Figures and Forms of Analysis Practice

The Western tradition, with its well-worn tropes, readily identifiable characters, iconic landscapes, and evocative soundtracks, is not limited to the United States. Western, or Western-inspired films have played a part in the output of numerous national film traditions, including Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. In International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled a collection of essays that explore the significance and meanings of these films, their roots in other media, and their reception in the national industries which gave them form. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: What do Westerns not made in the U.S. reveal? In what ways do they challenge or support the idea of national literatures and cinemas? How do these films negotiate nation, narrative, and genre? Divided into five sections, the twenty essays in this volume look at films from a wide range of national cinemas, such as France (The Adventures of Lucky Luke), Germany (Der Schuh des Maitu), Brazil (O Cangaceiro), Eastern Europe (Lemonade Joe), and of course, Asia (Sukiyaki Western Django). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars—often writing about Westerns adapted to their own national traditions—these essays address such matters as competing national film traditions, various forms of satire and comedy based on the Western tradition, the range of cultural adaptations of the traditional Western hero, the ties between the nation-state and the outlaw, and Westerns in a variety of unanticipated guises. Representing a broader look at global Westerns than any other single volume to date—and featuring more than 70 illustrations—International Westerns will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, and cultural history.

Given the foreseeable increase in demographic ageing, it is alleged by some that the current system of public solidarity is not equitable for future generations, who may be unable to benefit from a system as generous and wellarticulated as the one which exists today. They argue that current social spending should be reduced to avoid imposing an excessive burden on future generations, especially since debt is a perpetual sword of Damocles, whose effects may be multiplied by a rise in interest rates or an economic recession. Do recent sociodemographic changes make the pursuit of equity easier or more difficult in a context of long-term population ageing? Though equity is an inspiring principle and objective, it is not easy to define. Should public transfers and services remain constant whatever the cost? Or should costs remain constant, even if this entails reducing public transfers and services as a consequence? Nor is the principle of equity easy to apply. Cyclical aspects (economic, social, public finance) combine their effects with those of major structural change (demographic, social, economic) and sometimes make it difficult to establish an overall perspective. What has been the impact of changes in social spending since the beginning of the 1990s? Have the budgetary difficulties encountered by governments and the ensuing spending cuts substantially modified transfers between generations? And have the recent changes in social spending by age produced winner and loser generations? This article examines the changes in spending over recent decades. We see how different age groups were affected by increases and decreases in monetary transfers and services between 1991 and 2003, a period of public

Reviewed by: Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor Andrea Goulet Jean H. Duffy . Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Pp. 302, 21 illustrations. Having explored Claude Simon's artistic intertexts in Reading Between the Lines (1998), Jean Duffy now turns her erudite attentions to another author obsessed with the visual/textual relation: Michel Butor. The result is a must-read resource for all Butor scholars, for it provides not only sustained analyses of the author's major works, but also a thorough overview of relevent criticism from the 1960s to today. Indeed, the book's introduction serves as a critical guide to Butor scholarship, with succinct "mini-reviews" detailing general trends as well as particular critics's theses. The introduction becomes an essential reference when paired with the book's careful and thorough bibliography. Butor's prolific production spans half a century and includes not only books, but over 200 collaborative works with such artists as Baltazar, Joly, and Masurovsky, all of which Duffy has meticulously catalogued. The synthetic skill and pedagogical generosity of such work should not be overlooked. But of course it is the book's central (and clearly-stated) aim to study Butor's many textual references to architecture and the visual or plastic arts. Though other critics have mentioned Gaudì's role in L'Emploi du temps or the Roman trio (Cavallini/Pannini/Bernini) in La Modification, none has gone as "broad and deep" as does Duffy here. Broad, in that she extends intertextual analyses to the less-studied Butor corpus (including Boomerang, Les Mots dans la peinture, and Le Génie du lieu). And deep, in that she brings extensive art history and criticism to bear on her analyses. When relating the novel Degrés, for example, to Massys's 1514 The Money-Lender and his Wife, Duffy invokes the genre painting's iconographic symbolism as a moral gloss that underwrites Butor's broader critique of capitalist imperialism. She similarly goes beyond the mere enumeration of common themes between Butor's Passage de Milan and Duchamp's glass installation La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre). Yes, Duchamp's work acts as "narrative generator," providing Butor with the motifs of bride and bachelors, sexual desire and untimely death. But it also must be understood as part of a larger meditation—and Duffy invokes Duchamp's own notes on the project's "sex cylinders," "spangles," and "malic moulds" to re-cast it as a "symbolic meditation on [...] non-fulfilment, failure, abortive communication, sterility, and [...] the mechanistic dimension of modern man." She thus gives due to the discursivity of art and art criticism, rather than relegate pictures to the status of inert muse for the cultured writer. Signs and Designs is organized into 5 central chapters, the first four focussing on Butor's better-known works. The sustained Duchamp/Passage de Milan chapter ends with a reading of De Vere's artistic project as a mise en abyme of the novel's own spatial composition. The next chapter, on "high and low culture" in L'Emploi du temps, similarly emphasizes Butor's compositional strategies—this time as mirrored in novelistic references to cathedral architecture, museum images, and tapestry series. Here, Duffy begins to build one of her book's larger arguments about Butor's ambivalence toward the cultural endeavors of human civilization: the Old Cathedral [End Page 118] embodies a synthetic European cultural history both impressive and obsolescent, while the New Cathedral aligns with town fairs and cheap cinemas to challenge the modern town's blatant commercialism. The reading is, as always, thorough, well-researched, and clear-eyed vis-à-vis its critical predecessors, though one might not fully agree with Duffy's assessment of L'Emploi du temps as a fundamentally optimistic novel. The third chapter extends work Duffy has previously done on Michelangelo and La Modification; here, she applies her impressive breadth of art historical knowledge to a reading of Western Christian culture (in the art and architecture of Italy and France) as backdrop to the protagonist's personal spiritual quest. In...

Traditionally, historians of culture in general and art critics in particular have tended to base their analyses and their theoretical platforms upon the assumption that art somehow represents the embodiment or the concretization of basic values and fundamental truths that exist somewhere outside of history, beyond social mutation, external to political and economic reality.

Contemporary Russian socio-cultural, cultural and philosophical, sociopsychological, artistic and aesthetic practices actualize the Russian tradition of rejection, criticism, undisguised hatred and fear of power. Today, however, power has ceased to be a subject of one-dimensional denial or condemnation, becoming the subject of an interdisciplinary scientific discourse that integrates cultural studies, philosophy, social psychology, semiotics, art criticism and history (history of culture). The article provides theoretical substantiation and empirical support for the two facets of notions of power. The first facet is the unique, not only political, but also mental determinant of the problem of power in Russia, a kind of reflection of modus vivendi. The second facet is the artistic and image-based determinant of problem of power in Russia designated as artis imago. Theoretical grounds for solving these problems are found in F. Nietzsche’s perceptions of the binary “potentate-mass” opposition, G. Le Bon’s of the “leader”, K.-G. Jung’s of mechanisms of human motivation for power. The paper dwells on the “semiosis of power” in the focus of thoughts by A. F. Losev, P. A. Sorokin, R. Barthes. Based on S. Freud’s views of the unconscious and G. V. Plekhanov’s and J. Maritain’s views of the totalitarian power, we substantiate the concept of “the imperial unconscious”. The paper focuses on the importance of the freedom motif in art (D. Diderot and V. G. Belinsky as theorists, S. Y. Yursky as an art practitioner). Power as a subject of influence and object of analysis by Russian creators is studied on the material of perceptions and creative experience of A. S. Pushkin (in the context of works devoted to Russian “impostors” by numerous authors). Special attention is paid to the early twenty-first century television series on Soviet rulers (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Furtseva). The conclusion is made on the relevance of Pushkin’s remark about “living power” “hated by the rabble” for contemporary Russia.

Biomedical informatics (BMI) is an umbrella scientific field that covers many domains, as defined several years ago by the International Medical Informatics Association and the American Medical Informatics Association, two leading players in the field. For example, one of the domains of BMI is clinical informatics, which has been formally recognised as a medical subspecialty by the American Board of Medical Specialty since 2011. Most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries offer very strong curricula in the field of BMI, strong research and development funding with clear tracks and, for most of them, inclusion of BMI in the curricula of health professionals, but BMI remains only marginally recognised in Switzerland. Recent major changes, however, such as the future federal law on electronic patient records, the personalised health initiative or the growing empowerment of citizens towards their health data, are adding much weight to the need for BMI capacity-building in Switzerland.

Recent major legislative and regulatory changes to superannuation have brought improved equity to Australia's superannuation system, but women are still missing out when it comes to the adequacy of their retirement savings. The reasons are women's continuing marginal attachment to the labour force and their attendant low level of lifetime income in the paid workforce, which translates to low levels of accumulated occupation-linked superannuation savings. This paper argues that gender-based disparities in adequacy of superannuation persist, and that the prospects for retirement lifestyles for most older women continue to be dismal.

There has been growing interest in the impact of land-use regulation and planning on housing development and markets, and a consequent search for quantified measures of their extent and efficacy. Nevertheless, despite the UK having a long-established and comprehensive planning system, this kind of quantitative analysis of system performance has been limited. This paper assembles and reports on a set of local-level measures for England for the late 2000s and assesses their effectiveness in predicting the key flow-of-consents measure and actual housing development. The pattern of restrictiveness is assessed against broad sustainability criteria including urban settlement structure, economic growth potential, and housing affordability and need. We also assess recent changes and the potential impact of a major system change towards more localised planning decision making.

Negro, V., López-Gutiérrez, J.S., Esteban, M.D., Matutano, C., 2014. An analysis of recent changes in Spanish Coastal Law. In: Green, A.N. and Cooper, J.A.G. (eds.), Proceedings 13th International Coastal Symposium (Durban, South Africa), Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 70, pp. 448–453, ISSN 0749-0208. Spanish coastal legislation has changed in response to changing circumstances. The objective of the 1969 Spanish Coastal Law was to assign responsibilities in the Public Domain to the authorities. The 1980 Spanish Coastal Law addressed infractions and sanctions issues. The 1988 Spanish Coastal Law completed the responsibilities and sanctions aspects and included others related to the delimitation of the Public Domain, the private properties close to the Public Domain, and limitations on landuse in this area. The 1988 Spanish Coastal Law has been controversial since its publication. The “European Parliament Report on the impact of extensive urbanization in Spain on individual rights of European citizen, on the environment and on the application of EU law, based upon petitions received”, published in 2009 recommended that the Spanish Authorities make an urgent revision of the Coastal Law with the main objective of protecting property owners whose buildings do not have negative effects on the coastal environment. The revision recommended has been carried out, in the new Spanish Coastal Law “Ley 2/2013, de 29 de mayo, de protección y uso sostenible del litoral y de modificación de la Ley 22/1988, de 28 de Julio, de Costas”, published in May of 2013. This is the first major change in the 25 years since the previous 1988 Spanish Coastal Law. This paper compares the 1988 and 2013 Spanish Coastal Law documents, highlighting the most important issues like the Public Domain description, limitations in private properties close to the Public Domain limit, climate change influence, authorizations length, etc. The paper includes proposals for further improvements.

Since 2002, The Justice and Development Party has been governing in Turkey. From their first period to the current, major changes have been observed in the Turkish housing system, regarding both owner occupied and rented sectors. First one is the introduction of Mortgage Law in 2007. As already a home-owner society with a 64.16 % share in urban areas (2003), home ownership ratios can be argued to increase in coming periods. Second modification in owner occupied sector was significant policy change in Housing Development Administration (HDA) of Turkey. With a “housing mobilization” project, almost 500,000 new dwellings were built by HDA all over the country in 10 years. This has been a record in HDA’s history. Remarkable changes occurred in the rented sector as well. Originally, Turkey has been characterized with absence of public renting and considerable proportion of private rented stock especially in the big cities. Governments did not develop social rented housing and pro-owner laws have been followed. Renters could face eviction under certain situations determined by the Law on Property Rents, however these were subject to misuse by homeowners. As a third major change, a new Code of Obligations was introduced superseding Law on Property Rents. In this paper, recent changes in both rented and owner occupied sectors of the Turkish housing system are analyzed with reference to mortgage law, HDA’s new policies and changes in private renting legislation. In doing so, several key figures like buildings produced, inflation rate and physical attributes of private renting are provided.

Reviewed by: Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, and: William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality Ruth Livesey (bio) Medievalism: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, by Michael Alexander; pp. xxviii + 306. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $45.00, €25.00. William Morriss Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, by Marcus Waithe; pp. xvi + 218. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2006, €50.00, $95.00. The book beautiful and a revived interest in the quality of printing were later offshoots of the Victorian interest in things medieval. It was clearly a sign that I had been spending too much time with such aesthetes when I decided to read first Michael Alexanders expansive work, beautifully produced by Yale, with copious colour illustrations and handsome bindings. Marcus Waithes book, on the other hand, is the result of a new initiative by the UKs English Association, working with the independent academic press Boydell & Brewer, to support specialist monographs: such earnest intentions dont extend to dust jackets; the cover itself seemed to be the emblem of plain living and high thinking, with the author and title pasted on a label, and so it came second. [End Page 740] In addition to its very material advantage of colour reproductions, Alexander's study offers three refreshing differences to a standard monograph on modern medievalism. First, the chronological range of the work, from the 1760s up to the work of Geoffrey Hill and W. H. Auden in the mid-twentieth century, extends beyond anything else written on the subject. Second, the author is not a specialist scholar of Victorian literature or cultural history but has published a number of translations of Old and Middle English texts and hence possesses an increasingly unusual authority on the matter of medievalism in modernity. Third, Alexander himself is robust in dismissing the "evil" directive that "rewards research, not teaching" in British universities: his work is aimed at liberating "the common inheritance of English literature" from the enclosures of "fields of academic research" (xiii). This is a work written to give a piece of native earth to the endangered common reader, dispossessed by the lairds of academe. The greater part of the book reads—unsurprisingly—as a set of engaging public lectures (with colour slides) by a well-respected emeritus professor. Alexander claims that the study was an offshoot of his work on literary history for A History of English Literature (2000), and despite some assertion that this work is a cultural history, its chief mode is rather to move from author to author, assessing his or her significance in a traditional canon. Walter Scott, whose role in reviving medieval romance is very usefully mapped throughout the book, is relegated to a subordinate position: he is, apparently, "today regarded as a second-division British Romantic" (48). The poetic "tact" (147) and "moral seriousness" (142) of Christina Rossetti puts her a point or two ahead of her brother, Dante Gabriel, for his stubborn immaturity in confusing, rather than combining, the "sensuous with the spiritual" (120) in "The Blessed Damozel" (1847, 1881); Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1832, 1842) pips John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1820) to the top spot on similar grounds. That these Leavisite pronouncements are not worked through with detailed textual analysis would make me hesitate before recommending the book to undergraduates, despite helpful accounts of the sources of nineteenth-century medievalism, such as Thomas Malory's Le morte d'Arthur. There is a cheerful sense of liberation at first in Alexander's assertion that the work is the result of "reading primary sources" (xv) and that he has read very little in the way of critical studies on his subject (he notes that what he has examined "was not very encouraging" [xiv]). On reflection, however, a book hostile to current scholarship in toto but redolent of donnish authority makes for a strangely unstable text. The first seven chapters of Alexander's book cover familiar territory: Scott, Keats, Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Benjamin Disraeli, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Augustus Welby Pugin, and the Oxford Movement are all identified...

Purpose. The paper seeks to prove the thesis of the significance and importance of the theories and methodological approaches of historical anthropology, which are aimed at understanding the meanings, essence and value systems of human existence in the past for philosophical anthropology. The study of this problem is relevant for understanding the evolution of human identity with philosophical and anthropological concepts, understanding the essence of one’s own existence and attitude to the world. Theoretical basis. The author conducts research in the analysis of the reflexive field of philosophical anthropology and related disciplines, in particular historical anthropology, implemented in the philosophical literature of recent centuries, that is, in the space of non-classical and modern philosophical thought. Originality. I raise and substantiate the theoretical question of the scientific significance of the analysis of human existence in the past thanks to the involvement of theoretical approaches and concepts formed in the reflexive field of modern historical and anthropological research. This forms the prerequisites for understanding complex and interdisciplinary explorations of the essence and cultural and spiritual values of human existence. I analyse the problems of the work in the context of the concept of the incompleteness of the project of philosophical anthropology without its involvement in the theoretical achievements of historical-anthropological investigations. Conclusions. In my opinion, modern historical and anthropological studies of the essence and meanings of being a person of the past form an extensive theoretical system. It is realized through such theoretical aspects of comprehension of human existence by historical and anthropological studies as "history of mentalities", "microhistory", "history of women", "new cultural history", "history of identity", "history of memory", history of mental aspects of political processes. Methodological approaches and concepts of modern historical anthropology form the basis of mental reconstruction and understanding of the mental and cultural causes and factors of human existence, thanks to the analysis of the evolution of the worldview, behaviour, outlook, various forms of individual and social activity of the individual.

This device is one of a family of gyrotubes in which a relativistic, rotating shell of electrons interacts synchronously with high-order azimuthal, cylindrical TE modes. Harmonic operation together with RF gyroresonant acceleration of the electron beam constitutes a compact, lightweight, moderate-power millimetre wave amplifier. Recent changes in our fifth harmonic, four cavity device include the doubling of the drift region lengths and the improvement of the electron gun, electron optics, and accelerator drive quality. The maximum observed gain was 45 dB and the peak output power was 600 W. Data from an improved diagnostic for axial velocity is presented along with results from the experiment, analytic theory and simulation.

ESC 26, 2000 demonstrate abundantly that astronomy is an important “imag­ inative constituent” of Melville’s writings. V. K. CHARI / Carleton University Peter W. Sinnema. Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. [xii], 219. £45/$76.95 (U.S.). More than a decade ago, in a chapter devoted to outlining a fu­ ture agenda for scholarship in the burgeoning field of Victorian periodicals research, this reviewer noted that “more remains to be done on illustrated journals in general and on such middleclass parlor mainstays as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic in particular.” Peter Sinnema has heeded this call, as well as a “plea for a general recognition of periodicals as dis­ course rather than evidence” by — in his words — “apprehend­ ing Victorian periodicals as discursive and ideological entities” (2). Thus, he adopts an “interventionist” reading to “contextu­ alize” the ILN and its contents. Limiting his scope to the Illustrated London News’ first decade of publication, during which time its circulation in­ creased more than five-fold, Sinnema treats the periodical as “a textual centre around which other discourses circulate” (9). Moreover, space dictated that he seek “an adequately cogent delimitation of the field of analysis” in his “examination of an unexpurgated strata of social discourse.” The discourse that most concerns him is that between text and illustration, and here he seeks no less than “a politically discriminating ekphrasis , an interpretation of the complexities of image and text in their material production and social effects” (31). Combining the tools of literary and artistic criticism, Sinnema aims “to investigate the material conditions of possibility for the IL N ’s emergence in 1842” (206). In this, perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, the author discusses advances in the repro­ duction and mass production of illustrated texts, the interplay between the roles of illustrators and wood block engravers, and the general lack of status and “alienation” of the latter vis-à-vis the former (53ff.). The constraints imposed by the need to pro­ duce illustrations for an increasingly industrialized publishing 508 REVIEWS industry, the author argues convincingly, led to a more prole­ tarian status for illustrators, draughtsmen, and engravers. Less illuminating or persuasive, however, is the author’s lengthy, the­ oretical digression into the distinctions between “art” and “art reproduced.” Sinnema’s commitment to a theoretical pursuit of “ideolo­ gies,” in which he “attempts to break with the bibliographical tradition” (2) in the study of periodicals, appears at first to be promising. However, the author’s lack of attention to much of the historical (“bibliographical”) context, as well as his rigid adherence to passé critical theories and their attendant jargon, seriously handicap his efforts to offer worthwhile new insights and conclusions. In four “thematized” chapters that follow, the author considers the IL N 's treatment of interiors, railways, fic­ tion, and death. In the first of these, by “Taking the binary ‘interior /exterior’ as my problematic, I shall consider visual and verbal representations of indoor and outdoor spaces as some of the IL N 's most potent in terp ellate mechanisms. Linguistically and pictorially, the ILN frames a rigid distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or reading self and represented Other, in its con­ comitant elaboration of the interior/exterior opposition” (86). Thus, for example, the author interprets a major, illustrated article on the Pentonville prison in terms of Michel Foucault’s “panoptic modality of power” (93): “The ubiquitous artist was a synecdoche for a relatively new and pervasive culture of inde­ fatigable observation” (95). Thus, “Put simply, reading about and viewing the penal interior grants readers power” (88). A lengthy chapter is then devoted to plot summaries and analy­ ses of the ideology implicit in several works of fiction serialized during the IL N 's first decade. Nor does the author neglect to consider poetry, despite its infrequent inclusion, and we are as­ sured that “these poems calibrate seamlessly with the general strategy of ‘Othering’ already uncovered” in the prose works (145). The final chapter is devoted to the IL N 's “hypercathectic scrutiny” (6) and eulogizing of the Duke of Wellington follow­ ing his death in 1852. This “commodification” of...

The works of the Ukrainian composer Olena Ilnytska (born in 1977) are well known not only in Ukraine, but also abroad. Her works are performed by both domestic and foreign musicians. The piece “To Victory” for vocal sextet and symphony orchestra is an example of contemporary Ukrainian symphonism, combining Western European and national traditions with techniques of contemporary musical language. In it, as in other genres, the author's mythopoetic thinking is evident. She reflects on a complex, historically established genre that has a philosophical basis in the history of world musical culture. “To Victory” is indicative both for understanding of mythopoetics of symphony music and the author’s symphonic thinking, which revealed itself in the skill of large-scale thinking, combining different musical-semantical intonation models, uniting them in an integrate structure. Mythologization takes place on genre, thematic, and timbre levels.