Generic Figures Research Articles

Combinators as presheaves

Abstract Computer scientists, logicians and other researchers have recently paid renewed attention to the model of computation based on the logic of combinators. We develop a new formalization of the syntax of combinators employing the ‘generic figures’ approach to the categories of presheaves that provides an intuitive and easily interpreted diagrammatic syntax for combinators, one that eschews the need to label proper combinators with variable names. Furthermore, we show that this formal framework provides the possibility of representing choices of operand from among given alternatives at each level of a combinatory term, allowing for a more general type of combinatory expression, which we call a multi-combinator.

Representation of Whom? Ancient Moments of Seeking Refuge and Protection

Within the ancient corpus we find depictions of people seeking refuge and protection: in works of fiction, drama and poetry; on wall paintings and vases, they cluster at protective altars and cling to statues of gods who seemingly look on. Yet the ancient evidence does not lend itself easily to exploring attitudes to refugees or asylum seekers. Hence, the question that begins this investigation is, representation of whom? Through a focus on the Greco-Roman material of the Mediterranean region, drawing on select representations, such as the tragedies Medea and Suppliant Women, the historical failed plea of the Plataeans and pictorial imagery of supplication, the goal of the exploration below is not to shape into existence an ancient refugee or asylum seeker experience. Rather, it is to highlight the multiplicity of experiences within narratives of victimhood and the confines of such labels as refugee and asylum seeker. The absence of ancient representations of a generic figure or group of the ‘displaced’, broadly defined, precludes any exceptionalising or homogenising of people in such contexts. Remaining depictions are of named, recognisable protagonists, whose stories are known. There is no ‘mass’ of refuge seekers, to whom a single set of rules could apply across time and space. Given these diverse stories of negotiation for refuge, another aim is to illustrate the ways such experience does not come to define the entirety of who a person is or encompass the complete life and its many layers. This paper addresses the challenges of representation that are exposed by, among others, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Liisa Malkki and Gerawork Gizaw.

Generalized Fuzzy Linguistic Bicubic B-Spline Surface Model for Uncertain Fuzzy Linguistic Data

A fuzzy linguistic data set that is uncertain is difficult to analyze and describe in the form of a smooth and continuous generic figure. Therefore, the study aims to develop a new model of a B-spline surface using a different approach of a crisp and fuzzy linguistic point relation with three types of linguistic function: low L, medium Mi and high H. These linguistic functions are defined first to introduce the fuzzy linguistic point relation. Then, a new algorithm of the fuzzy linguistic bicubic B-spline surface model is presented to convert fuzzy linguistic data into fuzzy linguistic control points. In addition, a numerical example of fuzzy linguistic data is considered at the end of this study to visualize the suggested model. Thus, the relation between the fuzzy linguistic data points can be analyzed to present another area of knowledge in which symmetry phenomena occur. The symmetry here plays an important role in solving the uncertain fuzzy linguistic data problem by using the suggested model.

Seizure risk with repetitive TMS: Survey results from over a half-million treatment sessions

BackgroundSeizures are rare during repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) treatment, but estimating risk is difficult because of study heterogeneity and sampling limitations. Moreover, there are few studies comparing rates between device manufacturers. ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to calculate rTMS seizure rates across various FDA-cleared devices in naturalistic clinical settings. MethodsIn July and August 2018, approximately 500 members of the Clinical TMS Society (CTMSS) were electronically surveyed about seizures in their practices. Seizures were distinguished from non-seizures by a remote semi-structured interview with a Board-certified neurologist and Co-Chair of the CTMSS Standards Committee. Exact Poisson calculations were used to estimate seizure rates and confidence intervals across the four most widely used manufacturers. ResultsThe survey was completed by 134 members, with 9 responses excluded because of data inconsistencies. In total, 18 seizures were reported in 586,656 sessions and 25,526 patients across all device manufacturers. The overall seizure rate was 0.31 (95% CI: 0.18, 0.48) per 10,000 sessions, and 0.71 (95% CI: 0.42, 1.11) per 1000 patients. The Brainsway H-coil seizure rate of 5.56 per 1000 patients (95% CI: 2.77,9.95) was significantly higher (p < 0.001) than the three most widely used figure- 8 coil devices’ combined seizure rate of 0.14 per 1000 patients (95% CI: 0.01, 0.51). ConclusionThe absolute risk of a seizure with rTMS is low, but generic Brainsway H-coil treatment appears to be associated with a higher relative risk than generic figure- 8 coil treatment. Well-designed prospective studies are warranted to further investigate this risk.

Asymmetric faces: Symbolic, spiritual, and representative.

In humans, physically attractive faces are measurably, though subtly, asymmetric. As asymmetry increases, it has a negative impact. Medically, asymmetry can be congenital or acquired. Symbolically, it has varied connotations from playfulness and complexity to despair and corruption. In Chinese opera, stylized make-up exaggerates the features, and aspects of the "mask" indicate qualities of the character. The asymmetric faces belong to characters who are corrupt, devious, or evil. In the Dan culture of western Africa, performance masks channel spirits in the community. A spirit with asymmetric facial mask exemplifies ugliness and moral failing. The Nasca culture of South America made generic figures of farmers, deities, and so on, but not of individuals. However, there is evidence of mutual influence between the Nasca and the Wari, with whom they traded. A clay figure apparently representing an individual, or at least a very specific recognized persona, is a ball player with facial asymmetry presumably due to injury. Here the message is one of fierceness and strength. The relative rarity of asymmetric facial depictions compared to symmetric ones is cross-cultural. This implies that asymmetry is special somehow, in all connotations of that term.

GENERALIZED FUZZY LINGUISTIC CUBIC B-SPLINE CURVE MODEL FOR UNCERTAINTY FUZZY LINGUISTIC DATA

Fuzzy linguistic data is difficult to analyze. It becomes a problem to describe the data in the form of smooth and continuous generic figure. Therefore, the generalization of the problems of linguistic data in the form of curves and surfaces requires a new model such as fuzzy linguistic B-spline by using fuzzy linguistic approach. This paper discusses an approach of fuzzy linguistic point relation with three types of linguistic functions that generate new B-spline curve model.

A Generic Figures Reconstruction of Peirce’s Existential Graphs (Alpha)

We present a category-theoretical analysis, based on the concept of generic figures, of a diagrammatic system for propositional logic (Peirce’s Existential Graphs $$\alpha $$). The straightforward construction of a presheaf category $${{\mathcal {E}}}{{\mathcal {G}}}_{\alpha ^{*}}$$ of cuts-only Existential Graphs (equivalent to the well-studied category of finite forests) provides a basis for the further construction of the category $${{\mathcal {E}}}{{\mathcal {G}}}_\alpha $$ which introduces variables in a reconstructedly generic, or label-free, mode. Morphisms in these categories represent syntactical embeddings or, equivalently but dually, extensions. Through the example of Peirce’s system, it is shown how the generic figures approach facilitates the formal investigation of relations between syntax and semantics in such diagrammatic systems.

The Cognitive Structure of Full-Verb Inversion and Existential Structures in English

The goal of this study is to build on the Cognitive Grammar analysis of full-verb inversion (FVI) and existential structures proposed by Chen (2003, 2011 and 2013). Close attention will be given to two characteristics of these constructions not discussed by this author – lack of subject-verb agreement and the type of pronominal forms that occur in them – and their consequences forFVI’s cognitive structure will be worked out. Further parallels betweenFVIand the existentialthere-construction will be brought to light concerning the type of verbal predicate allowed, negation, transitivity, agreement patterns, presentational function, pronominal forms and heaviness of postverbalNPs. The cognitive structure ofFVIwith lack of S-V concord is argued to be: (1) ground-setter, (2) verb heralding presence/appearance of a generic third-person figure in the ground, (3) nominal identifying the generic figure. Chen’s Invertability Hypothesis is shown to generate false predictions with fronted adjectives and adverbials, and the claim that the preverbal element is in focus is shown to be problematic in the light of its usual status as given information.FVIis argued to be a construction in Goldberg’s (2006) sense of the term, although it does not constitute a meaning-form pairing which is completely independent of the lexical items that instantiate it.

'Bring Forth the Accused!' Defendant Attitudes and the Intimate Legitimacy of the International Criminal Trial

The accused is, oddly, the great forgotten figure of the international criminal trial. There is much interest in the rights of the accused as a generic figure, but very little attention to the actual role of the accused in his own trial. This article argues that the agency of the accused and its impact on both the dynamics, impact and legitimacy of international criminal justice has been considerably underestimated. On the contrary, the accused is one of the most central figure of the trial and his decisions and attitudes will have considerable repercussions on what international criminal justice can hope to achieve. Drawing on socio-legal scholarship and the idea that law is also produced by its subjects, the article proposes a comprehensive typology of defendant attitudes towards their trial. The four attitudes are (i) defiance, the attitude of a defendant who denies a tribunal any legitimacy to prosecute him, (ii) engagement, that of a defendant who defends himself conventionally by denying the charges against him but not the legitimacy of his judges, (iii) sacrifice, that of a defendant who does not contest the charges against him because of an assumption that “someone must take the blame” even if he casts his wrongdoing differently than a tribunal does, and (iv) repentance, the attitude of contrition and remorse of an accused who acknowledges the crimes he committed. The article is not a normative defense of either attitudes but an attempt to understand them for what they are and examine their logic, manifestations and impact on the trial. The article concludes with a few thoughts on how tribunals might understand their relationship to defendants.

Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright by Sheldon Brivic

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright by Sheldon Brivic Richard Barlow (bio) REVOLUTIONARY DAMNATION: BADIOU AND IRISH FICTION FROM JOYCE TO ENRIGHT, by Sheldon Brivic. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. vii + 319 pp. $65.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. Revolutionary Damnation is a wide-ranging collection of inventive and instructive readings of texts by eleven Irish writers: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, John Banville, Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Deane, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe, Colm Tóibín, and Anne Enright. These readings are organized into a set by way of the theories of the controversial French philosopher [End Page 189] Alain Badiou (with the occasional use of Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Slavoj Žižek) and are divided into three sections entitled "Philosophy," "War," and "Family." The readings, however, are also linked to the subject of damnation and related themes such as the infernal and the demonic. According to Brivic's text, there are quite a number of subjects or situations that can be conceived of as hellish or infernal. They include "hierarchy" (18), "frustration" (91), "losing a war" (183), "winning [a war]" (183), "love" (204), "colonialism" (205), "passion" (211), "work" (212), the "nature of life" (239), "hopelessness" (246), "blarney" (254), and "family" (281). Interestingly, an atmosphere of homophobia portrayed in Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship is "not quite a hell" (239).1 What is the relationship between the work of these Irish writers, Badiou, and damnation? For Brivic, the texts selected all feature a central character who does not fit in, who is outcast, lost, or damned. This figure embodies what Badiou … calls the generic, the new, undefinable term that leads to the truth of the unknown future possibilities of the event. … [T]he generic figure continues to prefigure liberating possibilities for Ireland or humanity even though he or she is effectively damned. (18–19) Brivic writes that "Joyce's characters tend to be enclosed by belief and compelled to seek escape from it through exploration of the forbidden" (81). The first of two chapters on "Herr Satan" (JJII 26), "Joyce, Stephen's Damnation, and Badiou's Saint Paul," joins recent works such as Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion by Geert Lernout and James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate's Wake by Chrissie Van Mierlo in expanding the scholarship on Joyce and religious matters.2 For Brivic, "Joyce's theology makes it manifest to him that modern artistic originality must always entail damnation because it has its source in what is outside the field of the acceptable" (41). He writes that "[j]ust as Paul, following Jesus, delivered a new dispensation that focused on love defined by weakness and universalism, so Joyce delivered a new dispensation based on art and multiplicity" (52). The second chapter on Joyce, "Badiou and the Multiple Subject of Joyce's Ulysses," suggests that "Joyce shared with Badiou the desire to promote infinite prospects of human emancipation, and Badiou's ideas help us to see the drive toward freedom in Ulysses" (79). These chapters are perhaps the strongest in the text, and the innovative application of Badiou's ideas on the "generic" and "the event" work well here. The rather simplistic claim that "Joyce is … inveterate in his opposition to nationalism" (44), however, is debatable. While the links between Joyce and Badiou are fully developed, [End Page 190] connections between Badiou and the other novelists covered are sometimes presented in terms of similarities or coincidences: "[t]his matches Badiou's definition of the event" (59), or "[t]he elimination of God as a unity matches Badiou's idea that the one does not exist except as a construction" (284). Brivic is quite keen on the word "matches": "Stephen's assumption of the role of the God of creation matches the central sin of Satan" (41); "[t]his matches Christopher Norris's definition of the generic" (59); "[t]his matches Swift's definition of happiness in A Tale of a Tub" (108); "[t]his matches observations about life by cognitive scientists that Žižek reports" (138–39); "Rheticus concludes that 'at the center of all there is nothing,' which matches...

Iconoclasm, Parody, and the Provocations of Lydia Maria Child's &lt;em&gt;A Romance of the Republic&lt;/em&gt;

If I live to be ninety years old, and go on at this rate, I shall be rabidest radical that ever pelted a throne, or upset an image. Lydia Maria Child to William Lloyd Garrison, 7 July 1865 In 1865, printer L. Franklin Smith and lithographer Max Rosenthal commemorated Abraham Lincoln's declaration of emancipation by publishing an extravagantly ornate print, Proclamation of Emancipation (see fig. 1). Adhering to conventions for such patriotic displays, Smith and Rosenthal surrounded text of Emancipation Proclamation with ample decoration: cherished American icons like flag and eagle, portraits of founding fathers and well-known abolitionists, allegorical figures, and several intricate vignettes depicting, as an accompanying booklet explains, the more striking results of great Crime (slavery) on left and results of the great Justice (emancipation) on right (Smith 7). This elaborate construction, with words of proclamation spread between scenes of slavery and freedom, implies that emancipation ended the great Crime and enacted the great Justice. According to Proclamation of Emancipation, Americans had much to celebrate and only past to grieve. Yet racial injustice in form of prejudice and segregation persist in print. The images present cliched scenes of black life before and after A shorter version of this essay won first prize in Legacy's Best Paper Contest, Student Category, honoring best student paper presented at Society for Study of American Women Writers Conference in Denver in 2012. It also won first place in SSAWW'S Graduate Student Paper Award Competition for that conference. emancipation, and none of scenes depict egalitarian integration. The only white figures pictured are slaveowners and overseers (on left) and a white teacher, far more elegantly dressed than his black pupils (on right). Between scenes of slavery and freedom are white allegorical figures and formal cameo portraits of white men and women celebrated for emancipation and America's commitment to liberty. These latter white figures are placed prominently toward center at bottom and top. As Harold Holzer, who has studied art and history of emancipation, explains, in nearly all these initial, tentative efforts to commemorate emancipation in popular prints, black Americans were emphatically not created equal. Blacks are relegated to sidelines, where they appear as generic figures, nominally free but still subordinate to whites (Holzer, Emancipating Lincoln 138). In this way, Proclamation of Emancipation, like most of era's strategically patriotic prints, promotes white supremacy and Northern pride. It placates rather than provokes its white postbellum viewers. (1) This print, however, unwittingly broaches its own critique by featuring Lydia Maria Child. While it is fitting that Child should be honored for her fierce advocacy of abolition, it is also ironic that her image should appear on such propaganda. Throughout her career, as we will see, she challenged grandiose conceptions of United States demonstrated by type of iconography appearing in abundance on this print. Moreover, she was openly critical of Emancipation Proclamation's compromises and failure to address problem of racial injustice at large. On 3o October 1862, soon after President Lincoln issued Preliminary Proclamation, Child wrote to good friend Sarah Shaw, As for President's Proclamation, I was thankful for it, but it excited no enthusiasm in my mind. With my gratitude to God was mixed an under-tone of sadness that moral sense of people was so low, that thing could not be done nobly.... The ugly fact cannot be concealed from history that it was done reluctantly and stintedly, and that even degree that was accomplished was done selfishly; was merely a war-measure, to which we were forced by our own perils and necessities. …

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930, by Kate Flint

Kate Flint's book has a worryingly generic title. The Transatlantic Indian is a study of 150 years of cultural interaction between different nations and different individuals. Yet the title, and central concept of the book, threatens to reduce this historical, geographical and cultural complexity and diversity to one stereotypical figure. Were this approach to be taken towards white people over a similar period, we would rightly be chary. To be sure, Flint claims to be delineating a generic figure created by white people rather than imposing her own. But she risks reifying rather than deconstructing this figure, because her methodology leads her principally to discover its literary persistence rather than to examine discourses that do not make use of it or that question or undermine it. The danger of summarising long periods of poetry and fiction in brief is that one defaults to an old-fashioned history of ideas divorced from the nuanced cultural contexts and discourses in which those ideas were formulated and circulated. An attendant problem is the over-compression of the complex history of colonial politics and cultural interaction. Flint's first chapter, on eighteenth-century and Romantic responses to Indians, suffers from both of these problems: little of the richest period of British/Indian relationships is discussed and little of the literary context appears, whether captivity narratives, traders’ accounts, conjectural histories, bardic songs or romantic epics. Eighteenth-century Indian writers are reduced to passing references: such major figures as Joseph Brant and John Norton, both of whom came to Britain as diplomats and counted noblemen among their friends, were two of the most important transatlantic Indians from the political and literary points of view in the years after 1776. Norton's account of his travels is perhaps the most substantial work by an Indian writer in the nineteenth century. Yet it is not even mentioned. Also absent are William Apess, the most rhetorically sophisticated and pungent satirist of white attitudes to Indians, and John Tanner, the white boy captured aged nine and raised as an Indian, whose narrative of Ojibwa life Louise Erdrich has called ‘an intensely personal and emotional tale, and probably one of the very few in the captivity genre that appeals strongly to Native Americans’. Instead, we get a rather brief summary of Romantic poems and novels, and a few pages on the mutual influence of Felicia Hemans and the white American poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and on other women poets, including Mary Howitt and Eliza Cook. Here Flint makes an apology for the sentimental stereotypes employed by these poets that might be persuasive were it to be supported by fuller analysis of their texts. But she has no space, and moves on.

Estimating Data for Incapacitation of People by Fire Smoke

Fire hazard and risk analyses establish the basis for providing conditions of safety for people, including those that are more sensitive to fire smoke than others. For this purpose, this paper develops a method for estimating, from information on lethal and incapacitating exposures for rats, smoke toxic potency values for incapacitation of smoke-sensitive people. For those engineering applications where the mix of combustibles is unknown, generic values are derived of the concentration of smoke that would incapacitate smoke-sensitive people in 5 min: 6 g/m3 for a well-ventilated fire and 3 g/m3 for an underventilated (e.g., post-flashover) fire. These values are estimated with significant assumptions in their derivation, resulting in an estimated uncertainty of about a factor of two. Further, there is a wide range of smoke toxic potency values reported for various combustibles, and some of these will lead to values significantly higher or lower than these generic figures.

The Queer Subject of "The Jolly Corner"

The Queer Subject of “The Jolly Corner” Eric Savoy “‘He, I say—I cannot say, I.’” —Robert Louis Stevenson For several decades, critical commentary on “The Jolly Corner”—James’s 1908 tale of Spencer Brydon’s return to New York, his encounter with the ghostly double who represents Brydon’s unlived American life, and his disavowal of whatever the double obscurely embodies and signifies—has situated the claims of “America” within an undiscerning account of heterosexuality’s reclaiming of the expatriate bachelor. Dorothea Krook suggests that this tale is “‘The Beast in the Jungle’ with a happy ending,” an exposition of “the power to receive love” (334); Daniel Mark Fogel asserts that Spencer “accepts the best in his American identity when he is reborn to reciprocal love with Alice Staverton” (196); Millicent Bell argues that Spencer Brydon “is rewarded as are few Jamesian heroes: he has recovered a possibility foregone” (287). Although there are few incontrovertible certainties obtainable in this strange text, it seems evident that the gothic narrative of “The Jolly Corner” explores the insidious reach of heterosexual reclamation as the occasion of profound terror. In order to chart the dimensions of this terror, I must consider, first of all, the particularities of Spencer Brydon’s “European” subjectivity, and, second, the odd circumstance that his ghostly, hypothetical “American” double is double-authored by Brydon’s melancholic response to an unlived life in conjunction with Alice’s equally retrospective heterosexual “script,” her mourning of an eclipsed heterosexual vocation. At this late moment in Jamesian criticism, we have come to understand the precarious situation of the bachelor, his liminal position in dominant culture and his permeable psychic boundaries which admit the rigors of homosexual panic. The bachelor’s indeterminate relation to identity and desire aligns this figure neatly with James’s narrative investments in “the incalculable.” The mapping of [End Page 1] the Jamesian bachelor by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has situated this recurring, almost generic figure on an incoherent, suspended point along “the treacherous middle stretch of the modern homosocial continuum” at which there is no “identity,” only “agonized sexual anesthesia” (Epistemology 188). Nowhere in subsequent criticism can we locate a self-identified, self-knowing “gay” bachelor; yet James, I would argue, establishes precisely such a subjectivity for Spencer Brydon upon his return from prolonged expatriation. James’s signalling of Brydon’s homosexuality takes the oblique form of connotation, but the play of connotation is sufficiently elaborate to acquire a solidity and a specificity in differential relation to the signs of heteronormative American masculinity. In some ways, the house on the jolly corner consolidates Brydon’s “gay” susceptibilities: he returns to “the black and white squares,” the “old marble of the hall pavement,” that “had then made in him . . . for the growth of an early conception of style” (455). If Brydon’s ancestral home provides an architecture, a spatial plotting of the temporality of the subject’s various “returns,” then this point of entry marks the uncovering of what might be conceptualized as the primal scene, the founding moment, of a homosexual “taste” that compelled Spencer to follow his “perverse young course—almost in the teeth of [his] father’s curse” (449) to Europe, where he led what he describes as “a selfish frivolous scandalous life” (450). “‘I know at least what I am,’” Spencer tells Alice, and what he knows is how New Yorkers have perceived him: “‘I’ve not been edifying—I believe I’m thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent’” (450). To dismiss these oblique self-revelations as instances of Jamesian conversational hyperbole would evade the point of what such hyperbole often serves in James’s texts: as a strategy of a logistical closet, it is a form of preterition that—as Richard Dellamora, Ed Cohen, and others have argued—allows “homosexuality” to accrue as a displaced referent under the metonymic cover of the sign of “aestheticism.” Recently, Wendy Graham has built on the work of Jonathan Freedman to survey the chain of associative signification that culminates in “homosexuality”: “the language of effeteness and effeminacy” translucently overlies “homosexuality as the unspoken subject . . . for which the term ‘aesthete’ has long served as a virtual synonym...

Le citoyen secoureur. Secours publics, sauveteurs et secouristes en France à la fin du XIXe siècle

The Helpful Citizen. Public Assistance, Rescuers, and First-aid Workers in XIXe Century France. Frédéric Caille [39-50]. This article deals with the management of collective risks in the French public space during the nineteen century. It studies two interest groups : the «rescuers» and the members of forst aid associations established between 1850 and 1900, and how they did not really attend to public safety but much more to the social construction of republican citizenship. The critic examination of the two main claims of these groups illustrates the permanence of their project : defense and illustration of the social exemplarity of a generic figure, the devoted, helpful and courageous citizen.

Generic reliability figures of merit design tools for surface mount solder attachments

Adequate reliability of surface mount (SM) solder attachments can only be assured with a design for reliability (DFR) based on solder joint behavior and the underlying fatigue damage mechanisms. The perceived difficulties with a DFR stem from the very complex and only partially understood nature of the interacting mechanisms underlying thermally induced solder joint fatigue combined with the highly temperature-, time-, and stress-dependent behavior of some of the involved materials, especially solder. Generic figures of merit are presented. These figures of merit are simple design tools that can easily be utilized by nonexpert users unfamiliar with the underlying complexities of solder fatigue and give reliability assessment results in a GO/NO-GO fashion. These figures of merit not only avoid the over simplifications-originally thought necessary for simple design tools and limiting the applicability of the figures of merit-contained in Version 1 of the figures of merit, but are also simpler to apply.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Heroes, Villains and Fools, as Agents of Social Control

SOCIAL types comprise a relatively unappreciated field of popular culture. Though certain ones have been intensively studied from special points of view and the role of stereotypes has been long recognized, there has been little effort to catalog, classify, or even adequately consider the vast number of highly significant types to be found in common speech, jokes, comics, popular fiction, folklore and the like. These conceptions, appearing wherever the popular mind finds expression, are truly collective in nature rather than the property of individual authors, coins of thought as Sumner phrased it, serving to express group judgments, facilitate consensus, and define roles. This article is concerned with three especially significant generic figures, the hero, villain and fool, and aims to state a theory of their normative nature, role as