“You Have Been in Afghanistan”: A Discourse on the Van Alstyne Method

This essay pays tribute to William Van Alstyne, one of our foremost constitutional scholars, by applying the methods of textual interpretation he laid out in a classic essay, Interpreting This Constitution: On the Unhelpful Contribution of Special Theories of Judicial Review. I make use of the graphical methods Van Alstyne has applied to the general study of the First Amendment to examine the Supreme Court\u27s recent decisions in the context of the Free Exercise Clause, in particular the landmark case of Employment Division v. Smith . The application of Van Alstyne\u27s use of the burden of proof as an interpretive tool and the results of the application of the graphic analysis, I argue, suggest that Smith is a gravely flawed decision, inconsistent both with precedent and with sophisticated textual analysis of the sort that much of Van Alstyne\u27s own distinguished scholarship holds before us as a model of principled and neutral constitutional application

The Empire Bites Back: Sherlock Holmes as an Imperial Immune System

Trained as a physician in the bacteriological age, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a detective-hero who acts both like a masterful bacteriologist and an imperial immune system. Doyle\u27s experiences as a doctor in South Africa taught him that the colonies\u27 microbes were his Empire\u27s worst enemy. In 1890, Doyle visited Berlin, where Robert Koch was testing a cure for tuberculosis, and in Doyle\u27s subsequent character sketch of Koch, the scientist sounds remarkably like Sherlock Holmes. Based on Doyle\u27s medical instructor Joe Bell, Holmes shares Koch\u27s relentless drive to hunt down and unmask tiny invaders. Imperialism, by the 1880s, had opened Europe to the peoples, cultures, and diseases of the lands it claimed. Holmes plays a defensive role, as an imperial intelligence network to detect foreigners passing in British society. The revenge, blackmail, and counterfeiting around which the Holmes stories are built reflect readers\u27 anxieties about infiltration, about punishment for their colonial theft, and about the legitimacy of their own identity in a socio-economic system built on contradictions. Holmes thus responds to conflicting social demands, exposing interlopers who mimic traditional signs of respectability, and protecting respectable citizens from the consequences of their colonial crimes

Crime and culture : a thematic reading of Sherlock Holmes and his adaptations.

This dissertation focuses on the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character and stories into the television shows Sherlock and Elementary on air today. The project will consider three central questions: 1) Why is this Victorian detective hero still popular in the twenty-first century and what has remained constant and still resonates with modern audiences? 2) Both television shows transport Holmes in time by setting their narratives in the present day; therefore, what has been changed in this process of adaptation? 3) How do these changes represent shifts in our cultural thinking about important aspects of humanistic inquiry? The dissertation is organized around types of crime with each chapter devoted to a different crime that will bring to the fore specific themes central to the chapter. Chapter one is focused on the crime of murder and considers the intersection of reason and emotion. Chapter two examines the crime of smuggling and the representation of the East (with a specific focus on China). Chapter three considers the crimes of the powerful in order to focus on the relationship within society between those with power and money and those without such resources. Finally, chapter four is centered on the crime of blackmail in order to examine the relationship between public and private identities and information. This chapter addresses how the television shows have updated the understanding of public and private in response to digital technologies and the proliferation of online media

'I see you have quite gone over to the supernaturalists' : the spiritual and scientific Arthur Conan Doyle

This thesis examines the mistaken premise that Arthur Conan Doyle abandoned rational enquiry in order to embrace the supernatural, including spiritualism. It explores how Doyle’s diverse fiction and non-fiction define potentially supernatural phenomena as originating in the natural world. Consequently, for Doyle, the supernatural did not exist. This thesis investigates how Doyle advocated that new undetected natural laws could be investigated by science to establish unusual phenomena, including the existence of fairies and spiritualism. Through a reading of Doyle’s autobiographical, medical, detective, imperial and science fictions this thesis traces his scientific trajectory from gothicised supernatural to spiritualism. It considers how mental illness and addiction can provide heightened perceptions of potentially supernatural visions. It also examines how Doyle’s interpretation of medical realism gothicised sexual transgression that eventually led to him challenging his early creation of a religious schema that incorporated natural selection. At the core of this thesis is a metaphor from ‘Lot No. 249’ that demonstrates Doyle’s belief that the shadows that darken the limits of the natural world could be illuminated by science. This thesis uses Doyle’s metaphor to examine Sherlock Holmes’s role in The Hound of the Baskervilles that provides the detective with a method to investigate unusual phenomena. Doyle’s romance of imperial exploration and scientific medical self-experimentation merge with his interest in unusual phenomena. This enables an examination of Watson’s experience with a deadly drug in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ that can be read as an encounter with a spirit-entity. This thesis continues by examining Doyle’s science fiction stories that include his belief that circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony should be utilised to sway scientific scepticism. The thesis concludes by noting how the author finally embraced spiritualism through ideas of spiritual salvation amidst a world doomed by their material pleasures, before briefly examining Doyle’s belief that science could still explain unusual phenomena by adapting technology

'I see you have quite gone over to the supernaturalists' : the spiritual and scientific Arthur Conan Doyle

This thesis examines the mistaken premise that Arthur Conan Doyle abandoned rational enquiry in order to embrace the supernatural, including spiritualism. It explores how Doyle’s diverse fiction and non-fiction define potentially supernatural phenomena as originating in the natural world. Consequently, for Doyle, the supernatural did not exist. This thesis investigates how Doyle advocated that new undetected natural laws could be investigated by science to establish unusual phenomena, including the existence of fairies and spiritualism. Through a reading of Doyle’s autobiographical, medical, detective, imperial and science fictions this thesis traces his scientific trajectory from gothicised supernatural to spiritualism. It considers how mental illness and addiction can provide heightened perceptions of potentially supernatural visions. It also examines how Doyle’s interpretation of medical realism gothicised sexual transgression that eventually led to him challenging his early creation of a religious schema that incorporated natural selection. At the core of this thesis is a metaphor from ‘Lot No. 249’ that demonstrates Doyle’s belief that the shadows that darken the limits of the natural world could be illuminated by science. This thesis uses Doyle’s metaphor to examine Sherlock Holmes’s role in The Hound of the Baskervilles that provides the detective with a method to investigate unusual phenomena. Doyle’s romance of imperial exploration and scientific medical self-experimentation merge with his interest in unusual phenomena. This enables an examination of Watson’s experience with a deadly drug in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ that can be read as an encounter with a spirit-entity. This thesis continues by examining Doyle’s science fiction stories that include his belief that circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony should be utilised to sway scientific scepticism. The thesis concludes by noting how the author finally embraced spiritualism through ideas of spiritual salvation amidst a world doomed by their material pleasures, before briefly examining Doyle’s belief that science could still explain unusual phenomena by adapting technology

\u27 You Have Been in Afghanistan : A Discourse on the Van Alstyne Method

This essay pays tribute to William Van Alstyne, one of our foremost constitutional scholars, by applying the methods of textual interpretation he laid out in a classic essay, Interpreting This Constitution: On the Unhelpful Contribution of Special Theories of Judicial Review. I make use of the graphical methods Van Alstyne has applied to the general study of the First Amendment to examine the Supreme Court\u27s recent decisions in the context of the Free Exercise Clause, in particular the landmark case of Employment Division v. Smith . The application of Van Alstyne\u27s use of the burden of proof as an interpretive tool and the results of the application of the graphic analysis, I argue, suggest that Smith is a gravely flawed decision, inconsistent both with precedent and with sophisticated textual analysis of the sort that much of Van Alstyne\u27s own distinguished scholarship holds before us as a model of principled and neutral constitutional application

Empire Under the Microscope

This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today

Remedial discourses : men, madness and mental management in fin-de-siècle literature

The period between 1880 and 1913, commonly known as the fin de siècle, was a time of great social, political and industrial change, an era in which the Victorian man saw his position within his society, his workplace and his family home undergo a radical transformation. It was also a period of evolution within the realm of mental medicine, which saw the development of radical new treatments across Europe and America. The methods, discourses and ideologies that underpinned these novel practices played a key role in the conception of mental illness, as well as the reconfiguration of the curative practices employed in its management. This thesis seeks to explore the depiction both of mental illness and of these new remedial discourses within the popular fiction of the period. Focusing specifically on the presentation of male madness, it seeks to extend the growing number of studies on masculinity and insanity in the nineteenth century, by considering its position at this late point of the period. It also breaks new ground by studying the depiction in fin de siècle literature not of illness, but of treatments for disorder, an area that has been considerably neglected critically. Divided into chapters based on genre, this thesis examines the portrayal of various types of madness in middle class male literary characters, arguing for a distinctive link between social anxieties and mental breakdown. It also explores how the fictional text engages with the scientific advancements of the period in treating mental illness, the key role played by narrative in both the creation of the story and the creation of the cure, and the clear interrelation and reciprocal influence between psychology and fiction at the end of the nineteenth century

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of filmic technology as a form of the proto-cinematic, a term I use as media scholars do—to describe devices integral to film history but that also each had a cultural impact in its own unique way. To demonstrate and support this argument, my project first introduces readers to a range of proto-cinematic technologies, toys that were important during the nineteenth century, and establishes these as a lens through which we might read Victorian narratives. The subsequent chapters offer close readings that delineate my proposed methodology; texts include Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes stories