\u27The Generations of Ant and Beavers\u27: Classical Economics and Animals in The Mill on the Floss

Before any named characters find their way into The Mill on the Floss, the narrator introduces us to two sets of animals (aside from a human driver): white ducks dipping their heads into the stream and horses pulling a covered wagon. The ducks are characterized as being \u27unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above\u27 (24). This characterization serves a comic purpose, indicating a disparity between the mentality of the unreflective animals and the implicit judgement of the narrator\u27s gaze. By contrast, the horses seem to possess a surprisingly developed interiority (however conditioned by the narrator\u27s \u27fancy\u27), as we hear of the \u27mild reproach\u27 they feel for the driver\u27s unnecessary whipping and their energetic exertion at being \u27so near home\u27. The horses\u27 very bodies are endowed with interior attributes, from their \u27struggling haunches\u27 to their necks possessing \u27patient strength\u27. These horses even take precedence over their driver: while the driver is thinking of his dinner, he will first feed his horses, and the narrator anticipates the horses neighing \u27over their hardly earned feed of corn\u27, but leaves the driver\u27s dinner \u27getting sadly dry in the oven\u27. The implication that the horses are in the laborious process of earning their feed figures them as economic beings, driven by the same motivations that drive their driver. In this paper, I will argue that George Eliot\u27s use of animals in this text, both with reference to motivation and more generally in connecting human and animal realms, presents a challenge to the conceptions of animals and the distinctions drawn between animals and humans in classical economics. Although critics have shown significant interest in economics and animals in relation to George Eliot, there has been as of yet no major attempt to relate these two fields. Elsie Michie\u27s \u27Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance\u27 probably comes closest to such an attempt, relating horses in Eliot, Gaskell and Hardy to social class - and more particularly discussing the disruptive appearance of members of the \u27newly enriched\u27 commercial classes on horseback. Works by J. Hillis Miller on rhetoric and animals in Mill, and by Beryl Gray and Rosemary Ashton on Natural History in Mill are of particular interest with respect to this paper and will be returned to later.! I follow the work of critics like Deanna Kreisel and Kathleen Blake in reading economic import both in the overt content (like Bob Jaken\u27s shipping, Mr. Tulliver\u27s bankruptcy) and the less obvious content (Maggie\u27s romantic plots, narrative digressions about education). I will also be taking as a starting assumption Dermot Coleman\u27s argument that Eliot was highly knowledgeable of and engaged in the conflicts of classical economics, both from direct familiarity with the works of political economists as well as through her work with The Westminster Review.\u27 Before turning to Eliot\u27s engagement with animals in The Mill on the Floss, I want to sketch out a brief account of animals in classical economics, as an important background for understanding this engagement

Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical practice of the Athenaeum circle in Germany, as a means of establishing the philosophical values and theoretical underpinnings of the project of experimental literature. As Kant, Schlegel and cohort upheld ideals of beauty and literature grounded in unpredictable productivity and experimentation, De Quincey, Dickens and Eliot produced texts that seek to realize unanticipated connections in thought and sensation, following lines of association and speculation. Next, I argue that De Quincey’s depiction of Kant as producer of accumulative sentences and texts can provide a useful means of reading the literary experiments of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and for complicating critical accounts of De Quincey’s hostility to Kant. In the third chapter, I read Dickens’s less-known Sketches by Boz and Mudfog Papers as instances of social, scientific and speculative experimentation that deserve to be read in their own light, rather than as anticipations of his novels. In the last chapter, I again offer experimental literature as a means of theorizing literary significance in the eccentric works of a novelist, with Eliot’s “The Legend of Jubal” and Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Far from reproducing an image of a natural and sympathetic realist, in these texts Eliot pursues vagrant lines of literary speculation and cultivates critical difficulty. Taken together, these literary and philosophical texts present an ideal and practice of experimental literature that prioritizes speculation over didacticism, the play of thought and language over their habitual use, and the exercise of criticism, analysis and humor over the veneration of the received and familiar

Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation and Autonomy in George Eliot and Kant

Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot’s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot’s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion’s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant’s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot’s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through Kant’s second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty

Inhibition of adenine nucleotide translocator pore function and protection against apoptosis in vivo by an HIV protease inhibitor

Inhibitors of HIV protease have been shown to have antiapoptotic effects in vitro, yet whether these effects are seen in vivo remains controversial. In this study, we have evaluated the impact of the HIV protease inhibitor (PI) nelfinavir, boosted with ritonavir, in models of nonviral disease associated with excessive apoptosis. In mice with Fas-induced fatal hepatitis, Staphylococcal enterotoxin B–induced shock, and middle cerebral artery occlusion–induced stroke, we demonstrate that PIs significantly reduce apoptosis and improve histology, function, and/or behavioral recovery in each of these models. Further, we demonstrate that both in vitro and in vivo, PIs block apoptosis through the preservation of mitochondrial integrity and that in vitro PIs act to prevent pore function of the adenine nucleotide translocator (ANT) subunit of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore complex