Atrial dimension reference values in healthy participants using the biplane/monoplane method for clinical and research use

AIM: To provide reference values of the dimensions of the left and right atrium (RA) obtained using the biplane and monoplane methods, respectively, on two- and four-chamber views, which represent the standard projections acquired in clinical practice, and correlation with body surface area (BSA), age, and gender. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Healthy volunteers, M:F = 1:1, including five participants per gender and age decile from 20 to 70 years, who underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) were enrolled prospectively. Normal atrial reference values were calculated for male and female subpopulations and stratified by age. Atrial areas and volumes were assessed both as absolute values and indexed to BSA. Differences among genders and correlation with age were assessed. Intra- and interobserver reproducibility were assessed in a subpopulation. RESULTS: Fifty participants (mean age 43.3 ± 14 years, 25 men) were evaluated. Image analysis took <1 minute for each subject (mean time 30 ± 5 seconds). Intra- and interobserver reproducibility were excellent (ICC >0.85 for all datasets). RA areas were significantly higher in males (p=0.0001). The left atrial (LA) surface did not show significant differences among genders. Atrial areas normalised to BSA did not show significant gender differences. Both right and left absolute atrial volumes turned out to be significantly higher in males (p=0.0001 and p=0.0047, respectively), and normalised to BSA remained significantly different only for the RA (p=0.0006). Neither atrial volume nor areas showed significant correlation with age. CONCLUSIONS: The monoplane method is a fast and reproducible technique to assess atrial dimensions. Absolute atrial dimensions show significant variations among genders. Gender-specific reference ranges for atrial dimensions are recommended

"Dare mother, when are you coming home?": from the epic of abjection to the lyric of ordinariness in Bessie Head's A Question of Power

The essay tackles a by-now \u2018classic\u2019 of ex-centric writing, A Question of Power (1974) by Bessie Head and proposes a reading of the descent into madness of its coloured protagonist Elizabeth as a devastating epic confrontation with abjection that finally leads her to a lyric celebration of ordinariness.Firstly it qualifies how the genre categories of \u2018epic\u2019 and \u2018lyric\u2019are employed in the essay. Subsequently, the notion of abjection as psychoanalytically developed by Julia Kristeva is closely applied not, as in some criticism on the novel, as atrope, though powerful (usually insisting on the border-trespassing motif), i.e. not figuratively but literally and structurally, as a hermeneuticallynecessary tool for an in-depth, admittedly tough, understanding of the nature and import of Elizabeth\u2019s madness. Besides Kristeva\u2019s, Frantz Fanon\u2019s voice is called to counterpoint the argumentative texture of the essay throughout. The reasons for his cohesive presence in this analysis of A Question of Power are given \u2013 last but not least the striking affinity between Head\u2019s and Fanon\u2019s philosophical-existential and political vision. Abjection is physically, psychically, and socially/ideologicallymagnified and \u2018practised\u2019 in racism, being at the core of the apartheid system; yet, in Head\u2019s novel racism is given as one, though exemplarily dehumanizing, version of Exclusive Power that feeds on the psychical, sexual, moral, and political humiliation of the ab-jected and that \u2018speaks\u2019 through the obscenity inhabiting the novel through multiple inflections. Violence and death pervade its epic scene, especially in connection with sex. The role played by language in this confrontation between abjection and \u201cdecency\u201d is given due emphasis, and is enhanced in a Fanonian light. Elizabeth\u2019s appeal to treasuring ordinariness \u2013 that the critic does notfail to discuss in anticipatory connection with Ndebele\u2019s famous call to a \u201crediscovery of the ordinary\u201d \u2013 involves embracing an ethic of finitude resonating with emotional and political tension and shunning any comfortable ethical self-sufficiency in favour of a lucidly disillusioned knowledge

Burnet's Heterobiography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

"Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester", published in London in 1680 soon after Rochester's death and written by the Scottish Latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet was an immensely popular biography, the earliest attempy to tell the libertine poet's life as a religious parable. The emphasis here is on Burnet's using and abusing of the biographical(-elegiac) frame that becomes the ambiguous meeting ground for biography, confession, theological disquisition/philosophical dialogue, letter-writing, and, above all, pulpit lecturing

I will not praise that purpose not to sell: retorica e metaretorica nel sonetto 21 di W. Shakespeare

Il saggio propone un\u2019analisi meta-retorica delle dichiarazioni di eloquenza epidittica e pertanto, nella prospettiva rinascimentale, poetica, contenute nel sonetto 21 di William Shakespeare, facendo del verso finale, \u201cI will not praise that purpose not to sell\u201d, il fulcro di ispirazione per un percorso riflessivo volto a leggere il suddetto sonetto in controluce, in un rapporto di palinsesto intertestuale con il poemetto narrativo The Rape of Lucrece e, pi\uf9 \u2018sotto\u2019, con la tragedia Titus Andronicus