Chapter 8 Stories, Love, and Baklava

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narra¬tive, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of narrative theory and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, it interrogates the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity. The book’s international group of contributors covers a wide range of primary texts that belong to the literary traditions of Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American communities. They demonstrate that paying attention to the formal features of these texts changes our under¬standing of narrative theory and that narrative theories can help us to think about their representations of time and space, the narration of trauma and other emotional memories, and the importance of literary (meta)paratexts, genre structures, and author functions

Affect, emotion, and ecocriticism

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has been interested in how ecologically oriented texts represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural world. More recently, ecocritical scholars have started to develop a more sustained theoretical approach to exploring how affect and emotion function in environmentally oriented texts of all kinds. In this article, I will attempt to trace this development over time, briefly highlighting some of the most important texts and theoretical concepts in affective ecocriticism.Nuestra relación con los entornos que nos rodean, sustentan y, a veces, amenazan, están llenos de emoción. Y ya que, tal y como el neurólogo Antonio Damasio ha demostrado, la cognición está directamente vinculada a la emoción, y la emoción a las sensaciones del cuerpo, nuestro entorno físico influye no sólo en cómo nos sentimos, sino también en lo que pensamos. De forma importante, esto es también cierto cuando interactuamos con las representaciones artísticas de esos entornos, tal y como las encontramos en literatura, cine, y otros medios. Por esta razón, nuestras emociones son como una montaña rusa cuando leemos un libro o vemos una película. Típicamente, esas emociones se evocan cuando empatizamos con los personajes mientras también vivimos emocionalmente en los mundos que rodean a estos personajes, con los que interactúan de distintas maneras. Dado este vínculo crucial entre entorno, emoción y narración medioambiental en el sentido más amplio, no es sorprendente que, desde su origen, el estudio de la literatura y el medio ambiente se haya interesado en cómo los textos con sesgo ecológico representan y provocan emociones en relación con el mundo natural. Más recientemente, académicos ecocríticos han empezado a desarrollar un enfoque teórico más continuo para explorar cómo funcionan el afecto y la emoción en todo tipo de textos con contenido ecológico. En este artículo, trataré de delinear este desarrollo a lo largo del tiempo, destacando brevemente algunos de los textos y de los conceptos teóricos más importantes en la ecocrítica afectiva

Chapter Introduction

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narra¬tive, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of narrative theory and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, it interrogates the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity. The book’s international group of contributors covers a wide range of primary texts that belong to the literary traditions of Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American communities. They demonstrate that paying attention to the formal features of these texts changes our under¬standing of narrative theory and that narrative theories can help us to think about their representations of time and space, the narration of trauma and other emotional memories, and the importance of literary (meta)paratexts, genre structures, and author functions

The human face of global warming: Warieties of eco-cosmopolitanism in climate change documentaries

Paul Lindsay’s Before the Flood (2004), Briar March’s There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho (2010), and Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2010) all focus on the consequences of climate change for the common people in different parts of the world. This article investigates the ways in which the three documentaries promote ecologically conscious forms of cosmopolitanism and how they unveil what Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier have called “the environmentalism of the poor.” Lindsay, March, and Nash approach their topic in different ways and make use of different filmic techniques to raise awareness, concern, and sympathetic solidarity. Foregrounding local perceptions of nature and global interdependencies, their documentaries give viewers an emotionally charged glimpse into the human drama of climate change in order to then remind them of their own role and responsibility in itTanto Before the Flood, escrita por Paul Lindsay en 2004, como There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho, de Briar March (2010), y Climate Refugees, de Michael Nash (2010), se concentran en las consecuencias que tiene el cambio climático en la vida de la gente común de diversas partes del mundo. Este ensayo investiga de qué forma estos tres documentales promueven formas cosmopolitas de concienciación ecológica y también cómo desvelan lo que Ramachandra Guha y Juan Martínez-Alier han denominado “el ambientalismo de los pobres.” Lindsay, March y Nash tratan estos temas de diferente manera, utilizando para ello técnicas fílmicas diversas para conseguir despertar conciencias y así lograr la solidaridad de la compasión. Captando muy bien las percepciones locales de la naturaleza así como la interdependencia global existente, sus reportajes hacen que los que los visionen tengan una primera pincelada emocional del drama humano que el cambio climático conlleva, para luego recordarles el papel y la responsabilidad que tienen en é

Renormalization group approach to the critical behavior of the forest fire model

We introduce a Renormalization scheme for the one and two dimensional Forest-Fire models in order to characterize the nature of the critical state and its scale invariant dynamics. We show the existence of a relevant scaling field associated with a repulsive fixed point. This model is therefore critical in the usual sense because the control parameter has to be tuned to its critical value in order to get criticality. It turns out that this is not just the condition for a time scale separation. The critical exponents are computed analytically and we obtain $\nu=1.0$, $\tau=1.0$ and $\nu=0.65$, $\tau=1.16$ respectively for the one and two dimensional case, in very good agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 uuencoded Postcript figure

The Pharmacogenetics of Symptom Response to Antipsychotic Drugs

Antipsychotic drugs are limited in their efficacy by the relatively poor response of negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia as well as by the substantial variability in response between patients. Pharmacogenetic studies have sought to identify the genetic factors that underlie the individual variability in response to treatment, with a past emphasis on dopamine and serotonin receptors as candidate genes. Few studies have separated effects on positive and negative symptoms, despite the established differences in response to drug treatment between these syndromes. Where this has been done most findings are consistent with the conclusion that dopamine receptor polymorphisms relate to positive symptom response, while negative symptom improvement is influenced by polymorphisms of genes involved in 5-HT neurotransmission. A wide range of polymorphisms in other candidate genes have been investigated, with some positive findings in those genes associated with glutamatergic transmission and/or risk factors for schizophrenia. However, there remains a lack of good replicated findings; furthermore there is little evidence to support drug-specific genetic associations with treatment response. While most past studies focused on single candidate genes, technology now permits genome-wide association studies with response to antipsychotics. Although not without major limitations, these "hypothesis-free" approaches are beginning to identify further important risk factors for treatment response. Again there is little consistency between various studies, although some of the polymorphisms identified are in genes involved in neurodevelopment, which is increasingly being recognized as important in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia