30 research outputs found

    Before American History

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    Before American History juxtaposes Mexico City’s famous carved Sun Stone with the mounded earthworks found throughout the Midwestern states of the U.S. to examine the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two North American republics usually studied separately. As the U.S. and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America’s past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.Christen Mucher creatively recovers the Sun Stone and mounded earthworks as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, produced by Indigenous people but settler controlled and settler interpreted. Her approach renders visible the foundational methodologies, materials, and mythologies that created an American history out of and on top of Indigenous worlds and facilitated Native dispossession continent-wide. By writing Indigenous actors out of national histories, Mexican and U.S. elites also wrote them out of their lands, a legacy of erasure and removal that continues when we repeat these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century settler narratives and that reverberates in discussions of immigration, migration, and Nativism today

    The Seduction of Pessimism: Eros, Failure, and the Novel

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    In Plato’s Symposium, we get a pessimistic myth not only about love, but about the first experience of loss, in which we were once globular cosmic beings who were split in two by Zeus’s thunderbolts as punishment for not obeying the Olympian gods. Falling down to earth after the split, Zeus introduced eros out of pity for our condition. Our consolation was to find our other halves and hold on to them as a way of remembering what it was like when we were whole. But, as Allan Bloom notes: …man’s condition soon worsened. In the beginning, their real half was right there, and they could hold on to each other. But soon some of the halves died while others lived on, and in succeeding generations, the offspring of mixed couples reproduced together without necessarily being the true other half. Eventually there are no true other halves. The result is that men continue the quest, but it is hopeless. (108) To Plato, wholeness is hopeless, and yet we still gesture to it in the act of love, even as we are doomed to fail. The pursuit of love coincides with the pursuit of truth—also a project doomed to fail. Socrates never arrives at any definition of Justice in The Republic. In Phaedrus, he offers an account of eros, but only to take it back and offer yet another account, ending the dialogue with a meditation on the limits of the written word and how this medium of language fails us. In the Symposium, rather than offering a definition of eros once and for all, Plato displays multiple and often contradictory explanations for it, ending with the distractions of a drunken mob. Truth stands always at a remove, as elusive as Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse. The most we can do is approach it as an asymptote. What Plato leaves behind is the vehicle to approach it—the dialogue itself, literally two halves summoned together in intercourse, pursuing love and truth as interchangeable categories. That original separation, or Urteil in German—the word for “judgment,” our faculty for pursuing philosophy in the first place—reveals that eros is at the heart of philosophy. It is the nothing, the negativity, the lack that compels us to reach for what we have lost. Plato rehearses this split again in The Republic, when Socrates speaks of philosophy and poetry as lovers who have suffered a bad breakup. But the poetry Socrates is speaking of is “ordinary,” written in the language of average everydayness—ironically, the same kind of language that Plato uses in his own novelistic dialogues (602B). Plato, then, marks the fault-line between philosophy and the novel, a fault-line in which the novel is at fault. My dissertation charts their relationship across time as an erotic one, and as a pessimistic one. Behind the veneer of deduction and induction, philosophy—like the novel—operates primarily by seduction. This is the story of how both philosophy and the novel are seduced back to each other in modernity. Before the criminal biography and the Renaissance anatomy give us the modern novel, one thread of its history can be woven through the Platonic dialogue, the medieval Romance, and the fairy tale, encompassing multiple genres in its quest to find its long-lost lover in the form of philosophy. I focus on three twentieth-century novels that, in dialogue with each other, narrate this progression. The structure of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is modelled on Plato’s Symposium; D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a modern version of the medieval Tristan Romance; and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a fairy tale that reimagines Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Each of these novels offers its own model of eros as a pessimistic phenomenon. I then bookend this discussion by coming back to Symposium as a model for Søren Kierkegaard’s pessimism and experimentation with form as a way to unite philosophy and the novel in his Seducer’s Diary and in his literary reviews. I argue that The Seducer’s Diary can also be read as a template for Lolita, and I explore how his reflections on the novel in his literary reviews prefigure the philosophy laid out by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Both Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s focus on the experience of “average everydayness” coincides with the overall project of the novel. This is where these two ancient lovers rediscover each other in modernity. I end the dissertation by exploring the novel as a pedagogical device that offers an alternative vision to a world hijacked by a destructive neoliberal politics of optimism

    Book as Body: The Meaning-Making of Artists' Books in the Health Humanities

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    This research-creation dissertation investigates how artists’ books’ text, images, form, materiality, and other sensory engagements merge to communicate lived experiences of illness and disability. I ask how the meanings of these abstracted book-bodies adapt and change when they are re-interpreted by readers, and how this can be an effective strategy for forming relational understandings of what it is like to live with illness. Within the framework of a phenomenological practice, I show the generative potential for empathy and intercorporeal exchange that often occurs when engaging with another’s artist’s book. Next, I describe past practices of artists who have deployed artists’ books in negotiating the biomedicalization of their illness experience. I then reflect upon my own contribution to the intersection of artists’ books and healthcare, Field Notes: How to Be With. Finally, I analyze the outcomes of artist’s book workshops I developed and conducted with multiple communities, including biomedical personnel. These distinct, but inter-related research-creation practices indicate how patient communities can devise tacit and multi-sensory expressions of embodied phenomena that may otherwise be difficult to communicate through verbal means alone. From a health humanities perspective, the pedagogical potential of reading and making artists’ books may assist in resisting systemic pressures for clinical efficiency and unseat biases towards illness and disability. This research-creation dissertation thus serves as a philosophical, pedagogical, and pragmatic example of how to engage with artists’ books in health contexts. It examines how the formation of archival, hand-made book objects constitutes a legacy of lived experience that may be called upon, again and again, to share and understand life, death, illness, health, unease, and wellbeing

    Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts

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    Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the only early Greek heroic epics to have survived the transition to writing, even though extant evidence indicates that they emerged from a thriving oral culture. Among the missing are the songs of Boeotian Thebes. Homer’s Thebes examines moments in the Iliad and Odyssey where Theban characters and thematic engagements come to the fore. Rather than sifting through these appearances to reconstruct lost poems, Elton Barker and Joel Christensen argue that the Homeric poems borrow heroes from Thebes to address key ideas—about politics, time, and genre—that set out the unique superiority of these texts in performance. By using evidence from Hesiod and fragmentary sources attributed to Theban tradition, Barker and Christensen explore Homer’s appropriation of Theban motifs of strife and distribution to promote his tale of the sack of Troy and the returns home. As Homer’s Thebes shows, this Theban material sheds light on the exceptionality of the Homeric epics through the notions of poetic rivalry and Panhellenism. Furthermore, by emphasizing a nonhierarchical model of “reading” the epics derived from oral-formulaic poetics, this book contributes to recent debates about allusion, neoanalysis, and intertextuality

    Incapacity

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    In this highly original study of the nature of performance, Spencer Golub uses the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein into the way language works to analyze the relationship between the linguistic and the visual in the work of a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Peter Handke, David Mamet, and Alfred Hitchcock. Like Wittgenstein, these artists are concerned with the limits of language’s representational capacity. For Golub, it is these limits that give Wittgenstein’s thought a further, very personal significance—its therapeutic quality with respect to the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from which he suffers. Underlying what Golub calls “performance behavior” is Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior”—that which gives public expression to private experience. Golub charts new directions for exploring the relationship between theater and philosophy, and even for scholarly criticism itself

    Compact Anthology of World Literature II: Volumes 4, 5, and 6

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    The Compact Anthology of World Literature, Parts 4, 5, and 6 is designed as an e-book to be accessible on a variety of devices: smart phone, tablet, e-reader, laptop, or desktop computer. Students have reported ease of accessibility and readability on all these devices. To access the ePub text on a laptop, desktop, or tablet, you will need to download a program through which you can read the text. We recommend Readium, an application available through Google. If you plan to read the text on an Android device, you will need to download an application called Lithium from the App Store. On an iPhone, the text will open in iBooks. Affordable Learning Georgia has also converted the .epub files to PDF. Because .epub does not easily convert to other formats, the left margin of the .pdf is very narrow. ALG recommends using the .epub version. Although the text is designed to look like an actual book, the Table of Contents is composed of hyperlinks that will take you to each introductory section and then to each text. The three parts of the text are organized into the following units: Part 4—The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Unit I: The Age of Reason Unit II: The Near East and Asia Part 5—The Long Nineteenth Century Unit I Romanticism Unit II Realism Part 6—The Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature Unit I Modernism Unit II Postcolonial Literature Unit III Contemporary Literature Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain--those published or translated before 1923--are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. In those cases, we have provided a link to a stable site that includes the text. Thus, in Part 6, most of the texts are accessible in the form of links to outside sites. In every case, we have attempted to connect to the most stable links available. The following texts have been prepared with the assistance of the University of North Georgia Press in its role as Affordable Learning Georgia\u27s Partner Press. Affordable Learning Georgia partners with the University of North Georgia Press to assist grantees with copyright clearance, peer review, production and design, and other tasks required to produce quality Open Educational Resources (OER). The University Press is a peer-reviewed, academic press. Its mission is to produce scholarly work that contributes to the fields of innovative teaching, textbooks, and Open Educational Resources. Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant funds may be used for services provided by the Press. To determine how the University Press can assist ALG grantees or anyone interested in developing OER with ALG, the University Press will provide advance free consultations. Please contact the Press at 706-864-1556 or [email protected]. “Textbook Transformation Grants” from Affordable Learning Georgia Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/1018/thumbnail.jp

    Observing from the Margins: James Parkinson and the Shaking Palsy

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    Abstract In 1817, James Parkinson (1755-1824) published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, describing paralysis agitans, or the shaking palsy, a condition he believed to be a specific and newly characterized disease. The disease concept specified both a constellation of signs and symptoms, including an abnormal gait, tremor, and difficulty initiating movement, and a specific order in which these signs and symptoms appeared, regardless of sufferers’ individual constitutions. Existing biographical and scholarly work about Parkinson and what is now known as Parkinson’s disease explicates the Essay but does not explore how Parkinson came to write it; his initial observations and subsequent conceptualizing of the disease have not been examined. Using the framework of the history of disease, this dissertation explores the early history of the shaking palsy, beginning with the training in observation that enabled Parkinson to envision the disease. He acquired this training in several settings: in his apprenticeship as a surgeon-apothecary and subsequent hospital experience; through his later period of study with John Hunter; and through his intensive study of fossils and chemistry. Next, it explores Parkinson’s neighborhood in Shoreditch, an increasingly impoverished suburb of London, where his medical work included attendance at madhouses and the parish workhouse. It then examines what inhabiting that environment would have allowed Parkinson to see. At a time when disease was increasingly seen as localized in the body’s tissues, correlatable with characteristic pathologic lesions visible at autopsy, the shaking palsy lacked a characteristic lesion to justify its classification as a new disease. To identify, bound, and define the disease, Parkinson needed a different conceptual framework to structure his ideas. This he accomplished using the framework of case histories and case series, a method he had employed in earlier published work. The shaking palsy continued to lack a pathologic explanation for many decades after Parkinson published the Essay. The dissertation ends by exploring how the disease concept survived and came into general use during the first decades following the Essay’s publication

    Data Classification for L-Diversity

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    Corporations are retaining ever-larger corpuses of personal data; the frequency of breaches and corresponding privacy impact has been rising accordingly. One way to mitigate this risk is through use of anonymized data, limiting the exposure of individual data to only where it is absolutely needed. This would seem particularly appropriate for data mining, where the goal is generalizable knowledge rather than data on specific individuals. In practice, corporate data miners often insist on original data, for fear that they might miss something with anonymized or differentially private approaches. This dissertation provides both empirical and theoretical justifications for the use of anonymized data, in particular for a specific scheme of anonymization called anatomization (or anatomized data). Anatomized data preserves all attribute values, but introduces uncertainty in the mapping between identifying and sensitive values, thus satisfying `-diversity. We first propose a promising decision tree learning algorithm. Empirical results show that this algorithm produces decision trees approaching the accuracy of non-private decision trees. We then show that a k-nearest neighbor classifier and a support vector classifier trained on anatomized data are theoretically expected to do as well as on the original data under certain conditions. The theoretical effectiveness of the latter approaches are validated using several publicly available datasets, showing that we outperform the state of the art for nearest neighbor and support vector classification using training data protected by k-anonymity, and are comparable to learning on the original data
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