Epic Journeys Research Articles

MORAL LESSONS AND VALUES IN UZBEK AND KOREAN FAIRY TALES: AN INSIGHT INTO CULTURAL BELIEFS

In recent years, Uzbek folklore has become increasingly interested in comparing it with the folklore of other peoples and nationalities. Comparing the features of a number of genres created at the stage of the nation’s literary development - fairy tales, epics, ritual folklore, this article is of great importance in establishing literary cooperation in the era of the Third Renaissance.The common features of Uzbek and Korean folklore genres are the presence of folk heroes and legends, who express courage and resourcefulness, and often go on epic journeys or quests. These heroes are revered in their cultures for their extraordinary qualities and deeds as symbols of strength and virtue

Silat Warriors as Malay Cultural Heroes

The unprecedented success of the film Mat Kilau: Kebangkitan Pahlawan and ongoing discussions about the cultural significance of Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat suggest that Malay Silat warriors continue to be seen as heroic figures among many Malaysians. This article examines this idea by considering the phenomenon of warrior heroes, in general, and the Tuah/Jebat story, in particular. The perennial question of which of the Melakan warriors who fought to the death was right is discussed, concluding that the answer is much more ambiguous than traditionally presented. The whole notion of cultural heroes raises questions about the context in which they emerged, the values with which they have been identified and the aspects of their lives and actions that are selectively constructed. This is true for Hang Jebat, whose celebrity seems to stand in stark contrast to his reported behaviour, and Hang Tuah, for whom popular recreations of his adventures typically omit large and significant parts of his epic journeys. Stories of heroes, I suggest, serve multiple functions, and to an interesting and, to significant extent, these stories can hold somewhat tenuous ties to the heroes themselves.

The in-space rescue capability gap

The United States government and commercial spaceflight providers have no plans in place to conduct a timely rescue of a crew from a distressed spacecraft in low Earth orbit, or anywhere else in space. Without rescue plans and dedicated resources, today's space travelers will journey at their own risk. U.S. rules and regulations governing commercial spaceflight simply require launch service and space travel providers to inform the crew and passengers that there are risks. The United States, however, as the world's greatest space faring nation, has the wherewithal to develop and employ effective in-space rescue capabilities if it chooses to do so. This paper seeks to raise awareness of the need to revisit space rescue policies and close capability gaps through historical analogs such as the ancient maritime explorers that embarked upon epic journeys with multiple ships, effective submarine rescue operations, and the rich history of human spaceflight. Potential solutions to improve safety during space travel are identified and policy options are discussed.

An Anti-Imperial Mythology

Critics have read Howards End as if Forster ‘specifically barred’ the poor from the novel (Trilling), so that only the middle classes are considered and not in a ‘truly radical’ way (Crews). Yet Forster does, after all, concern himself with the very poor in his depiction of Leonard Bast, Jacky and other characters, and extensively in the thoughts of Margaret. Furthermore, he creates the myth he says England lacks, and, considered in relationship to the main narrative events and to the novel’s imagery, this takes the form of an anti-imperialist mythology. Mythic elements include epic journeys and battles, a symbolic sword and tree, a sacrificial death and a redemptive child. In the novel’s poetic passages and in its account of Margaret’s education on the ‘hard road of Henry’s soul’, the nature of England’s imperialism is revealed and defeated by an alternative radical and feminist vision of society.

Voyager still breaking barriers decades after launch

As Voyagers 1 and 2 continue their epic journeys through interstellar space, they're resolving past controversies and even helping to spark a new one: the true shape of the heliosphere. Launched more than four decades ago, the two Voyager spacecraft keep expanding our horizons. Having flown past the giant planets in the late 1970s and 1980s, Voyagers 1 and 2 are now well beyond all their planetary targets, with Voyager 1 more than five times farther out than Neptune and Voyager 2 not far behind. “Every day is a new record for Voyager,” says the spacecraft’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, CA. New data from the fabled Voyager spacecraft have fed a controversy over the geometry and activity of the heliosphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. “I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would still be working on Voyager fifty years after we wrote the proposal,” says Voyager researcher Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, MD. During the past decade, both spacecraft reached a new realm, entering the interstellar medium: the tenuous material that fills the vast space between the stars. There, the spacecraft continue to make new discoveries. The interstellar magnetic field has surprised researchers with both its strength and its direction, and the new data have even fed a controversy over the geometry and activity of the heliosphere—the Sun’s magnetic domain. Is the heliosphere the shape of a comet, as has long been assumed, or is it instead more spherical? And does it expand and contract when sunspots wax and wane, or is it more stable? The spacecraft have offered up some tantalizing clues. Voyager 2 left Earth in 1977, followed by Voyager 1. They weren’t the first spacecraft to reach the nearest of the giant planets—that honor …

Celtic Myths in Cartoon Saloon's The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014): A Critique of Irish Postcolonial Animation

My study grows out of a desire to make sense of the attraction to Celtic myths as exemplified in The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014) since an academic breadth for the visual Celtic orientalism is still not fully achieved. To expand the scope of the Irish studies, the present paper is an attempt to construct the Irish criticism in the twenty-first century within the motion picture paradigm as manifested in the productions of the indigenous Irish studio, Cartoon Saloon, established in 1999 in Southeast Ireland. I argue for the equal significance of animation which has not been yet theorized in a comprehensive critical media discourse to emphasize Ireland's exceptional perception of itself as extraordinary. The premise of the study is to establish The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014) as Irish postcolonial animation to examine the tenor of the Celtic postcoloniality that has been shaped by energies of the past. The two animated films interrogate fanciful spatial practices undertaken by fictional child protagonists, Brendan, Ben and Saoirse to tackle fantasy as a genre to explore national symbols worthy of investigation within the postcolonial criticism, thereby, fantasy and animation are woven gorgeously to act as a critique. The child protagonists' epic journeys are remediated in animation to signify a metaphantasmagoric, metamedial enterprise to ardently explore Celtic myths. The two animated films depict Celtic myths in transmedia reflecting postmodern strategies of make-believing metafantasy critique to transgress the confines of the oral literature towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Cartoon Saloon is not in favor of computer imagery and instead it advocates the hand-drawn techniques which render animation its sleekness, round and curved lines to depict the exotic parallel worlds inhabited by mythic faeries. Finally, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea embody the features of performance forms in terms of dynamic visuals, distinctive Irish music and Celtic songs. Irish postcolonial animation maintains a medieval/timeless sense of immediacy within dream-like territories deploying 2D graphical design to draw the postmodern viewer into realms of Celtic myths and fantastical mise-en-scene.

Welcome back to Junkspace! Performing infinity while confined in lockdown

For months we have been locked out of Junkspace. So, who’s complaining? Confined to domestic spaces, #stayhome has given many of us a forced opportunity to rethink the type of spaces that are not only functional and useful, but that make us feel comfortable. Our own residential arena may have felt restrictive and even – for some – oppressive at times, but who would say that they truly missed their daily passage through the endlessly stale air of check-in desks, departure gates, and duty frees at the airport; the epic journeys through low ceiling corridors and passageways of railway terminals and subway stations; and the blinding hallucinatory proliferation of brands and franchises in malls…?

An epic journey in sharing: The story of a young researcher's journey to share her data and the information professionals who tried to help

Sharing data can be a journey with various characters, challenges along the way, and uncertain outcomes. These “epic journeys in sharing” teach information professionals about our patrons, our institutions, our community, and ourselves. In this paper, we tell a particularly dramatic data-sharing story, in effect a case study, in the form of a Greek Drama. It is the quest of – a young idealistic researcher collecting fascinating sensitive data and seeking to share it, encountering an institution doing its due diligence, helpful library folks, and an expert repository. Our story has moments of joy, such as when our researcher is solely motivated to share because she wants others to be able to reuse her unique data; dramatic plot twists involving IRBs; and a poignant ending. It explores major tropes and themes about how researchers’ motivations, data types, and data sensitivity can impact sharing; the importance of having clarity concerning institutional policies and procedures; and the role of professional communities and relationships. Just like the chorus in greek drama provides commentary on the action, a a chorus of data elders in our drama points out larger lessons that the case study has for research data management and data sharing. Where actors in the greek chorus were wearing masks, our chorus carries different items, symbolizing their message, on every entry. 
 [i] The narrative structure of this paper was inspired by the IASSIST 2018 conference theme of “Once Upon a Data Point: Sustaining Our Data Storytellers.”

Anglers of Men: the Politics of Rescuing African Migrants in the Mediterranean Basin

This article theorizes the dynamics that emerge from the intimate relationship between contemporary African migration, liquid borders, and law around the channel of Sicily, between Italy and Libya. There, in the same waters where Ulysses and Aeneas roamed for years, whose epic journeys are considered foundational within the European identity narrative, today the trajectories that migrants boats traverse are disrupting and shuffling the European geographical limits. As a response, states are enacting a policy of containment that renders African migrants’ presence at sea invisible, while criminalizing human solidarity enacted by private organizations as well as individuals. Making use of a legal discourse analysis I will dig the premises behind the antinomic concept of criminal solidarity that emerges today in Europe as a somehow coherent system of thought, shaped by laws, codes of conduct, rules, and rulings. Specifically, by analyzing the rulings of one tribunal in Sicily, I will make an attempt to expose how rigid conceptions of borders naturalize state’s efforts to define the limits of national territory, while conversely, I will consider how the micropolitics of justice are capable of shaping the contours of discourses on current migration.

Vesicovaginal fistula in Uganda

Kitovu Hospital in Masaka, Uganda, is a leading obstetric fistula repair centre in the country with the highest rates of fistula in the world. In this retrospective case review, the regional incidence and causative factors were studied in patients with vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) who were admitted at Kitovu Hospital. Fistula history included severity (ICIQ score), causes and outcomes of VVF were measured. Women suffered with symptoms of VVF for an average of 4.97 years with an average ICIQ severity score of 7.21. Patients travelled an average distance of 153 km and the majority travelled by public transport. Rates of prolonged labour were high. 69% of fistula-causing delivery resulted in stillbirth and 12% resulted in early neonatal death. Following surgery, 94% of patients were dry on discharge.Impact statementWhat is already known on this subject? Vesicovaginal fistula (VVF) is a severe, life-changing injury. Although largely eradicated from the Western world thanks to modern obstetric practice, VVF is still highly prevalent in developing countries where factors such as young childbearing age and poor access to emergency obstetric care increase the incidence (Wall et al. 2005). At the current rate of fistula repair, it is estimated that it would take 400 years to treat those already suffering with fistula, providing that no new cases emerged (Browning and Patel 2004).What do the results of this study add? The Ugandan women in this study reiterate tales of foetal loss, social isolation and epic journeys in search of fistula repair, as previously described in the literature. The study offers some hope for prompt help-seeking during labour and after fistulas are developed. It demonstrates the success of fistula repairs at Kitovu Hospital but highlights the paucity of service provision across Uganda.What are the implications of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? Further epidemiological research is required to quantify the true burden of the disease. Only by raising the profile of VVF in both developing and developed countries, can there be a collaborative effort to make universal change. To embark upon the prevention and cure of the disease it is necessary to continue tackling issues of poverty and gender inequality.

C&EN talks with Peter Hore, magnetoreception researcher

Migratory birds make epic journeys of thousands of kilometers each year, navigating with the help of Earth’s magnetic field. Yet the mechanism behind the biological compass that enables them to achieve this astonishing feat remains a mystery. Peter Hore of the University of Oxford is a leading proponent of the idea that this magnetic sense depends on chemical reactions involving excited radicals produced in a protein in the birds’ retinas. Mark Peplow spoke to him about the growing body of evidence behind the hypothesis. How do we know that birds have a magnetic sense? Experiments in the 1960s applied magnetic fields to migratory birds in cages. They tried to get out of the cages in different directions, depending on the direction of the field. In controlled experiments, birds can detect the axis of a magnetic field to within 5 degrees, and we suspect it would be more accurate in the

A Beginner’s Mind: On Beginning Psychoanalytic Schooling … Bion, Keith Jarrett, and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACTFree associations structure … and loosen … what follows. In midair, having sprung from a high dive of 20-plus years of psychoanalytically informed professional work, the author free-falls into formal psychoanalytic training—meditating on the memory that his father was a jazz musician. The meditation strays to the author’s own jazz education … then wanders to a consideration of a primal scene interpretation emerging from Bion after he listened endlessly to a psychotic patient’s vamp—”I don’t know what I mean.” Bion’s (2013) stance of waiting for O links associatively to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations, what Jarrett calls his “epic journeys into the unknown.” The author hears a fugue in Bion’s primal scene interpretation—back to Freud and Klein and forward to Bion’s psychoanalytic students invited to compose using Bion’s unsaturated concepts. The author worries how he will communicate with his new psychoanalytic colleagues and considers the usefulness of origin myths (such as the primal scene) in such lateral communications. And, finally, the author loops back again to consider repetition when listening to Jarrett … repetition when listening to Bion … and repetition when listening to patients.

Reconstructing the story of Mustafa/Estebanico: A Moor in the New World: An interview with Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami’s award-winning novel The Moor’s Account reconstructs the pioneering and epic journeys of Estebanico, a Moroccan slave who was among the four survivors of the disastrous Spanish Narvaez expedition to Florida in 1527. He is a historical figure, mentioned in Cabeza de Vaca’s eyewitness account of that journey during which the members of the expedition were lost in alien North America and separated from their known world until they reached Mexico (New Spain) eight years later. In this interview conducted by email in May 2015, Laila Lalami comments on her reconstruction of Estebanico’s scantily recorded story and the suppressed narratives of Spain and the New World, barely four decades after the Fall of Granada and Columbus’s discovery of the America in 1492.

Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century by Frédérique Aït-Touati (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century by Frédérique Aït-Touati Henry S. Turner (bio) Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, translated by Susan Emanuel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 272 pp. $45.00 cloth. From the moon, Africa looked like a head bending in a kiss toward Europe. Europe was a young girl in a long dress, stretching out her hand to reach a leaping cat: Scandinavia. No: Europe was a pear, with a bite removed. And South America was a bell, hanging from the rope of Nicaragua and Mexico. And then the earth turned, and everything changed again. [End Page 331] These are only a few of the striking images that emerge from Frédérique Aït-Touati’s Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, a book as sweeping as the epic journeys from earth to moon and beyond that it traces from antiquity to the scientific revolution. By returning to this peculiar early modern genre, which is populated by witches, space-traveling demons, and aliens who wander the lunar surface while gazing at the spectacle of the globe above them, Aït-Touati tells the story of how the rotation of the earth became an established astronomical fact and a demonstration piece for the mathematical procedures that characterize modern scientific method. Across Europe—from Johannes Kepler in Prague, to Francis Godwin and John Wilkins at Oxford, to Robert Hooke in London; from Cyrano de Bergerac in Paris, to Bernard de Fontenelle in Rouen, to Christiaan Huygens in the Hague—the earth’s movement and its grand orbit through the heavens became a captivating problem for scientific and literary authors alike and a central fulcrum for the larger transformation of ancient cosmology into the new astronomy, as Aït-Touati describes it in one of the book’s broadly Kuhnian arguments. But if Thomas Kuhn presides as a tutelary spirit here, it is Kuhn as he might have emerged from seminars in Paris with Griemas and Foucault, after sharing a cigarette with Feyerabend and grooving on his “anything goes” attitude. For Fictions of the Cosmos is, by turns, a subtle literary history of a forgotten genre and a risk-taking, ambitious exercise in the history of science, one that sets out not simply to describe a paradigm shift in astronomical thinking but to sketch a revolution in the status of “fiction” itself. Its goal is to recover a moment in the history of European thought when familiar distinctions between “literary” and “scientific” writing were far more blurry than we have become accustomed to, when literature still had the right to say something serious about the composition of the world and its consequences for those who lived in it, and science, as it stepped toward heterodoxy, did whatever it needed to stay alive. For some time now, historians, literary critics, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and others who come to trade in the interdisciplinary zone of “science studies” have been conducting an ongoing conversation about the nature of scientific knowledge and what debt, if any, it might owe to the humanities. What, finally, makes a statement about reality “true”: Is it mere belief, or is it something more? And into this ongoing conversation—often technical, always lively, and sometimes controversial—Aït-Touati throws a provocative hypothesis. What if fiction has been handling the big ontological problems all along—the questions about what is and what is not, about what kinds of things “are” and to what degree they are with us? Has not fiction gone even further, making beings and setting them before us to reflect on their peculiar condition? What, exactly, does fiction know? What can it tell us or teach us? Fictions of the Cosmos approaches the question by returning to what is perhaps the single most irrefutable and iconic example of inquiry into the nature of reality in the history of Western science: Copernicus’s announcement in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) that the earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun, along with the moon...

The West Coast range, Tasmania: mountains and geological giants

It has long been believed that, with the exception of mounts Sorell and Strahan, the peaks of the West Coast Range, western Tasmania, were named by Charles Gould, first Tasmanian Government Geologist, during his three epic journeys to the region undertaken between 1860 and 1862. Although the peaks were named after nineteenth-century men of outstanding achievement in science, all Fellows of the Geological Society of London, only four (Murchison, Sedgwick, Lyell and Owen) were named by Gould at the time of his journeys and two (Huxley and Jukes) were probably named by him at a later time. Three other peaks (Darwin, Geikie and Read) and the Tyndall Range were named directly or indirectly by Thomas Bather Moore.

Cassandra Pybus. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. Boston: Beacon Books, 2006. xxii + 281 pp. Maps. Appendix. Notes. Sources. Index. $16.00. Paper.

Cassandra Pybus. Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. Boston: Beacon Books, 2006. xxii + 281 pp. Maps. Appendix. Notes. Sources. Index. $16.00. Paper. - Volume 52 Issue 1

The discovery of France: a historical geography from the Revolution to the First World War

While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages.The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France-past and present-remains to be discovered.

The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution, and: Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution, and: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution, and: Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (review)

Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in Age of Revolution. By Gary B. Nash. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 235. Cloth, $19.95.) Slave Nation: How Slavery United Colonies and Sparked Revolution. By Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen. (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2006. Pp. 335. Cloth, $24.95; Paper, $14.95.)Rough Crossings: Britain, Slaves, and Revolution. By Simon Schama. (New York, NY: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2006. Pp. 475. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $16.95.)Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. By Cassandra Pybus. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007. Pp. 281. Cloth, $26.95; Paper, $16.00.)Reviewed by Robert G. ParkinsonThere is an increasing call among historians of Revolution to reconsider period era of Washington. Not George, mind you, but Harry. Harry Washington was considered property of patriarch of Mount Vernon until he made his escape during first year of Revolutionary War. He traveled first to New York, then to Nova Scotia, and, in a touch of powerful irony, eventually found himself in Sierra Leone accused of treason against British government twenty-four years after his former master had committed same crime. global story of Harry Washington and thousands of other former slaves who deserted fathers and embraced the tyrant George III are subjects of these engaging and provocative works. They compel Americans to turn their Revolution on its head, to ask why tens of thousands of African Americans ran away from Declaration of Independence, and to inquire into consequences for those who stayed behind. At bottom, these works together encourage us to reevaluate just how much American and have really ever been connected.This interpretation, of course, is not brand new. Since 1960s historians have called triumphant narrative of Revolution into question by spotlighting chasm between rhetoric and reality. Among vanguard of these historians has been Gary B. Nash, who follows last year's efforts to increase awareness of unknown Revolution with Forgotten Fifth, a series of three concise essays originally delivered Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard University in 2004. first essay, The Black Americans' slices through thorny historiographical issues with clear and simple prose. For example, when describing complex shift toward an emergent, new form of racism, Nash puts it neatly: as war wound down dominant theoreticians of republican ideology . . . began to view black people themselves rather than institution of slavery corrosive to 'the great republican experiment' (58). For Nash-and for Cassandra Pybus and Simon Schama-there are certainly fathers to celebrate during Revolution, but not Jefferson or Adams. Nash argues that still largely unappreciated black founding fathers faced far more daunting challenges to securing their freedom than their white counterparts (48). And, Nash points out, they are not just black fathers, but black founding mothers, too, because many one-third of all runaway slaves during Revolutionary War were women, a number far greater than previous patterns. Nash's second essay, Could Slavery Have Been Abolished, updates an argument he raised more than a decade ago in Race and Revolution.1 Nash believes that several factors converged in aftermath of war for independence that made abolition of slavery in new United States possible-if effective and principled leadership could only have been found. He pins blame squarely on North for not having statesmen who could capitalize on southern weakness, antislavery fervor in North, human rights impulses of Revolution, and possibilities of trans-Appalachian territory a reserve for emancipated slaves. …

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty

Epic journeys of freedom: runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty

Epic journeys of freedom: runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty