Literature in Transition : European aesthetics and the early American novel

This paper seeks to account for the strangely double nature of the early American novel. For twenty-first-century readers, novels such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modem Chivalry, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple or Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland seem firmly embedded in a premodern culture that subordinates the rights of art under those of religion, morality, and education. In their persistent didacticism, their claims to truthfulness and social utility, and their long authorial digressions, these texts perform those kinds of heteronomous functions Romantic theorizing and literary practice of the early nineteenth century would seek to reject in their quest for literary autonomy. Yet a closer look at early American novels also reveals elements of modern artistic practice that exist side by side with premodern residues. Brackenridge, for instance, repeatedly insists that his work is but an exercise in style devoid of ideas, praises originality and the figure of the genius, consistently privileges form over subject matter, and ridicules the excessive didacticism of his contemporaries. In such passages, we can see a modern consciousness at work. Tensions between these modern impulses and a premodern sensibility pervade both early novels and aesthetics, another invention of the eighteenth century. This paper discusses those tensions from a systems-theoretical perspective

Resources for the study of nineteenth-century American poetry : a selective guide

This survey essay provides an overview of print and electronic resources for the study of nineteenth-century American poetry. As does the volume as a whole, it focuses on (currently) less-studied poets such as the sentimental-domestic tradition (Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Sargent Osgood) and the schoolroom/fireside poets (Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant)

Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

This essay argues that Nabokov's Lolita is suffused with a rhetoric of death. Humbert Humbert's discursive constructions of Lolita trap her in a semantic web of death that conjures up her literal death in childbed at the age of seventeen. My reading of Lolita traces the fibres of that web in the more sinister implications of Humbert's intertextual references, his persistent gestures of aestheticization and his reflections on the nature of nymphets

Literary Acoustics

Bringing together sound studies and intermediality theory, this essay revisits the notion of ‘literary acoustics’ to inquire into the usefulness of intermediality studies for analyzing the relations between literature and sound. The second part of the essay is dedicated to an illustrative analysis of Ben Marcus’s highly experimental, noisy book The Age of Wire and String

'Sound all around' : sonic mysticism and acoustic ecology in Don DeLillo's White Noise

Taking the title of DeLillo’s novel at its most literal, this paper argues that if White Noise is an environmental novel, it is also in important ways a novel about acoustic ecology. In its literal sense, DeLillo’s title refers to the omnipresence of broad-band noises as keynote sounds of the postmodern soundscape. As Barry Truax, whose Acoustic Communication (1984) appeared in the same year as DeLillo’s novel, explains, the constant hum of traffic and technical appliances such as air-conditioners or computers approaches the acoustic qualities of white noise: “Traffic and air-conditioning are […] examples of “broad-band” sounds, that is, sounds whose spectrum or energy content is continuously distributed over a fairly large range of frequencies. When that range is the whole audible spectrum and the distribution is uniform, the sound is called “white noise,” by analogy to white light which contains all visible frequencies” (Truax, 20). Taking my cue from the soundscape studies of Barry Truax and Murray A. Schafer as well as William Paulson’s The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (1988), I explore the ways in which DeLillo positions his text within the cultural and political landscapes and soundscapes of postmodernity

Exogenous induction of synucleinopathy in transgenic mice - An experimental study on the prion-like properties of alpha-synuclein

The accumulation of misfolded proteins into insoluble aggregates is a common feature in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, and it is thought that the aggregation process plays a central role in the pathogenesis. Parkinson´s disease (PD) is the most common move-ment disorder and characterised by a progressive and selective degeneration of dopamin-ergic neurons of the substantia nigra. Histopathologically, the hallmark feature of PD is the intracellular deposition of aggregated α-synuclein (αS) protein in Lewy bodies. In PD pa-tients, Lewy pathology occurs in a stereotypic pattern, originating in lower brain regions before spreading to higher areas of the brain. Despite a significant amount of research, the mechanism underlying the formation of αS lesions is still poorly understood. However, recent findings highlight that a nucleation-dependent aggregation mechanism, initially de-scribed for prion diseases may also contribute to the propagation of protein aggregation in other neurodegenerative disorders. According to this concept, corrupted protein particles can act as nuclei (or ‘seeds’) of aggregation and further convert endogenous proteins into their pathological isoforms. The main objective of this thesis was to study the ‘prion-like’ properties of αS to gain fur-ther insight into the pathogenesis of PD. In our studies we used different transgenic mouse models of synucleinopathy, which are based on mutations identified in human disease and replicate some aspects of the PD pathology, to probe this theoretical explanation of dis-ease. These mouse lines harbor either the A53T (Tg-9813[A53T]αS and Tg-M83[A53T]αS) or A30P human αS transgene (Tg-[A30P]αS). Tg-9813[A53T]αS mice de-velop a severe and early-onset synucleinopathy. On the other hand, both Tg-M83[A53T]αS and Tg-[A30P]αS mice (both being homozygous for the transgene) have a delayed-onset of motor symptoms, whereas the latter tend to exhibit a milder disease phe-notype. As shown previously by other research groups, synucleinopathy can be induced by exogenous αS seeds in vivo. Accordingly, we performed a series of inoculation experi-ments to investigate the seeding effect of pathological αS. In a first set of experiments, we assessed whether αS seeds were still capable of inducing fatal synucleinopathy when treated with formaldehyde. In a previous study, our lab had shown that Aβ seeds resist the inactivation by formaldehyde fixation similar to prions. Therefore, we intracerebrally inoculated young pre-symptomatic mice with extracts from formaldehyde-fixed and fresh-frozen brainstem tissue. Remarkably, in Tg-9813[A53T]αS mice we found that fixed αS seeds were able to induce synucleinopathy lesions after 30 days of incubation. Stimulated by these results, we repeated the experiment in Tg-[A30P]αS mice and incubated until motor symptoms presented. Intriguingly, we found that the pathogenicity of αS seeds was retained even after formaldehyde fixation prior to the injection. Remarkably, the extract from formaldehyde-fixed brainstem tissue was almost as potent as the fresh-frozen tissue-derived extract with regard to both survival time and pathological αS load. The second part of this thesis was focused on investigating whether CSF from mice with synucleinopathy is seeding active. While our group and others had already shown that extracts from mouse brain tissue containing aggregated αS are potent inducers of synucle-inopathy, it is still unclear if extracellular αS from a bodily fluid is also pathogenic. Our first results revealed an elevated level of αS in the CSF of symptomatic Tg-[A30P]αS mice. Therefore, we intracerebrally inoculated young presymptomatic Tg-[A30P]αS mice with CSF of spontaneously ill donors. To compare the putative seeding potential of CSF-derived αS, we additionally performed intracerebral inoculations of the PBS-soluble and PBS-insoluble fractions of brainstem-derived extracts. Our results showed that CSF was not able to induce a synucleinopathy. Likewise, the PBS-soluble fraction failed to induce αS lesions in Tg-[A30P]αS mice, suggesting a lack of pathogenicity. Conversely, we found a severe induction of synucleinopathy lesions and a significantly reduced life span after inoculation with PBS-insoluble αS seeds in comparison to the non-tg control inoculum. Although less than 4% of the αS remained in this fraction, PBS-insoluble αS seeds were highly seeding-active when compared to the original extract that was diluted to match with the αS level of both the soluble and insoluble fractions. In addition, we found that the seeded induction of αS lesions occurred in a concentration-dependent manner. Finally, in a last set of experiments we have investigated the cross-seeding effect of two mutant αS pathogens, since in vitro studies have indicated that there are indications for structural and functional differences among fibrils of either the mutant A53T or A30P hu-man αS. When injected into the hippocampus of young presymptomatic Tg-M83[A53T]αS and Tg-[A30P]αS mice, we found that both extracts induced an accelerated disease phe-notype with reduced survival times. Moreover, we observed seeded synucleinopathy le-sions in each of the recipient mouse strains. However, we found that both the incubation time and the pathology were not different between the tg extract-injected mice in either of the lines indicative of a strong host effect. Therefore, to determine whether the two αS extracts have a differential cross-seeding capacity, we injected hemizygous Tg-M83[A53T]αS and Tg-[A30P]αS mice that – uninoculated – remain healthy until late adult-hood. Intriguingly, both extracts were capable of inducing a de novo synucleinopathy in both mouse strains. While we did not find a significant difference in the incubation periods between the two αS extracts in the hemizygous Tg-M83[A53T]αS mice, the A30P-derived extract was markedly more potent in reducing the survival time than A53T in hemizygous Tg-[A30P]αS mice. In summary, we were able to study the exogenous seeding mechanism of αS in different mouse models of synucleinopathy. Our data provide new insight into the persistent nature of αS seeds that is reminiscent of prions. Moreover, the results of this thesis indicate that PD-linked αS mutants may dictate functional characteristics in vivo. Thus, our findings support the concept that synucleinopathies share several common features with prion dis-eases. Consequently, Insight into the seeding aspect of the disease could lead to a better understanding of the misfold initiation and spread of the pathogenic protein, ultimately pav-ing the way to therapeutical strategies targeting this particular attribute of PD

Sympathy Control: Sentimental Politics and Early European Aesthetics

This essay re-reads early American sentimental novels (Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Emily Hamilton) through the lens of contemporaneous European aesthetics (Baumgarten, Schiller) to argue that American writers' anxieties concerning the power of their work to either educate or deceive are more than defensive responses to the novel's detractors. These anxieties are real: they testify to concerns about the reliability of sensuous perception that also haunt early European aestheticians. Once we realize this, we see that sentimental writers do not, as major theorists of sentimentalism claim, unconditionally affirm the expression of feelings. Instead, they advocate what I call sympathy contro