Sarah Moss Research Articles

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Taska brilliantly brings to the forefront the contradictions inherent in idealism, secrets, and nationality, showing the imminence of disaster that accompanies every pen stroke, every train ride, when one lives under the surveillance of a dictatorship. Ultimately, however, I must give the thrust of my credit as an anglophone reader to Christopher Moseley’s masterful translation . Through careful structuring and witty literalism, Moseley has made universal a story so inherently regional, and for that I cannot thank him enough. “One has to preserve form so that content doesn’t disappear forever,” gripes one character, but this book proves that neither need be sacrificed, blending form and content, bringing both across time and space to grip the hearts of modern readers. Linda Stack-Nelson University of Oklahoma Sarah Moss Ghost Wall New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 144 pages. Early in Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, the narrator , a smart seventeen-year-old named Silvie, recalls accompanying her father to a history museum near their home in northern England. A bitter man who abhors the modern world, Bill Hampton rhapsodized about an exhibition of Bronze Age artifacts. “That’s where you come from,” he told Silvie, “those folk, that’s how it used to be.” Unfortunately, Bill is consumed with the crackpot idea that his once-pure country has been sullied by immigration. He channels his rage and insecurities into historical reenactments, one of which is at the heart of Moss’s harrowing novel. The reenactment is meant to mimic life as it was lived 2,500 years ago, and so the participants—Bill, his wife, Alison, and their daughter, Silvie; an archaeology professor and a few of his students—are roughing it in a wooded area near the North Sea. They pick berries, gather mussels, and cook their meals over an open fire. Most everyone tries to keep the mood light, but Bill, a stickler and a sexist, criticizes the students’ store-bought tents and expects all involved to observe outmoded gender roles. Worse, when he sees Silvie bathing topless in a stream, he takes her aside and beats her with a belt. Inspired by an ancient tribe that was said to have built a defensive “ghost wall” out of human bones, the campers collect rabbit and sheep skulls, intent on constructing a small replica. The project awakens something primal in the male members of the group. Soon, the increasingly febrile men begin planning another primitive ritual, this one centered on a shocking act of misogyny. The author of a lauded memoir about living in Iceland, Moss writes beautifully about the natural world, and she’s incisive when discussing the dynamics that emerge among strangers in close quarters. But this is more than just a story about a horrifying misadventure in the woods. Moss has written a feminist parable for an era in which an American president promises to build an insuperable wall and Brexit-supporting Brits are erecting barriers between their country and the rest of Europe. An unflinching depiction of tribalism and sexism , Ghost Wall is an intelligent work of fiction, one in which a character’s baleful misunderstanding of the past helps explain our fraught present. Kevin Canfield New York Giorgio van Straten In Search of Lost Books:The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes Trans. Simon Carnell & Erica Segre. London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 130 pages. Giorgio van Straten’s day job as director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York seems to have been tailor-made for him. He is a public intellectual whose interests seem as wide-ranging and omnivorous as any true polymath. He has written books, translated the works of others, and serves as an editor. He is the author and presenter of the institute’s wonderful video series, “Il Novecento racconta il Novecento: Rubrica letteraria a cura di Giorgio van Straten,” a series of short editorials on Italian literature. His second and latest book to appear in English is the enchanting In Search of Lost Books in Review 86 WLT WINTER 2019 ...

A Counterexample to Three Imprecise Decision Theories

AbstractThere is currently much discussion about how decision making should proceed when an agent's degrees of belief are imprecise; represented by a set of probability functions. I show that decision rules recently discussed by Sarah Moss, Susanna Rinard and Rohan Sud all suffer from the same defect: they all struggle to rationalize diachronic ambiguity aversion. Since ambiguity aversion is among the motivations for imprecise credence, this suggests that the search for an adequate imprecise decision rule is not yet over.

Thinking through Thinking through Fiction: a round table

ABSTRACTThis paper takes a round table discussion of the ‘novel of ideas’, with Andrew Crumey, Sarah Moss, and Joanna Kavenna, as a starting point from which to consider some of the questions raised by the conference Thinking through Fiction as a whole; offering a conclusion to this selection of papers as well as an invitation to further contemplation.

Books: The Tidal Zone

Sarah Moss Granta, 2016 , PB, 336 pp, £7.49, 978-1783783076 I’ve always believed that doctors and medical students have much to learn from works of fiction, and here is a case in point. Sarah Moss has boldly adopted the first-person narrative voice of a stay-at-home father, Adam, who is married to workaholic GP Emma. They have two daughters, 8-year-old Rose and her 15-year-old sister Miriam. Miriam has had a few episodes of wheezing, but one day, on the playing field at school, she has a cardiac arrest, is resuscitated, and taken into hospital. The book explores the effect of this crisis and its aftermath on the whole family, emphasising the anguish of uncertainty. Adam is desperate to know what caused the incident, whether …

Sarah Moss: <i>Spilling the Beans. Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women’s Fiction, 1770–1830</i>

Sarah Moss: Spilling the Beans. Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women’s Fiction, 1770–1830: Manchester University Press, 2011; 202 pp., paperback; £15.99.

Counterfactual Discourse in Context

AbstractThe classic Lewis‐Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals captures that Sobel sequences are consistent sequences, for example: If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro dance. But reverse a sequence like this one and it no longer sounds so good, which is surprising on the classic semantics. This observation motivated Kai von Fintel (2001) and Thony Gillies (2007) to propose dynamic semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. Subsequently, Sarah Moss (2012) defended the classic semantics against the charge that it need be abandoned in the face of these order effects, arguing that the infelicity of the reverse sequences is pragmatic. I argue that both accounts are ultimately untenable, but each account has strengths. Seeing what works and what doesn't in each account points the way to the right positive view. With this in mind, I defend a contextualist account of counterfactuals that takes conversational relevance to play a central role.

Probabilistic Knowledge and Cognitive Ability

Sarah Moss (2013) argues that degrees of belief, or credences, can amount to knowledge in much the way that full beliefs can. This essay explores a new kind of objective Bayesianism designed to take us some way toward securing such knowledge-constituting credences, or “probabilistic knowledge.” Whatever else it takes for an agent's credences to amount to knowledge, their success, or accuracy, must be the product of cognitive ability or skill. The brand of Bayesianism developed here helps ensure this ability condition is satisfied. Cognitive ability, in turn, helps make credences valuable in other ways: it helps mitigate their dependence on epistemic luck, for example. What we end up with, at the end of the day, are credences that are particularly good candidates for constituting probabilistic knowledge. What's more, examining the character of these credences teaches us something important about what the pursuit of probabilistic knowledge demands from us. It does not demand that we give hypotheses equal treatment, by affording them equal credence. Rather, it demands that we give them equal consideration, by affording them an equal chance of being discovered.

BJGP Library: Bodies of Light and Signs For Lost Children

Bodies of Light Sarah Moss Granta, 2015, PB, 320 pp, £7.99, 978-1847089090 Signs for Lost Children Sarah Moss Granta, 2015, PB, 368 pp, £12.99, 978-1783781058 There’s a lot of rubbish written about work–life balance. The flawed assumption is that there is ‘work’ and there is ‘[family] life’, and the well-adjusted doctor keeps these cleanly separate. We all know it’s not like that. Difficulties with work colleagues or patients may be readily explained by what is going on at home (for us or them). More positively, events in the family (illness, hardship, a journey) can inspire a productive and fulfilling career in a particular medical specialty. This is the central theme in two recent novels set in the 1860s to 1880s, an era when British women were struggling to gain the right to learn and practise medicine. The UK’s first female medical graduate, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, qualified in 1865; although both the Society of Apothecaries and the British Medical Association promptly banned any further women from joining their ranks. It was not until 1876 that the new Medical Act …

Preface by the organizers

<p>The papers collected in this online volume were presented at the 24th Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory, North America’s foremost conference devoted to natural language semantics with relevance to linguistic theory. SALT 24 was hosted at New York University from May 30th to June 1st, 2014.</p><p>The four invited speakers were Emmanuel Chemla (ENS), Valentine Hacquard (Maryland), Lauri Karttunen (Stanford), and Sarah Moss (Michigan).</p><p>The conference featured 14 talks and 24 posters. They were selected from 246 submissions, based on 955 reviews by 187 reviewer colleagues, by the program committee, consisting of Chris Barker, Lucas Champollion, Simon Charlow, Salvador Mascarenhas, Philippe Schlenker, and Anna Szabolcsi.</p><p>Not all presenters have submitted papers to this volume. For the full program, with abstracts, slides, handouts, and posters for download, see <a href="http://nyu.edu/salt2014">nyu.edu/salt2014</a>.</p><p>115 people registered for the conference, and audiences over the three days held steady at just under 100. We gratefully thank our graduate students, department chairs Chris Barker and Alec Marantz, and Deans Michael Laver and Thomas J. Carew for their help, which made this conference possible.</p><p>The lead editor for this volume is Todd Snider, and his fellow editors at the Cornell Linguistics Circle are Sarah D’Antonio and Mia Wiegand.</p><p>Starting with this year, the SALT proceedings are no longer using eLanguage to host them and are moving to a differently branded server based on Open Journal Systems. As was the case for previous proceedings, this volume is released online for free. Both platforms are hosted by the Linguistic Society of America, whose support we gratefully acknowledge.</p><p> </p><p>Lucas Champollion and Anna Szabolcsi</p><p>for the organizing team</p>

Supervenience Arguments and Normative Non‐naturalism

Descriptive properties, for Jackson, are just properties which can be expressed with descriptive language—that is, with language that includes no normative vocabulary such as ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘reason’, etc.1 Descriptivism thus implies that every normative property can be expressed using descriptive vocabulary only. (We will return in §2 to the question of why, according to Jackson et al., Descriptivism is supposed to be true.) Most parties to the debate—both those friendly to Jackson’s argument and those concerned to resist it—are willing to grant at the outset that if Descriptivism is true, then the traditional non-naturalist views about the normative found in Moore (1903) and elsewhere are false. Non-naturalism is true, in other words, only if Descriptivism is false.2 Let us label this thesis Implication: ∗Thanks to Campbell Brown, James Dreier, Allan Gibbard, Ishani Maitra, David Manley, Sarah Moss, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Bart Struemer, and Brian Weatherson for helpful discussion of the various issues covered in this paper. 1Jackson (1998, 113, 117). Gibbard (2003, 99) draws the same distinction using the term ‘natural’, stipulating that supernatural, mathematical and psychological properties count as “natural” in the relevant sense. Brown (2011) doesn’t explicitly accept the same definition of ‘descriptive property’, presumably on the grounds that his version of the argument is supposed to avoid the “linguistic detour” present in Jackson’s. He doesn’t, however, offer an alternative characterization of the notion. I will not try to settle this question for Brown; but it should be clear that the points I make against Jackson’s argument should apply mutatis mutandis to Brown’s version if he were to accept the same characterization of what descriptive properties are. 2In addition to Brown (2011) and Streumer (2008), Shafer-Landau (2003, 94 ff.), Fitzpatrick (2008, 199), Shafer-Landau (2003), Suikkanen (2010), and Schmitt & Schroeder (2011, 146-7) all raise questions about a different premise in Jackson’s argument. For more discussion, see §§56 below.

Review ofScott's last biscuit: the literature of polar exploration, by Sarah Moss

Fifty years ago, George Bass revolutionized maritime archaeology with the observation that it was far simpler to train an archaeologist to be a scuba diver than it was to turn a scuba diver into an underwater archaeologist. One is tempted to make a similar observation about literary theorists writing polar history while reading this interesting volume. It is not that scuba divers cannot perform underwater archaeology; it is just that one set of skills cannot be learned nearly as quickly as the other.

Review of Scott’s last biscuit: the literature of polar exploration, by Sarah Moss

Fifty years ago, George Bass revolutionized maritime archaeology with the observation that it was far simpler to train an archaeologist to be a scuba diver than it was to turn a scuba diver into an underwater archaeologist. One is tempted to make a similar observation about literary theorists writing polar history while reading this interesting volume. It is not that scuba divers cannot perform underwater archaeology; it is just that one set of skills cannot be learned nearly as quickly as the other.