Telepathos: Medium Cool Romanticism

This essay argues for the critical value of situating Romantic poetry—particularly as it’s theorized by Wordsworth and Scott—as a “medium” between the two extremes that often shape accounts of media history: the “primary orality” of Walter Ong and the “techno-informatic vanishing point” of aesthetics recently described by Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool. I propose that Sir Walter Scott’s story, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” offers a “supernatural” or occulted account of how literature operates as a kind of telepathic medium, enabling readers to be “affected by absent things as if they were present.” But it offers at the same time, in its almost anachronistic play with the concept of “resolution” as a feature of the televisual screen, an account of all perception—both “immediate” and mediated—as a process of discretization and resynthesis that works remarkably like Wordsworth’s “digital” theory of meter

Telepathos: Medium Cool Romanticism

This essay argues for the critical value of situating Romantic poetry—particularly as it’s theorized by Wordsworth and Scott—as a “medium” between the two extremes that often shape accounts of media history: the “primary orality” of Walter Ong and the “techno-informatic vanishing point” of aesthetics recently described by Alan Liu in The Laws of Cool. I propose that Sir Walter Scott’s story, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” offers a “supernatural” or occulted account of how literature operates as a kind of telepathic medium, enabling readers to be “affected by absent things as if they were present.” But it offers at the same time, in its almost anachronistic play with the concept of “resolution” as a feature of the televisual screen, an account of all perception—both “immediate” and mediated—as a process of discretization and resynthesis that works remarkably like Wordsworth’s “digital” theory of meter

Romantic vagrancy: Literature and the simulation of freedom

This dissertation seeks to explain the ideological resonance of the pedestrian metaphor informing Wordsworth\u27s representation of social relations, politics, and history. I suggest that Wordsworth\u27s passionate belief that walking constituted a fundamental human right emerges from the negative definition of freedom, in Declaration of the Rights of Man, as freedom from unjustified restraint. This definition justifies the dispossession, dislocation, and vagrancy produced by the transference of property, reproducing them as forms of social mobility. I read Wordsworth\u27s enriched attention to a perpetually or chronically unemployed surplus-population within the formal structure of the walking tour as his attempt to transform the expropriation of the rural poor into their liberation. Adopting the behavior of the dispossessed, Wordsworth effaces the particular class content of that behavior, so that walking embraces two entirely different significations: vagrancy and freedom. On a literary or aesthetic level, Wordsworth thus simulates their enforced mobilization as his own freedom. The first two chapters, on Plato and Rousseau, establish a philosophical tradition identifying freedom with itinerancy, distinguished from both absolute vagrancy and all trajectories determined by needs-statisfaction. The third chapter reads Wordsworth\u27s early poems against the English legal tradition regarding a disputed jus spatiandi, or right to wander over other\u27s property; I argue that Wordsworth validates an aesthetic of mobility as essential to a new form of property, the money-form. The fourth chapter establishes the political context of Wordsworth\u27s pedestrian excursions, reading Descriptive Sketches and The Prelude in the context of the French Revolution. The final chapter, The Walking Cure, attempts to draw together the various discourses of walking--philosophical, political, and poetic--in a reading of The Excursion as an attempt to establish community no longer on an ethic of productivity, but on the negative exercise of freedom that is walking. Finally, I suggest how the poem offers a critical method for resisting current theories still sedimented by the Romantic simulation of freedom as mobility

Romantic vagrancy: Literature and the simulation of freedom

This dissertation seeks to explain the ideological resonance of the pedestrian metaphor informing Wordsworth\u27s representation of social relations, politics, and history. I suggest that Wordsworth\u27s passionate belief that walking constituted a fundamental human right emerges from the negative definition of freedom, in Declaration of the Rights of Man, as freedom from unjustified restraint. This definition justifies the dispossession, dislocation, and vagrancy produced by the transference of property, reproducing them as forms of social mobility. I read Wordsworth\u27s enriched attention to a perpetually or chronically unemployed surplus-population within the formal structure of the walking tour as his attempt to transform the expropriation of the rural poor into their liberation. Adopting the behavior of the dispossessed, Wordsworth effaces the particular class content of that behavior, so that walking embraces two entirely different significations: vagrancy and freedom. On a literary or aesthetic level, Wordsworth thus simulates their enforced mobilization as his own freedom. The first two chapters, on Plato and Rousseau, establish a philosophical tradition identifying freedom with itinerancy, distinguished from both absolute vagrancy and all trajectories determined by needs-statisfaction. The third chapter reads Wordsworth\u27s early poems against the English legal tradition regarding a disputed jus spatiandi, or right to wander over other\u27s property; I argue that Wordsworth validates an aesthetic of mobility as essential to a new form of property, the money-form. The fourth chapter establishes the political context of Wordsworth\u27s pedestrian excursions, reading Descriptive Sketches and The Prelude in the context of the French Revolution. The final chapter, The Walking Cure, attempts to draw together the various discourses of walking--philosophical, political, and poetic--in a reading of The Excursion as an attempt to establish community no longer on an ethic of productivity, but on the negative exercise of freedom that is walking. Finally, I suggest how the poem offers a critical method for resisting current theories still sedimented by the Romantic simulation of freedom as mobility

Southey's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Thalaba

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Southey’s “Christabel” abstract In September 1800, while living in Portugal, Robert Southey wrote a verse romance responding to the story of “Christabel.” He composed several hundred lines of poetry about Leoline, a “hell-hag,” a damsel, and her mother the Lady of the Land – intending them for the last book of his Oriental romance Thalaba the Destroyer. They remain little known, although they are preserved in two MS drafts, because Southey dropped them from the poem before publication. The purpose of this article is to make them more easily available to scholars, and to consider what they reveal about Coleridge and Southey as instigators and revisers of each other’s poetry (including their adoption of experimental meters), about the trajectory of Coleridge’s unfinished poem, and about the development of Oriental and gothic romance from its origins in Spenser and Percy. Southey’s Leoline verses were not only one of the first but also one of the best-informed responses to “Christabel”: they were inflected by inside knowledge of Coleridge’s intentions for the poem, and throw light on its second part and on his plans for its completion

A Peek into the Complex Realm of Histone Phosphorylation▿

Although discovered long ago, posttranslational phosphorylation of histones has been in the spotlight only recently. Information is accumulating almost daily on phosphorylation of histones and their roles in cellular physiology and human diseases. An extensive cross talk exists between phosphorylation and other posttranslational modifications, which together regulate various biological processes, including gene transcription, DNA repair, and cell cycle progression. Recent research on histone phosphorylation has demonstrated that nearly all histone types are phosphorylated at specific residues and that these modifications act as a critical intermediate step in chromosome condensation during cell division, transcriptional regulation, and DNA damage repair. As with all young fields, apparently conflicting and sometimes controversial observations about histone phosphorylations and their true functions in different species are found in the literature. Accumulating evidence suggests that instead of functioning strictly as part of a general code, histone phosphorylation probably functions by establishing cross talk with other histone modifications and serving as a platform for recruitment or release of effector proteins, leading to a downstream cascade of events. Here we extensively review published information on the complexities of histone phosphorylation, the roles of proteins recognizing these modifications and the resuting physiological outcome, and, importantly, future challenges and opportunities in this fast-moving field