"We Have Come of Age": Growing Bodies in the Twentieth-Century Irish Novel

Twentieth-century Irish culture -- shaped by, for instance, the Catholic Church, nationalist narratives of blood sacrifice for "Mother Ireland," and the experience of emergence from colonialism--put special pressure on the meanings attached to bodies in narratives of both individual and national maturation. This dissertation examines the human body's role in Irish novels of development, tracing specifically how Irish authors deploy the growing body in relation to the self-cultivating subject of a Bildungsroman (or "coming of age" novel). This project shows that Irish social conditions provoked urgent reworkings of generic conventions, and impelled Irish authors to develop sophisticated strategies for representing growing bodies in narrative. Through close examinations of four novels, this project identifies four facets of the role the growing body can take in fictions of development. The introduction provides an overview of the absent body, the body that grows in passing, the body growing sideways, and the unnarratable body. Individual chapters examine these respective facets as they manifest in James Joyce's highly influential Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), John McGahern's The Dark (1965), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Dancers Dancing (1999), and Anne Enright's The Wig My Father Wore (1995). Chapter one describes how Joyce largely reserves Stephen Dedalus's body from representation so that other developmental aspects feature more prominently. Chapter two examines McGahern's representations of the real, material growing body's volatility and entanglement with forces beyond the subject's autonomous control as a strategic response to the post-Independence Irish social environment. Chapter three asserts that Ní Dhuibhne depicts a female protagonist filling out and experiencing lateral, or "sideways" modes of growth to expand the possibilities for narrating Irish female identity and to denaturalize nationalist representational strategies, while chapter four identifies the protagonist's growing body as an unsayable and indeterminate thing at the center of Enright's experimental text. The coda considers the contemporary moment of instability and recession against claims that Ireland "came of age" in the 1990s, taking stock of the growing body in the "Celtic Tiger" literary moment and grounding this stock-taking in earlier representations of development that mobilized bodily growth to tell stories

Livsformer og livskvalitet i Grønland: Et indblik i sammenhængen og den potentielle udvikling

This article examines how life modes and quality of life are related in Greenland from a social science perspective. The article also relates to how this is linked to the country's development towards independence. Quality of life and the notion of the good life belong to the cultural and value-laden aspects of ways of life. In other words, it is a notion of how things should, must or may be, in order for us to feel that life is good. But the physical locality of where a person lives is also important. It is a classical notion that people have substantially different ways of life in a city versus a settlement, and that values ​​and attitudes to what quality of life can be, substantially varies between the two. Based on the results of a quality of life studies in South Greenland in 2018 and through an analysis and discussion of Thomas Højrups’ life mode analysis, the article seeks to answer the following questions: How are life modes and quality of life in Greenland interrelated? And how are they linked to the current development towards independence? The article argues that life modes and quality of life are to a large extent associated with relations to family, nature and work, but that the ability of the Greenlandic people to adapt also plays a role in the relationship between life forms and quality of lif

Watchful Waiting After Radiological Guided Drainage of Intra-abdominal Abscess in Patients With Crohn’s Disease Might Be Associated With Increased Rates of Stoma Construction.

Background: Management of spontaneous intra-abdominal abscess (IAA) in patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) with radiologically guided percutaneous drainage (PD) was debated. Methods: This is a secondary analysis from a multicenter, retrospective cohort study of all the patients with CD who underwent PD followed by surgery at 19 international tertiary centers. Results: Seventeen patients (4.8%) who did not undergo surgery after PD were compared to those who had PD followed by surgical intervention 335/352 (95.2%). Patients who had PD without surgery were those with longer disease duration, more frequently had previous surgery for CD (laparotomies/laparoscopies), enteric fistula, on steroid treatment before and continue to have it after PD. Patients who had PD without subsequent surgical resection had a higher risk of stoma construction at later stages 8/17 (47.1%) versus 90/326 (27.6%) (P < .01). Patients with PD with no subsequent surgery had numerically higher rates of abscess recurrence 5/17 (29.4%) compared to those who had PD followed by surgery 45/335 (13.4%) the difference was not statistically significant (P = .07). Conclusions: Even with the low number of patients enrolled in this study who had PD of IAA without subsequent surgery, the findings indicate a markedly worse prognosis in terms of recurrence, length of stay, readmission, and stoma construction. Watchful waiting after PD to treat patients with spontaneous IAA might be indicated in selected patients with poor health status or poor prognostic factors.post-print179 K

Circulating cytokines and cytokine receptors in infliximab treatment failure due to TNF-α independent Crohn disease

The inflammatory response at infliximab (IFX) treatment failure due to tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α-independent Crohn disease activity is unknown. This is an exploratory, hypothesis-generating study based on samples collected in a clinical trial among patients failing conventional IFX dosages and treated with an intensified IFX regimen for 12 weeks. Patients with clinical response at week 12, as defined by a reduction of Crohn disease activity index by ≥70, were considered to suffer from nonimmune pharmacokinetic (PK) treatment failure (n = 18), and nonresponders had a presumed pharmacodynamic (PD) failure due to non-TNF-driven disease (n = 8). Patients failing IFX due to functional anti-IFX antibodies (n = 2) were excluded. The study population also comprised a group of 12 patients in long-term remission on IFX. A functional cell-based reporter gene assay was applied to measure IFX and anti-IFX antibodies. Circulating cytokines and cytokine receptors were assessed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay: granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor, interferon-γ, interleukin (IL)-1α, IL-1β, IL-1Ra, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12p70, soluble TNF receptor (sTNF-R) 1, sTNF-R2, IL-17A, and monocyte chemotactic protein 1. The IFX levels were similar between patients with IFX failure caused by nonimmune PK or PD at treatment failure (median 1.4 vs 2.4 μg/mL; P = 0.52), during treatment intensification (8.1 vs 5.6; P = 0.85), and after 12 weeks (8.8 vs 7.7; P = 0.93), congruent with nonresponders failing IFX due to predominantly TNF-α-independent signaling pathways in their disease. Cytokine and cytokine receptor levels were comparable between patients with nonimmune PK failure and PD failure at time of manifestation of IFX failure, but with higher IL-6 and sTNF-R2 levels among IFX treatment failures as compared with patients in remission (IL-6 median 3.6 vs <3.1 pg/mL; P = 0.03; sTNF-R2 3207 vs 2547 pg/mL; P = 0.01). IL-6 and sTNF-R2 were lower after 12 weeks in nonimmune PK failures than in PD failures (<3.1 vs 4.0; P = 0.02; 3209 vs 4740; P = 0.04, respectively), and were measured at levels comparable with patients in remission. Further, trends of decreased IL-6 and sTNF-R2 levels among nonimmune PK failures during IFX intensification (P < 0.05 and P = 0.12) were observed. These observations indicate that IL-6 and sTNF-R2 are of potential relevance in driving the inflammatory response in IFX refractory Crohn disease caused by TNF-α-independent disease activity

Watchful Waiting After Radiological Guided Drainage of Intra-abdominal Abscess in Patients With Crohn’s Disease Might Be Associated With Increased Rates of Stoma Construction

Crohn’s disease; Abscess; StomaMalaltia de Crohn; Abscés; EstomaEnfermedad de Crohn; Absceso; EstomaBackground Management of spontaneous intra-abdominal abscess (IAA) in patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) with radiologically guided percutaneous drainage (PD) was debated. Methods This is a secondary analysis from a multicenter, retrospective cohort study of all the patients with CD who underwent PD followed by surgery at 19 international tertiary centers. Results Seventeen patients (4.8%) who did not undergo surgery after PD were compared to those who had PD followed by surgical intervention 335/352 (95.2%). Patients who had PD without surgery were those with longer disease duration, more frequently had previous surgery for CD (laparotomies/laparoscopies), enteric fistula, on steroid treatment before and continue to have it after PD. Patients who had PD without subsequent surgical resection had a higher risk of stoma construction at later stages 8/17 (47.1%) versus 90/326 (27.6%) (P < .01). Patients with PD with no subsequent surgery had numerically higher rates of abscess recurrence 5/17 (29.4%) compared to those who had PD followed by surgery 45/335 (13.4%) the difference was not statistically significant (P = .07). Conclusions Even with the low number of patients enrolled in this study who had PD of IAA without subsequent surgery, the findings indicate a markedly worse prognosis in terms of recurrence, length of stay, readmission, and stoma construction. Watchful waiting after PD to treat patients with spontaneous IAA might be indicated in selected patients with poor health status or poor prognostic factors