Oral tradition and contemporary critical theory : I

This is the first of two clusters of essays devoted to exploring the ways in which oral theory intersects with, informs, and is in turn informed by other schools of contemporary criticism.Note, Mark C. Amodio, Guest Editor

Oral tradition and contemporary critical theory : II

This is the second of two clusters of essays whose shared project is to put oral theory into dialogue, directly or indirectly, with other schools of contemporary critical thought.Note: Mark C. Amodio, Guest Editor

Affective criticism, oral poetics, and Beowulf's fight with the dragon

Affective criticism, as it has been practiced over the last few years, has come to focus upon the reader's (or audience's) subjective experience of a given literary work.1 Rather than examining the text qua object, affective criticism (like all subjective criticism) has abandoned the objectivism and textual reification which lay at the heart of the New Critical enterprise, striving instead to lead "one away from the 'thing itself' in all its solidity to the inchoate impressions of a variable and various reader" (Fish 1980:42).2 Shifting the critical focus away from the text to the reader has engendered much controversy, in large part because the emphasis placed upon the reader as sole (or co-)creator of meaning has led to "the exclusion, and even to the avowed extinction, of authors and literary objects" (DeMaria 1978:463)

Medieval English oral tradition

For nearly fifty years, the medieval English oral tradition has been one of the most intensely studied of all the world's oral traditions,1 but it has so far proved to be an extremely difficult one both to define and to understand. In addition to the issues that confront everyone who works with long-silent, entexted oral traditions--among which are fundamental questions about how a given culture's verbal art was composed/produced/presented/encoded/received--there are a number of other issues that are specific to the English tradition in the Middle Ages.Not

Tradition, performance, and poetics in the Early Middle English period

Of the many periods into which scholars habitually divide English literary and social history, the post-Conquest period surely ranks as one of the most interesting and most complex. The tumultuous years 1066-1250 witness not only the rise of most of those political and social institutions upon which England's unique national identity rests,1 but it is also the period in which literacy and its concomitant practices and habits of mind move beyond the walls of the monastic and scholastic cells where they had long been sheltered and begin to become more widely available, and increasingly necessary, to people situated at all levels of the social hierarchy.2Not

Use of ATP bioluminescence for assessing the cleanliness of hospital surfaces: A review of the published literature (1990-2012)

Hospital cleanliness tends to be considered by patients and the public as an important indicator of the general quality of healthcare. Tests for detecting the presence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as a proxy of microbial contamination are increasing in popularity, and several studies have been conducted on this topic in the last few decades. The aim of the present study was to review the published literature on this topic and summarize and discuss the available results. The review focused on relevant English-language articles that were identified through searches of two databases [PubMed and Scopus (1990-2012)] by using the keywords "ATP", "bioluminescence", "hospital", and "surfaces". Twelve articles were included and analyzed. ATP measurements showed a wide variation, with values ranging from 0 to >500,000 relative light units (RLU)/s before cleaning and from 3 to 500,000. RLU/s after cleaning. ATP benchmarks used by authors ranged from 100 to 500. RLU/s. The percentage of surfaces exceeding the chosen cut-off limit showed a failure rate varying from 21.2% to 93.1% before cleaning and from 5.3% to 96.5% after cleaning. Although the use of ATP bioluminescence can be considered a quick and objective method for assessing hospital cleanliness, it appears to be still poorly standardized at both the national and international level. © 2013 King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences

Riemergenza del poliovirus ed implicazioni per la vaccinazione anti-poliovirus in Italia

Nel 1988, l\u2019Organizzazione mondiale della Sanit\ue0 (OMS) ha approvato il piano di eradicazione mondiale della poliomielite con l\u2019obiettivo di annullare la circolazione del virus a partire dall\u2019anno 2000. Tale target, per motivi economici, organizzativi, culturali, bellici e financo religiosi, \ue8 stato successivamente spostato in avanti negli anni fino a giungere attualmente al 2015. A seguito di questo impegno, negli anni si \ue8 registrata una riduzione dell\u2019incidenza di poliomielite di oltre il 99%, passando dai 350.000 casi annui di polio paralitica documentati nel 1988 in 125 paesi, alle poche centinaia di casi riscontrati nel 2013 sia negli ultimi 3 paesi endemici (Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan) sia in paesi polio-free spesso confinanti con quelli endemici ed interessati da un corollario di epidemie di dimensioni variabili

Spectral solution of ODE-IVPs by using SHBVMs

Recently, Hamiltonian Boundary Value Methods (HBVMs), have been used as spectral methods in time for effectively solving multi-frequency, highly-oscillatory and/or stiffly-oscillatory problems. A complete analysis of their use in such a fashion has been also carried out, providing a theoretical framework explaining their effectiveness. We report here a few numerical examples showing their potentialities to provide a fully accurate solver for general ODE problems