Idiosyncratic Vision Research Articles

Exploring Heteronormativity and the Illusion of the “Real Man”: A Case Study of Sivuyile (Siv) Ngesi

ABSTRACT In this paper, we aim to explore public reactions to non-normative expressions of masculinity within South African society. We argue that although society has become more accepting of such expressions, there still exists public criticism and heteronormative labelling of sexuality and gender. The case study of a local entertainment celebrity, Sivuyile Ngesi, is used to interrogate the illusion of the “real man” and the construction of heteronormative masculinities in the South African context. Ngesi’s personal portrayal of his masculine identity is unconventional and provides an example of an atypical expression of a Black African heterosexual identity. In the paper we draw on a range of local media sources, as well as an in-depth interview with Ngesi himself, to discuss an idiosyncratic vision of an alternative Black African masculine identity and the realities and implications around it.

Talking Modernism: Donald Hall’s Paris Review Interviews

GEORGE PLIMPTON, critic and socialite, set up The Paris Review in 1953 with a characteristically idiosyncratic vision: to produce ‘eclectic excellence’.1 Its editors followed the numerous little magazines piloted by modernist writers. Many of these thrived on undercutting a new mass media which was funded by advertising and an increasingly commercialised publishing industry. But in establishing their radical political agendas or promoting their high cultural values, modernists also used new technology and brand identity to create their own closely guarded hierarchies of influence. The Review, being somewhat late to the game, benefited from this legacy, which helped to produce its widest popular and critical export, its interview series ‘The Writer at Work’. The format played on media, celebrity, and journalism to reach a wider audience than the magazine’s new writing in poetry and fiction might otherwise have been able to. ‘The Art of Poetry’, ‘The Art of Fiction’, ‘The Art of Criticism’, as the interviews were organised (among other categories), were about writing as much as the writer. How do writers write, where do they write best, do they write on paper, with a typewriter, or with the aid of an assistant? The questions, asked by a writer or critic knowledgeable about the interviewee’s work, established a tone of mutual respect for craft and professionalism while exploring the primal material and social scenes of writing. This attention to the creative process helped to establish the magazine’s overall commitment to the business of writing. More significantly, it also reinvented what the literary interview meant for readers, writers, and critics.

GANDHIJI’S PHILOPSHY OF HEALTH: TRADITIONAL MEDICINES, FASTS AND DIETARY CHANGES

No single person is more directly associated with India and India’s struggle for independence than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. His name has become alternative to the struggle for human equality, dignity and freedom. There is no match for Gandhi in sensualizing the temperament of Indians during colonial period and formulating freedom strategies accordingly. Highly versatile as he was, he influenced every aspect of Indian life including social, economic as well as cultural. By his observation and experiments with various strands of life, he developed his idiosyncratic vision about various spheres of human life. One of these visions was about human health including diseases, medicines and therapies. He conveyed this vision through the medium of his writings including his autobiography, letters and various books. His Views on diseases – Physical, mental and social, reasons of illness, remedies including fasts, dietary changes and uses of natural substances as well as on various medicinal systems are as relevant in today’s life as are his politico-social ideas. Gandhi’s guide to health needs to be emphasized much more than it has been by researchers to reap its maximum benefits.

What Drives the Use of Dual-Class Structures in Technology IPOs?

This paper contributes to the longstanding and escalating debate over the use of dual-class structure in initial public offerings (IPOs) by introducing a novel measurement to analyze factors influencing technology-based firms in their decision to employ a dual-class structure. Using media coverage of firms’ founders prior to their IPO as a proxy for their idiosyncratic vision, this paper’s first and primary finding indicates that idiosyncratic vision strongly predicts the use of dual-class structure among technology-based firms. Further analysis shows that the effect of media coverage as a proxy for a founder’s idiosyncratic vision differs according to a firm’s state of incorporation, such that idiosyncratic vision is of greater importance for firms incorporated outside of the state of Delaware. While exploring possible explanations for this striking finding, this analysis also highlights certain costs associated with the penalties and obstructions institutional investors impose to discourage divergence from a single-class, one-share, one-vote structure.

A review of the literature on dual-class firms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically review the relevant literature from the perspective of dual-class firms and to provide suggestions for future research on dual-class firms, and on methodological issues that should be addressed in such research.Design/methodology/approachThe research design consists of three parts: an introduction to dual-class firms (motivations for; firm life cycle effects) in Part 1; concerns with firms with such share class structures (valuation; governance; accounting and corporate policy issues) in Part 2; and some solutions or ways to accommodate the trade-offs involved with such share class structures (retention arguments; index/exchange exclusions; contractual provisions; external monitoring) in Part 3. Throughout the paper, the authors provide some critiques of existing studies, particularly from a methodological perspective, the authors’ opinion on the state of the literature and suggestions for future areas of research.FindingsWhile motivations for the use of dual-class voting structures include flexibility so that the idiosyncratic vision of their entrepreneurs/founders can be pursued in a less encumbered fashion, greater innovation and long-term managerial orientation, there are many possible costs (e.g. underinvestment and managerial entrenchment) to this ownership structure. Nevertheless, the authors believe that such firms should have provisions in place that facilitate a reversion to a single-class structure longer term when such firms have become more mature, less dependent on the idiosyncratic vision of the entrepreneurs/founders at IPO and have attracted more managerial talent.Originality/valueThe literature arrives at no consensus on the benefits/drawbacks of this type of share ownership structure which means that many topics of research require further academic examination. The authors provide suggested directions for such future enquiries.

Corporate Control and the Limits of Judicial Review

Companies with a dual-class structure have increasingly been involved in high-profile battles over the reallocation of control rights. Google, for instance, sought to entrench its founders’ control over the corporation by recapitalizing from a dual-class into a triple-class structure. The CBS board, in contrast, attempted to dilute its controlling shareholder by distributing a voting-stock-dividend that would empower minority shareholders to block a merger it perceived to be harmful. These cases raise a fundamental question at the heart of corporate law: What is the proper judicial response to self-dealing claims regarding reallocations of corporate control rights? This Article shows that the reallocation of control rights raises an inevitable tradeoff between investors’ protection from agency costs and the controller’s ability to pursue its idiosyncratic vision, making the value of different allocations of control rights both firm-specific and individual-specific. It is thus inherently impossible to create objective valuation models for reallocation of control rights. The impossibility of creating reliable valuation models sets the limits of judicial review: The legal tools long used by Delaware courts to adjudicate conflicts over cash-flow rights, such as entire fairness review, are fundamentally incompatible with the adjudication of conflicts over reallocations of control rights. This Article explores the policy implications of this insight and suggests that courts treat reallocations of control rights as questions of charter interpretation as to who has the power to decide on reallocations of control rights, and avoid reviewing the discretion to use that power. Courts should enforce the decision of the parties as to reallocations of control rights and apply the business judgement rule where the charter is silent.

Il Mappamodello di Nanni Strada: “unire mondi differenti nelle fasi del progetto”

L’articolo intende riflettere sulla singolare visione dell’abito elaborata dalla designer di moda Nanni Strada nell’arco di una intera carriera a partire dal ruolo che la “decentralizzazione” del suo profiloautobiografico ha assunto nella narrazione di tale visione. L’articolo si propone inoltre di esplorare la serie di progetti indumentali raccolti nell’opera intitolata Mappamodello (pubblicata in Italia nel 2012) e come essi siano espressione plastica della vocazione di Strada a “unire mondi differen ti nelle fasi del progetto”.

“Ya soy mío:” Escarramán y la autonomía del arte en El rufián viudo llamado Trampagos

In El rufián viudo llamado Trampagos, Cervantes juxtaposes reality and fiction by means of the different referentialities embedded in the name and character of Escarramán, a literary ruffian whose popularity is mostly attributed to Quevedo. Cervantes's Escarramán is both a real person, a fellow ruffian to the characters inside the interlude, and a legendary figure who belongs to the literary world. Cervantes has often demonstrated the complex and porous mimetic fabric with which he weaves his texts, manifestly in his novel Don Quijote de la Mancha, as well as in his poetry. This article explores how Cervantes chooses the infamous genre of the entremés and a marginal character such as Escarramán as vehicles to ponder his own idiosyncratic vision of mimesis.

Few-Body Techniques Using Momentum Space for Bound and Continuum States

These notes were written for a set of three lectures given in a school at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in October/2017 before the workshop "Critical Stability of Quantum Few-Body Systems". These lectures are primarily dedicated to the students and represent a very idiosyncratic vision of the author, mainly in the last part of the text related to applications. These notes are only a tentative to show a technique, among many others, to solve problems in a very rich area of the contemporary physics - the Few-Body Physics - many times unknown by a considerable part of the students.

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy:Edgar Allan Poe's Ambitions for the American Short Story Wanlin Li* (bio) Edgar Allan Poe's significance as a short story writer has been duly noted by critics. The voluminous criticism his stories received (and continue to receive) attests to the widely acknowledged importance of the writer. However, in comparison with his individual works, Poe's devotion primarily to short story writing in his brief but very productive career has elicited far less attention. Critics sometimes refer to the market potential of the genre as a strong motivation,1 which is at least partly true, but we must take into account nonfinancial considerations as well. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain why Poe decided to stay with the genre when other contemporary short story writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, gradually shifted to novel writing. Nor does the market theory of Poe's genre choice adequately explain why Poe showed such unswerving commitment to the genre in theory, praising its aesthetic value at every turn. To answer these questions, we need to place Poe's creative and critical efforts with respect to short story writing in a larger transatlantic context, in which American writers felt compelled to justify the distinctiveness and independence of American literature. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that Poe embraced the idea of a national literature as eagerly as many renowned literary nationalists, but instead of advocating thematic localization, Poe supported formal innovation, and turned to the short story as the primary [End Page 164] medium through which he could achieve his individualized ambitions for American literature. Understanding Poe's idiosyncratic vision for American literature has consequences for interpreting his literary theories and practices. Poe's aesthetic theory emphasizes the unity of effect and proposes a compositional model characterized by strong authorial control as a means for achieving such unity. Specifically, in order to produce a premeditated effect on the reader, the author needs to orchestrate his or her narrative resources in perfect coordination and leave nothing to chance. This compositional model gives the author the greatest advantage when he/she operates in a short medium. As a result, it allows Poe to foreground the generic merits of the short story in comparison with its British rival, the serialized novel (see the last section for a more nuanced argument and analysis). The latter's discursiveness, in Poe's eyes, greatly undermines its aesthetic quality. Governed by a new aesthetics, the short story stands for a literary medium through which American literature can achieve generic distinction. Not surprisingly, Poe's own creative efforts were geared towards demonstrating the power of such an aesthetic model, namely, how a writer can craft his or her stories in particular ways to produce vivid effects on the reader. Among the various strategies Poe designed for this purpose, ambiguity seems to be a most unlikely (though not infrequent) choice, since ambiguity,2 referring to the coexistence of mutually exclusive meanings, seems, on the surface, to work against the unity of effect. But if we recognize Poe's underlying desire for control, we would realize that ambiguity actually works for Poe's purpose, since it strengthens authorial control by way of forcing the reader to grapple more with parallel interpretive possibilities. In other words, in cases of ambiguity, Poe seeks the unity of effect not at the level of stable meaning, but at the level of making the reader aware of instability. To illustrate how ambiguity works in specific contexts, I offer my readings of several of Poe's fantastic stories, including "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson," in analyses that foreground the irresolvable nature of their ambiguity, before I move on to interpret the significance of the ambiguity in relationship to Poe's aesthetic theory and his nationalistic ambition to outstrip British literature. My readings will hopefully bring an end to the efforts to resolve the apparent ambiguity in Poe's fantastic stories, as critics recognize how ambiguity serves the author's larger theoretical and historical goals. [End Page 165] The Irresolvable Ambiguity in "Ligeia" The ambiguity in "Ligeia" has been a source of continuing controversy in the critical history of...

"Ya soy mío:" Escarramán y la autonomía del arte en El rufián viudo llamado Trampagos

In El rufian viudo llamado Trampagos, Cervantes juxtaposes reality and fiction by means of the different referentialities embedded in the name and character of Escarraman, a literary ruffian whose popularity is mostly attributed to Quevedo. Cervantes's Escarraman is both a real person, a fellow ruffian to the characters inside the interlude, and a legendary figure who belongs to the literary world. Cervantes has often demonstrated the complex and porous mimetic fabric with which he weaves his texts, manifestly in his novel Don Quijote de la Mancha, as well as in his poetry. This article explores how Cervantes chooses the infamous genre of the entremes and a marginal character such as Escarraman as vehicles to ponder his own idiosyncratic vision of mimesis.

Cool Beats and Timely Accents

Cool Beats and Timely Accents

Concentrated Ownership Revisited: The Idiosyncratic Value of Corporate Control

This Article offers a novel theory of corporate control. It does so by shedding new light on corporate-ownership structures and challenging the prevailing model of controlling shareholders as essentially opportunistic actors who seek to reap private benefits at the expense of minority shareholders. Our core claim is that entrepreneurs value corporate control because it allows them to pursue their vision (i.e., any business strategy that the entrepreneur genuinely believes will produce an above-market rate of return) in the manner they see fit. We call the subjective value an entrepreneur attaches to her vision the entrepreneur’s idiosyncratic vision. Our framework identifies a fundamental tradeoff, stemming from asymmetric information and differences of opinion, between the entrepreneur’s pursuit of her idiosyncratic vision and investors’ need for protection against agency costs. Entrepreneurs and investors address this inevitable conflict through different ownership structures, each with different allocations of control and cash-flow rights.Concentrated ownership, therefore, should not be viewed as an unalloyed evil. To the contrary, it creates value for controlling and minority shareholders alike. Our analysis shows that controlling shareholders hold a control block to increase the pie’s size (pursue idiosyncratic vision) rather than to dictate the pie’s distribution (consume private benefits). Importantly, when the entrepreneur’s idiosyncratic vision is ultimately realized, the benefits will be distributed pro rata to all investors. Our framework provides important insights for investor protection and corporate law doctrine and policy. We argue that corporate law for publicly traded firms with controlling shareholders should balance the controller’s need to secure her idiosyncratic vision against the minority’s need for protection. While the existing corporate-law scholarship has focused solely on the protection of minority shareholders, we show that it is equally important to pay heed to the rights of the controlling shareholders.

Munisipal Darpan: imagining the embodied state and subaltern citizenship in 1890s Calcutta

This article interrogates the way in which the ‘state’ was imagined in Calcutta of the 1890s. Using a rare pamphlet of municipal sanitary propaganda written in the form of a drama, the article reveals a radically different vision of the state than the one available in the extant historiography. In this vernacular imagination of the state, the abstract institutional realities are recast as specific embodied hierarchies and exclusions. Since the text concerned was one intended for public propaganda, such a vision could neither be an idiosyncratic vision of an individual, nor could it be described as the ‘popular understanding’ of the state. Instead, as a piece of governmental propaganda that was presented as a drama, it had to be both the state's vision of itself and what it thought people usually thought it to be. The text thus becomes a window into what might be called a ‘vernacular state’, i.e. the state as it exists and sees itself existing in everyday contexts. The stark lines between ‘state’ and ‘society’ become blurred and reorganized in this vision of a vernacular state. The two key features that define the vernacular state are a simplified hierarchy of levels and its embodiment in bhadralok officials. The latter in turn signals a convergence between bhadralok authority and state interests and a consequent marginalization of subaltern citizens. Scholarly interest in the everydayness of the state is growing, but where this article seeks to add to that interest is by highlighting the issue of embodiment of the state's authority.

Understanding Joseph Heller

This is a critical survey of the complete body of work by the author of Catch-22. In this revised edition, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Heller's writings, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist. This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22; Now and Then, Heller's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and as Catch Can, a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.

Righting Sendak: The Psyche of Mother Goose

Righting Sendak:The Psyche of Mother Goose Anne Lundin (bio) Lucy Rollin . Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Study of Nursery Rhymes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. I have always been a bit peeved at Maurice Sendak for his disdain of Kate Greenaway's 1881 classic, Mother Goose; or, The Old Nursery Rhymes. I have a particular fondness for her work and a certain weakness for romanticized childhoods in English gardens. Sendak charged that Greenaway had no sense of the real spirit of Mother Goose and even accused her of initiating a whole school of sentimental Mother Goose collections. My indignation was somewhat lightened by reading Iona Opie and Peter Opie's I Saw Esau (illustrated by Sendak), in which the earthiness of rhymes evoked other than Greenaway images. Sendak's most recent book, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, reveals even further the psychic complexity of some of the familiar and less than familiar verse. Could he be right in his idiosyncratic vision of Mother Goose? My sensibilities have grown even further with this provocative critical study of nursery rhymes. I will never see Mother Goose in the same slant of light again. Lucy Rollin's Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Study of Nursery Rhymes explores different voices—the cultural as well as psychological meanings that shape the text of this early folk poetry, a rowdy street lore. Aware of a decided skepticism toward Freudian interpretation or, more specifically, of the idiosyncratic Bettelheim approach toward fairy tales, Rollin draws together the many voices of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, folklore studies, cultural history, and cultural anthropology to express meanings that lie deep within nursery verse. These meanings may be purposeful—intentional messages from [End Page 236] adult to child—as well as unconscious recordings of the human experience, its darkness and light. Much to her credit, Rollin is tempered in her approach toward the psychoanalysis of folk culture. She acknowledges the delicate nature of her research, the controversies within. As a feminist scholar, Rollin also acknowledges her own resistance to the sexism of the rhymes, as well as to the persistent attempts to alter them, prescriptively, toward modern gender standards. The author refers to a commentary on the hazards of psychoanalytic literary theory in Children's Literature "The Reproduction of Mother in Charlotte's Web" (vol. 18, 1990) and addresses the concerns for a more cultural approach. In this particular volume, various critics—such as Michael Steig, Jerry Phillips, Ian Wojcik-Andrews, U. C. Knoepflmacher, Patrick Horgan, and Jack Zipes—critique the application of absolutist Bettelheimian-Freudian assumptions and argue, instead, for more elastic, multiple perspectives. Rollin positions her work within a broad framework of social history and conjoins various interpretive disciplines. Moreover, revealing her own relation to the particular theory she has chosen, she describes the psychoanalytic approach as "a congenial and informative way of looking at human behavior and at literature" (xv). Rollin distinguishes her own approach as a departure from classical Freudian concerns and toward object relations and ego psychology, which are only briefly defined in a sentence or two. Although I appreciate the author's nontechnical rhetoric, I would have appreciated a fuller explanation of these distinctions. She does articulate her own bent toward nursery rhymes to be their "containment of strong urges and the use of defensive and adaptive maneuvers in the service of maturation." Rollin shapes her cogent analysis around specific categories—animal rhymes, courtship and marriage rhymes, lullabies, and amusements—that examine nursery rhymes as a body of verse. Rollin observes a considerable amount of cruelty to animals, with an ambivalent strain of tenderness. Nature can be tamed, they seem to say. The romantic verse reveals a complex relationship between the sexes and a fear of womanly arts. The verse that accompanies holding and playing activities between adult and child is both gentle and rough and tumble. Thus follows cradle and all—rock-a-bye and then the fall. Rollin also examines the adaptation of verse, a kind of censoring and controlling process that is ongoing and all too contemporaneous. Whether the cause is ecological, fundamentalist, or gender free, many attempts have been made to purge the...

Law: The Decline of the People's Lawyer?

to Ivan Boesky's credo, He who owns the most when he dies, wins. In his diary, Service dissects the partner for whom he works, a lawyer of the older generation who has little stomach for the less attractive parts of the hostile-takeover business, such as rifling the rubbish-bins of target corporations in quest of dirt about their executives. Service, the New Man of the Eighties, writes this: He wants to be a leader of today's bar and at the same time reconcile his actions with a code of ethics for a desoeuvre society of nineteenthcentury aristocrats. And obviously it's not going to work. Obviously? Is today's bar really so different? Already in the 1963 Auchincloss novel Powers of Attorney we found associates going through each others' desks, reading the partners' correspondence files, backstabbing and apple-polishing, all in order to make partner. The scrambling associates of 1963 are the genteel senior partners of today. Perhaps it is in the nature of things that each generation thinks that its Younger Generation has fallen into moral decline; or perhaps Diary of a Yuppie is simply the idiosyncratic vision of Auchincloss.