Shakespeare and the Landscape of Death: Crossing the Boundaries of Life and the Afterlife

This essay explores how denying or ignoring the meanings of the spaces scripted for the dead, or “deathscapes” as anthropologist Lily Kong calls them, can lead Shakespeare’s characters to a spiritual death as well as a bodily one. I examine the cultural meanings of deathscapes in the early modern era--specifically the grave, graveyard and church--through the lens of the schism of Christianity caused by separation of Protestantism and Catholicism. When Hamlet, for example, makes the mistake of treating the spaces of the dead in ways that speak more to how Catholics define and use them, he puts himself in deadly peril. I argue, however, that this in no way makes Hamlet a “Catholic play,” as some critics have in the past claimed. Instead, I show how Shakespeare reinforces the tenets and ideas of Protestantism by punishing Hamlet’s lapses with such a thorough and unavoidable harshness that Hamlet’s anti-Protestant actions and behaviours serve as a warning to audience members. The fact that Hamlet appears to treat the deathscape with more than a nod to the medieval notion of le danse macabre reinforces his weak and unstable nature, and leaves the audience in some doubt as to his chances of meeting with a favourable outcome in the afterlife

Playing God: The Landscape of Resurrection in Romeo and Juliet

"Playing God" explores Shakespeare's use--or rather, misuse--of specific landscapes from the perspective of the transgression of morality through oppositional representations, actions, and beliefs that result in moral and physical destruction. That is, when his characters attempt to recreate the miracle of reincarnation upon those spaces scripted solely for the dead, they are punished not only for their inability to recognize the culturally acceptable meanings of the landscape but are also mirroring Satan’s sin by taking upon themselves the power of resurrection, which is meant for divine application only. By having his protagonists “playing God,” as it were, Shakespeare adds layers of both tragedy and flaw to their characters. Through his use of interior and exterior spaces, physical objects, and metaphysical understandings of religion and the religious canon, Shakespeare distances the concept of resurrection from the more accepted Christian meanings of redemption and rebirth, and redefines it through the use of what early modern Protestants would term witchcraft and black magic, forms of supernatural power against which the early modern English playgoer was vigorously indoctrinated. Characters such as Friar Lawrence, Romeo, and Juliet, then, are placed in both physical and metaphysical danger as they overreach their strictly human abilities and attempt to access the powers of the divine. It is possible, Shakespeare shows us, that we can misuse landscape in terms of both the dead and those who are seemingly brought back to life

“Thou Map of Woe”: Mapping the Feminine in Titus Andronicus and King Lear

In this article, I claim that Shakespeare moves beyond the archetypal early modern definitions of land, and the maps that represent it, as benefitting from masculine intervention and argue that he envisions unnecessary masculine interventions regarding the performativity of the feminine in terms of landscape and cartography to be harmful to both the perpetrator and object of the intervention. He acknowledges that there is a connection between how his male characters—specifically, fathers—define their nations and their daughters, but warns that demonstrating a lack of trust or understanding in the agency of women and attempting to overwrite them the way boundaries are changed on a map results in tragedy for all involved. I use Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender to demonstrate that such masculine interventions often cannot differentiate between normative and subversive acts, which compounds the dangers of such interferences. Using both his early and later plays, specifically Titus Andronicus and The Tragedy of King Lear, I show that Shakespeare portrays the desire to treat women as territories or blank maps and to deny his female characters the ability to make their own choices as problematic and dangerous

Straddling Genres: McKillp and the Landscape of the Female Hero-Identity

This is a discussion of Patricia McKillip's "Fool's Run" using a feminist critique

Lehren und Lernen mit digitalen Medien unter Berücksichtigung der Zusammenhänge zwischen relevanten Professionswissensdomänen und Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen von Lehramtsstudierenden

Die vorliegende Dissertation soll einen relevanten Beitrag zur Verbesserung der universitären Ausbildung angehender Lehrkräfte leisten. Einführend wird der Fokus auf relevante Professionswissensdomänen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von digitalen Fähigkeiten gelegt. Letztere werden darüber hinaus im Hinblick auf die durch die COVID-19-Pandemie bedingten Herausforderungen im Distanzlernen spezifiziert. Hieran anschließend werden Chancen und Herausforderungen digitaler Medien für den naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht skizziert. Unter exemplarischer Betrachtung des Fachs Biologiedidaktik widmet sich ein erstes Forschungsprojekt den Zusammenhängen zwischen Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen und der Innovationsfähigkeit Lehramtsstudierender. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass ähnliche Zusammenhänge bestehen, die zuvor in Studien aus der Unternehmenswelt berichtet wurden. Im Rahmen eines zweiten Forschungsprojekts konnte aufgezeigt werden, dass sich die Werte auf den Dimensionen des Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge- und des Big Five-Persönlichkeitsmodells bei Lehramtsstudierenden vor und nach der Umstellung auf das COVID-19-bedingte Distanzlernen voneinander unterscheiden. Im Rahmen eines dritten Forschungsprojekts wurde schließlich gezielt auf die Lernförderlichkeit digitaler Unterrichtselemente fokussiert, indem eine Gruppe Lehramtsstudierender, die die Bestimmungsübung Botanik mit einer App absolviert hat, mit einer zweiten Gruppe verglichen wurde, die die Lerninhalte auf traditionellem Wege erarbeitet hatte. Es zeigten sich keine signifikanten Unterschiede zwischen den Gruppen bezüglich des Wissenserwerbs, wohl aber bezüglich der akkuraten Einschätzung der eigenen Fähigkeiten, wenn man die Korrelationen zwischen Botanik-CK-Selbstkonzept und tatsächlich gezeigter Leistung im Wissenstest betrachtet. Zum Abschluss werden die Ergebnisse dieser drei Forschungsarbeiten im Hinblick auf ihre praktische Relevanz kritisch diskutiert und zukünftige Perspektiven herausgearbeitet

A revised dry deposition scheme for land-atmosphere exchange of trace gases in ECHAM/MESSy v2.54

Dry deposition to vegetation is a major sink of ground-level ozone and is responsible for about 20 % of the total tropospheric ozone loss. Its parameterization in atmospheric chemistry models represents a significant source of uncertainty for the global tropospheric ozone budget and might account for the mismatch with observations. The model used in this study, the Modular Earth Submodel System version 2 (MESSy2) linked to the fifth-generation European Centre Hamburg general circulation model (ECHAM5) as an atmospheric circulation model (EMAC), is no exception. Like many global models, EMAC employs a "resistance in series" scheme with the major surface deposition via plant stomata which is hardly sensitive to meteorology, depending only on solar radiation. Unlike many global models, however, EMAC uses a simplified high resistance for nonstomatal deposition which makes this pathway negligible in the model. However, several studies have shown this process to be comparable in magnitude to the stomatal uptake, especially during the night over moist surfaces. Hence, we present here a revised dry deposition in EMAC including meteorological adjustment factors for stomatal closure and an explicit cuticular pathway. These modifications for the three stomatal stress functions have been included in the newly developed MESSy VERTEX submodel, i.e. a process model describing the vertical exchange in the atmospheric boundary layer, which will be evaluated for the first time here. The scheme is limited by a small number of different surface types and generalized parameters. The MESSy submodel describing the dry deposition of trace gases and aerosols (DDEP) has been revised accordingly. The comparison of the simulation results with measurement data at four sites shows that the new scheme enables a more realistic representation of dry deposition. However, the representation is strongly limited by the local meteorology. In total, the changes increase the dry deposition velocity of ozone up to a factor of 2 globally, whereby the highest impact arises from the inclusion of cuticular uptake, especially over moist surfaces. This corresponds to a 6 % increase of global annual dry deposition loss of ozone resulting globally in a slight decrease of ground-level ozone but a regional decrease of up to 25 %. The change of ozone dry deposition is also reasoned by the altered loss of ozone precursors. Thus, the revision of the process parameterization as documented here has, among others, the potential to significantly reduce the overestimation of tropospheric ozone in global models.Peer reviewe

Symmetry breaking and gap opening in two-dimensional hexagonal lattices

9 páginas, 3 figuras.-- et al.The inhibition in wave propagation at band gap energies plays a central role in many areas of technology such as electronics (electron gaps), nanophotonics (light gaps) and phononics (acoustic gaps), among others. Here we demonstrate that metal surfaces featuring free-electron-like bands may become semiconducting by periodic nanostructuration. We combine scanning tunneling spectroscopy and angle-resolved photoemisssion to accurately determine the energy-dependent local density of states and band structure of the Ag/Cu(111) noble metal interface patterned with an array of triangular dislocations, demonstrating the existence of a 25 meV band gap that extends over the entire surface Brillouin zone. We prove that this gap is a general consequence of symmetry reduction in close-packed metallic overlayers; in particular, we show that the gap opening is due to the symmetry lowering of the wave vector group at the K point from C3v to C3.This work was supported in part by the Spanish MICINN (MAT2007-66050, MAT2007-63083 and Consolider NanoLight.es), the EU (NMP4-SL-2008-213669-ENSEMBLE), the Basque Government (IT-257-07) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).Peer reviewe

Intronic small nucleolar RNAs regulate host gene splicing through base pairing with their adjacent intronic sequences

Background Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are abundant noncoding RNAs best known for their involvement in ribosomal RNA maturation. In mammals, most expressed snoRNAs are embedded in introns of longer genes and produced through transcription and splicing of their host. Intronic snoRNAs were long viewed as inert passengers with little effect on host expression. However, a recent study reported a snoRNA influencing the splicing and ultimate output of its host gene. Overall, the general contribution of intronic snoRNAs to host expression remains unclear. Results Computational analysis of large-scale human RNA-RNA interaction datasets indicates that 30% of detected snoRNAs interact with their host transcripts. Many snoRNA-host duplexes are located near alternatively spliced exons and display high sequence conservation suggesting a possible role in splicing regulation. The study of the model SNORD2-EIF4A2 duplex indicates that the snoRNA interaction with the host intronic sequence conceals the branch point leading to decreased inclusion of the adjacent alternative exon. Extended SNORD2 sequence containing the interacting intronic region accumulates in sequencing datasets in a cell-type-specific manner. Antisense oligonucleotides and mutations that disrupt the formation of the snoRNA-intron structure promote the splicing of the alternative exon, shifting the EIF4A2 transcript ratio away from nonsense-mediated decay. Conclusions Many snoRNAs form RNA duplexes near alternative exons of their host transcripts, placing them in optimal positions to control host output as shown for the SNORD2-EIF4A2 model system. Overall, our study supports a more widespread role for intronic snoRNAs in the regulation of their host transcript maturation

ASO targeting RBM3 temperature-controlled poison exon splicing prevents neurodegeneration in vivo

Neurodegenerative diseases are increasingly prevalent in the aging population, yet no disease-modifying treatments are currently available. Increasing the expression of the cold-shock protein RBM3 through therapeutic hypothermia is remarkably neuroprotective. However, systemic cooling poses a health risk, strongly limiting its clinical application. Selective upregulation of RBM3 at normothermia thus holds immense therapeutic potential. Here we identify a poison exon within the RBM3 gene that is solely responsible for its cold-induced expression. Genetic removal or antisense oligonucleotide (ASO)-mediated manipulation of this exon yields high RBM3 levels independent of cooling. Notably, a single administration of ASO to exclude the poison exon, using FDA-approved chemistry, results in long-lasting increased RBM3 expression in mouse brains. In prion-diseased mice, this treatment leads to remarkable neuroprotection, with prevention of neuronal loss and spongiosis despite high levels of disease-associated prion protein. Our promising results in mice support the possibility that RBM3-inducing ASOs might also deliver neuroprotection in humans in conditions ranging from acute brain injury to Alzheimer's disease