Vacant

Pages 42-4

Working from home? The UK’s broadband and wifi will be put to the test

The UK government’s announcement that people should work at home “wherever possible” shifts more focus towards the robustness of the country’s broadband network and its ability to cope with increased usage. In Spain, which entered a 15-day-plus lockdown of the population, calls were made for residents to reduce their use of the internet

Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft\u27s Fiction

S. T. Joshi, the preeminent scholar of weird fiction, considers H. P. Lovecraft a “topographical realist,” noting that, in his later fiction, Lovecraft creates realistic and painstakingly detailed settings. In “Providence Lost: Natural and Urban Landscapes in H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction,” I explore the significance of Lovecraft’s topographical realism and trace its evolution through Lovecraft’s career. I argue that Lovecraft’s early fiction, the tales, that is, that he wrote from 1917 to 1924 under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany, pays little attention to the natural landscape, though Lovecraft does, in story after story, allude to fabulous, semi-mythical cities. His method changed, quite suddenly, in 1925 when Lovecraft, impoverished, unemployed, and alone in New York City, started to hate his new home. Painfully aware of his surroundings and the sense of alienation they inspired, Lovecraft wrote three stories about the city, “The Horror at Red Hook,” “He,” and “Cool Air,” all of which feature settings far more detailed than his earlier efforts at landscape description. After he returned to Providence, the city of his birth, Lovecraft ceased describing Dunsanian cityscapes. Instead, he began to write about nightmarish cities located beneath the sea or on alien planets. Lovecraft’s approach to the natural landscape also began to change, resulting in a series of passionate descriptions that would seem to disrupt the mood he was trying to establish. From this, one might be tempted to conclude that Lovecraft’s fiction evolved in a linear direction, becoming increasingly antagonistic to the urban landscape, but his last work of original fiction, “The Haunter of the Dark,” returns to Providence, which it describes in loving terms. Having examined the evolution of Lovecraft’s approach to natural and urban landscapes, I argue that these passages, far from being gratuitous descriptions, change how we think of Lovecraft as a person, how we interpret his fiction, and how we understand his philosophical beliefs

Donkeys under Discussion

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, the semantic analysis defines a general schema for quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier

A Bleak, Barren Land : Women and Fertility in \u3ci\u3eThe Lord of the Rings\u3c/i\u3e

Critics, and even the general public, have noted the absence of women in The Lord of the Rings, an absence so glaring that it could hardly be overlooked. Many feminist scholars have, as a result of this deficiency, denounced J.R.R. Tolkien, interpreting this lack of female characters as indicative of repressed misogyny. Others, however, have defended the author, pointing out that the female characters that do exist could be considered role models. This essay offers an alternative interpretation and contends that the absence of women in the novel, though potentially reducing its appeal to modern readers, reinforces one of its central motifs: the barrenness and infertility of Middle-earth. Overawed by Tolkien’s landscape descriptions and the extent of his worldbuilding, readers have overlooked just how empty this world is, how rarely the Fellowship encounters settled districts or even lonely habitations. Replacing the farms, villages, and markets a reader would expect to encounter are vast stretches of wilderness and the ruins of forgotten nations. The almost total absence of women, of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers, reinforces this sense of desolation, suggesting to the reader that Middle-earth has no future. The novel’s few women actually contribute to this impression, for they are all, for different reasons, childless. Compared to the infertile and declining populations of elves, humans, and dwarves, Tolkien’s orcs display a shocking and unnatural fecundity, reproducing—in a manner only hinted at—in enormous numbers. The novel’s conclusion, which begins with Aragorn’s long-desired wedding and ends with Sam’s return to Rosie Cotton, generates a flurry of contented relationships, suggesting not misogyny on the author’s part, but a veneration for sex, romance, and family life. That Frodo is unable to partake in any of these makes his sacrifice all the more poignant