Human Destruction Research Articles

Project Review: SwampScapes

Project Review: <i>SwampScapes</i>

W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: Memories of the Holocaust in the Fluid Cartography of a “Natural History of Destruction”

ABSTRACT This article will trace the “map-like” quality of W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn, and will demonstrate the ways in which this characteristic of Sebald’s prose works can assist in illuminating the quiet echoes of historical traumas such as the Holocaust that permeate his oeuvre. Fundamentally, however, a normative understanding of mapping is inadequate to the complexities of Sebald’s meditations on history, memory, place, and destruction; accordingly, the article will complicate such understandings by presenting the novel as a kind of “fluid cartography.” The mutability inherent in the notion of fluid cartography is apt to Sebald’s writing, and can offer an enhanced understanding of the author’s methods of representing memory and the past, along with the ways in which such concerns become embedded in the landscapes depicted. This article will focus on aspects of Holocaust memory that are inserted in such a way, and which become connected – through the fluid cartographical reach of the text – to a broader history of both human and natural destruction.

A warring style: A corpus stylistic analysis of the First World War poetry

The poetry of the First World War bears poignant testimony to the unprecedented tragedies of human destructiveness. It has been the subject of numerous studies that looked at it from diverse perspectives, drawing from various contemporary psychological, historical, and literary theories. The present study can be regarded as yet another contribution to the existing picture of this rich and enduring field where literature and history are explored alongside. Informed by the emerging field of digital literary studies, this article aims to revisit the war experience through a computational analysis of the poetry of the Great War and explore how soldier-poets conveyed their emotions in the face of traumatic war experience. We adopted a top-down corpus-driven approach that moved from key semantic domains to lexical items and then to their collocates. First, we detected the key semantic domains of the genre through a corpus tool, Wmatrix. ‘Anatomy and physiology’, ‘religion and the supernatural’, and ‘senses’ were identified as the key semantic domains in our corpus. The unusual abundance of binaries led us to group and treat these lexical items as a separate category: ‘binary oppositions’. In the second phase of the research, we analysed these key semantic domains to foreground the frequent lexical items under each domain and explored the surrounding context of those items through their collocational networks exploiting another corpus tool, Lancsbox. Finally, we further investigated the frequent items and corresponding concordance lines to identify the common stylistic features in the Great War Poetry.

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Proteinous Components of Neutrophil Extracellular Traps Are Arrested by the Cell Wall Proteins of Candida albicans during Fungal Infection, and Can Be Used in the Host Invasion

One of defense mechanisms of the human immune system to counteract infection by the opportunistic fungal pathogen Candida albicans is the recruitment of neutrophils to the site of invasion, and the subsequent production of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) that efficiently capture and kill the invader cells. In the current study, we demonstrate that within these structures composed of chromatin and proteins, the latter play a pivotal role in the entrapment of the fungal pathogen. The proteinous components of NETs, such as the granular enzymes elastase, myeloperoxidase and lactotransferrin, as well as histones and cathelicidin-derived peptide LL-37, are involved in contact with the surface of C. albicans cells. The fungal partners in these interactions are a typical adhesin of the agglutinin-like sequence protein family Als3, and several atypical surface-exposed proteins of cytoplasmic origin, including enolase, triosephosphate isomerase and phosphoglycerate mutase. Importantly, the adhesion of both the elastase itself and the mixture of proteins originating from NETs on the C. albicans cell surface considerably increased the pathogen potency of human epithelial cell destruction compared with fungal cells without human proteins attached. Such an implementation of adsorbed NET-derived proteins by invading C. albicans cells might alter the effectiveness of the fungal pathogen entrapment and affect the further host colonization.

Demography of a Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) population within a strictly protected area in Central Europe

Large carnivores promote crucial ecosystem processes but are increasingly threatened by human persecution and habitat destruction. Successful conservation of this guild requires information on long-term population dynamics obtained through demographic surveys. We used camera traps to monitor Eurasian lynx between 2009 and 2018 in a strictly protected area in the Bohemian Forest Ecosystem, located in the core of the distribution of the Bohemian–Bavarian–Austrian lynx population. Thereby, we estimated sex-specific demographic parameters using spatial capture–recapture (SCR) models. Over 48,677 trap nights, we detected 65 unique lynx individuals. Density increased from 0.69 to 1.33 and from 1.09 to 2.35 individuals/100 km2 for open and closed population SCR models, respectively, with corresponding positive population growth rates (mean = 1.06). Estimated yearly sex-specific survival probabilities for the entire monitoring period were high (females 82%, males 90%) and per capita recruitment rate was low (females 12%, males 9%), indicating a low yearly population turnover. We ascertained an average number of recruits of 1.97 and a generation time of 2.64 years when considering resident reproducing females. We confirmed that reproduction in the study area took place successfully every year. Despite the overall increase in local lynx densities, the number of detected family groups remained constant throughout the study period. These results indicated that the strictly protected study area acts as a source for the multi-use landscapes in its surroundings. In this first open population SCR study on lynx, we provide sex-specific demographic parameters that are fundamental information for lynx management in the study area as well as in similar contexts Europe-wide.

Megalodon

Megalodon

Indexing War: The Craft of the Catalogue in Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage

This article explores how Sinan Antoon's novel The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) brings Arabic literary history into unlikely conversation with US military jargon as it offers an alternative catalogue of the destruction incurred during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the violence that followed. First, by drawing attention to the novel's original Arabic title Fihris (2016), which can be translated as ‘index' or ‘catalogue', I consider the titular transformation the novel underwent by translation and unpick intertextual strands woven through the text, focusing in particular on the tenth-century compendium of Arabic books Kitāb al-Fihrist, compiled by Ibn al-Nadim, as a key intertext. I then interrogate how the concept of ‘collateral damage', which has been widely used to refer to the unintentional damage and deaths incurred during military operations including the 2003 Iraq War, is creatively redeployed in the novel. Rather than reading the text as an attempt to ‘write back to' or ‘resist’ the dehumanising rhetoric of collateral damage, I argue instead that Antoon repurposes the logic of this abstract term, which blurs human and non-human destruction, to expose its absurd politics of personification. Presenting readers with a chorus of uncanny narrators – both human and non-human – who each tell the story of their destruction, the novel forms a literary compendium of collateral damage. By bringing together Arabic literary history and contemporary military jargon in this way, I argue that Antoon creates a poetics of infinity which asserts the impossibility of ever indexing the consequences of war while also attesting to the writerly compulsion to record, however imperfectly, this destruction.

“아르마딜로”가 두 “스컹크”에게: 로웰, 비숍, 히니의 시 비교 연구

The paper is to compare and explore the poems and their themes, “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell, “The Skunk” by Seamus Heaney, and “Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop. Lowell breaks away from his poetic practice and expresses his poem as an opportunity for essential voice and deep introspection. Heaney realizes his love for his family and presents his poem as a daily longing when he is tired of direct writing about Irish war and politics. Both skunks are reborn with courage and concentration in poetry, free from the prejudice, the epitome of stench. “Armadillo”, which influenced two poems, presents poetic inspiration in a concise and comfortable confessional style. Unlike “Skunk Hour,” which enumerates a group of people listed as many episodes, “Armadillo” has the power to withstand human fear and destruction even though it looks frail. This means that rather than adding new characteristics to the animal, the poet maintains his original tendency through the development of the poem and is embodied as a unique poetic image. In “Skunk,” Heaney notes the two-word diction, ‘head down’, ‘tail down’ in Bishop’s poem, and he creates various images of a skunk and his wife by continuing the sequential flow.

Problems of preventing domestic violence against children in Ukraine.

The article reveals the problems of domestic violence against children in Ukraine. It is noted that the globalization changes in the social-economic and political processes taking place in the XXI century require legal protection of the legal rights and interests of human being and citizen in various spheres of life, including domestic sphere. Unfortunately, domestic violence against children is not an accidental fact of human destructiveness, but a stable, massive, extremely dangerous phenomenon that requires (ultra ratio) state intervention on a daily basis. The article emphasizes that the problems of preventing domestic violence against children, as one of the forms of domestic criminality in Ukraine, are generally little studied and quite relevant for our society, and in particular for every family. Factors that shape the causes and conditions of domestic violence against children are related to: – social-political crisis in Ukraine, which does not strengthen the protection of the family as the main center of society, but on the contrary corrupts its foundations; stratification of the population according to the level of material condition, when some families have everything and others survive as they can; – insecurity of the majority of citizens in the future, which creates a reluctance to have children, to deal with their upbringing; – the emergence of aggression and conflict in the family, as a consequence, divorce, the commission of a criminal offense with all its features; – the perpetrator of domestic violence against a child creates a psychological trauma, which can create a basis for aggression in adulthood; – lack of pedagogical knowledge and basics of psychology in most parents, which leads to cruelty, violence in relations between adults and children, etc. In the process of researching the problems of domestic violence against children, we paid attention to the data on the physical and mental state of health of the subjects of domestic violence (father or mother). According to some of the criminal proceedings we have studied regarding the commission of a criminal offense under Art. 126-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, we failed to establish any chronic (somatic) diseases in perpetrators who committed violence against children. This means that the abuser is directly aware of the commission of illegal acts against his child and wants to commit them. The construction of a system for the prevention of domestic violence against children is substantiated, which can take place only with the implementation of comprehensive programs adopted on the basis of state criminal policy, taking into account the specifics of the state of domestic violence and its nature.

Historically informed digital reconstruction of the Roman theatre of Verona. Unveiling the acoustics of the original shape

The Roman theatre of Verona is one of the most beautiful open-air theatres, still in operation by keeping the artistic programs throughout the winter and summer seasons. Inaugurated during the 1st century BCE, the theatre fell in disuse caused by natural (e.g. fire, earthquake, flooding) and human (e.g. barbaric devastations, private properties) destructions. During the following centuries, many iconographies and drawings interpretations have been made in form of sketches by painters and architects (Caroto, Palladio, Guillaume), other than amateurs (Monga, Pinali) of the arts. Only recent excavations undertaken during the 20th century allowed a faithful reconstruction of the theatre owed to the critical and archaeological approach kept by scholars (i.e. Franzoni, Bolla) who compared the historical documents with the discoveries conveyed on site. On this basis, acoustics measurements have been undertaken in order to photograph the existing conditions of the incomplete ima cavea, which is what has been left by the original monument. The first digital model has been realized in order to calibrate the absorbing coefficients of the applied materials with the results obtained by the survey. Additionally, another 3D digital reconstruction has been realized, and used for the performance of acoustic simulations that allow to restoring the listening environment inside the theatre at its primordial shape. A comparison between the existing and the original volume size highlights the difference of the acoustic parameters, indicating that better listening conditions would be if attending a live performance during the ages of the Roman Empire.

The Inevitable Consequences of Nuclear Armament: An Urgent Call for Nuclear Disarmament

Advancement in technology and growth in human wisdom and knowledge has become a boom and at the same time, a bane to the continued survival of mankind. Despite been born free, mankind has become enslaved to the products of their hands. The invention of weapons of human destruction (nuclear weapons), which remains the most destructive form of armory ever created, with the capacity to inflict a large-scale disaster in the shortest time, in just a strike. These weapons and their mass destructive capacity were first experienced in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing in the year 1945, from that moment on the world, have seen an increase in nuclear testing, nuclear armory, and nuclear race among nuclear-weapon states. The mere presence of nuclear weapons poses a serious threat to the earth's environment and its inhabitants. Many islands have become inhabitable or declared a no-go zone due to the high presence of radiation and radioactivity in those places which is a direct result of years of nuclear testing. As a consequence, many people have been displaced from their ancestral lands, while some victims have lost their time to radiation-induced diseases such as cancer and its various variation. This article, therefore, will focus on the global threat to humanity posed by nuclear armament.

Reconstitution of the destruction complex defines roles of AXIN polymers and APC in β-catenin capture, phosphorylation, and ubiquitylation

SummaryThe Wnt/β-catenin pathway is a highly conserved, frequently mutated developmental and cancer pathway. Its output is defined mainly by β-catenin’s phosphorylation- and ubiquitylation-dependent proteasomal degradation, initiated by the multi-protein β-catenin destruction complex. The precise mechanisms underlying destruction complex function have remained unknown, largely because of the lack of suitable in vitro systems. Here we describe the in vitro reconstitution of an active human β-catenin destruction complex from purified components, recapitulating complex assembly, β-catenin modification, and degradation. We reveal that AXIN1 polymerization and APC promote β-catenin capture, phosphorylation, and ubiquitylation. APC facilitates β-catenin’s flux through the complex by limiting ubiquitylation processivity and directly interacts with the SCFβ-TrCP E3 ligase complex in a β-TrCP-dependent manner. Oncogenic APC truncation variants, although part of the complex, are functionally impaired. Nonetheless, even the most severely truncated APC variant promotes β-catenin recruitment. These findings exemplify the power of biochemical reconstitution to interrogate the molecular mechanisms of Wnt/β-catenin signaling.

It’s Time to Revisit the Cairo Consensus

Just over a quarter century ago, the so-called ‘Cairo Consensus’ was forged, fundamentally improving how governments worldwide, international organisations, and the NGO community approached women’s reproductive health and reproductive rights on the world stage. Yet, the deafening silence this consensus offered on issues of runaway population growth has had massive repercussions on the world we live in today, with the ever-increasing human footprint fuelling climate change and ecological destruction on a scale that was entirely predicted. Given what we know now about how empowering, just and ethical strategies focused on women and girls can effectively bend the global population curve, it is time that we revisit the Cairo Consensus.

Isolation and characterization of 38 SNP markers for the black rockfish, Sebastes schlegelii by next-generation sequencing

The black rockfish (Sebastes schlegelii) is an economically important species. However, wild S. schlegelii resources have declined sharply in recent years as a result of human disturbance and habitat destruction. Thus, it is crucial to protect the current resources of S. schlegelii. In this study, 38 novel single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers were developed based on restriction-site associated DNA sequencing. The results showed that the observed heterozygosity and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.1400 to 0.6400 and 0.1487 to 0.4978, respectively. The minor allele frequency raged from 0.1429 to 0.4694. Polymorphic information content ranged from 0.174 to 0.365. Four SNPs were found to be deviated significantly from the HWE (P < 0.05). These SNP markers will serve as a useful tool for genetic studies and population evaluation aimed at the conservation of S. schlegelii.

Destructive Speech Behavior in the Digital Environment: Factors that Determine the Negative Impact on the User’s Worldview

Today, in the context of universal digitalization and informatization of the society, the Internet environment is becoming a criminogenic communication environment, favorable for the commission of "speech crimes", i.e. speech actions that form the objective element of the corpus delicti. The paper is devoted to the criminological analysis of the factors that determine the negative impact of information threats on users of the digital communication environment (primarily, the Internet environment). Based on monitoring social communication in the Internet and analyzing the patterns of language functioning in conditions of the Internet communication, the authors summarize the main properties of the Internet communication and factors that provide the possibility of abuse of rights (freedom of speech and the right to freely search, receive, transmit, produce and distribute information) in order to have a destructive impact on the ideological safety of Internet users (primarily children and young people). Such factors include simulation, virality, hyperreality, the phenomenon of social disinhibition, etc. Particular attention is paid to the concept of destructiveness of information impact, considered on the basis of an analysis of the phenomena of human destructiveness, aggression and cyber aggression, deviance and delinquency. The authors propose to treat content risks and communication risks as forms of representation of destructive speech behavior in the digital environment as information threats to the ideological security of the Internet communication. The paper provides the authors’ classification of the information risks under consideration based on a generalization of judicial and forensic practice (including cases when materials were included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials by court decisions), the practice of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor), as well as interdisciplinary analysis of scientific publications. The authors suggest that the terms "mortilatrya" and "eridophobia" be introduced in the context of ensuring the worldview security. The authors of the paper analyze the influence on the axiosphere of the Internet user of delinquent subcultures that erode a person’s identity in order to impose a new pseudo-correct- identity.

Critiquing 21st Century Creative Violence: Tagore’s Concord (Milan) and Harmony (Samanjaysya) Imagining “One World”

Modern science, acclaiming the success of the creative human brain as ‘progressive changes’ in the 21st century continues to prosper through prominent images of scientism, ingestion, cartelized capitalism, chemistry and rocket technology to name a few. Introspecting the 21st century from the given nexus, we are quite likely to conclude that it has remained a century when the human destructiveness has reached its creative pinnacle. ‘Creative progression’ disguised under the garb of SARS COVID-19 is currently ransacking mankind, resulting in mass genocide, destruction of cultures and worldviews. The creative human self now remains predisposed with the activation of low-grade mental illness. depression, anxiety and trauma. Tagore’s ‘creative self’ with a magisterial rebuke had always protested the prevalent dominant theories of violence and counter- violence down the time line. His philosophical vision intertwined with the humane self of ‘being’ instead of ‘becoming’ counterpoises this ‘creative enigma’ of scientific and material human progression even to this day. Standing on the threshold of the 21st century we earnestly look forward to reminiscence Tagore’s vision of Concord (milan) nurturing the “living bonds in a society” and brewing Harmony (samanjaysya) as the “wholeness and wholesomeness of human ideals” to provide a remedy for re-thinking the possibilities of “One World” (my italics) defined in terms of ‘becoming’ instead of ‘humane -being’.

Immigration issues in tamil nathi mythology

Created by various human groups, caste, language and race are the forces that divide humanity. Although the above elements are meant to identify people who are divided into groups, when a serious tendency is expressed over them, they become inclined to impose self-drive and power among other ethnic and linguistic peoples, disrupting the unity of the country. Sri Lanka's chauvinist environment is evident that the oppression and suppression of people on the grounds of race and language can lead to human destruction. The creators of Eelam proclaim the vigour of racism that has killed tens of thousands of people to international nations through their writings. Thus, Thamizhnathy, the birthplace of Eelam, has conceived in his works the communal tendency that is being played out on the soil, the oppression of the Tamil people and the tragedy of migration. The purpose of this article is to examine the migration issues in his collection of poems, 'kalam uraintha sattagam'.

O POJMU I RAZVOJU UNUTRAŠNJEG AUTORITETA

The problems of relations of authority and power, authority and violence, authority and security in today's world point to the need to continually write about and discuss the authority. The paper proceeds from the ontological understanding of authority as a voluntary activity that is done because the actor believes the other person will watch their activity with approval. After that the results of research on the relationship of authority and obedience are problematized, and the question is raised about reasons for rejecting obedience. The difference of internal and external authorities is introduced and then analysed the emergence and development of the internal authority according to psychoanalytic theories. It turns out that the internal authority is attached to the inner true being of man and is based on caring for other people. Development of internal authority can set us free of coercion of outside authorities and help in coping and fight against human destructiveness.

Vampire apocalypse and the evolutionary sublime: the ‘End of Days’ in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful

ABSTRACT Supernatural narratives sustain popularity partly due to the way they speak to threats, such as the idea that the appearance of the monster heralds the inevitability of large–scale human destruction or transformation. The theme of apocalypse has become increasingly prevalent in popular culture, widely rehearsed in Anglo–American television horror since the 9/11 attack on New York City – with its concomitant sense of vulnerability amongst Western nations and growing ethos of social and political extremity. In the third season of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky), Christian Camargo portrays the all–powerful vampire, Dracula, disguised as a charming museum curator, who entrances the female lead, Vanessa Ives, with his terrifying vision of an evolutionary ‘end of days’ (S3:E6). Vanessa’s struggle to resist the compulsion of Dracula’s fatalistic embrace speaks to issues of pressing immediacy in our own time, including the ambiguities of human agency in the face of a transfigured world. This paper will interrogate the theme of compulsive apocalypse and the sublime in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.