tradition, other critics recognize that such discursive labeling can sometimes risk oversimplifying what was in fact a much more complex stance towards Catholicism from the very beginning of his literary career.2 Such critical disagreement becomes particularly intense when we turn to his most well-known novel, Jean-Christophe, an “œuvre de foi” (xiv) which has usually been read as an archetypal example of Rolland’s pantheistic vision at work in literary form (e.g., Bresky 1053). In this paper, however, we will follow the critical pathway laid out by Bernard Duchatelet, who hints at the possibility of undertaking a more thorough analysis of the numerous Biblical references that are scattered throughout the novel.3 The purpose of such a study is not to argue for a re-classification of the novel as a “Christian” text, nor to suggest that previous pantheistic definitions should be discarded entirely. Rather, by focusing on the textual representation of God in Jean-Christophe through a utilization of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity (Déconstruction du christianisme), I will seek to exploit the Biblical tradition in order to re-envisage the text as a literary example of the praxis of open...

TRANSLATION ASSISTANCE SYSTEM BASED ON SELECTIVE WEIGHTING AND CLUSTER-BASED SEARCHING METHODS

Visiting a foreign country is now much easier than it was in the past. This has led to a consequent increase in the need for translation services during these visits. To satisfy this need, a reliable translation assistance system based on sentence retrieval techniques is proposed. When a user inputs a sentence in his/her native language, the proposed system retrieves sentences similar to the input sentence from a pre-constructed bilingual corpus and returns pairs of sentences in the native and foreign languages. To reduce the lexical disagreement problems that inevitably occur in this sentence retrieval application, the proposed system uses multi-level linguistic information (i.e., keywords, sentence types, and concepts) with different weights as indexing terms. In addition, the proposed system uses clustering information from sentences with similar meanings to smooth the retrieval target sentences. In an experiment, the proposed system outperformed traditional IR systems. Based on various experiments, it was found that multi-level information was effective at alleviating critical lexical disagreement problems in sentence retrieval. It was also found that the proposed system was suitable for sentence retrieval applications such as translation assistance systems.

The ethnography of Charles Darwin: a study of his writings on aboriginal peoples

Because of his stature as one of the great minds of the nineteenth century, Darwin and his work have been examined from almost every conceivable angle. This has led to much critical disagreement on his thoughts regarding the dignity of man, particularly of aboriginal peoples. This book attempts to reconcile the prevailing dual visions of Darwin--as racist and as humanitarian. By consolidating Darwin's fragmentary ethnographic writings, the text charts his switch from early resignation regarding the victimization of native tribes to advocacy for their plight. While recognizing the differences between modern Europeans and primitive communities, Darwin developed a firm belief in the dignity of man and ultimately viewed the exploitation of aboriginal peoples as morally indefensible.

The poetics of disengagement: Jane Austen and echoic irony

If it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is ‘irony’ in Jane Austen’s novels, there is far from general agreement as to how that irony works. Most critics hold that there is a gap between what the novels say and what they mean, but different schools of criticism interpret that gap in contrasting ways. This article assumes that such critical disagreement arises from the multiplicity of voices in Austen’s oeuvre, and more specifically, from the evaluative confusion or indeterminacy created by what Sperber and Wilson call an ‘echoic’ use of irony on the narrator’s part. This article, however, registers a dissatisfaction with Sperber and Wilson’s definition, and proposes to rewrite ‘echoic irony’ as ‘perspectival disengagement’ — a more neutral and general term capturing the narrator’s ability to subsume other characters’ voices while at the same time subtly indicating that their viewpoints are not quite his/her own.

Dialectical vs. Experimental Method: Marcuse's Review of Dewey's &lt;em&gt;Logic: The Theory of Inquiry&lt;/em&gt;

This introduction contextualizes and evaluates Herbert Marcuse’s the accompanying, previously untranslated review of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry . Marcuse’s critique of pragmatism is indebted to Max Horkheimer’s claim that pragmatism is an example of “traditional” theory and reduces thought to mere instrument in service of external ends. Unlike Horkheimer, Marcuse concedes that Dewey, unlike the logical positivists, attempted to develop a material logic of ends. However, he concludes that the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. I place this conclusion in the context of Marcuse’s critique of technological reason. Lastly, I defend Dewey from the charge of crude instrumentalism and delineate Marcuse’s and Dewey’s critical disagreement on science’s capacity for self- reflection.

Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader Steven Knapp (bio) In a series of essays published over some three decades, the late Ralph Rader developed a theory of literary explanation that was remarkable for a number of reasons. Among them were the clarity and hence intentional vulnerability of its hypotheses and its unembarrassed focus on the established classics of English literature. Rader drew his examples almost exclusively from the canon of the English and Irish novel, Defoe to Joyce, and of English lyric poetry from Gray to Eliot. This at a time when the larger enterprise of literary criticism was busily expanding if not dissolving the canons of the various national literatures and probing the boundaries between high literature and other modes of discourse. Rader’s concentration on the canon was, however, a direct and deliberate consequence of an extraordinary explanatory ambition. He aimed at nothing less than defining the essential nature of literary objects and, in the process, providing a basis in our shared experience for the explanation and resolution of interpretive controversy. One of the impressive features of Rader’s theory is the complexity he generates out of a fairly small set of conceptual resources. This is easiest to see in his clearest and most comprehensive statement of the theory, his retrospective essay “Literary Constructs,” published in Poetics in 1989. The ambition mentioned above is evident in the paper’s abstract, where it is stated with characteristic precision, if also with a characteristically forbidding syntax and vocabulary: The overall aim of the paper is to show how a single theoretical perspective can articulate and collaterally explain and illuminate both the micro-facts, the pre-analytical [End Page 104] shared invariants of our immediate tacit reading experience of literary works, and the macro-facts of our collective experience. The most crucially significant of these macro-facts are patterns of agreement—and particularly disagreement—in the interpretations which have grown up around major works and rendered them critically problematical. It is in critical disagreement that the complexities of experience most perplexingly but also (potentially) most fruitfully manifest themselves, since the very limitation of understanding that such interpretive shortfall reflects provides a rich test for further explanatory inquiry if we appreciate the fact that patterns of disagreement are as specific as a spectrograph to individual works and therefore offer for decoding an implicit structural characterization of the works as objects of our experience. (337) The first premise—in many ways the key to Rader’s whole theory—is familiar from the early writings of Stanley Fish and other proponents of reader-response criticism: that readers share the same fundamental experience of the work, even if they follow different trajectories in interpreting what they have experienced. It follows that one should be able to work backwards along those trajectories, tracing the conflicting interpretations to their common source in the original experience. Rader goes on to state a second major premise: that one’s hypothetical reconstruction of the experience produced by a single literary work can be both tested and expanded by applying the same hypothesis to other works in the same genre, with due attention to the evolution of genres through history. Or as he continues in the same abstract, “[e]xplanatory accounts of individual forms gain power the more their implications are extended to provide collateral and comparative accounts of other members of the same or related genres and, as possible, their historical development as well” (ibid.). This reciprocal relation, in Rader’s account, between the explanation of individual works and groups of related works underlies his clearest statement in this essay of his largest ambition, which is to turn the study of literature into (something like) a true science: “[t]he aim is one general to explanatory endeavor on the scientific model, to seek at once the greatest generality and the greatest particular[ity] of explanation on the basis of the most cogent set of assumptions for doing so” (339). There is one final premise that does not appear in Rader’s abstract but arrives later in the article: that the form to which our experience of a work responds—at least in the case...

Shave-off vector profiling for TEM samples

This study aims to cross-check the same sample, the same part and the same piece by shave-off profiling and scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) imaging. For cross-check analysis, a piece was picked up from a failed IC package which might cause electrochemical migration. Critical disagreement on each result was gradient curve on shave-off depth profiling from anode to cathode. In the same piece, shave-off profiling visualized a faint gradient of migrated ions which could not be observed by STEM imaging.

‘And Somewhere the Dove Rose’: Seamus Heaney y su Fase Aérea en la Crítica Literaria

This article concentrates on the different analyses made by critics regarding the beginning of the so-called airy phase in Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre. In contrast with the generalized critical acceptance of a new airy, visionary, escapist phase, which follows a first earthy, sensorial, more politically committed phase, the main objective of this article is to show the outstanding critical disagreement over the collection/s which introduce/s this poetic shift and, consequently, the fragility of such critical hypothesis. After providing evidence on this discrepancy among critics and claiming our own disagreement with this airy phase, we offer a re-examination of Heaney’s poetic evolution which detaches itself from the binary opposition earth vs. air in favour of emphasizing tension and balance between both of them –as in many other Heaneyian dualities– all throughout his literary career.