‘The Heart Fails Without Warning’: Precarious Bodies in Hilary Mantel’s Short Fiction

In her essay ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf decries literature’s effacement of the corporeal, its understanding of the human body as ‘a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and non-existent.’Such a criticism could not be levelled at Hilary Mantel’s second collection of short fiction, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. By turns anorexic, angelic, vampiric, disabled, disfigured, medicalised, migrainous, and monstrous, the bodies we find in these stories are unpredictable, and secretive, broken or uncomfortable, prone to becoming transparent, losing their boundaries or disappearing entirely. Through close readings of two stories from the collection, ‘Comma’and ‘The Heart Fails Without Warning’, I will demonstrate how Mantel depicts her characters’ bodies as spaces where metaphor and materiality interact, as essentially biocultural. This biocultural quality, I will argue, is ultimately the source of their profound precarity, making these bodies available for degredation and negation by a wealth of social and cultural forces.The various modes of embodiment available to Mantel’s characters foreground a series of interacting class-based and gendered understandings of certain bodies which act to nullify, over-simplify or oppress those who live in them by rendering them non-human

Effect of grazing on ship rat density in forest fragments of lowland Waikato, New Zealand

Ship rat (Rattus rattus) density was assessed by snap-trapping during summer and autumn in eight indigenous forest fragments (mean 5 ha) in rural landscapes of Waikato, a lowland pastoral farming district of the North Island, New Zealand. Four of the eight were fenced and four grazed. In each set of four, half were connected with hedgerows, gullies or some other vegetative corridor to nearby forest and half were completely isolated. Summer rat density based on the number trapped in the first six nights was higher in fenced (mean 6.5 rats ha–1) than in grazed fragments (mean 0.5 rats ha–1; P = 0.02). Rats were eradicated (no rats caught and no rat footprints recorded for three consecutive nights) from all eight fragments in January–April 2008, but reinvaded within a month; time to eradication averaged 47 nights in fenced and 19 nights in grazed fragments. A second six-night trapping operation in autumn, 1–3 months after eradication, found no effect of fencing (P = 0.73). Connectedness to an adjacent source of immigrants did not influence rat density within a fragment in either season (summer P = 0.25, autumn P = 0.67). An uncalibrated, rapid (one-night) index of ship rat density, using baited tracking tunnels set in a 50 × 50 m grid, showed a promising relationship with the number of rats killed per hectare over the first six nights, up to tracking index values of c. 30% (corresponding to c. 3–5 rats ha–1). The index will enable managers to determine if rat abundance is low enough to achieve conservation benefits. Our results confirm a dilemma for conservation in forest fragments. Fencing protects vegetation, litter and associated ecological processes, but also increases number of ship rats, which destroy seeds, invertebrates and nesting birds. Maximising the biodiversity values of forest fragments therefore requires both fencing and control of ship rats

Psychoanalysis

In 2018 trauma emerged as one of the key preoccupations in the field of psychoanalytic scholarship, not only in terms of its manifestations in the clinic but in the social sphere and the cultural imaginary. This year’s review examines six texts which, implicitly and explicitly, interrogate the significance and function of trauma from a range of standpoints. It is divided into four sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Theorizing Trauma and the Subject (which examines John L. Roberts’s Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject and Rudi Vermont’s Reading Bion); 3. Memory, History, and Trauma (which explores Roger Frie’s History Flows Through Us and Eric R. Severson and David M. Goodman’s edited collection, Memories and Monsters: Psychology, Trauma and Narrative); 4. Mothers and (M)others—Trauma and the Family (which considers Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and Jean Owen and Naomi Segal’s edited collection, On Replacement: Cultural, Social and Psychological Representations)

Where the Ghosts of Meaning Are: Haunting and Spectrality in the Work of Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel has risen to mainstream prominence in recent years following her double Man Booker Prize wins for the historical novels Wolf Hall (2010) and Bring up the Bodies (2012). Yet, despite Mantel’s significant contribution to contemporary literature, and the extensive media attention she and her writing have garnered, critical studies of her oeuvre are still extremely limited. My thesis foregrounds the primary significance of the motif of the ghost and the situation of haunting for reading her work and in so doing seeks to address the critical occlusion Mantel’s work has been subject to within the academy. This thesis contends that Mantel’s use of the spectral is not a self-contained phenomena which renders a handful of her texts ‘ghost stories’ in a literal sense, but a ‘dis-organizing principle’ which suffuses the entire body of her work. It argues that Mantel recognises the simultaneously revelatory and disruptive potential of the spectral and exploits its ability to trouble the status quo, to perform disturbing disclosures on multiple levels, disclosures which are as often opaque and enigmatic as they are clarificatory. In the five chapters which make up the thesis I read haunting and spectrality in relation to life-writing, care-giving, social and political marginalisation, technology and intertextuality, demonstrating the evolution of the ‘Mantelian ghost’ and the situation of haunting within Mantel’s oeuvre and establishing them as articulating reactions to multiple concerns emerging from a complex and shifting social and political landscape. Ultimately, I argue that when one meets, in one of Mantel’s texts, a situation of haunting or a ghost in the Mantelian mode, it is a profoundly ethical encounter in which something or someone previously rendered silent or invisible is made available for acknowledgement, consideration and debate

High interindividual variability in habitat selection and functional habitat relationships in European nightjars over a period of habitat change

An animal's choice of foraging habitat reflects its response to environmental cues and is likely to vary among individuals in a population. Analyzing the magnitude of individual habitat selection can indicate how resilient populations may be to anthropogenic habitat change, where individually varying, broadly generalist populations have the potential to adjust their behavior. We collected GPS point data from 39 European nightjars (Caprimulgus europaeus) at a UK breeding site where restoration measures have altered large areas of habitat between breeding seasons. We calculated individual habitat selection over four breeding seasons to observe changes that might align with change in habitat. We also analyzed change in home range size in line with change in habitat availability, to examine functional relationships that can represent trade‐offs made by the birds related to performance of the habitat.Individual explained more of the variation in population habitat selection than year for most habitat types. Individuals differed in the magnitude of their selection for different habitat types, which created a generalist population composed of both generalist and specialist individuals. Selection also changed over time but only significantly for scrub habitat (60% decrease in selection over 4 years). Across the population, individual home range size was 2% smaller where availability of cleared habitat within the home range was greater, but size increased by 2% where the amount of open water was higher, indicating the presence of trade‐offs related to habitat availability. These results highlight that using individual resource selection and specialization measures, in conjunction with functional responses to change, can lead to better understanding of the needs of a population. Pooling specialist and generalist individuals for analysis could hide divergent responses to change and consequently obscure information that could be important in developing effective conservation strategies

Cost benefit analysis of the Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart programme

This report summarises the results of an analysis of the costs and benefits of the Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart programme. Under the programme, subsidies are provided towards the costs of retrofitting insulation and/or installing clean heating for pre-2000 houses. The benefits that are included in this report are analysed in more detail in three separate papers produced as part of this study that assess the impacts on energy use, health outcomes and producer surpluses, with additional data on employment. The costs of the programme are also assessed in this report and include the costs of the additional insulation and clean heating plus the administrative costs falling on the government. The overall results suggest that the programme as a whole has had sizeable net benefits, with our central estimate of programme benefits being almost five times resource costs attributable to the programme

Letter from Frances Lucy Wightman Arnold, Cobham, Surrey, England, to Louise Manning Hodgkins, : autograph manuscript signed, 1890 May 2

Written on mourning stationery.https://repository.wellesley.edu/autographletters/1107/thumbnail.jp

The trade-off between fix rate and tracking duration on estimates of home range size and habitat selection for small vertebrates

Despite advances in technology, there are still constraints on the use of some tracking devices for small species when gathering high temporal and spatial resolution data on movement and resource use. For small species, weight limits imposed on GPS loggers and the consequent impacts on battery life, restrict the volume of data that can be collected. Research on home range and habitat selection for these species should therefore incorporate a consideration of how different sampling parameters and methods may affect the structure of the data and the conclusions drawn. However, factors such as these are seldom explicitly considered. We applied two commonly-used methods of home range estimation, Movement-based Kernel Density Estimation (MKDE) and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) to investigate the influence of fix rate, tracking duration and method on home range size and habitat selection, using GPS tracking data collected at two different fix rates from a small, aerially-insectivorous bird, the European nightjar Caprimulgus europaeus. Effects of tracking parameters varied with home range estimation method. Fix rate and tracking duration most strongly explained change in MKDE and KDE home range size respectively. Total number of fixes and tracking duration had the strongest impact on habitat selection. High between- and within-individual variation strongly influenced outcomes and was most evident when exploring the effects of varying tracking duration. To reduce skew and bias in home range size estimation and especially habitat selection caused by individual variation and estimation method, we recommend tracking animals for the longest period possible even if this results in a reduced fix rate. If accurate movement properties, (e.g. trajectory length and turning angle) and biologically-representative movement occurrence ranges are more important, then a higher fix rate should be used, but priority habitats can still be identified with an infrequent sampling strategy

Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches

Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned or not, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse. We first provide a broad review of linguistic phenomena that are sensitive to information structure. We then discuss several theoretical approaches to explaining information structure: information status as a part of the grammar; information status as a representation of the speaker’s and listener’s knowledge of common ground and/or the knowledge state of other discourse participants; and the optimal systems approach. These disparate approaches reflect the fact that there is little consensus in the field about precisely which information status categories are relevant, or how they should be represented. We consider possibilities for future work to bring these lines of work together in explicit psycholinguistic models of how people encode information status and use it for language production and comprehension