Killing animals

Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.While many collections originate as a series of separately planned conference papers drawn together only by editorial fiat, the essays that comprise Killing Animals were regarded as parts of a larger whole from their inception. The result is a remarkably collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that includes eight individually authored chapters and a collectively written introduction. Rather than attempting to produce a single ethical understanding from their diverse views, however, the group aims instead to demonstrate the value of the wider academic study of the place of animals in human history. The conclusion to Killing Animals takes the form of a discussion among the eight contributors, with each expanding upon issues raised earlier in the book

Twice-Two: Hegel’s Comic Redoubling of Being and Nothing

Following Freud’s analysis of the fragile line between the uncanny double and its comic redoubling, I identify the doubling of the double found in critical moments of Hegelian dialectic as producing a kind of comic effect. It almost goes without saying that two provides greater pleasure than one, the loneliest number. Many also find two to be preferable to three, the tired trope of dialectic as a teleological waltz. Two seems to offer lightness, relieving one from her loneliness and lacking the complications of a third who comes in between. And yet, we learn through Marx and Freud that the double (even the double of tragedy and farce) borders on something closer to horror than comedy. In the following, I would like to explore why four is funnier than two in my staging of dialectic as the doubling of the double or, to borrow a movie title from Laurel and Hardy, “Twice Two” (Roach et al. 1933a). I will begin by exploring the formulations of the double in the form of a pair of opposites and in the form of a pair of twins. The literary tropes of the double as the odd couple, on one side, and the twins, on the other, appear to serve very different narrative functions, which incite different kinds of affective responses from the audience. However, the form of the opposed double sometimes conceals the realization that the empty or fragmented content of the first is only reduplicated in the second. The “straight man” of the odd couple cannot see himself in his counterpart “the comic.” The redoubling of the double, however, forces not only the audience, but the original double on stage to confront what was already present, but unrealized, from the beginning. To illustrate this redoubling of the double within the opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic, I consider two short films by Laurel and Hardy in which the comic duo redoubles itself. The formula (2 x 2) produces a comic excess through the dialectical redoubling of there uncanny double

Any Dark Saying:Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties

The contours of Louis MacNeice's career are rarely contested: from the high point of his nineteen thirties work, reaching a crescendo with Autumn Journal (1939), he drifted into a slump, reaching a nadir with two collections from the early nineteen fifties, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954), before reviving to develop a startling new style at the end of the decade. The historical moment clearly demanded stylistic renegotiation, both for poets living in Ireland and those outside it, but in comparison with the new styles developed coterminously by Clarke and Kavanagh, MacNeice's late work is stark, suggestive of nightmarish solipsism and a breakdown of social cohesion. If the failure of his volumes from the early Fifties suggested a symbolic break between self and society, his subsequent inward turn affirms the self as the ground of lyric poetry. MacNeice's late work should be understood as symptomatic of an encroaching dissolution of communality that would profoundly affect the cultures of both islands as the twentieth century progressed. This essay explores MacNeice's stylistic evolution at mid century and considers the extent to which these developments were an essential foundation for the creation of his remarkable late style. </jats:p

Constraint Logic Programming for Natural Language Processing

This paper proposes an evaluation of the adequacy of the constraint logic programming paradigm for natural language processing. Theoretical aspects of this question have been discussed in several works. We adopt here a pragmatic point of view and our argumentation relies on concrete solutions. Using actual contraints (in the CLP sense) is neither easy nor direct. However, CLP can improve parsing techniques in several aspects such as concision, control, efficiency or direct representation of linguistic formalism. This discussion is illustrated by several examples and the presentation of an HPSG parser.Comment: 15 pages, uuencoded and compressed postscript to appear in Proceedings of the 5th Int. Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming. Lisbon, Portugal. 199

The Allegorical and Symbolic Modes of Representation in W. Wordsworth\u27s Poems of the Fancy and Poems of the Imagination

The present study focuses on the controversial issue concerning the differentiation of Fancy and Imagination in the context of S. T. Coleridge\u27s and W. Wordsworth\u27s Romantic aesthetics. Wordsworth\u27s theoretical and poetic discourses lead to an indeterminacy in the attempts to distinguish between the lower poetic faculty of Fancy and the higher poetic faculty of the Imagination. The present investigation proceeds from the assumption that the two poetic modes can only be defined accurately as complementary rather than distinct. They engender an unstable perspective upon the external world which allows for transmutations of the visible into the visionary, of the act of seeing into the process of envisioning reality and of states of being into processes of becoming. The analysis of Wordsworth\u27s poetic discourse relates the theory of Imagination to his Poems of the Fancy and the theory of Fancy to his Poems of the Imagination. The poems The Danish Boy, To a Skylark and With How Sad Steps, O Moon reveal a symbolic mode of vision and re-figurings of the Imagination which represent a transformation of reality. A Night-Piece, The Reverie of Poor Susan and View from the Top of Black Comb show an allegorical dichotomy which substitutes for the symbolic synthesis that Wordsworth\u27s poetic discourse engenders on the basis of the Imagination. The inference of a symbolic mode of representation in Wordsworth\u27s Poems of the Fancy and of an allegorical mode in his Poems of the Imagination is a method applicable to the larger context of his poetry in an attempt at reaffirming the complementarity of Fancy and Imagination in its relation to a Romantic process of becoming

The Allegorical and Symbolic Modes of Representation in W. Wordsworth\u27s Poems of the Fancy and Poems of the Imagination

The present study focuses on the controversial issue concerning the differentiation of Fancy and Imagination in the context of S. T. Coleridge\u27s and W. Wordsworth\u27s Romantic aesthetics. Wordsworth\u27s theoretical and poetic discourses lead to an indeterminacy in the attempts to distinguish between the lower poetic faculty of Fancy and the higher poetic faculty of the Imagination. The present investigation proceeds from the assumption that the two poetic modes can only be defined accurately as complementary rather than distinct. They engender an unstable perspective upon the external world which allows for transmutations of the visible into the visionary, of the act of seeing into the process of envisioning reality and of states of being into processes of becoming. The analysis of Wordsworth\u27s poetic discourse relates the theory of Imagination to his Poems of the Fancy and the theory of Fancy to his Poems of the Imagination. The poems The Danish Boy, To a Skylark and With How Sad Steps, O Moon reveal a symbolic mode of vision and re-figurings of the Imagination which represent a transformation of reality. A Night-Piece, The Reverie of Poor Susan and View from the Top of Black Comb show an allegorical dichotomy which substitutes for the symbolic synthesis that Wordsworth\u27s poetic discourse engenders on the basis of the Imagination. The inference of a symbolic mode of representation in Wordsworth\u27s Poems of the Fancy and of an allegorical mode in his Poems of the Imagination is a method applicable to the larger context of his poetry in an attempt at reaffirming the complementarity of Fancy and Imagination in its relation to a Romantic process of becoming