Emphasis Mine Research Articles

Electoral Institutions and the Manifestation of Bias: The Effect of the Personal Vote on the Representation of Women

The “personal vote” refers to “that portion of a candidate's electoral support which originates in his or her personal qualities, qualifications, activities, and record” (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987, 9). The presence of a personal vote in an electoral system means that the person up for election matters, not just the candidate's party. Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina go so far as to refer to it as “relationships between the represented and representatives,” claiming that these relationships are more “personal, particularistic, and idiosyncratic than in other kinds of systems” (8, emphasis mine).

Culturing Food: Bioart and In Vitro Meat

In a 1961 essay, Roland Barthes argues that a central feature of modernity is the proliferation of ‘social situations’ in which food serves not just to nourish bodies but to communicate identities ...

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience

Almost three-quarters of the way through his book, McNamara writes: “At this point (assuming the reader has plowed through the material in the previous chapters [emphasis mine]), we are no longer surprised to see links between phenomena involving aberrations in self-consciousness with the right anterior lobe” (187). McNamara is an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine who argues that religion and religious experiences involve key nodes of the amygdala, large portions of the prefrontal lobes, and the anterior temporal cortex of the brain (ix). Even being thus forewarned in the preface and relying heavily on QUICKSTUDY© brain and nervous system charts, a reader who is not a neuroscientist or only superficially acquainted with human anatomy does indeed feel as if she or he were plowing with a wooden plow drawn by a horse through rocky terrain. Even my charts prepared for medical students did not have all the places McNamara mentioned in the brain. The effort, however, is rewarding, for his use of neuroscience insights in investigating religious experiences is both illuminating and challenging. This reviewer accepts the neuroscience as reliable, leaving its critical evaluation to neuroscientists. I will instead reflect on his work from the perspective of an anthropologically informed theologian and biblical scholar.

Downward Causation: Polanyi and Prigogine

Downward Causation: Polanyi and Prigogine

Resulting Patterns, Palimpsests, and “Pointing Out” the Role of the Listener in Reich's <em>Drumming</em>

RESULTING PATTERNS, PALIMPSESTS, AND “POINTING OUT” THE ROLE OF THE LISTENER IN REICH’S DRUMMING1 PHILIP DUKER XPERIENCING A MINIMALIST WORK is seldom described as an active process.2 Nor, according to many musicians, does it require a listener’s rapt attention. This would seem to be a curious anomaly compared with the diverse situations in which musicians and scholars encourage active listening. Consider for instance, the importance we place on such engaged musical activities as: tracing the entrances of a fugue subject, feeling the pull to a new key area in sonata form, or following the development of motives. It is strange then, that many music scholars claim that the opposite strategy is a preferable way to listen to minimalist pieces. E 142 Perspectives of New Music Since the first minimalist works were performed, musicians have recognized the radically different demands placed on a listener in comparison with much twentieth-century music. Timothy Johnson writes that: The earliest minimal pieces (from the late 1950s and early 1960s) . . . move sharply away from the idea of requiring the listener to recognize goals and goal-directed motion and toward the notion of listening from a nonparticipatory viewpoint suspended in time [emphasis mine].3 The idea that a listener doesn’t invest the same amount of attention that they normally would when listening continues to this day. Even some those who write sympathetically about minimalism have described the listening experience as a non-attached process. Consider the following quote from Jonathan Bernard: minimalist composers often make it a losing proposition for the listener to do more than just barely focus on differences between chords and motives, for instance—only to the threshold necessary for apprehending the temporal process.4 While minimalist works are not ambient music for these scholars, they describe a very limited kind of listening. What does it mean to experience this music if you “just barely focus on differences between chords and motives” or take a “non-participatory viewpoint.” Reinforcing this view, some minimalist composers encourage their audiences to use concerts as a chance for meditation, stressing again the idea that the music doesn’t warrant much attention from the listener.5 Yet, this approach would seem to significantly dilute how music scholars have historically used the term “listen.” Ian Quinn has remarked that if we approach minimalist works with the intent of staging a full analytical assault in order to demonstrate the depth of a composition, “process music will remain a source of frustration.”6 One might extend this comment to include the listening strategies associated with many of our analytical tools. Arguably when classical music scholars listen to minimalist works in habitual ways, there is a stark mismatch between their expectations of engagement and what the compositions offer. For listeners who actively seek relationships in the music, there often doesn’t seem to be much depth beyond the busy surface. Some may even wonder whether you can actively engage with a minimalist piece when it seems to offer so little “Pointing Out” the Role of the Listener in Reich’s Drumming 143 to engage with. Or more generously, what is the range of listening strategies that one can productively bring to a minimalist work? Robert Fink offers a largely pessimistic reply when he argues that minimalist works co-opt a kind of “mindless” repetition that dulls the senses.7 He finds the processes at work in minimalist pieces (specifically Drumming, which I examine below) are intertwined with contemporary advertising strategies; and just like the tactics of consumer marketing, we are bombarded with a constant “sameness” in this music. As with the culture of mass consumption in late capitalism, Fink finds that there is very limited room for individuality and agency when listening to such pieces.8 On the one hand, Fink has found some very interesting resonances across culture, and has provided a provocative lens with which to examine and contextualize this repertoire. Yet, on the other hand, in his view listeners of this music occupy a very diminished role, having little choice in deciding how they interact with a work. And while Fink is at pains to spare listeners from this conclusion and preserve some agency for...

Do Coalition Governments Bring Economic Stability?1

Coalition Politics and Economic Development: Credibility and the Strength of Weak Governments. By Irfan Nooruddin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 266 pp., $93.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-19140-1). In Coalition Politics and Economic Development, Irfan Nooruddin speaks to the seminal puzzle that Barry Weingast posed: “The fundamental political dilemma forces us to ask what form of political system is required so that a viable, private market economy is a stable policy choice of that political system” (Weingast 1995, p. 2, emphasis mine). In the Weingast thesis, “market preserving federalism,” an apparently depoliticized form of government, was proposed as a solution to the credible commitment dilemma. Nooruddin roots for “more democracy” instead and argues that “countries in which policymaking authority is diffused across political institutions controlled by actors responsive to different societal constituencies are better able to make credible commitments to long-term policy stability” (p. 3). The causal mechanism works as follows: minority or coalition governments entail diffusion of policymaking authority among multiple parties representing “diverse societal preferences” (p. 4), which, in turn, prevents governments from making arbitrary policy choices, bolsters investor confidence, ensures longevity of investments, and attenuates growth rate volatility (p. 55). The evidence and analyses that the author presents build upon a number of empirical innovations. For instance, growth rate volatility is usually calculated as the standard deviation of economic growth in a given period of time. Considering this unsatisfactory, Nooruddin devises a new measure (using the residuals from the autoregressive process of growth in GDP per capita ), which accounts for baseline economic growth, temporal differences in average economic growth, and for the nature and extent of fluctuations over time. Moreover, the author measures growth rate volatility in three different time panels—the entire period (1964–2000) for which data are available, in increments of 10 years over the same period, and in increments of 5 years over the same period. Each of the explanatory variables is also measured in corresponding time panels. Based on the political …

Review: The Europeanization of Domestic Legislatures

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF DOMESTIC LEGISLATURES The Empirical Implications of the Myth in Nine Countries. Sylvain Brouard, Olivier Costa, Thomas Konig, eds. New York: Springer, 2012. 244PP, $116.19 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4614-1501-5Before reading this book, I used to tell my students what I suspect many readers of this review tell theirs, namely that 80 percent of national legislation in Europe originates from Brussels. Most European Union (EU) legislation must indeed be transposed into national law, either through executive decrees or ordinary laws. This means that some proportion of domestic laws are either rubberstamped by national parliaments or not even reviewed by them because they are downloaded from the EU. The proportion of 80 percent is one of those hooks we use to convince blase undergraduates that the EU is an important illustration of post-national democracy, as worthy of their interest as participatory democracy in Porto Alegre or the threat of war in the South China Sea.Fortunately, when my co-author, Julien Weisbein, and I wrote our French textbook on the EU, we did not invoke the 80 percent figure because we could not find an appropriate reference for it. Thanks to Sylvain Brouard, Olivier Costa, and Thomas Konig, we can now rely on new figures. This edited volume begins by tracing the origins of the Delors' myth, named after Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission, who seems to have first mentioned the 80 percent figure. It turns out that Delors was more nuanced than the myth he created. He actually said the following: 10 years, 80% of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs, will be of Community origin (emphasis mine). In the two decades that followed, commentators, from EU scholars to the Dutch Upper Chamber, expanded this prediction to include all legislation. This became a convenient truth for both Europhiles, who could thus overstate the level of supranational integration, and Euroskeptics, who could lament the creation of a European superstate.Yet even relatively cautious assertion (compared to the way I used to misquote him) turns out to be wrong. After a careful, methodical, painstaking examination of legislative production in eight EU member states (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain) and Switzerland, the editors of this book conclude that the proportion of domestic laws that have been adopted as a result of EU pressures ranging from six percent (in the late 1980s) to 29 percent (in the 2000s) - an upward trend, to be sure, but not quite reaching 80 percent. Furthermore, this book shows that national parliaments still scrutinize and amend EU-derived laws a great deal more than we would expect. There is, according to several contributors, no evidence that national executive power is growing at the expense of legislative power as a result of Europeanization (although it may grow because of other factors). This point suggests that the departmentalization hypothesis, according to which national parliaments are losing their autonomy both vis-a-vis the EU and vis-a-vis their own executives, is unfounded.The book is the outcome of a rare collaborative and coordinated multinational research effort. The authors use a similar research design for each country case, and they pay a great deal of attention to the challenge of operationalizing this design in different national contexts and in different languages. …

De/framed visions: reading two collections of gardens at the Xi'an International Horticultural Exposition

In landscape, we form meaning through placefulness; as Martin Heidegger observed, ‘“place” places man in that dimension which reveals the revealing meaning of being’. 1 Gardens infer a more acceler...

What were the adverse events for Dupuytren’s patients treated with Xiaflex who had contractures less than 20°?

Dear Sir: I read with interest the online first article “Nonsurgical treatment of Dupuytren’s contracture: 1-year US post-marketing safety data for collagenase clostridium histolyticum” that reports the 270 adverse incidents voluntarily reported to the FDA during the first 12 months that the drug had been used after approval in the USA [3]. I believe that transcript of the FDA’s Arthritis Advisory Committee’s September 16, 2009 meeting underscores the importance of my question for the authors. All of my page references are to the transcript pages for that hearing [2]. Auxilium’s senior vice-president of quality and regulatory affairs clearly stated (pp. 21–2): “The proposed indication is the treatment of advanced Dupuytren's disease, and that can be defined as a progressive disease resulting in a fixed flexion deformity or a contracture in one of several joints, most commonly the last two digits of the hand.” Auxilium’s chief medical officer presented data to support the proposed indication. He said (pp. 40–1): “The three double-blind placebo-controlled trials were all identically designed …The key inclusion criteria, these were adults at least 18 years of age who were affected with Dupuytren's disease and a palpable cord, causing a contracture of at least 20 degrees.” (emphasis mine) He stated that the objective measurement of “clinical success was reduction of the joint contracture from at least 20 degrees (the inclusion criterion) to no more than 5 degrees” (pp. 42–3): “Now, the primary endpoint, the primary outcome of all of the studies, was the proportion of subjects who achieved that correction to within zero to 5 degrees after their last injection, and this was defined as ‘clinical success’ in the protocol.” The severity of Dupuytren’s contracture is extremely important. Most of us are familiar with and use Hueston’s Table Top test to counsel patients who arrive with nodules and cords [1]. Even Auxilium’s own presenter stated (p. 31): But we reserve treatment of the contracture until the contracture is bad enough, because there’s limitations with all of our treatments. A quick test is when a patient can’t get their hand flat on a table anymore, we typically think that their contracture has advanced to the point that intervention is warranted. Agreeing with the Auxilium speaker was William Swartz MD, a member of the FDA’s Arthritis Advisory Committee. He noted that most of his patients with Dupuytren’s disease do not develop contractures that required any treatment (pp. 104–5). “Most patients who come to my office with this condition have it in a mild form. They may have a nodule that may or may not be painful. They may have an early contracture. And our advice to these patients is that we don’t know if it’s going to be progressive or not. And so observation, as has been mentioned earlier, is the most often the first encounter and the first advice to these patients, and they come back when it’s more significant. Swartz was concerned about the possible off-label use of Xiaflex for milder cases (pp. 105–6): But with this medication, I can envision that our inclination is going to be to recommend that we treat them without knowing that in fact, they will have a progressive condition, and treat them before the contracture of the MP joint is more than 30 degrees or the PIP joint more than 20 degrees. So my question to the FDA panel as well as to the Auxilium people is would this be considered an off-label treatment, and is this going to be—and I guess, a better question, will there be a long-term focus and study of these patients to see if in fact, it does prevent progressive disease? That’s my first question.” It appears that Dr. Swartz’s concern about “off-label” use of Xiaflex has happened, but not for the reason that he expected. Despite the fact that by a unanimous vote of 12 to 0 the Committee recommended (p. 244): “Approval of Auxilium’s clostridial collagenase for the treatment of patients with advanced Dupuytren's disease” (emphasis mine). Xiaflex’s “Current Indication and Usage” states: “XIAFLEX is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with Dupuytren’s contracture with a palpable cord.” In other words, Xiaflex is indicated for any degree of contracture no matter how mild it may be despite the absence of any data on its safety and efficacy for contractures less than 20°. My question for the authors is: Since none of the published prospective trials included patients with contractures less than 20°, what were the adverse events for patients with contractures less than 20° in your study?

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Locating Authorial Ethics:

The Achilles Simile in Purgatorio 9

The Achilles Simile in Purgatorio 9 Thomas E. Mussio The comparison between the pilgrim's disorientation and fear upon awaking at the threshold of Purgatory and the young Achilles' reaction as he awakes in unfamiliar Skyros intimates the pilgrim's continued attachment to the secular values of glory and honor, as well as his doubts about the success of his spiritual journey. This simile at the opening of Canto 9 and the narrative that surrounds it mark this point before the door of Purgatory as a crucial moment in the process of conversion, in which the pilgrim struggles at a deep level against the forward momentum of the journey. While most commentators and critics have focused only on the primary point of the comparison, there are compelling reasons for considering the wider effects of linking the two characters here.1 First, the poet hints strongly that he is interested in describing more than mere disorientation, as he reminds the reader in the course of the comparison that Achilles' journey will not end in Skyros, as his mother had hoped, but rather with the Greek army on the plains before Troy: "... quando la madre da Chiron a Schiro/ trafuggò lui dormendo in le sue braccia,/ là onde poi li Greci dipartiro" (Purg. 9, 37-39, emphasis mine).2 Second, the projection of Achilles' tragic future within the simile also recalls all the ambivalence of the pilgrim toward the figure of Ulysses, who, as the pilgrim hears in Inferno 26, was instrumental in Achilles' destruction, even as he led him to glory (Inf. 26, 61-63). Here Ulysses continues to figure in the pilgrim's imagination throughout much of the journey as a temptation to an experience that opposes that [End Page 79] of the journey toward conversion. Third, Dante's redaction of the scene from Statius' Achilleid intensifies the emotion of the waking protagonist. Singleton suggests that the language of intense fear here echoes other points of crisis in the pilgrim's journey, such as the pilgrim's utter sense of loss before the horror of Lucifer's image (Singleton, 185). Given these aspects of the figure of Achilles, the timing of the comparison seems particularly peculiar and purposeful, as it occurs just after the pilgrim has received the grace to lift him to the threshold of Purgatory proper. Finally, the Achilles simile is tied to the complex of signs woven into the first part of Purgatorio 9, and is inextricably linked to the pilgrim's dream that precedes it. It is impossible to read the anxiety of the pilgrim without recalling the image of Ganymede snatched violently from his familiar surroundings. The comparison to Achilles here provokes questions about the pilgrim's susceptibility to the rhetorical power of Ulysses intimated in Inferno 26 and the temptation to value worldly glory over heavenly grace. Compared to other mythological figures evoked in the Commedia as negative exempla for the pilgrim, such as Phaethon, Achilles' direct connection to Ulysses points to the danger not only of obvious pride and presumption but also of the more subtle parts of one's character upon which a master rhetorician could work. If, as many commentators believe, Ulysses is a constant reminder for the pilgrim/poet of his potential for transgression, Achilles is a figure of the hero tempted, a hero who could not restrain himself.3 In this specific passage, Dante's highly condensed account of the story of Statius' Achilles here reduces it to two essential movements: the movement away from danger and tragedy and a subsequent counter-movement toward it, Thetis' attempt to save her son by hiding him in Skyros and the Greeks taking him away from there. Dante's terse description of the counter-movement of the Greeks away from the island ("là onde poi...") suggests the strong, nearly inevitable pull of Ulysses' manipulation of Achilles' will, as he thoroughly [End Page 80] erases the moment of Achilles' initial resistance to the call to war. This double movement, the second of which "undoes" the first, has strong implications for the pilgrim. Although he is lifted by Lucia to the "salvific" steps of Purgatory, Dante suggests that, as with Achilles, this progress could...

“Cracked Across”: Blake, Milton, and the Noise of History

For Joseph Wittreich ... he stood, as one who pray'd, Or some great matter in his mind revolv'd. --Samson Agonistes, 1637-38 when I was on the Other Side, I received no instructions. Guide pressed me, and when I was about to enter trance I would pray to be given an order to give [the church], so they could take action. I wanted this so much, and I prayed as I went into trance, and it was all quite painful and trying. In the end when I returned, completely spent, the message that Guide heard me and reworked into ordinary language told them neither to take action nor to desist. --Patron, in Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault (1999; English trans., 2003; second emphasis mine) GIVEN BLAKE'S ENDURING PASSION FOR MILTON, IT IS REMARKABLE THAT he never illustrated Samson Agonistes. Over many years he visualized every other major work of Milton's except Lycidas, and some texts (such as the Nativity Ode and Paradise Lost) he illustrated multiply and variously. The dramatic poem's omission becomes even more puzzling when we consider that Blake did execute several paintings on the Samson cycle the Book of Judges, including Samson Pulling Down the Temple mentioned by William Rossetti, now regrettably lost. On the rare occasions when Blake does link one of his images to Samson Agonistes, he does so obliquely. Around 1804 he inscribed caption beneath the famous rose print, the figure of youthful exuberance he had first sketched almost twenty-five years earlier (fig. 1). Rising from where he labourd at the Mill Slaves, Albion clearly recalls Milton's Samson, Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill slaves, (1) but the relationship between image and source text is by no means clear and has led Blake scholars to strikingly different conclusions. David Erdman, for instance, was convinced that this naked youth expresses the collective political spirit of the American Revolution and the Gordon Riots; properly understood as a terrific social utterance, rose provides Erdman's Prophet Against Empire its first corrective lesson in how to read Blake historically. Others have suggested the picture is more personal, representing either the renewed ecstatic visions Blake experienced after returning Felpham to London in 1803 or the artistic freedom he desired after many years of being mired in the drudgery of commercial copywork. (2) The image that lies closest to Milton's Samson at the pillars is the last of the 537 watercolors Blake prepared for an illustrated version of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (fig. 2), where his representation of an open-eyed Samson directly contradicts the biblical narrative and instead echoes Milton's description of Samson with inward eyes illuminated (1689). But despite its oblique, secondary reference to Samson Agonistes, this picture primarily refers to the final, apocalyptic lines of Young's poem: like Him of Gaza in his Wrath, / Plucking the Pillars that support the World. (3) Samson Agonistes sneaks in under cover, leaving us again to wonder why Blake never illustrated it directly. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] The absence of direct visual representation by no means indicates that Milton's tragedy was unimportant to Blake. In fact, I believe it indicates the opposite. Blake was haunted by Samson Agonistes, especially by Samson at the pillars, and he returned to that moment almost obsessively. He never represents it directly because he Cannot; that is, he cannot form that moment into unified image or series that would achieve comprehensive interpretation of the dramatic poem, as his other illustrations of Milton's poetry brashly attempt to do. Despite Manoa's concluding promise to build his son monument, Samson Agonistes leaves its reader heap of ruins, tangled wreckage of bodies and building, and the poem likewise enters into Blake's work in collapse, as multitude of fragments we can view only serially and collectively, in pieces, but never unified into single whole. …

Arboreal Politics in the Knight's Tale

Arboreal Politics in the <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Will Work for Cultural Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements He shares his life with his award-winning poet son Zachariah and his wife Barbara, who will soon have her first novel published by MIRA Books. Notes 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 178. 2. Gregory J. Seigworth, “Maps and Legends,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 317, emphasis mine. 3. Gregory J. Seigworth, “Maps and Legends,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 317, emphasis mine. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 5. Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America's Future (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 6. Toby Miller, “Cultural Studies in an Indicative Mode,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 320. 7. Toby Miller, “Cultural Studies in an Indicative Mode,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011), 321. 8. Toby Miller, “Cultural Studies in an Indicative Mode,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011), 321. 9. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–94. 10. Miller, “Cultural Studies in an Indicative Mode,” 322. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLawrence GrossbergLawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Beckett and Ireland (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett and Ireland S. E. Gontarski Beckett and Ireland. Seán Kennedy, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 223. $85.00 (cloth). Irish identity, muddled at least since Henry II but seemingly clarified at the end of the nineteenth century, the run up to the Easter Rising, and the emergence of the Free State, remains unsettled to this day, its fractal imagery and representations amid cultural and literary history multiplying or dissolving into identities. The vastly influential Norton Anthology of English Literature (emphasis mine) exacerbates the muddle. One might expect some geographical cohesion or political sensitivity in this gathering, but how account for so much Yeats, twenty-eight poems, [End Page 921] a survey of Joyce that includes two stories from the very localized Dubliners, and, perhaps most curiously, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, written in French some thirty-five years after independence? Beckett, English? Au contraire, he famously quipped, invoking Irish otherness. But other "English" curiosities abound: Brian Friel's anti-English Translations, and the assimilation of poets Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Eavan Boland into the web of Englishness. Even more curious is The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, volume VI, The Twentieth Century and Beyond (emphasis mine) where the Irish big three, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (among others), are absorbed into the fabric of Britishness. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, volume 2, is likewise fitted out, propped up, say, with Irish authors. Such fluid, expandable definitions of identity permit, presumably, a talent grab with rules of inclusion as slippery as those used to determine World Cup football sides. This then is the territory that Seán Kennedy and his band of nine contributors return to in something of a reassessment of Beckett and Ireland. That said, Kennedy takes issue with suggestions that the enterprise might be tinged with reverse or counter colonialism, "a wrong-minded move to reclaim him," an enterprise, he observes, often deemed "reductive" (3). Kennedy bristles at the charged word "recolonize," which he may misread, albeit creatively: "The suggestion is that birth in Ireland represents a form of colonization for Beckett, and flight to Europe a means of decolonizing" (5). The issue, in fact, is less that of birth than critical readings or stagings of the work, and some high profile campaigns by homelanders. The dialectics of Kennedy's argument requires counterattack: "there must also be something reductive in the desire to retain Beckett as a quintessentially 'European' writer" (3). Agreed, but the attack on either/or, binary thinking that pervades the introduction and most essays in this volume may be too easy a target since it appears in very little serious contemporary criticism. Kennedy attributes such a position to the authors (not the editors as the bibliography would have it) of The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004) and to a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies also published as a book called Beckett the European (2005) where, he argues, "the dichotomy is forcefully restated" (5). But the binary argument exists in neither, especially as Kennedy clarifies the issue, "wrong only that it overstates the case if applied unthinkingly across the entire oeuvre" (10-11). The position of both publications is, finally, that which Kennedy himself advocates, that is, to dismiss or diminish Beckett's Irishness is as reductive as seeing him through Irish eyes exclusively. Beckett's nationalism may be closer to that version of home(land) expressed in the miniature story, "neither," as that "between two lit refuges," or in the failed syncretism of First Love. Kennedy's call "to deconstruct the binaries of Irish Studies" (8) and his insistence that "the two spaces of [Beckett's] writing, Ireland and Europe, need to be considered together" (7), thus sound remarkably familiar, what Andrew Gibson calls limbo, which Beckett "made . . . his element" (195). It is, after all, Beckett's own method, as Micheal Wood suggests and develops in his essay: "dissolving of binary logic occurs everywhere in Beckett's late work" (175). The most forceful, direct, if not combative statement of theme and purpose is that offered by Rónán McDonald in chapter 1: "The concern in this chapter is with the...

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. By Catherine Wilson

By pointing us to the Epicurean flavor of many of the ideas that pervaded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and natural and political philosophy—Catherine Wilson's work offers a great opportunity to improve our understanding of what was involved in the transformation of Scholastic doctrines into modern philosophy. Her professed aim is to show that “Epicureanism was addressed, adopted and battled against by the canonical philosophers of this period” (emphasis mine). It is important to bear this particular focus of Wilson's project in mind and to remember that she did not set out merely to show that canonical figures, such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, were quasi-Epicureans. In what follows, I will offer three reasons why these reminders are necessary in order to appreciate the breadth and quality of Wilson's discussion. First, some reviewers have castigated Wilson's book for its limited focus and methodology. Thus, Margaret Osler has claimed that Wilson ignores traditions apart from Epicureanism that were decisive in their influence on modern thinkers such as Gassendi, Boyle, and Locke (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 24, 2009). And Eric Schliesser, who offered a defense of Wilson against Osler (Mind 119/474, April 2010), yet voices concern that Wilson sees Epicurean influences where there are none. Let me address these points in turn. Concerning Osler's objection, it needs to be mentioned that Wilson is often rather careful to show that particular elements of modern approaches are reminiscent of certain Epicurean key aspects: Descartes' vortex theory, for example, is taken to borrow heavily from the ancient depiction of the universe as a heap of atoms, albeit without the admission of a void. Wilson's discussion neither implies that there were no other influences present in Descartes' writings nor that he was not a critic of large portions of Epicurean thought. Since it is the aim of Wilson's book to draw attention to Epicurean ingredients in early modern philosophy, it seems acceptable if in this and other contexts she is reluctant to give a detailed account of what further doctrines and schools have made an impact on a particular thinker.

Vibration training and body fat: a comment on Artero et al. (2011)

I read with interest the recent publication of Artero and colleagues “EVects of whole-body vibration and resistance training on knee extensors muscular performance” (Artero et al. 2011). The introduction to this work concludes by asserting that a central aim was to compare resistance versus resistance + whole-body vibration (WBV) training modalities to determine “any additional eVect on knee extensors muscular performance compared to an identical exercise program without vibration” (emphasis mine). Due to the analysis conducted, the central and signiWcant conclusion to this paper was not presented in this manner. The control group lost 1.3% body fat (BF) from baseline (p = 0.116) and the WBV group somewhat more (2.1% BF, p < 0.001). Crucially, these results were not compared to each other, the authors’ rationale being that the baseline result for the control group was not signiWcant. Regardless of the signiWcance of the control condition, I submit that it is much more appropriate to derive an interaction term between these results; hence testing the magnitude of an additional eVect, rather than a simple within-group eVect. Fjeldstad et al. (2009) performed precisely this kind of analysis in a pre-post study on additive WBV training in sedentary women. If this result is robust to the above correction, I suggest that it is unusual. The study cited by Artero et al. (2011) in support of this result (Da Silva et al. 2007) reported statistically signiWcant changes between WBV and nonWBV groups in both energy expenditure and respiratory exchange ratio, which may represent a potential mechanism for decreasing fat mass. However, their protocol involved using repeated bouts of signiWcant external resistance and exercising to near-muscular failure during WBV exercise rather than an additive approach. Relevant to resistance training, vibration shows an equivocal ability to improve balance, jump height, and muscle power (see Rittweger 2010 for review), but there is no reliable evidence that it individually improves body composition (Cochrane 2011). Rittweger et al. (2001) estimated the increase in speciWc oxygen uptake at 4.5 mL kgi1 mini1 during WBV, which amounts to an approximate adipose reduction of approximately 10 g per hour under standard assumptions (Rittweger 2010). While the parameters of the training vary somewhat, the overall training load in Artero et al. (2011) is approximately 2 h total across 8 weeks. Thus, it would seem either the central result is artifactual or requires an entirely separate mechanism whereby WBV has a facilitatory eVect on subsequent resistance training, which in turn aVects energy expenditure. This is a possibility, as the relationship between WBV and other exercise modalities has received insuYcient research attention.

The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

When critics are not discussing the antiwar message of SlaughterhouseFive, they usually analyze Billy Pilgrim’s (and sometimes, by extension, Kurt Vonnegut’s) mental health. Leonard Mustazza, Lawrence Broer, and Peter Freese have all done so, at least in passing in their work on Vonnegut, but one of the most recent and most thorough analyses has come in Susanne Vees-Gulani’s article “Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vees-Gulani reads Pilgrim through the lens of PTSD, arguing that he matches with the description of the disorder extremely well. Without attempting to argue with how well Pilgrim does match that description (where I think she has done an excellent job), I would like to argue that she does misread at least part of the novel and thus omit another problem that Vonnegut is struggling with in this novel. When Vees-Gulani discusses the lack of treatment Billy receives in the psychiatric hospital, she writes, “Yet just as mainstream American society does not provide an atmosphere conducive to recovery from the horrors of war, the psychiatric establishment also fails Billy,” later adding, “Billy thus falls victim to the previous tendency in psychiatry to underestimate the role of an ‘external factor, something outside the person’ in causing trauma and to focus instead only on ‘individual vulnerability as the reason for people’s suffering.’” 1 However, even Vonnegut allows that the psychiatrists might be at least partially correct in their interpretation of Billy and Rosewater’s mental struggles. Vonnegut tells the reader that “they [Pilgrim and Rosewater] had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war” (emphasis mine). 2 The distinction that begins with “partly” is an important one. As Thomas Hoffman writes concerning Player Piano, “In short, Vonnegut is dealing with the failure of the human ego in crisis with society . . . and the man versus machine thing is his means of explaining individual loneliness. The complex ‘machine’ here is more than a mechanical system, [sic] it is the intricate complexity of American society.” 3 In the same way that it is more than the machines in Player Piano that cause Paul Proteus’ isolation, Billy and Rosewater’s lives

Dare I Write About Oppression on Sacred Ground [Emphasis Mine

Autoethnography and Spoken Word1 are utilized here to describe the reaction of a Black female professor impacted by microaggresssions2 after publishing an autoethnographic chapter about multilayered oppression. This evocative performance narrative is created from journal entries, conversations, text messages, emails, and uses the process of sociological introspection to reconcile reactions emanating from dialogues. This work contributes to larger sociopolitical discourse on oppression in the academy, the implications, and professional dilemmas embedded in such talk when one dares to write about one’s own professional experiences. Additionally, this piece illustrates the conflicts inherent in Academic Freedom, perceptions of autoethnography, and the dilemma of representation in critical qualitative research traditions. Finally, this piece challenges the academy to consider the power of Spoken Word as a valuable method of storytelling; and, as an essential epistemology to enact and enliven representations of the self, and of others, with the greater purpose of engaging in activist 3 scholarship.

So Contagious: Hybridity and Subcultural Exchange in Hip-Hop's Use of Indian Samples

This is part of a larger cultural trend within hip-hop of finding the next beat. It's widening the palate, looking for something different. It's part of the rise of Bollywood globally.... There has been a long fascination within black culture with the Orient. It's easy to say culture is being stolen, but actually this is part of a larger dialogue. --DJ Rekha (2008) Every hip-hop record got an Indian sample / Do your research. --Wyclef Jean (2007) Gimmie some new shit. --Missy Elliott (2001) In the spring of 2001, producer Timbaland and hip-hop artist Missy Elliott released Get Ur Freak On, which featured tabla, tumbi, and two male vocal snippets in Panjabi. This chart-topping release represented a turning point in an east-west sampling experiment that began in the 1990s with hip-hop artists such as Jay-Z and A Tribe Called Quest, and its success opened the floodgates to sonic possibilities previously unrealized by hip-hop's producers and performers. The music of South Asia, especially Bhangra and Bollywood, has become a familiar sound in American hip-hop? In 2008, hip-hop, pop, rap, and rhythm and blues (RB in this light, their creative production is distinct from that of a hegemonic Western popular culture or, in Edward Said's words, from an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness (1978, 6, emphasis mine). This complicates any reading of Indian samples in hip-hop as a neo-Orientalist fad or trend in the mold of, for example, Madonna's use of Bollywood-inspired dance moves in concert or mehndi and bindis on sale at Urban Outfitters. In this essay, I argue that hip-hop's use of Indian samples, rather than exemplifying appropriative action by one culture upon another, is better understood as part of a subcultural exchange of commodities, one result of which is the creation of hybridity as a means to negotiate a relationship between both parties, as well as to a dominant culture. …