True Originality Research Articles

An original approach to anomalies in intertemporal choices through functional data analysis: Theory and application for the study of Hikikomori syndrome

The pattern of intertemporal preferences is related to critical behavioural aspects involving individuals' emotional and cognitive spheres. The characteristics of the discount function can provide a quantitative interpretation of pathological conditions, such as addiction, depression, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In the literature on intertemporal preferences, researchers commonly refer to parametric models, which are often characterized by structural limitations, mainly when behavioral anomalies manifest in the dynamics of choices. This paper proposes using Functional Data Analysis (FDA) as an innovative tool to analyze discount functions' characteristics and interpret intertemporal choices' anomalies, overcoming the limits of a completely parametric approach. To show the potential of FDA in studying intertemporal decisions, this research proposes a novel methodology for dealing with discount functions and a possible application to the so-called Hikikomori condition. The latter is a social phenomenon that has recently raised concerns and claimed the need for in-depth studies. Although the application focuses on an original implementation of the functional analysis of variance approach to capture possible differences between groups of curves, the main novelty of the paper lies in the methodology for treating discount functions via FDA in the context of intertemporal choices.

Les Disparus de Daniel Mendelsohn et La Carte postale d’Anne Berest : deux succès aux antipodes

This study compares the success of two books written by descendants of Holocaust victims in France. With The Lost. A search for six of six million (2006) / Les Disparus (2007), Daniel Mendelsohn brought from the United States a new look at the Holocaust and a true originality in the restitution of this event. Fifteen years later, French writer Anne Berest’s La Carte postale (The Postcard) (2021) trivializes the model of third-generation family investigation that The Lost represented. The study first details the markers of success (sales, prices, reception in the media) which already indicate two very different target audiences, then – in a second part – compares these investigations which, despite some similarities, are differently narrated, Anne Berest even adopting on the essential the opposite positioning of Daniel Mendelsohn. Finally, the last part relies on readers’ opinions to verify and clarify the trivialization detailed in the second part.

INTEGRATION OF LEGAL AND MORAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF THE ACADEMIC INTEGRITY OF THE FUTURE MANAGER OF EDUCATION

This article examines a modern acute problem: the formation of academic integrity of future educational managers, who must not only learn the essence of the current laws of Ukraine regarding the protection of intellectual property and copyright during their studies in domestic specialized institutions of higher education. First of all, they must acquire a reputation, authority, even an aura of a kind of respectability of the image of a teacher-leader (a teacher is also for a team of colleagues, parents, and not only for pupils, students), which is important not only for themselves – as managers of pedagogical affairs, but also for pupils and students. – for your successful career. Therefore, they will have weight for valuable in science, because they are original, their author's possessions (as well as in high art) – material manifestations of individual imagination, so important from the point of view of authorship rights, intellectual property, and at the same time - from the point of view of morality: conscience, nobility , honesty, because all this integrally constitutes the true originality of the creative product, which is submitted to the review of the scientific and social public.
 Therefore, education of such personal traits can form a special kind of value competences of future managers of education – spiritual. And they will undoubtedly, over time, become characteristic not only of the most progressive educational and scientific community of Ukraine, but literally of the entire world.
 But the leitmotif of the article lies not in the utopian plane of ideal ideas about an ideal society, but in practical recommendations on methods of forming academic integrity in future educational managers. Thus, the assimilation by students of a whole series of laws of the current legislation of Ukraine on copyright and related to them, on copyright and protection of intellectual property should gradually, on education in the process of training and practice, be integrated in the minds of future managers, becoming a generator of the movement towards honest work for the good future generations.

ДЕТАЛИЗАЦИЯ КАК АСПЕКТ НАРРАТИВНОГО ПАЛИМПСЕСТА (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РОМАНА К. ЯРМЫШ "НЕВЕРОЯТНЫЕ ПРОИСШЕСТВИЯ В ЖЕНСКОЙ КАМЕРЕ № 3")

The application of the category of palimpsest in the theory of intertextuality makes it possible to distinguish between meaning-forming references to predecessor texts from random, optional echoes. According to G. Genette, the mental imposition of a new text on the classical one, an analysis of their similarities and differences, can make it possible to see their true originality. One of the structural levels, at which one can easily see the relationship between modern and long-known texts to the reader, is the level of detail. Repetitive details, in turn, form a system of motifs that is equally extended to the text and links it with other works. On the example of the novel by K. Yarmysh, we are convinced that certain details of the depicted world and the internal state of the characters are due not only to the choice of topic (in this case, the topic of imprisonment), but are important for understanding the meaning of the work bound to its appeal to the literary tradition. Among such details, the description of the interaction of female and male prisoners, the features of the prisoner’s perception of the free world and the world of the prison as at home stand out. Special attention is paid to the role of the external unity of the prisoner with others, combined with internal loneliness, as well as personal memories and the need to adapt to the restrictions imposed in order for the punishment to achieve its goal – correctional education. Everyday details and subtle touches of the spiritual life of a person who was imprisoned are organized into a system that firmly links Yarmysh’s novel with Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novel pages about being imprisoned.

Perspnages like Rustaveli’s in a biographical novel (Rostom Chkheidze’s ‘Son of music’, ‘Days of storm’- cronicle of Merab Kostava’s life)

In the article a summary account and ideological meaning in the title of the biographical novel and in general allusive style of Rostom Chkheidze’s biographical novels is underlined. The author is drawing a parallel between ‘ The Knight in the Panther’s Skin’ Tariel-Avtandil and Zviad-Merab, people of the 20-th century. (A real face of Avtandil-Tariel, their life style, knightly friendship is shown). By telling above mentioned novel in artistic and publicistic way the etimology each of the names is proved to make clear the research question, which leads to the main point. From the aesthetics of the title ‘Sons of music’ and ‘Days of storm’ the author links the way of Zviadi’s life to the highest art, eucharist and struggle against dictatorial regime, fight for the health of the nation’s conscious and soul. It is significant that documental materials in the novel are shown with amazing frankness. For true attitude, creativity and originality each passage is convincing. The reader shares the true friendship of these two special friends who managed to face the challenges in Georgia where the soviet darkness and arrogance of national movement was rising. Artistic peculiarity of the work is that it guides you to informatical awareness through the deep lays of literature, music, politics and tells you everything with refined sequence. It is the method chosen by Rostom Chkheidze. This thick book carries true knightly friendship of Merab Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia who where brought by fate on ruds of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia in Colchic tower. They were similar to Rustaveli’s personages, the way of struggling with evil was chosen by them in the same way.

The Ultimate Sanqu Song: Yao Shouzhong's “The Complaint of the Ox” and Its Place in Tanaka Kenji's Scholarship on Sanqu

Abstract Starting from a discussion of Yao Shouzhong's sanqu suite “The Complaint of the Ox,” in which the slaughtered animal lays its plaint before King Yama, this article calls attention to the scholarship on sanqu of the Japanese scholar Tanaka Kenji (1912–2002) of the 1950s and 1960s, which culminated in his 1969 article “Gendai sankyoku no kenkyū” (A Study of the Sanqu Songs of the Yuan Period). In this long and highly original article, Tanaka first traced the origin of sanqu back to the tradition of vernacular ci of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that resulted in the detailed description of daily life, including its less pleasant aspects. He next noted how sanqu, through impersonation, transformed the tradition of yongwu poetry by allowing the objects of description to speak in their own voice. Seeing the true originality of the genre in the combination of these two developments, Tanaka hailed Yao Shouzhong's work and some comparable texts as the genre's culminating achievement.

Analysis of the criteria of originality in projective methods in the study of talented and gifted individuals

Analysis of the criteria of originality in projective methods in the study of talented and gifted individuals. The study analyses the criterion of originality in projective diagnostic tests used for the assessment of creative and gifted persons. For the analysis, the tests of Torrance, Gilford, Wartegg, and the methodology of "Pictogram" were utilized. The concept of originality is assessed in all these projective methods. This concept, according to J. Gilford, is strongly related to the creativity of a person. The originality, according to the scientist, is the capability to find the non-standard solutions, which are different from most answers for the particular test task. Thus, this parameter is related to the capability to create the new ideas based on the standard stimuli, which is the basis of creativity. However, the true originality, as the ability to produce a new product, cannot be measured within the testing procedure. Thus, J. Gilford created the criterion of originality of projective tests as a statistical parameter. For different tests, the frequency of the solution, needed for describing it as original, can be different. Precisely, in Torrance’s test, the answer is considered original if it occurs in less than 5% of answers. In Gilford's test, the original solution was shown to be presented in less than then 2.5% cases. For the "Pictogram" methodology, the original answer occurs in less than 2%, and in Wartegg’s test – in less than 1%.
 When analysing the concept of originality, it is also necessary to ensure the adequacy of the proposed solution is also evaluated. A tested person can propose the answer to the test task that ignores the instruction or the essential characteristics of stimuli. In this case, such a variant of the solution of the problem will be original, as it occurs rarely. However, this solution does not appear to be adequate and it might not be related to the creativity of a person. Hence, original but adequate answers should be applied as indicators of the true creativity.
 Thus, the criterion of originality is a statistical one. To evaluate the originality of the answer, a researcher assesses the frequency of a particular result in the entire assessed group. This criterion in the significant way depends on the cultural code of the person as well as on the sample of the study. The same solution can be considered as original for one sample and standard, normative for another one. On the other hand, creativity of a person not always can be controlled and applied consciously. The creative process is frequently spontaneous. Therefore, the absence of the original solutions in the results of proactive tests does not necessarily mean the absence of creativity in a particular person. In such a rank, the criterion of originality can serve as an indicator of a non-standard process of thinking of an individual. However, the assessment of creativity and giftedness requires a comprehensive and individual approach.

Geografías regionales y metropolitanas de la financiarización habitacional en Chile (1982-2015): ¿entre el sueño de la vivienda y la pesadilla de la deuda?

Through the process of financialization, neoliberal policies have turned social rights into debt. The Chilean case stands out in Latin American in that sense and it is argued that the early interpenetration of high finance—with the provision of housing—constitutes its true originality in addition to the already recognized subsidy to demand. Consequently, the objective of this article is to conduct a socio-spatial analysis of the regional and metropolitan geographies of mortgage debt between 1982 and 2015. For this, a dialectical logic is assumed, that emphasizes the description both in the creation and the adjustments that they have experienced, the mechanisms of financialization of the production of space and housing, as well as the process of massification of increased indebtedness in the period between 2004 and 2015. Finally, it is concluded that this massification corresponds to different subjects of debt and that the process of over-indebtedness raises questions about the possibility of future crises.

The nurses' uniform in pediatrics, the opinion of children and nurses.

Background and aim:The nursing uniform represents a non-verbal mean of communication which in the case of children can arouse positive or negative emotions. The first study conducted on a sample of 107 children, aimed to define their preferences on different models of decorated nursing uniforms; the second one conducted on 101 nurses to understand the preferences, the meanings attributed to the uniform and their availability to adapt it according to the preferences expressed by the children.Methods:We conducted an observational study with a qualitative approach. For the first objective with the children, a visual stimulus was used, showing 6 models of uniform: the traditional plus 5 models of different colors and themes (cartoons characters and videogames). For the second objective with the nurses, in addition to reproducing the same visual stimulus, a semi-structured questionnaire was used.Results:Children and nurses seem to be in perfect accord, because in both groups, color models were the most chosen. Nurses defined their uniform with terms of particular moral, intellectual and professional value and declared themselves available to align with the preferences of the children.Conclusions:This study leaves little doubt about preferences; it also represents the true originality of the study because almost never in the literature have been compared the point of views of children and professionals, generally favoring the comparison between children and care givers. Our findings could represent a further landmark for guiding the choices of health organizations on currencies to be adopted in the pediatric field. (www.actabiomedica.it)

Numénius et la tradition judéo-hellénistique : une relecture du fragment 21 F (13 dP)

Numenius, a Platonic and Pythagorean philosopher of the 1st century, shows himself to be undeniably familiar with the Judeo-Hellenistic tradition. As proof, it is usual to refer to the fragment 21 F (fr. 13 dP) of his dialogue “De Bono.” In this text, it seems that he may have used the same formula as in the Bible, in the Septuagint translation (Ex 3:14a), with which God introduces himself to Moses: ὁ ὤν. Numenius thus apparently designated his first God as the “being par excellence” (τὸ ὄν, τὸ αὐτοόν), just as the Judeo-Hellenistic tradition does, and more specifically Philo of Alexandria, who called God “He who is.” However, the biblical meaning is not present in the sentence from which this formula is taken. This paper argues this point by analyzing the fragment and bringing out the true originality of Numenius which consists in rewriting Timæus (41 c - 42 a; 90 a) and more specifically the Platonic figure of the demiurge. It then appears that the parallel with Philo also cannot be drawn from the function that Numenius attributes in this fragment to his second God, to whom he entrusts the proper function of demiurge. If a connection between the two philosophers is possible, it is to be found above all in their shared appropriation of Plato. Numenius could indeed have encountered Philo and counted him among those Jews who, according to him, shared the master’s teaching (cf. 10 F = fr. 1 dP). Such a reasoning would nevertheless imply that Numenius sometimes summoned him in order to illustrate the correctness of his own interpretations. However, the Christian authors who quote him do not give any direct proof of this, and even if this does not exclude the possibility of an occasional inspiration, in the present state of my research, which will have to be continued, there is no evidence of it, at least not in the fragment 21 F.

A Secure Image Watermarking Architecture based on DWT-DCT Domain and Pseudo-Random Number

The outburst media contents in today's platforms a need for securing the ownership, authentication and data tampering raised. Protection against tapering the media contents is one of the challenges facing the individuals and industry in a digital age, in another hand rise of artificial neural network models such as deep fake and media contents editors threaten the originality and ownership of media in today digital base life. Demands to secure the ownership and authenticity of data that create by author risen. Hidden the true identity and originality of the media is one way to protect digital creation. Using a watermarked content is one way to protect the ownership of the digital media. It is possible to hide the watermark in the original content to secure it from tapering or illegally usage of the product, by hiding the watermark more securely and acceptable imperceptibility to sensors it is possible to have minimised the effect of watermark process on original contents. In this paper researchers designed an architecture that enhanced and centred on robustness and security of the watermarked image. In this method, we used four random number as seeds generated by a pseudo-random number generator, randomised numbers used as Initial value for encryption of watermark image. Watermark designed in a way that has a lesser footprint on the covered image. Outputs evaluate using PSNR, SSIM and different modification attacks tested against the watermarked image. The result shows that the architecture output is in acceptance range and enhanced the security and robustness of watermarking compere to some existing watermarking architectures and algorithms.

TOPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRONOTOPE MODELS IN P. ZAGREBELNY’S НISTORICAL NOVEL «ROXOLANА»

The article is devoted to the problem of determining the topological characteristics of models of the chronotope of a historical novel by P. Zagrebelny «Roxolanа». The purpose of the article is to highlight and characterize in the historical novel by P. Zagrebelny «Roxolanа» the key topos, which, through conceptualizing symbolic content, help to trace the relationship between the outer and inner spaces of the characters. One of the topical aspects of the study of the artist’s historical works was the study of their chronotope organization, which is explained by the true originality of many writer's works in terms of their spatial dimensions. The interpretation of chronotope through the category of event made it possible to introduce the concept of «chronotope model», which refers to a typical event, which is depicted in the plane of one work several times in relation to different heroes or the same hero or in the plane of different works. To represent this event, the author can choose different topographic and chronic parameters, while maintaining the invariant nature of the event. The conceptualisation of the symbolic content of key novel topos is deepened by the generalized, fundamental artistic realization of the author’s concept of «time as eternity». Models of chronotopes of the main characters: fights, atonement, victories, defeats, escapes, insights are realized by P. Zagrebelny in the novel «Roksolana» in the following topos: seas, rivers, rivers, mirrors, wells; pillar, columns, ladders, gates; islands, harem, hamam, palace Topkapі, ruin; stone, circle. The water topos in P. Zagrebelny’s historical novel «Roxolanа» has a double meaning: 1) the water element acts as a symbol of spiritual death and rebirth; 2) the water element acts as a power that can punish for sins. Topos of pillars, columns, ladders, gates in P. Zagrebelny’s historical novel, «Roxolanа», are associated with the symbol of the World Tree, which is characteristic of many peoples’ worldview, and correlates with the world axis, acting as one of the variants of division into Heaven and Earth. Topos of harem, hanum, palace Topkapі are connected with the organization of the personal space of Roksolana, which is marked by a closed structure.

Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music: Charles Wuorinen's Ashberyana

MODERN ILLUMINATIONS IN POETRY AND MUSIC: CHARLES WUORINEN’S ASHBERYANA SARAH ROTHENBERG OURTEEN YEARS AFTER ITS CREATION, Charles Wuorinen’s Ashberyana stands as a tour-de-force of musical text-setting, bringing together, to mutual benefit, the work of two contemporaneous artists at the height of their powers. Wuorinen’s compositional agility, wit and deep understanding of English language poetry rise to the idiosyncratic challenges of John Ashbery’s poetic genius. The resultant work, composed in 2005, is a transparent and illuminating marriage of music and text in which the audacious inventiveness of each artist shines with diamond-sharp brilliance. This year, as we celebrate Charles Wuorinen’s 80th birthday, we also mourn the death of John Ashbery, who died this past September at the age of 90. Eleven years apart in age, these two men, distinct in personality, share key attributes: towering intellects, fierce artistic independence, and profound historical knowledge of their respective art forms. (As well as a taste for dry martinis.) Thoroughly committed to modernism, each possesses a rare historical sense of his own place in the larger trajectory of his respective art-form—the embodiment of F 248 Perspectives of New Music authentic artistic personality as outlined by T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot argues that true originality does not spontaneously appear, but is tied to an understanding of the past; even if the brilliance of innovation seems completely new, a seeming rebellion against all that is current, the sustainability of such brilliance is tied to an understanding of tradition: [Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.1 This keen knowledge of artistic past, in both Wuorinen and Ashbery, provides the foundation for daring originality—both of these artists understand what has preceded the moment into which they are born. John Ashbery was quietly erudite, an insatiably curious reader who continually dug into the past, with a refined taste for the obscure, from such early surrealist poets as Raymond Roussel back to medieval times. He was also a great music-lover, with a large and diverse record collection , who cultivated a special penchant for forgotten composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in addition to following his musical contemporaries. He wrote eloquently and prolifically about painting, was active as an art critic in the 1960s, and shared deep friendships with many artists of his time. Associated with a rigorous modernism, Wuorinen’s concept of the modern is one in which tradition holds with innovation. Occasional overt homages to music of the medieval, renaissance, and classical traditions have figured throughout his compositional career, as evidenced in such early works as Two Lute Songs of Thomas Campion (1956) and Salve Regina: John Bull (1966); several works inspired by the Renaissance genius Josquin Desprez—Josquin: Ave Christe (1988), Josquiniana (2002), Ave Maria . . . Virgo Serena (Josquin) (2007)— Jan’s Dowland (2014); and, recently, cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto, which were preceded over five decades ago, in 1965, by cadenzas to a Mozart concerto. These tributes, besides being delightful musical works, serve as a gracious acknowledgement of techniques that have informed Wuorinen’s approach to composition. Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music 249 With his deep respect for craft, Wuorinen’s roots go back to the two seminal modernists of the last century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky—as testament, their photographs sit side by side on a music stand in his study. Wuorinen absorbed the late works of Stravinsky with such depth that they become a springboard for his own distinctive style; this was recognized in his tribute of 1975, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, in which Wuorinen received...

Introduction: Shaw and Classical Literature—What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Introduction: Shaw and Classical Literature—What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...

Future life will be synthetic: About the emergence of engineered life, its promises, prophecies and the formal causalities needed to make sense of them

This article proposes to reflect on the promises of synthetic biology through fieldwork carried out in 2014–15 with a group of bioartists in Helsinki, Finland. It narrates the author’s experience of three one-week gatherings leading to the production of a piece titled Your Synthetic Future, an ironic apparatus appearing as an oracular machine. This reflection leads us to understand that the true originality of synthetic biology resides in its ability to breach the once clear and impenetrable frontier that has kept apart the analogue and digital modes of existence. In turn, this renewed understanding of what is at stake with the current state of the field of synthetic biology leads us to focus on the unfolding of new forms of presence across the analogue/digital divide. It argues for a renewed perspective on causality that was first intuited by Marshall McLuhan as an original insight on the question of the medium.

“Dog Sleep”: Creaturely Exposure in De Quincey and Wordsworth

“Dog Sleep”:Creaturely Exposure in De Quincey and Wordsworth Eric Lindstrom (bio) Alone, idle, and always near danger, savage man must like to sleep, and be a light sleeper like animals which, thinking little, sleep so to speak all the time they do not think. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse (1755)1 I don’t underestimate it. I know it takes courage. But let us suppose for a moment that someone had it, this courage de luxe to follow them, in order to know forever (for who could forget it again or confuse it with anything else?) where they creep off afterward and what they do with the rest of the long day, and whether they sleep at night. That especially should be ascertained: whether they sleep. —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)2 Hardly an unknown link to scholars before then, by the 1990s a number of readers had noted with new intensity how closely Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shadows the Romantic “Lake Poets” as its model. The range of associations and incidents in Confessions conjure up “Wordsworth’s abjected other,” in the language of Alan Bewell.3 The text calls “on the major tropes of Romanticism that Wordsworth and Coleridge had long established”—including a string of events wherein, as Josephine McDonagh goes on to say in her 1994 study, A youthful spirit is oppressed by social institutions—not unlike Wordsworth in The Prelude, which De Quincey had [End Page 391] read in 1810; he wanders alone in the countryside and the city; he befriends the poor and dispossessed (such as the prostitute, Ann)—whose noble spirits resemble those of the rural peasants in Lyrical Ballads; he recounts his opium dreams, yet more graphically than Coleridge; and so on.4 Structurally, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater proceeds in musical terms as a kind of whole-scale thematic fugue upon the theme of Wordsworthian marginal encounters.5 Along with the Scottish Blackwood’s critics whose number he would later join, De Quincey’s negative modeling after Wordsworth in Confessions places him among the first writers and critics to trade on the idea of a branded “Wordsworthian” romanticism.6 By this, I mean the since-reified notion of Wordsworth not as an ambitious idiosyncrasy in literary history (the basic aegis under which stewards of literary decorum as different as Coleridge and Francis Jeffrey viewed him)—but as the schematically harmonious, idealizing poet made to represent an entire pole of the imagination in contrast with everything more fragmented, unclassifiable, and dark. In juxtaposing his wandering early life of abjections with mature Wordsworth’s secured safety, his psychotropic visions and nightmares to Wordsworth’s visionary sobriety, and Confessions’ cosmopolitan orientalism to Wordsworth’s Lake District provincial domestic life, the same De Quincey who so admired and was drawn by Wordsworth’s singularity has rendered the most influential (because admiring) caricature of the poet. Yet rather than stop at finding in this overwhelming pattern solely an inscription of the shape of conventionalized Wordsworth, at the same time I will argue that a few key passages in De Quincey track the unofficial, uncanny Wordsworth best: nowhere are the poet’s least assimilated effects reproduced more unnervingly. The disclosure of Wordsworth’s true originality—often only negatively sensed by others who alternately “worship” or denigrate nature and Wordsworth’s so-called nature poetry7—is found in recurrent gestures toward somatism and in-difference that yield what Paul H. Fry in his 2008 study of Wordsworth entitles The Poetry of What We Are: “the leveling of consciousness effected by the refusal to acknowledge a hierarchy of being, with its description of the human in its nonhuman, somatic registers.”8 This essay offers an associated, but slightly different, disclosure of Wordsworth’s permanent originality and its almost inevitable, internally wrought sequence of normative distortions. I follow a theme of creaturely animal life within the corpus of Wordsworth and De Quincey, as two romantic authors known primarily for thinking about animals in [End Page 392] anthropocentric and metaphorical registers instead. Yet it is on these very terms that I will show how De Quincey’s...

The Magic of Organizing?

The Magic of Organizing?

On Vulnerability: Probing the Ethical Dimensions of Comparative Theology

Though the notion of vulnerability regularly pops up in Clooney’s reflections on comparative theology, he does not develop a systematic account of it. What precisely vulnerability is and how it influences interreligious dialog do not receive enough theoretical grounding. In this article I will probe the complexity of this notion and how it plays out in comparative theology. This will not only enable us to grasp the true originality of Clooney’s project, it will also allow us to uncover its deeper ethical dynamics. For, as I will seek to show, at its core, comparative theology is moved by an ethical concern to enable a just relation between the one’s own tradition and the foreign one. It is my intention to unfold the deep moral dynamics of this particular interreligious approach and to conceptualize the ethical conditions for interreligious learning as present in comparative theology.

The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega David Cowart (bio) Many have anatomized the disquiet experienced by Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but few have done so with as much subtlety and intellectual brio as Don DeLillo. In nuanced, stylistically distinctive, often funny meditations on all that has happened to us and all that we dread, DeLillo captures something that everyone feels and no one fully understands. Frank Lentricchia perceptively characterizes DeLillo’s novels as “montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (2). Lentricchia’s terms—“montages,” “yoking”—signal the qualities in DeLillo’s writing that link it to other modern and contemporary art: cinema, collage, even verse influenced by the metaphysical poets (given to “heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together,” as Samuel Johnson famously observed [15]). Derived at least in part from the modernist aesthetic that married a high standard of economy to new representational challenges, DeLillo’s prose strikes readers as elliptical yet replete, brimming with intimation. Supercharging predication in sentence after sentence, he performs something of a stylistic highwire act: if the reader ever suspects the least element of rhetorical fakery, down comes the house of pregnant prose. Such whiffs from the sewer of pretension in fact undermine the gnomic pronouncements of Richard Elster, the central figure in DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega.As Ezra Pound, or T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce creates a flawed version [End Page 31] of himself as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, or J. Alfred Prufrock, or Stephen Dedalus, so does DeLillo, in Elster, imagine his own secret sharer. Properly to read and analyze any DeLillo work, one needs to avoid the premature pronouncement, the facile assessment that belies this author’s true originality as thinker and maker. I would like to offer a reading of Point Omega attentive to the rich suggestiveness of the DeLillo style. To that end, I beg the reader’s patience if my remarks about meaning in this novel give way only gradually to actual assertions. That is, I propose to approach my subject—at least initially—in what Jacques Derrida, commenting on Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, characterizes as a “speculative” or “athetic” mode, the better to remain open to meanings that a more thesis-driven analysis might throttle in the hermeneutic crib.1 I do not mean to be mysterious. My argument will emerge in two parts, the first focused on cinematic ekphrasis in this novel, the second on the perennially vexed question of just how an artist can, without didacticism, incorporate political perceptions into work that they might render tendentious. Ultimately, I will argue for a kind of astute ascesis in DeLillo’s engagement with political themes. Though he foregrounds the spiritual crisis of an apologist for the Second Gulf War, DeLillo deflects problems of immediate political legitimacy toward larger, less topical questions of a civilization’s decline. He perpends the prospect of an omega point for the American empire. 1 One thinks of the DeLillo oeuvre as a rich weave of thematic or semic elements that include language, terror, film, deserts, American identities, and, with increasing urgency, eccentric and unusual artworks. As early as Americana, readers encounter considerable emphasis on the extraliterary artistic enterprise—whether [End Page 32] the film that David Bell is making or the strange sculptures of his friend Sullivan. But toward the latter part of his career, DeLillo begins to carry ekphrasis and allusion to new heights—thus Andy Warhol (and Warhol pastiche) figures in Mao II, Pieter Bruegel at the Polo Grounds and B–52s in the desert in Underworld, and the performance art of Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. The story “Baader-Meinhof” centers on a suite of Gerhard Richter paintings, Falling Man on the guerrilla theater of David Janiak. Characters in Cosmopolis participate in a Spencer Tunick–like project, and Alex Macklin, the moribund artist in Love-Lies-Bleeding, embraces “land art” (25) and imagines painting “every square inch” of “[a] chamber, a cubical room. Fashioned out of solid rock” (59). One can often—perhaps always— discern in such material...