The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East. Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. (...) One is regaled with chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that. The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends precisely on this other world, on what happens over there. 1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry , p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP. Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

In the opening chapter of this groundbreaking work, Bruce Kawin asks: can a film which is already the dream of its maker and its audience, and which can present itself as the dream of one of its characters appear, finally, to dream itself? Contrary to the classic assumption that all film narration is third person, the author contends that a movie can be narrated in first person through a consciousness that originates either on screen or off. Through a discussion (...) of Keaton, Welles, Resnais, Bergman, Godard, and even Chuck Jones, Kawin shows how the self-reflexivity of film stimulates the aesthetic, political, and psychological processes of the audience, making possible a greater knowledge and acceptance of ourselves.". (shrink)

Brain damage may doubly dissociate cognitive modules, but the practice of revealing dissociations is predicated on modularity being true (T. Shallice, 1988). This article questions the utility of assuming modularity, as it examines a paradigmatic double dissociation of reading modules. Reading modules illustrate two general problems. First, modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of exclusionary criteria that define pure cases. As a consequence, competing modular theories force perennial quests for purer cases, which simply perpetuates growth in the list (...) of exclusionary criteria. The first problem leads, in part, to the second problem. Modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of pure cases. The second failure perpetuates unending fractionation into more modules. (shrink)

For Paul and Luke alike, the present age is the age of the Spirit; for them both, the presence and activity of the Spirit constituted the great new fact of their time.

“… the recipients of this letter had to learn that while Christ is unchanging, he is nevertheless onward-moving, always leading his people forth to new ventures in his cause…. He is the pioneer, the trailblazer, along the path of faith….”.

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

The belief that damaging an object may harm the individual to which the object relates is common among adults. We explored whether arousal following the destruction of a photograph of a loved partner is greater than that following the destruction of a photograph of a stranger, and whether this response is greater than when a photograph representing a non-person sentimental attachment is destroyed, using a measure of skin conductance response. Long-term supporters of a football team, who were also in a (...) long-term relationship, showed increased arousal when asked to destroy a photograph of their partner, but not a photograph of their team, even though both elicited equivalent ratings of emotional attachment. This may be because football teams are conceptualized differently from individuals. Future studies should address whether destruction of symbols that represent the enduring nature of the team elicit more emotional distress than photograph. (shrink)

Research on corporate political activity has considered a number of antecedents to a firm’s engagement in politics. The majority of this research has focused on either industry or firm-level motivations that lead to corporate political activity, leaving the role of the firm’s leader noticeably absent in such scholarship. This article combines ideas from Upper Echelons Theory with research in corporate political activity to bridge this important gap. More specifically, this research utilizes CEO demographic characteristics to determine whether a firm will (...) invest in political activity and how these characteristics influence the particular approach to political activity the firm undertakes. Considering 27 years of data from large U.S. firms, we find that a CEO’s age, tenure, functional, and educational backgrounds influence whether and how the firm invests in political activity. (shrink)

Transcriptional enhancer sequences have been shown to play a pivotal role in the regulation of some highly expressed genes. First described in eukaryotic viruses, the discovery of enhancers has augmented the previously defined control‐sequence motifs to give a more complete understanding of eukaryotic transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. Some properties of enhancers that distinguish them from other regulatory sequences include their ability to function in a position‐ and orientation‐independent manner. Furthermore, the observation that some enhancers and transcriptional promoters exhibit tissue specificity in (...) their activity has generated considerable interest. Enhancer activation is thought to involve sequence‐specific DNA‐binding proteins but the process by which this leads to an increase in the initiation of transcription remains obscure. Although viral enhancers are more fully characterized, several cellular enhancers have recently been identified. One such enhancer sequence has been detected in a 3′ flanking region of a highly expressed human placental lactogen gene. This enhancer can increase the transcriptional rate of an adjacent gene by at least 50‐fold. (shrink)

The neglect of issues related to the economic status of minorities and women in introductory economics textbooks widely used in the United States is a problem rooted in the most fundamental theoretical propositions of mainstream economics. Despite the fact that the claims of both mainstream methodology and general equilibrium theory have been seriously questioned in recent years, introductory economics textbooks fail to incorporate into the principles curriculum those critical findings which would allow analysis of the economic problems of women and (...) minorities in the United States. This article compares mainstream and radical textbooks' treatments of race and gender issues to show how the radical approach to these economic questions overcomes many of the deficiencies of the mainstream approach. (shrink)

This paper describes the application of eight statistical and machine-learning methods to derive computer models for predicting mortality of hospital patients with pneumonia from their findings at initial presentation. The eight models were each constructed based on 9847 patient cases and they were each evaluated on 4352 additional cases. The primary evaluation metric was the error in predicted survival as a function of the fraction of patients predicted to survive. This metric is useful in assessing a model’s potential to assist (...) a clinician in deciding whether to treat a given patient in the hospital or at home. We examined the error rates of the models when predicting that a given fraction of patients will survive. We examined survival fractions between 0.1 and 0.6. Over this range, each model’s predictive error rate was within 1% of the error rate of every other model. When predicting that approximately 30°K of the patients will survive, all the models have an error rate of less than 1.5%. The models are distinguished more by the number of variables and parameters that they contain than by their error rates; these differences suggest which models may be the most amenable to future implementation as paper-based guidelines. (shrink)

New forms of information technology, such as email, webpages and groupware, are being rapidly adopted. Intended to improve efficiency and effectiveness, these technologies also have the potential to radically alter the way people communicate in organizations. The effects can be positive or negative. This paper explores how technology can encourage or discourage moral dialogue -- communication that is open, honest, and respectful of participants. It develops a framework that integrates formal properties of ideal moral discourse, based on Habermas' theory of (...) communicative action, with properties of informal communication that help sustain good moral conversations. Ten criteria distilled from these works form the basis of a template that can be used for assessing the positive and negative impacts of emerging information technologies on moral dialogue. (shrink)

Traditional forms of farming, herding, and fishing are remarkably adapted to African conditions but these traditional approaches are being overtaken by modern pressures, particularly population growth. According to a report published by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a nonpartisan analytical support agency of the U. S. Congress, one promising way to help African farmers and herders would be for development assistance organizations to focus more attention on the various forms of low-resource agriculture that predominate in Africa.In keeping with OTA's (...) mission and primary audience, “Enhancing Agriculture in Africa: A Role for U. S. Development Assistance” (1988) is a policy-oriented synthesis of available technical information. The report provides Congress with a range of options that, if pursued, could help Africans enhance agriculture, increase their food security, and improve their lives.This paper is drawn from the larger OTA report, and it focuses on the role technology might play in enhancing low-resource agriculture. Readers should see the full assessment (OTA, 1988) for more information on policy considerations; the specific technologies mentioned; or a complete list of advisory panel members, workshops and participants, and commissioned papers.OTA's report comes at a critical time: for a variety of reasons—ranging from changing values to increased budget constraints—U. S. foreign assistance policy is undergoing a fundamental reevaluation. This review of the potential of low-resource agriculture, and options the United States might pursue to enhance this approach, was intended to aid in this reevaluation. (shrink)