Sometimes the Silence Can Be like the Thunder: Access to Pharmaceutical Data at the FDA

Those committed to the free exchange of scientific information have long complained about various restrictions on access to the FDA\u27s pharmaceutical data and the resultant restrictions on open discourse. A review of open-government procedures and litigation at the FDA demonstrates that the need for transparency at the agency extend well beyond the reach of any clinical trial registry

The Public Health Impact of Needle Exchange Programs in the United States and Abroad: Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations

The goal of the project was: "To assess the public health impact of needle exchange programs." Fourteen research questions were identified; Chapters 5 through 18 of Volume I of the report each address one of these research questions. The study consisted of four components: 1) formal review of existing research, 2) NEP site visits; 3) mail surveys of NEPs not visited; and 4) cost-effectiveness modeling

Accelerated Field‐Cycling MRI using the Keyhole Technique

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1939–1945 by Stuart Burrows (review)

Stuart Burrows\u27s book makes a strangely familiar claim. Its premise traces an arc in literary history and understandings of vision and epistemology that we think we know but which, in Burrows\u27 hands, in fact turns toward a different idea about American prose realism than one with which we\u27re familiar (that is, that writers responded to the daguerreotype by emulating its representational fidelity). Realist writers like Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and the early James, Burrows shows, were hardly naïve about the changes in perception wrought by a then-new technology of vision like photography. For their realism is not a version of fiction that, camera-like, seeks to reproduce the authentic surface aspect of people, objects, and places. Nor do these writers\u27 narratives and descriptions traffic in the also common nineteenth-century assumption that the daguerreotype plumbed the interiors of such surfaces—the premise of physiognomy, which, as Burrows indicates, nineteenth-century thinking saw as proof that the photographic subject revealed an inner nature. Rather, what Burrows shows is that such writers demonstrated an uncannily early awareness of developments we ordinarily attribute to modernist, postmodern, and even twenty-first-century writers and sensibilities: the pervasive sense in modernity, and especially in American cultural life and social reality, of the simulacrum

Kinds of Faulknerians

There are, it seems, two kinds of Faulknerians. Or there used to be. Although not contending critical camps per se, these two approaches to the long career of this modernist from the American south nevertheless partake of very different ways of considering the canonical writer. In the process, they seek to maintain Faulkner’s continuing relevance in ways that say much about his contribution to a uniquely American and regional modernism as well as a body of work marked, particularly in his later novels, by post-Second World War—if not also postmodern—practices and concerns

Vision's Immanence

William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them.To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism

Inside and Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, the Frame, and the Racing of Space in Yoknapatawpha

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108). If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been theorized as a modern and cinematic optics or perception. The importance of the novel’s references to consumer culture, though, or of its potential filmic overtones is not simply a historical and perceptual congruence. Rather, they allow us to see the Bundren’s transformation into, not only a different family, but arguable a new identity of both race and class

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (review)

In his book\u27s final sentence, David Evans is concerned that we assure a future for Faulkner, and a Faulkner for the future (236). Taken at a glance, this concern might imply a need to safeguard Faulkner\u27s continuing relevance: pointing to the future and Faulkner together suggests that their mutuality is not, in fact, certain. And in light of shifting critical approaches to this canonical writer, not to mention the diminishing importance of author studies as well as scholarly genres like the monograph, Evans\u27s caution makes a certain critical sense. Yet the statement\u27s fuller meaning within the context of this new study lies with Faulkner\u27s creative and intellectual affinity with an ostensibly quite different figure. Such is Evans\u27s main contention in William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition. This is a rich study, notable for the attention Evans pays to James\u27s prose as well as his ideas, and to the ways he links the Harvard philosopher and member of the gentile New York clan to the Bard of Mississippi. Evans readily admits the unusual nature of this linking. Yet he argues that despite their differences, Faulkner and James share, above all, a commitment to the notion of truth as produced, not found; to the narrative aspect of knowledge; and to the ways in which reality is constructed through communal acts of faith and a willingness to believe—all dimensions of what Evans describes as central pragmatist ideals

Faulkner\u27s Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, and the Accessible Past

This paper looks at changes in visual representation in the 1930s as a means of understanding Faulkner\u27s newly historiographic methods in this decade. The advent of Kodachrome® in 1935 as the first widely used color film stock presaged the turn toward the black-and-white documentary mode so important to the nation\u27s efforts to countenance, or see, the economic crises of the period. Faulkner\u27s descriptive and representational practices in the period 1929-36 also shifted from a more pervasive use of coloration to a style like the silver halide photos prevalent in the middle nineteenth century--the period of the past-tense events in Absalom, Absalom! and of the original documentary photos of Matthew Brady and others. In addition to references to the daguerreotype and photographs at key points in this novel--or to Kodak in Light in August--Absalom uses a sustained metaphor of the illuminating glare or flash of understanding that Walter Benjamin used to describe the photographic quality of history. The essay uses Benjamin\u27s Theses on the Philosophy of History to explain this pattern in Faulkner\u27s writing and his arrival in Absalom at a full-blown historicist fiction, one that takes the full measure of time\u27s rupture and of characters\u27 efforts to understand material history in the face of Sutpen\u27s designs on time and his dynasty\u27s continuum

Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane

The extended historical “moments” that Crane and Faulkner both seek to offer readers may then be defined by their affinities with pain. In the context of American history, that painfulness refers to the experience of historical subjects such as the American Indian as well as marginalized populations like Southern blacks and, as with young Thomas Sutpen, rural poor whites. What both Faulkner and Crane signal in key sections of their work is the way that historical awareness, on the part of either characters or readers, is activated by and necessitates a textual effect of suffering. It is the different valence of this suffering as experienced by readers—masochistic and identificatory, for Crane, sadistic and distance, for Faulkner—that I suggest contributed to either writer’s relation to the modernist canon. Faulkner’s Southernness and supposed traditionalism were only part of his appeal to Tate and the Agrarians. Among other things, what appealed to the group that became the New Critics about Faulkner’s modernism, and what prevented them from “entering the dimensions” of Crane’s poetry, as Paul put it, was precisely this difference in either writer’s sexuality. Faulkner’s text, we will see, wields a force that follows from his heterosexuality and that evokes conventional (sexual) models of aggression. In his treatment of characters who are crucial for his reflections on Southern history such as Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson, but who for him also raised problems of sexuality, Faulkner inscribes effects that suggest a type of punishing as well as distance. Crane’s text, conversely, bears the traces of a queer sexuality that evokes a shared suffering with his historical subject and an openness to what Kaja Silverman, in her theoretical work on masochism, calls a productive form of “deviant” masculinity, a socially destabilizing pleasure in pain. For the critics who helped establish the modernist canon and who laid such emphasis on a traditionally ordered, masculine culture and society, and for reasons that to Paul appeared puzzling but which I hope to make clear, Faulkner’s version of historical pain proved far more appealing