Leone Contini's "Foreign Farmers"

This podcast reviews "Foreign Farmers", an installation and public intervention by the Florence-born cultural anthropologist and visual artist Leone Contini. It was one of the forty-five project on display in Palermo, in 2018, when the city hosted the itinerant, pan-European art exhibition "Manifesta"

World Literature and the Self-Conscious Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has served, since approximately 2000, as a transdisciplinary vector for the emergent framework that links comparative literature, critical theory and the modern languages. My article assesses this period from the perspective of literary and cultural historiography and advances the hypothesis of a new Anthropocenic cultural dominant

Tutoring German ESL Students

Tutors of American university writing centers can be invaluable advisors for German ESL students who come to study in the United States. The tutors can directly assist German students in coping with their particular academic and cultural difficulties. German students must adapt to the American academic conventions to become successful students at their U.S. universities. The tutors can point out to them the features of the American academic standard and show them effective methods for learning and studying in the American environment. The American academic standard includes the students\u27 almost perfect reading comprehension. Students must be prepared for heavy reading assignments. They must understand and take notes on lectures in standard spoken English. Lastly, they must be able to produce standard English written work. Technical and scientific terms, idiomatic English, grammar, and style can be difficult areas for them. German ESL students may have special difficulties with style. They tend to use an over-formal variety of English. The tutors can help them with different exercises (for example, sentence completion exercises) to become aware of the varieties of English and improve their writing. Since writing plays an important part at the U.S. university, the tutors must spend time on motivating the students to generate ideas, arrange and organize papers and paragraphs, learn new vocabulary, practice cohesion, and improve general writing skills. Also, the students should develop their reading and note-taking abilities. They should be taught to revise, edit, and proof-read, for these are the skills they might neglect as writers of English as their second language. They must consciously adapt these skills to be satisfied with their papers and exclude mistakes and errors. Tutoring German ESL students, and foreign ESL students generally, should be understood as a chance to improve international and personal relationships. There will be nearly 500.000 foreign students studying in the United States in 1990. And if these numbers are reached, it will be necessary that American universities are prepared to offer writing and tutoring centers with adequate counselling and guidance

Apocalyptic Narcissism and the Difficulty of Mourning

In this article I examine how death and loss feature in recent apocalypse fiction and suggest that, in a genre mostly concerned with finitude, there appears to be paradoxically little room for expressions of mourning. I assess contemporary attitudes towards mortality through the writings of Philippe Ariès, Zygmunt Bauman, Simon Critchley and others, and propose a psychoanalytic reading of solitary survivor narrative, inspired by the work of Martin Jay. In the final part of the article, I turn to Sigmund Freud and René Girard to explore the relation between apocalyptic teleology, melancholy, and the expectation of global catastrophe

In defence of Radical Inquiry in Comparative Literature, Translation and the Study of Language(s) – 7: Pluralism and Vulnerability

This intervention stresses the positive importance of pluralism in the Arts and Humanities. Instead of championing a single definition of the Arts and Humanities, I emphasise the positive ambivalence of these fields and the interdependence of arguments, attitudes and styles that are in play; the irreducible complexity of political, social and cultural situations that will not be settled by neat solutions that focus on one interpretative category alone. I suggest that the social importance of the Arts and Humanities cannot be stated in purely economic or institutional terms. It also stems from the artist’s and the scholar’s ability to query the human from diverse angles, including the position of its least privileged and most vulnerable designations. This ability, I propose, must continue to serve as a bedrock for reasoned and respectful dialogue, in academic criticism and in wider cultural and political exchanges

An assessment of the long-term changes in chondrichthyan abundance on the inshore trawl grounds of the Agulhas Bank, South Africa

Trawl fisheries have been operating in South African waters for roughly 110 years. In contrast to other trawl fisheries, the South African fishery was opened by government-funded scientific trawl surveys beginning in 1898. Detailed records of survey trawls undertaken immediately prior to and during the beginning of commercial trawling activity provided a rare opportunity to examine longterm changes in fish abundance. This dissertation focuses on the chondrichthyans, which are believed to be the group of fishes most at risk from intense exploitation. Despite some problems associated with changes in taxonomy and the efficiency of gear, this analysis was able to compare two distinct periods at three taxonomic levels: The periods were taken to represent baseline values prior to the opening of trawl fisheries and contemporary data, separated by roughly 80 years of intense, trawling activity. Three historically important trawl grounds were identified as having sufficient samples from each period. Between the surveys, trawl velocity did not deviate much from contemporary trawl velocities, although all surveys were found to have a significantly different velocity. In respect to the catch composition, significant changes were found in the relative abundance of the total catch composition, as a general shift from large, long-lived species towards smaller species was found. This applied both for teleosts as well as chondrichthyans, with the entire chondrichthyan catch composition showing a decrease, with the exception of Callorhinchus capensis, which increased significantly. Changes in chondrichthyan swept-area density were found to follow those trends found in the relative abundance: An increase was found in Callorhinchus capensis, whereas all other species decreased. All chondrichthyans were classed in low productivity categories and were assigned a high risk factor to overfishing. Reasons for the declines in the chondrichthyan assemblage were low fecundity, slow maturation and the inability due to these factors to adapt to an environment altered by trawling. Only in the case of Callorhinchus capensis were secondary effects of trawling such as the removal of competitor species likely to have caused the increase in relative abundance and swept area density as well as Callorhinchus capensis having a relatively high fecundity among chondrichthyans. In general, chondrichthyan decreases exceeded those of teleosts, and this work provides broad empirical support for the hypothesis that the low fecundity and slow growth of chondrichthyan species places this group at higher risk than teleosts

Italy and Germany need new political narratives

Andreas Jacobs, a political analyst at the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, and Florian Mussgnug, a Reader in Comparative Literature and Italian at UCL, examine the cultural attitudes Germans and Italians have toward each other