Sublime offal:Coleridge, Hegel, Schelling, and the remains of German idealism

What remains of German Idealism? This essay sets out by proposing that in both Hegel and Schelling the answer is ultimately an ontology of remains: an unsystematic philosophy of divine abjection in which the waste of the One is exposed as its own condition of possibility. This sheds new light on Coleridge’s uneasy relationship with German Idealism, especially his puzzlement over Hegel’s Science of Logic and his scandalized fascination with Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. At the heart of Coleridge’s disquiet is his detection in both philosophers of a form of transcendental ontology that redirects the Kantian concern with the epistemological conditions of possible knowledge into an enquiry into the ontological conditions of the subjectivisation of being. The essay traces the implications of the ontologising of transcendental idealism for Coleridge’s philosophy, chief among which is the way in which an indivisible remainder or Abfall (waste, offal) of the Absolute presents an excess that refuses to be harmonised into the transcendental unity of Coleridge’s Prothetic ‘One.

Preface to FORUM Issue 12: Authenticity

Like many ideas forged in the Enlightenment, ‘authenticity’ has lost much of its lustre. The product of an eighteenth-century culture fascinated with the past, with notions of origins, essences, and depths, it was endowed by twentieth-century existentialism with a numinous quality that many theorists saw as ripe for deconstruction. Indeed, the traditional rhetoric of authenticity is emphatically un-postmodern in its auratic essentialism and its concern, in the absence of rational foundations, to locate some kind of centre for what is genuine and real. Such metaphysical earnestness is apt to cause embarrassment today, which is perhaps why commentators not bent on dismantling the notion of the authentic have approached it with circumspection. Among these, Lionel Trilling, whose 1971 study Sincerity and Authenticity remains essential reading, worries that ‘authenticity,’ like ‘irony’ and ‘love,’ is ‘one of those words [...] which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning [...]’ (120). More recently, Geoffrey Hartman has conceded that ‘“Spirit” and “authenticity” are word concepts that cannot be saved from their own pathos. Perhaps we should not even try to sober them up’ (1). The temperate critic, it would seem, is well advised to handle authenticity with care

Gender, nation and embodiment in Byron's poetry

This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Indigenous arthropod natural enemies of the invasive brown marmorated stink bug in North America and Europe

Since the establishment of the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys (St\ue5l) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) in North America and Europe, there has been a large, multi-group effort to characterize the composition and impact of the indigenous community of arthropod natural enemies attacking this invasive pest. In this review, we combine 98 indigenous natural enemy datasets spanning a variety of sampling methods, habitats, and geographic areas. To date, the vast majority of H. halys biological control research has focused on the egg stage, using sentinel egg masses to characterize indigenous parasitoid and predator communities and their contribution to H. halys egg mortality. Although egg parasitism and predation levels by indigenous natural enemies are low (typically <10% each) in most surveys, total egg mortality attributable to natural enemies can be higher (typically between 5 and 25%; up to 83%)\u2014even though these values were likely underestimated in most cases because some mortality due to biological control was not recognized. In North America, where the most data are available, it appears that the relative prevalence of different indigenous parasitoid species varies among habitat types, particularly between crop and non-crop habitats. Predator species responsible for egg mortality are much less commonly identified, but appear to include a wide variety of generalist chewing and sucking predators. To date, studies of natural enemies attacking H. halys nymphs and adults are relatively rare. Based on our review, we identify a number of key research gaps and suggest several directions for future research