Denatured Nature

Background: Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1617) was a Spanish writer, who has often been considered as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's outstanding novelists. His novel Don Quixote, is a work often cited as both the first modern novel and one of the best works of world literature. The life of Cervantes has been full of fascinations, imaginations, attracting the attention from all walks of people, including psychiatrists. Methods: With career interest in psychopharmacology, the author in this review intends to focus on Cervantes's notions in his works on the use of psychotropic agents. The author also categorized psychotropic agents into four different scenarios of use – therapeutic remedies, toxic and poisonous agents (love philters, poisonous potions), antidotes as well as drugs of abuse (witches' ointments). Results: Cervantes' works were found that Cervantes made references to those preparations in Don Quixote, The Galatea, Journey to Parnassus, The Spanish English Lady, The Lawyer of Glass, The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura, The Dialogue of the Dogs, Pedro de Urdemalas and The Diversion. The main agents cited by Cervantes in the context analyzed included henbane, tobacco, rhubarb, rosemary, vervain, and in a masked way, opium. Cervantes did not identify the ingredients of other preparations with psychotropic properties, although, in the sense of the symptoms described by the author, they could be plants of the Solanaceae family, such as the henbane, nightshade, jimson weed, belladonna, or mandrake. Conclusion: Cervantes' texts, although by no means scientific treatises, give us with a correct description of the uses (and effects) of psychotropic substances in late Renaissance Spain, and explain how a group of drugs could have four archetypal qualities – remedy, poison, antidote, and drug of abuse.

Come take a closer look at ordinary footwear, like sneakers, or children's toys and Saturday cartoon TV shows, or make a comparison between Don Quixote and John Rambo of the Sylvester Stallone movie. Although some regard popular culture as shallow, this book reveals that it is more often complex, deep, meaningful and subject to the style changes we associate with high art. Bergesen shows how complex philosophical ideas of reincarnation are embedded in Transformer toys; how sneakers have gone through a life cycle of style types; why the decline of empires like Spain and the United States led to fictional characters like Don Quixote and Rambo; and why monsters from Japan look different than those from the United States.

When I Met Kathy Acker

Faulkner’s The Reivers exemplifies the Quixotic Picaresque-a conflation of the narrative modes exhibited in Lazarillo de Tormes and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This essay explores the correlation between Spain’s transition from feudalism to a modern mercantile society and the United States’ transition from an agrarian society based on slavery to a modern industrial nation within the cultural contexts of these novels. In each of these works, a series of trickster figures undertake performative acts of deception, particularly the masking tradition of Carnival, in order to endure the hardships of modernity. However, whereas most tricksters tend to be solely focused on pragmatic individual objectives, quixotic pícaros maintain a sense of idealism that leads them to consider the Other and thus act in the name of communal prosperity. These selfless tricksters meta-theatrically parody the generic social conventions in which they reside in order to subvert the hegemony that seeks to oppress and marginalise them and fellow members of their communities. In performing an array of identities and social roles, these quixotic pícaros contribute to the opacity of modern multicultural nation-states, and thus, disrupt all social hierarchies leading to the regeneration of the public body, mobility, and a more utopian world.

This collective volume addresses the current paradigm shift in the humanities (from national literatures toward crosscultural encounters) by exploring how postnational perspectives have an effect on Hispanic literature and literary theory in the “Global Now” (Appadurai), as crystallized within a new “world literature” written by Latin American, U.S., and Spanish writers. The contributing authors are scholars from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, who have examined the impact of globalization on Hispanic literature within their respective fields: postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies. The shared focus of postnational perspectives ensures the cohesion and coherence of the volume while also providing enough common ground for a fertile interdisciplinary and transatlantic dialogue between the chapters. The varying angles from which the contributing authors interpret and apply the postnational position to works of contemporary Hispanic literature show how changing worldviews lead to a new understanding of memory, belonging, and identity, as well as of a new “world” literature.

Deontological Originalism: Moral Truth, Liberty, and, Constitutional 'Due Process'

8I2 Reviews threat to the human soul and to human salvation. This book sets out to redress the balance, and to explore this 'other Renaissance': that of night-lovers, night-students, and night-contemplators, the astronomers, poets, artists, mystics, theologians, and cosmographers who variously celebrated, illustrated, and mapped the complexities of the night. Menager's texts are drawn from an impressively large sample of elite literature: Galileo, Cervantes, Jean de la Croix, Belleau, Ronsard, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Duirer are only the more canonical figures in this wide-ranging survey. The choice of the term 'Renaissance' over 'sixteenth-century' is a deliberate one: it allows Menager to explore a cultural movement, and to draw on two centuries of Italian, English, French, and Spanish writers. The book charts awide range of influences and echoes: the influence of astronomy on poets and painters, but equally, that of poetry and philosophy on astronomers. Menager is keen to point out that his book does not aim simply to reverse the binary opposition that keeps night obscured and frightening; this, he argues, is a product of the privileging of day and one that is not necessarily reproduced in the texts under consideration. Chapter I describes how, for medieval and Renaissance theologians, night and day were not radically opposed like light and darkness; the night that was created on the first day gave order and form to the darkness, but was distinguished from the primordial obscurity that existed before the creation, and that returned for an instant when Christ was crucified. Menager describes the various representations of night as unsystematic, sometimes contradictory. And yet, the picture that emerges does have coherence, of slightly illegitimate pleasure: stripped bare of the simplicities and glaring evidences of the day, the night was dedicated towhat was essential. For pastoral poets, itwas a time of escape and love. For astronomers, the night represented fervent study and the possibility of the progress of knowledge. Don Quixote spurned sleep in order to read and invent his histories of chivalry. Commentators on the Psalms insisted that the night was a privileged time inwhich to experience the divine presence; and for Renaissance mystics, night provided an opportunity to contemplate and participate in the Passion. The book is divided into five chapters, which consider, broadly, cosmologies and mythologies; images and the imaginary; proper 'use' of the night, inwhich the adage 'the night brings counsel' is discussed; mystical and theological versions of night, with particular attention given to Christmas and the night inGethsemane, perhaps the most successful and stimulating chapter; and a final chapter on nocturnes, con centrating on representations of night in painting. These varied and wide-ranging contexts are both rich and stimulating. They also represent a potential weakness in the project, as the focus on representations of night may get lost sometimes in the summarizing and elaboration of existing criticism and other concerns. But this does not ultimately detract from the success of this book in illuminating a dark space of Renaissance culture in such thought-provoking ways. UNIVERSITYOF SHEFFIELD EMILYBUTTERWORTH Poetik des Dialogs: Aktuelle Theorie und rinascimentales Selbstverstdndnis. Ed. by KLAUSW. HEMPFER. (Text und Kontext, 2I) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2004. I91 PP. ?34. ISBN 3-5I5-o8576-9. The last decade has seen a very welcome increase in studies on the use of the dia logue genre in the Renaissance. In this context, Poetik des Dialogs stands out strongly because its contributors make an exceptional effort to discuss specific possibilities of the genre from the point of view of modern theories on the dialogue, which are then linked in turn to sixteenth-century theoretical discourse on dialogue poetics. The first MLR, IOI.3, 2oo6 8I3 of the five studies in the collection is a lengthy essay by Bernd Hasner. In line with thewidely underestimated work of Leonid Batkin on humanistic dialogue in Italy, he approaches the genre as a new episteme for the transmission of knowledge, which, as such, needs to be distinguished theoretically from competing genres between Middle Ages and Enlightenment, such as essays and treatises. This is a very dense essay that, through constant reference to the dialogues of Bruni and Tasso, but also to Plato, Shaftesbury, and Diderot, painstakingly unravels themany...

When scientists consider the interaction of science and value judgments, debates often occur. When public policy grows out of science, disagreements between scientists can become even more spirited. This paper examines the case of nutrition policy in the United States, which has been both at the interface between agriculture and medicine and the object of serious discord concerned with the strength and validity of the scientific evidence and the responsibility for action. The development of indirect intervention policies, designed to educate and inform the public on diet and health, is traced as a practical demonstration of the effects of involvements of nutritional scientists of different disciplines and philosophic bents. Controversies centered mainly on the issues of diet and coronary heart disease and of diet and cancer in nutritional guidelines for Americans and the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs). But the arguments turned on a complex web of values and interests as well as scientific questions. A remarkable turnaround by animal agriculture and its scientific support occurred, changing from a defensive, rightist stance to one that appears to recognize a moral responsibility to the public health. The convincing point was likely the changing market. Nutritional scientists, however, remained divided on the issue of whether a public health strategy keyed to public education should replace a strategy to identify persons of high risk and modify the risk by treatment. Our analysis suggests that the tension between libertarian and utilitarian social values of scientists is at least as important as disagreements relative to validity and strengths of the scientific evidence.

As a nation, we seem to have become preoccupied with inconsequential matters, while matters of the most magnitude are left in a horrifying state of neglect. A few years ago, holierthan-thou politicians brought the government to a virtual standstill with their concern regarding a possible presidential peccadillo; this was not why we elected them, and the country was held in thrall by sensationseeking news media for months. In the meantime, the economy was slipping and information about terrorist activity in the United States and genocide occurring in other parts of the world was largely ignored by our country. To fiddle while Rome burns is neither new nor unique to our community. In the final decades before the birth of Christ, the ancient Roman poet and philosopher, Horace, was writing about the emptiness of boastful political promises, “The mountains are in labor, and a ridiculous mouse is born.” (The metaphor of using “mouse” as a mark of gross inadequacy is still with us today, often preceded by “Mickey.”) There are so many things that are expected of us anew, brought about by a humongous administrative process that leaves our patients little or no better off. So often the rules are changed to try to enforce what we were doing anyway but, in fact, create little change other than more paperwork to show observance of the protocols.

With the rise of the modern nation-state during the eighteenth century, power, discourse, and knowledge have constituted central elements controlling the populace. Especially the West, the nation-state has governed the lives of its people, creating the mirage of and external security, economic growth, and cultural identity exchange for power, money, and certain rights. In addition, the positioning or, rather, projection of an Other as a potential threat to the nation has played a crucial role the discursive construction of national communities. Part of this construction has been the projected fear that alien elements infect and ultimately destroy the ostensible unity of the national body through racial and cultural difference. As a method of self-constitution, discourses of the nation have generally excluded marginal voices of race, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual preference and have thus desired to keep the collective body pure from radical alterity. While national narratives have been designed to level out certain differences within the ethnos, there always remains a certain degree of otherness which cannot be assimilated but is fact necessary to delimit the ideal social body from certain nationalities and groups that reside within the confines of the nation. Similar to nation-building processes the centers, the ignition of national consciousness the peripheries was also based on an imagined cultural substratum. Within many anti-colonial and civil rights struggles, those control of discursive practices have often silenced voices of alterity order to unify a people the struggle against colonial, hegemonic orders. (1) In recent years, scholars and New Americanists have focused on these topics of national inclusions and exclusions their analyses of cultural and literary texts. For example, New Americanists have introduced the term to convey a sense of opposition to the discursive constructedness of the nation cultural representations. A postnational perspective hence exposes the exclusionary practices of national discourses by debunking and criticizing the embedded patriarchal, essentialist, and heterosexual hegemonies. (2) Such a research perspective also seeks to explore critically the points of intersection between American studies and theory order to explore notions of empire relation to the US. This marks an important intervention because, the past, many literary and cultural critics have discarded the notion of the United States as postcolonial. It has often been claimed that the US had its postcolonial moment after 1776, but soon developed its own distinct colonial and imperial endeavors, domestically and abroad. (3) However, recent debates have suggested an inclusion of certain experiences the United States for instance, slavery, migration, internal colonialism, and minoritarian struggles for civil rights under the auspices of studies (cf. King). The relations between Anglo America and Mexican Americans call for an incorporation of the Chicana/o experience into the field of studies because they were historically marked by many features of proper: political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural dominance. Since the 1960s, a number of Chicana/o critics have adopted the theoretical concept of internal colonialism to account for their group's subordinate socio-economic and cultural position within US society) Supporting this claim, Fredric Jameson has suggested that in the United States itself, we have come to think and to speak of the emergence of an Third World and of Third World voices, as Black women's or Chicano literature (151). Hence, a growing number of Chicana/o studies scholars are debating and testing the applicability of certain paradigms--colonial discourses, national liberation projects, border crossings, or hybridity--to literary and cultural representations of the Mexican American condition (see, for instance, Arteaga; Aldama and Quinonez; Perez-Torres; Karrer). …

The scale of wildfire destruction has grown exponentially in recent years, destroying nearly 25,000 buildings in the United States during 2018 alone. However, there is still limited research exploring how wildfires affect migration patterns and household finances. In this study, we evaluate the effects of wildfire destruction on in-migration and out-migration probability at the Census tract level in the United States from 1999 to 2018. We then shift to the individual level and examine changes in homeownership, consumer credit usage, and financial distress among people whose neighborhood suffered damaging fires. We pair quarterly observations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel with building destruction counts from the US National Incident Management System/Incident Command System database of wildfire events. Our findings show significantly heightened out-migration probability among tracts that experienced the most destructive wildfires, but no effect on in-migration probability. Among the consumer credit measures, we find a significant drop in homeownership among those treated by major fires. This is concentrated in people over the age of 60. Measures of credit distress, including delinquencies, bankruptcies, and foreclosures, improve rather than deteriorate after the fire, but the changes are not statistically significant. While wildfire effects on migration and borrowing are measurable, they are not yet as large as those observed following other natural disasters such as hurricanes.

Little is known about the context sensitivity of users’ online security perceptions and behaviors to national and individual attributes, and there is inadequate research about the spectrum of users’ behaviors in dealing with online security threats. In addressing this gap, this paper draws on two complementary theoretical bases: (1) the contextualization of the protection motivation theory (PMT) to online security behavior and (2) a poly-contextual lens for the cross-national comparison of users’ security behaviors in the United States and China. The conceptualized model is tested based on 718 survey observations collected from the United States and China. The results support our model and show the divergence between the United States, an exemplar of modern Western society, and China, an exemplar of traditional Eastern society, in forming threat perceptions and in seeking help and avoidance as coping behaviors. Our results also uncovered the significant moderating impacts of espoused culture on the way perceptions of security threats and coping appraisals influence security behaviors. Our findings underline the importance of context-sensitive theory building in security research and provide insights into the motivators and moderators of individuals’ online security behaviors in the two nations.

This paper challenges the current thinking for building High Performance Computing (HPC) Systems, which is currently based on the sequential computing also known as the von Neumann model, by proposing the use of Novel systems based on the Dynamic Data-Flow model of computation. The switch to Multi-core chips has brought the Parallel Processing into the mainstream. The computing industry and research community were forced to do this switch because they hit the Power and Memory walls. Will the same happen with HPC? The United States through its DARPA agency commissioned a study in 2007 to determine what kind of technologies will be needed to build an Exaflop computer. The head of the study was very pessimistic about the possibility of having an Exaflop computer in the foreseeable future. We believe that many of the findings that caused the pessimistic outlook were due to the limitations of the sequential model. A paradigm shift might be needed in order to achieve the affordable Exascale class Supercomputers.

Explaining US travel behavior with perceived threat of pandemic, consumer sentiment, and economic policy uncertainty

Examines how the European Middle Ages has been used and received in a variety of American cultural contexts. There is a deep-seated preoccupation in North America with the cultures of the European Middle Ages, but despite the insightful conversations that have developed between medieval and postcolonial studies, this phenomenon remains underexplored. This book considers these New World medievalisms, from the links between New World colonization and Christian crusades to the medievalisms endemic to contemporary cultural productions, such as Game of Thrones, demonstrating how European figures and narratives have functioned to rationalize Euro-American colonial efforts. Each of the chapters takes up a period of British colonial or U.S. cultural history, with an eye to how authors of that period depict, refer to and imagine the medieval. Topics range from the remarkable popularity throughout American literary history of Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote to the role the Norman Conquest of Britain played in the British-American colonial cultural imaginary. It also showcases subversive counter-narratives from Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ursula K. Le Guin; these authors challenge the use of anachronistic and geographically displaced medieval figures and narratives to define a modern nation-state such as the United States. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medievalism studies, medieval studies and American studies, this book shows how the "medieval/modern divide" continues to inform U.S. national identity and American historiography more generally.