La retorica di Ulisse contro la<i>pietas</i>, da Dante a Tennyson

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Maney via http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0263990415Z.00000000091In antiquity, public speaking was based on a set of linguistic strategies for obtaining agreement, with a good command of rhetoric seen as an asset. In the post-classical period, rhetoric was vilified and its status diminished due to the increasing (scientific) demand for tonal neutrality in discourse and the sublimation of oratory into printed material. In principle, Dante would have been respectful of the tradition governing epic speech-making, but ultimately chose to depict Ulysses’ fate in Inferno XXVI as a case of morally suspect rhetoric, exaggerating the hero-sinner’s deceptive skills and wanderlust as concepts antithetical to pietas, the idea of devotion espoused by Aeneas, Virgil’s hero. Tennyson’s depiction of Ulysses conforms in many ways to epic rhetorical conventions, though the post-Romantic incarnation of the Homeric hero does not precisely dovetail with the figure of classical and medieval tradition, instead fitting the Victorian mould of a restless wanderer, more concerned with intellectual pursuits than social pietas and oratorical trickery. By undertaking a comparative analysis of the rhetorical devices and presentation of pietas in these two works, a distilled appreciation of the fluctuating significance of Ulysses and notions of duty from the medieval era to modern times can be achieved

Ecopoetic ruminations in Baudelaire’s ‘Je n’ai pas oublié’ and ‘La Servante au grand cœur’

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.993676‘Je n’ai pas oublié’, the ninety-ninth poem in the second edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1861), involves the narrator reminiscing about his impoverished childhood in his mother’s small house near Paris. In the following piece, ‘La Servante au grand cœur’, the narrator suggests to his mother that they should take flowers to the tomb of his nursemaid, whose nigh forgotten body lies beside other neglected corpses suffering the passage of the seasons. These two vignettes of memory highlight a burgeoning awareness of new prosodic and ecological systems, making them ripe for ecopoetic analysis. This article suggests that the evocation of Baudelaire’s modest pre-metropolitan existence offers the key to understanding the diminished human and non-human presences that figure in the surrounding 16 poems of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ series, marked by the melancholic metrocentrism that suffuses Baudelaire’s later poetry

Optimising Community-Based Forest Management Policy in Indonesia: a Critical Review

Community-based forest management (CBFM) is a popular concept in many countries, covering over 400 million hectares worldwide. In Indonesia, CBFM is viewed as an important component of the forestry sector with the government's goal to establish 5.6 million hectares of CBFM by 2011 (twice the area of industrial plantation forests). The Indonesian government is pursuing CBFM as a strategy to reduce deforestation of tropical forests, to alleviate poverty in rural communities, and to contribute timber supplies to the processing industry.There has been a belief that CBFM can lead to a physical and socio-economic transformation at the local level. However, in practice, especially in Indonesia, this claim appears problematic because in over 35 years since it has been officially introduced it does not appear to have contributed significantly to address the problems of deforestation and rural poverty.Despite the government's ambitious goal for CBFM, there are several challenges, for instance the entrenched poverty of many rural communities and inconsistent and unsupportive policies of CBFM at the national, provincial, and local government. This paper is intended to explore, discusses, and criticize the implementation of CBFM policies in various countries and in particular in Indonesia. This paper also aims to explore its challenges in the future development in Indonesia

Social inclusion and valued roles : a supportive framework

The aim of this paper is to examine the concepts of social exclusion, social inclusion and their relevance to health, well-being and valued social roles. The article presents a framework, based on Social Role Valorization (SRV), which was developed initially to support and sustain socially valued roles for those who are, or are at risk of, being devalued within our society. The framework incorporates these principles and can be used by health professionals across a range of practice, as a legitimate starting point from which to support the acquisition of socially valued roles which are integral to inclusio

Neural Priming in Human Prefrontal Cortex: Multiple Forms of Learning Reduce Demands on the Prefrontal Executive System.

Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom-up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions ("neural priming"/"repetition suppression") during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through which learning from the past decreases demands on the prefrontal executive system. Manipulation of learning at three levels of representation-stimulus, decision, and response-revealed dissociable neural priming effects in distinct frontotemporal regions, supporting a multiprocess model of neural priming. Critically, three distinct patterns of neural priming were identified in lateral frontal cortex, indicating that frontal computational demands are reduced by three forms of learning: (a) cortical tuning of stimulus-specific representations, (b) retrieval of learned stimulus-decision mappings, and (c) retrieval of learned stimulus-response mappings. The topographic distribution of these neural priming effects suggests a rostrocaudal organization of executive function in lateral frontal cortex

Communicating REDD+ Issues at Local Level: Creating Latent and Manifest Conflict

”Carbon offsetting”in forestry-related projects is widely regarded as the ideal solution to the three challenges of the 21st Century: climate change, biodiversity conservation andsocio-economic development. At the same time, there is scepticism about the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) proposal particularly because of the weak governance and institutional capacities in many developing countries, which could jeopardize the delivery of benefits at the local level. One major problem is that most people have little knowledge on the causes and consequences of the climate change. This is partly because the information is largely scattered among scientific journals, and obscured by jargon and sophisticated mathematical models. Consequently, REDD+ is beyond thereach of manyof the people affected by REDD+. This paper examines the efforts and the capacity of the local governments and other development agents in explaining the REDD + issues and its impacts on the local people, especially customary communities. The research shows that lack of policy communication and promotion, as well as consultations with the affected groups arethe main contributing factors to latent and manifest conflicts. In turn, this conflicth as proven that NGOs, district governments and scientists have not been successful intermediaries. Thus, in the future policy communication on REDD+ should beaimed at improved network formation (i.e. between farmer groups with business partners and NGOs and other related actors), learning, negotiation and relationship building (i.e. between members of farmer groups, not only withtheir leaders within the farmer groups but also with governmental and business sectors). Policy communication should also create a new configuration of support and services in form of advocacy, empowerment and management skills and technical skills for conserving their natural resources, for adaptation to climate change and building more equitable governance and transparency at local level