Tragic Demise Research Articles

Examining Singapore’s State Responsibility in International Law Perspective for the Death of David Hartanto: A Case Study of an Indonesian Citizen in Singapore's Territorial Territory

This paper delves into the complex legal and ethical dimensions surrounding the death of David Hartanto, an Indonesian citizen, within the territorial boundaries of Singapore. Hartanto's tragic demise sparked significant attention and debate, raising questions about Singapore's obligations under international law regarding the protection of foreign nationals within its jurisdiction. Drawing upon legal principles, case law, and relevant international agreements, this study scrutinizes Singapore's state responsibility concerning the death of Hartanto. It analyzes the circumstances leading to his demise, investigates potential breaches of legal obligations by Singaporean authorities, and evaluates the adequacy of the legal frameworks governing the protection of foreign nationals. Moreover, the paper explores the broader implications of this case for diplomatic relations, human rights protections, and the rule of law in the context of transnational incidents involving state responsibility. By critically examining the Hartanto case, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of state sovereignty, human rights, and international legal obligations, offering insights into avenues for enhancing accountability and ensuring the protection of individuals irrespective of their nationality within a state’s territorial jurisdiction.

Representation of Humiliation in Bengali Dalit Literature: A Comparative Study

This article proposes to develop a comparatist framework of pan-Indian Dalit writings on one hand and the representative Bengali Dalit writings on the other in the context of the experience of humiliation. The chief objective of this comparison would be a close reading of the treatment of the experience of humiliation, along with its claims and contexts, in both literary traditions. Cutting across the literary genres, the main argument of this article will be to show the qualitative difference in the perception of humiliation in Dalit literary expressions and a resultant realization that Bengali Dalit experience somehow falls short of depicting the intensity of insult abundantly manifest in Marathi and other Dalit writings. Throughout the scope of this article, various factors responsible for such low decibel representation of humiliation will be taken up for detailed study with frequent references to past and present Dalit authors and their most representative studies. Another abiding engagement with the issue of humiliation, vis-a-vis the tragic demise of Chuni Kotal, will lead to questions about the muted presence of the community experience of humiliation by the erstwhile Criminal Tribe, Lodha Savar, in contemporary Bengali Dalit writings.

REVOLUTIONARY POETRY OF ZEMGALIEŠU BIRUTA

The article offers an insight into the connection of the writer Zemgaliešu Biruta with revolutionary activity and references to this activity in different sources. Around the year 1905 Zemgaliešu Biruta was among the enthusiasts of the revolution. Her contribution was a translation of the essay of the Austrian social theorist and juridical expert Anton Menger “Anarchism” from German to Latvian. There are three main motifs in her creative work. One of them is her poetry texts inspired by the spirit of the time and marked by revolutionary enthusiasm. Her poetry embodies the spirit of protest, dissatisfaction with the ruling order, and an inclination to break free. The woman is frequently in the centre of the poetry: she is the one who expresses the spirit of protest; she is a passionate and brave fighter. Although there is no particular record of Zemgaliešu Biruta as a revolutionary who had been assigned to carry out secret tasks, there is a reason to believe that she had a close connection with the events of 1905–1906. It is known that the writer and the revolutionaries had strong ties: she helped to spread flyers and revolutionary literature, took part in secret gatherings and debates, she also left the territory of Latvia together with the revolutionaries when the government reaction against revolution took place. Zemgaliešu Biruta’s enigmatic course of life and her tragic demise is closely connected with the revolutionary atmosphere and events of the age: her contact with the revolutionaries served as a reason for her arrest. In a flat in Lielā Ņevas Street where Zemgaliešu Biruta also used to live, an explosive was found which was intended for the assassination of the governor general. Even though the real role of Zemgaliešu Biruta in revolutionary activity during the time of 1905–1906 cannot be fully established, and no direct written records have been preserved about her contribution to the revolutionary activities, the recollections book of the writer Jānis Akuraters “Dienu atspīdumi” (“Reflections of the Days”) allows me to draw a conclusion that she was one of the rare Latvian women revolutionaries of the time who had a deeper conviction about different ideas to transform the society, etc.

“Dangerous conceits”: Racial Bodies and Microaggression in Shakespeare’s Othello

Many scholars read Othello, written during England's entrance onto the global stage as a colonial power, as Shakespeare’s reflection upon the increasingly diverse population of England and the rise of a modern conception of race and racism. While conceptions of race and racism shift with culture, Othello is positioned at the inception of racism and systems of oppression that are still at work today. Similarly, subtle racial slights towards Othello mirror what Professor Chester Pierce first termed as microaggressions. Drawing on Kevin Nadal's clinical research and the poetry of Claudia Rankine that details the bodily experience of microaggressions, I argue that the barrage of subtle and explicit racism that Othello experiences provides context for what at first appears to be an unbelievably quick turn against Desdemona. Othello’s tragic demise, rather than resulting from an individual character flaw, demonstrates the devastating and accumulated impact of microaggressions on racialized bodies and their collective function within a system of oppression.

Russia invaded by Germans A story of a literary sensation

The article is concerned with the literary history behind the anonymous brochure entitled La Russie Envahie par les Allemands, which appeared at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1844 and quickly became a sensation in Russia and Europe alike. Its author, a former member of the Arzamas Society Filipp Vigel (Weigel), had fallen under the spell of the Slavophiles. The brochure served as the first manifesto and the first attempt at a historical-philosophical justification of the anti-German sentiment espoused by the majority of the Russian elite during the reign of Nicholas I. The book’s publication is examined in the context of the rivalry between the Ministry of the Interior (where Vigel held an office from 1829 to 1840) and the Third Department, believed to be a stronghold of the German party, and the rising Pan-Slavism in Europe, whose principal champions were in correspondence with Vigel. In addition, the article considers the connection between the brochure’s fragment describing Pushkin’s death and the anonymous anti-German letters received by V. Zhukovsky and Count A. Orlov upon the poet’s tragic demise.

Global 1968 in Egypt: Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Farag and the Disarticulation of Area Studies

Abstract This article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s novel Farag as an afterlife of the global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist political culture of 1968. I argue that Farag entangles post-1968 Egypt and France from a position of decentered interlocality, which places the histories of Egypt’s 1970s student movement and France’s Third-World-Marxist left in critical dialogue. At a time when the Egyptian left was paralyzed by state co-optation, the political awakening of the novel’s protagonist, Nadā, is fostered by her exposure to the independent left of 1968 France. After she is imprisoned in Egypt several years later for participating in the student movement, however, Nadā must reckon with the incongruities of her postcolonial experience and interrogate French theory’s Eurocentric claim to universality. Thereafter, ʿĀshūr’s novel charts the tragic demise of the radical left across the Global South through the declining parallel figures of Nadā’s French mother and two Egyptian student movement leaders.

When the Utopian Impulse “Fails”: Queer Spatialities of Traumatic Cultural Memory in Randall Kenan’s “A Visitation of Spirits”

Adopting a Utopian Studies perspective, this essay maps the ways in which the cultural memory of slavery underlies the conflicts and their attempted negotiations in Randall Kenan’s "A Visitation of Spirits" (1989). The central dilemma in the novel is the irredeemable divide between same-sex desire and patriarchal heteronormativity, the roots of which reside in the demeaning definitions of African American sexuality established during slavery, perpetuated in its aftermaths, and transmitted through generations via cultural memory. This problematic position is what Horace, an African American teenager, struggles with in his Black southern community. This conflict is understood as an ideological closure that the narrative seeks to open up and resolve by generating a Queer utopian impulse, a desire to imagine alternative futures to the oppressive status quo. This becomes visible particularly in terms of spatiality, as Horace revisits the central places of his life, where the heteronormativity of the community and the underlying traumatic cultural memory of slavery intertwine with Horace’s personal memories and same-sex desire. While the novel envisions the ways in which Horace’s Queer presence disrupts the heteronormative order and seeks to assert agency, his tragic demise facilitates a consideration of the limits of oppressive social and cultural structures and of the possibility of envisioning alternatives to the status quo. The utopian impulse offers merely fleeting glimpses of the horizon of alternative futures through moments of resistance and belonging that fail to make a lasting impact. Despite this failure within the world of the novel, the text becomes a significant literary intervention that has played a role in calling attention to the problems faced by nonnormative sexualities and underlying the rise of Black Queer Studies.

Preface

PREFACEThe “Victor Villanueva Memorial Meeting” to pay homage to our friend and colleague Victor Manuel Villanueva Sandoval was held at the premises of the Institute of Physics and Mathematics, University of Michoacán in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, on December 6, 2013, about 3 months after his tragic demise. This gathering was attended by his close friends, family, collaborators, colleagues and students. Several of those who could not physically be present for this commemorative gathering sent their messages of condolence and/or scientific contributions for this proceedings volume for which we are immensely grateful.The meeting started with personal recollections by Victor’s wife Ana Rosa Tenorio Lúa and his sisters Alejandra and Gabriela Villanueva. His daughters Ana Paola, Daniela and Mariana were also present to grace the solemn occasion and later provided us with their heart-felt messages. The academic part of the meeting started with Adnan Bashir presenting a summary of Victor’s scientific life, his research and its impact.Research talks were then presented by Luis Villaseñor (Ultra energetic cosmic rays - recent results), Mauro Napsuciale (A formalism for higher spins based on parity), Christian Schubert (Amplitudes with many photons in QED), Naser Ahmadiniaz (Amplitudes with gluons in a string inspired formalism), Carlos Vaquera (Second order fermions and renormalization) and Adnan Bashir (Strong interactions - peculiarities and challenges). There were several potential and interested speakers who were unable to physically attend the meeting but, as we have mentioned before, agreed to send their contribution for the proceedings volume at a later date. They are Dmitry Antonov (University of Lisboa, Portugal), Fiorenzo Bastianelli and Roberto Bonezzi (University of Bologna and INFN, Italy), Olindo Corradini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy), Pietro Dall’Olio (University of Michoacán, Mexico), Jan Govaerts (Université Catholique de Louvian, Belgium), Emanuele Latini (University of Zurich, Switzerland), Khaled Hassan Ould-Lahoucie (University Ferhat Abbas of Setif, Algeria), Eckehard Mielke (Metropolitan Autonomous University of Iztapalapa, Mexico), Néstor Ortiz, Olivier Sarbach and Thomas Zannias (University of Michoacán, Mexico).We are very grateful to the director Ricardo Becerril and personnel of the Institute of Physics and Mathematics, University of Michoacán, who ensured a smooth and pleasant organization of the meeting. We offer our special thanks to Itzel Alvarez who prepared a beautiful poster to announce the meeting. She also organized the personal part of the material for the proceedings in an outstanding manner.Finally, we would like this meeting and the proceedings volume to serve as a token of our appreciation and admiration for our friend Victor Villanueva. We also hope it serves as an inspiration for Victor’s students and his daughters Paola, Daniela and Mariana to follow in his footsteps and attempt to reach the stars.Adnan BashirChristian Schubert

Roman Tribune Cola di Rienzo (1347), Res Gestae Divi Augusti and Lex de Imperio Vespasiani

The anonymous and fragmentarily preserved Romance-dialect Chronicle describing the history of Rome in 1325–1360, the extensive correspondence between Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354) and rulers, nobles, Church dignitaries, and intellectuals (especially Petrarch) in Italy and abroad, as well as various documentary sources allow us to trace Rienzo’s career in considerable detail. A papal notary, a scholar in Classical literature, an exceptional orator and a copyist and translator of Ancient Roman inscriptions, Rienzo, aided by a group of followers, overthrew the baron rule in Rome in May 1347, assumed the title of ‘Roman Tribune’ and seized power with the aim of reuniting Italy under a common emperor, a concept modelled on the first Roman emperor, Augustus. After undertaking a number of more or less successful measures, public manifestations and diplomatic activities, he was forced to retreat by a clash with the barons’ army even before the end of the year. After years of exile, he returned triumphant in the middle of 1354 to seize power, but the first few weeks of tyranny and arbitrary measures led to his tragic demise at the hands of an infuriated mob. Later he grew into the subject of myth, portrayed in numerous literary, musical, and dramatic adaptations. The present paper examines two ancient documents crucial to the formation of the principate (the renewal of which was Cola’s objective), i.e. Augustus’ account of his own deeds (Res gestae divi Augusti), which is mentioned by Suetonius and known from three epigraphically attested copies from Asia Minor, and a bronze plaque bearing a law on the conferment of powers on Emperor Vespasian, the so-called Lex de imperio Vespasiani. The plaque was used as propaganda by Cola during his preparations for the coup. The inconsistencies between the parts of the law preserved on the plaque (it must have been preceded by at least one other plaque) and the account of Cola’s interpretation as given in the anonymous Chronicle raise a number of questions, which resist definitive answers.

English

Arthur Miller's, Death of a Salesman seems to have lost some ground to its once established position as many critics of late downplayed the demise of its protagonist Willy Loman by inscribing the causes of his death on 'narcissism' and excessive self-importance other than delving into the deeper causes behind his tormented and isolated private life. However, the author argues that Willy's life gets systematically shattered and crippled by his careless and cruel society fuelled by 'capitalist ideology' underlying the so called American dream. His death is extremely significant and current as present day self-harm and suicide rates unfailingly reverberate with the tragic demise of Willy. Though Willy's obsession with success, in disguise, puzzles the critics as conceited hubris his refusal of Charley's job offer strongly testifies to the unceasing resentment he holds towards capitalist workers. This paper rejects 'narcissism' as to be the major cause of his self-committed suicide and rightly points the self-termination, caused by the life-circumstances, to 'capitalist American dream'. Finally, it validates the transformation of his vengeance into his self-destruction that still reverberates with self-harm and self-destruction committed by men and women today.   Key words: Narcissism, capitalism, American dream, self- committed suicides, psychopathy.

Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent: Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism

Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent:Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism Jeffrey Zamostny On March 25, 1913, the Spanish writer Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent published the short novel La primera de abono in the kiosk literary collection El Libro Popular. Mobilizing Hoyos's signature blend of folkloric costumbrismo and cosmopolitan Decadence, the narrative recounts the tragic demise of a love affair between an amateur bullfighter and a famous dancer. On February 12, 1915, Hoyos republished the text under the title La zarpa de la esfinge in another short novel collection, Los Contemporáneos. Apart from some small revisions and typographical corrections, the rebaptized text features a new dedication to the modern dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia as well as fourteen new portraits of Tórtola by renowned painters and illustrators. La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge contain nearly identical texts, but the latter novel's paratexts contribute new meaning by encouraging readers to associate the female protagonist with Tórtola, a prominent dancer in Spain at the time. Not coincidentally, Tórtola was at the height of her celebrity when La zarpa de la esfinge hit kiosks in 1915. On the one hand, the republication of La primera de abono followed standard practice in kiosk novel collections such as El Libro Popular and Los Contemporáneos. As we shall see, prolific contributors often resorted to dubious means of churning out novels, not least of which was to publish the same text multiple times under different titles. The editorial paratexts of La zarpa de la esfinge give no indication that the text had been published previously as La primera de abono. Moreover, [End Page 297] Hoyos discussed the later novel without acknowledging its origin, making way for early reviewers to present it as an original work.1 On the other hand, the circumstances surrounding the transformation of La primera de abono into La zarpa de la esfinge make this case of self-plagiarism into something more than a commercially motivated ruse. The paratexts of the latter publication do not simply package the text in new trappings; rather, they modify its meaning to the point that La zarpa de la esfinge is a significantly different novel. This article analyzes the variations between La primera de abono and La zarpa de la esfinge while situating the novels in a larger textual corpus that attests to the long-term friendship between Hoyos and Tórtola and their mutual desire for celebrity. The aim is to elucidate the possible motivations behind the recycling of La primera de abono as well as the aesthetic and sociocultural effects of its metamorphosis into La zarpa de la esfinge. Together, the two novels furnish a fascinating case study into the intimate relationship between kiosk literature and celebrity in the context of two important novelistic subgenres of Silver Age Spain, the novela taurina and the roman à clef. Hoyos and Tórtola, Celebrities Hoyos and Tórtola rose to celebrity in Spain, especially in Madrid, in the years before and during World War I. By that time, the Spanish word celebridad had undergone a shift in meaning to a definition that remains recognizable today. Noël Valis notes that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this word applied to individuals who were celebrated for their virtue, heroism, or noble lineage. With the growth of commercial print culture and the decline of the aristocracy in the late nineteenth century, new usages began to shed these previous meanings, such that modern celebrity referred less to accomplishment and high birth than to the generation of widespread attention by the nascent mass media (Valis 130–32). In this context, celebrity involves the "attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere," an attribution that may derive from the celebrity's "special talent or skill," but that may just as well hinge on scandal and sensationalism (Rojek 10, 18). As deft manipulators of celebrity culture, Hoyos and Tórtola drew attention to themselves by means of their art, their unconventional public personae, and their [End Page 298] sustained engagement with mass cultural forms such as kiosk literary collections and illustrated magazines. Antonio de Hoyos y...

Musical Interludes in 1960s Mexican Melodrama: Crafting a Sonic Space of Exclusion

Musical Interludes in 1960s Mexican Melodrama:Crafting a Sonic Space of Exclusion Carolyn Fornoff This article examines how the musical interlude operates in Rumbo a Brasilia (No importa mi color) (1961) and Pecado de juventud (1962), two understudied Mexican melodramas concerned with racial and class discord. While Mexican domestic melodramas filmed in the sixties pared down the incorporation of musical numbers, these song and dance breaks remained a fundamental element of the melodrama genre. I argue that these films' musical numbers illuminate the changing narrative role of the obligatory sonic interlude. In both Rumbo and Pecado, spectatorship does not function to refold the alienated protagonist back into the collective fold of the listening group, but exacerbates their symbolic isolation. Outsiders looking in, these characters remain separate from the exuberant space of song and dance, able to listen but excluded from participation. Contemporary usage of the term "melodrama" invokes sensationalist theatrics, moral polarization, and emotional excess. Peter Brook's influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination, argued that this aesthetic of exaggeration functioned to transform the ordinary into something so entertaining that the audience would pay attention to the stakes of everyday life (10). In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theater, melodrama referred to the pairing of theatrical drama with musical accompaniment–melos, the Greek word for music. This structural coupling of narrative with music became central to early Hollywood and Latin American cinemas. Musical numbers interrupted the unfolding narrative in order to reinforce character development and emotional texture, or simply to entertain through tone and rhythm. While the centrality of music has largely died off in twenty-first century iterations of Latin American melodrama, in the twentieth century, diegetic music played a fundamental role in what Darlene Sadlier describes as the region's "populist mode par excellence" (15). [End Page 507] In Golden Age Mexican cinema, musical performances punctuated and reinforced narrative development; they revealed characters' intimate feelings and unexpressed emotions. Or alternatively, the musical interlude was non-narrative in function; it paused the plot to provide filmgoers the pleasure of experiencing familiar tunes by renowned performers, and strengthened the feeling of shared cultural ground, not only on-screen but off. It was a crucial diegetic space in which the audience's identification with national rhythms was consolidated. Ana López explains that while music is present across all genres of Mexican Golden Age cinema, it is always "deployed within melodramatic scenarios" (121). The melodrama rose to prominence in Mexico in the wake of the massive popularity of Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936). This film gave birth to the comedia ranchera, a genre that married identifiable icons of mexicanidad with romantic intrigue and exuberantly melodious performances of genres like the bolero, mariachi trio, and ranchera. Importantly, the musical interlude in the comedia ranchera codified these musical genres as indicators of national community. Interrupting the narrative diegesis, the breakout into song operated to "produce a sense of the cohesiveness of a community linked explicitly to national ethos," a way for the viewer to feel like they belonged within the screened musical exuberance of mexicanidad (López 126). As Desirée J. García notes in her analysis of Allá en el Rancho Grande, the songs performed on screen in folk musicals are not necessarily performed for the audience, but with them. The singer acts as the audience's emotional conduit; the performance is collective, and fosters a sense of homogeneity and togetherness (77). Musicality was not just confined to the cinematic setting of the rural hacienda in Golden Age Mexican cinema, but also flourished in films of the cabaretera or rumbera genre. Set in urban cabarets and starring a working-class prostitute or dancer, cabaretera films include artfully choreographed dance sequences that highlight the rumbera's costumes and rhythmic prowess. According to scholarship, the musical dance interlude functions in two ways. First, following Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro, as a way to compensate for holes in the plot (168). And second, as a vehicle for erotic expression at a time when most films were ideologically conservative. In contrast with these films' conservative messaging, exemplified through the heroine's inevitably tragic demise, Laura G. Gutiérrez argues that their musical numbers "fracture the...

The Savage Within

Heart of Darkness is often viewed as an allegory that relates the tragic demise of the colonists and the annihilation of the noble ideas they hold. In Heart of Darkness, the colonial theme is best examined through the fate of Kurtz, the protagonist of the novel who emerges from the surface of conventional European values as a man of varied talents and high culture. Equipped with moral ideas, Kurtz travelled to the Congo to campaign for noble ideals, yet having arrived in a primeval place, the uncivilised wilderness awakened his “brutal instincts” and “monstrous passion”. He submitted himself utterly to the temptation to “go native”, descending into a moral and physical state of degeneration. He is to become a savage man, consumed by the tangled and unforgiving jungle. The life and death of Kurtz in the wilderness helps to demonstrate that the treat of barbarism comes from indeed within civilisation itself. This paper thus seeks to examine the savage humanity by scrutinising Kurtz’s Mephistophelian transformation in the heart of darkness.

Contested Ruins: Nationalism, Emotions, and Archaeology at Armenian Ani, 1892–1918

The article analyzes the politics of archaeological research in late imperial Russia and addresses the problem of conflict and engagement between academic research, nationalist policies, and popular imagination. It tells the story of Nikolai Marr’s archaeological excavations in Armenia, and describes his attempts at de-heroicization and denationalization of the history of the city of Ani, a medieval capital of Armenia. The materiality of Ani’s history uncovered in the process of excavations attested to the cosmopolitan spirit of the city’s material culture. However, the epistemological principles of Marr’s work that defied the possibility of the “national” attribution of artifacts, and his interpretation of Ani’s “natural” rise and decay were out of tune with the dominant emotional atmosphere, as well as the popular narratives of the Christian Ani’s tragic demise after barbarian invasions. His scholarly position also contradicted the project’s reliance on the financial and political support of the Armenian community.

“Daytsh iz dokh Yidish:” Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son as Born-Translated Literature

What makes Sholem Aleichem’s story so interesting, apart from the fact that it evokes eerie associations with the plight of migrants in the present age, is that it chronicles the tragic demise of E ...

Preserving and Perpetuating Memory at the Musée Nissim de Camondo

This article investigates the complex layering of historical and memorial references at the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris as it has evolved from private residence to an increasingly open public museum. Built between 1911 and 1914 for an important collection of eighteenth-century furnishings and decorative arts, the house took on a commemorative function following the death of the founder’s son, Nissim, for whom the museum was named. Over the last century, through the vicissitudes of history, revised narrative priorities and changing approaches to museum presentation, this house-turned-museum has become a site of historical representation focused as much on the twentieth century and the Camondo family as on the period of its original inspiration. This article explores that transition, attending to the museum’s founding memorial goal in the wake of World War II, the tragic demise of the Camondo family, and shifting perspectives on French history.

¿Sacrificar al héroe para fundar nacionalismo? Clemencia, de Ignacio Manuel Altamirano

Clemencia (1869) presents a tragic resolution with the death of Fernando Valle, the novel's hero, depicted as patriotic, military, and moreno. The ending is problematic when considering the novel in terms of a narrative that constructs the nation-state (Doris Sommer) because there is no explanation for tragic demise of its exemplary citizen. A possible interpretation arises when Valle is considered a sacrificial victim (René Girard). The historical setting for the novel is a moment of crisis in Mexican history, a moment in which the distinctions between traitor and hero become unclear. Valle's death, analyzed from the perspective of Girardian sacrifice, is an act that reestablishes order in the community and contains the previously uncontained violence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Succeeding or Overcoming Father: Two Ideas on American Cities in Death of a Salesman and Fences

In this essay I illuminate two disparate but concurrent ideas on the American cities of 1940-50s reflected in the stories about father-son relationship, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and August Wilson’s Fences. The urban space appears as irrevocable reality in both texts, and it functions as the main reason for the tragic demise of fathers and the problematic father-son relationship. Nonetheless, the protagonists as well as their sons in each play react to the city space in a diametrically opposed way: Willy Loman eludes the city, but Troy Maxson indulges in it; Biff and Happy succeed their father, but Cory defies and overcomes his. This essay explains this difference stemming from the same urban condition through interdisciplinary study of literature and socio- historical research of the American cities of mid?twentieth century. I begin by textual analysis of each play, of which aim is to manifest the gap in the characters’ attitudes, and in expansion, the plays’ standpoint concerning cities. Then I move on to explore the history of urbanization in America, and the influences of its particular phases on the discordant perspectives on American cities. Accordingly, Jeffersonian agrarianism originating from the 19th century that still held negative stance on the city in the 20th century is discussed in relation to the birth and expansion of American cities, which is clearly reflected in Death of a Salesman. On the other hand, the appearance of naturalism to which social determinism was an intrinsic element is discussed in step with the American ghetto formed by massive influx of foreign and local immigrants, which is vividly depicted in Fences.

In memory of Ian Beecroft

The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS) mourns the loss of Ian Beecroft, Editorial Manager of the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EJCTS, 1996–2010). Ian died on Sunday, 2 September 2012, during one of his adventure trips white water kayaking the Tsrarap Chu in Ladakh, India. Shortly after the switch to Elsevier as publisher of EJCTS, I approached Ian Beecroft with a job offer to work for the journal, and he agreed to join us as Editorial Manager in 1996. Over the course of the next 14 years, his dedication and foresight went on to contribute greatly to the success of EJCTS, now a foremost journal in its field. He quickly reorganized the editorial office, introducing a precise filing and reminder system, effective not only for authors, but also for reviewers and editors. This streamlined the work and shortened the manuscript processing times. In light of the increasing workload for editorial staff, we decided to switch to an electronic system of manuscript submission and processing, a bold and—at that time—risky change. Ian made a careful study of the available electronic journal management systems, and—after the usual teething troubles had been overcome—we were able to switch completely to an electronic journal office in 1999. This made EJCTS the first journal in its field to embrace this pioneering platform, which is often taken for granted today. It was Ian's profound interest in this matter and his excellent knowledge of possibilities and pitfalls of electronic journal management that enabled us to make these changes without any major problems. Ian was deeply interested in the workings of CTSNet, which he saw as a key connection between the various journals and associations, and he attended all meetings of CTSNet editors during his tenure of office. Another significant contribution of his was the launch of the Interactive CardioVascular and Thoracic Surgery in September 2002. This interactive journal was a true novelty in its discipline, promising rapid publication and the possibility of entering into a discussion on article content. ICVTS was self-published by the EACTS at that time, but it was Ian Beecroft who was behind the success of this Herculean feat, outsourcing printing and typesetting to suppliers in Ireland, ultimately making this venture a financially viable one. Ian Beecroft was a meticulous, almost pedantic worker. During my daily visits to the editorial office, where I would hurriedly deal with manuscripts and all other related business before rushing back to the operating room, or to my rounds, he could be observed returning pencils and stacks of papers to their original location. Ian lived in Martigny, so we arranged a room for him in the vicinity of our office for his use during the working week. He preferred to travel by car, and I gave my parking spot outside the hospital, which, at that time, was prominently labelled ‘Director of Clinic for Cardiovascular Surgery’. Ian was in the kayaking business back then, and he used to travel in a dilapidated transporter, which he had modified to carry a large number of kayaks. This strange automobile obviously stood out among the more distinguished vehicles belonging to other clinic directors, raised many eyebrows and elicited several hesitant inquiries with my secretary about my changing interests. After leaving the EJCTS, Ian started a consulting business for scientific publishing, pursuing matters of scientific integrity and plagiarism. We kept in close contact and had lively exchanges on these matters, even shortly before his departure on his fateful last trip. EACTS is deeply indebted to Ian Beecroft, and all of us who have had the privilege to work with him are saddened by his tragic demise. Ian is survived by his wife Raphaelle and his children Neal, Gaelle and Jonathan, of whom he was so proud. EACTS expresses its sincere condolences to his family.