Slavery in Enlightenment America – Crèvecoeur’s bilingual approach

Crèvecoeur’s reception has been skewed by a focus on his writing in English. His work on slavery has been neglected - with the exception of one extract on a bestial Southern atrocity, and even that letter has been undermined as an anti-slavery text. In fact, he wrote significant abolitionist pieces as well as engaging in abolitionist activism. However, his writing can be ambiguous when he describes kindly-treated slaves in the Northern provinces. On the one hand, this seems to detract from the abolitionist case, but, on the other hand, relative to much contemporary writing, humanizes black Americans as part of the community with common practices, feelings and rational aims. The cosiness of this black and white family-community is, however, shadowed in Crèvecoeur’s texts by (a) the antithetical figure of the Native American who starkly formulates the absolute value of liberty – as against trading some freedom for comfort, wealth or even survival, and (b) the parallel with domestic animals

Identifying Effective Social Work Practices in Response to Prostitution

This thesis aims to explore social work practices in relation to sex work. It addresses the research question of what challenges, trends and implications evolve for professional social work in Germany once effective practices in response to prostitution have been identified. These issues are explored through the method of qualitative interviews. The study uses social stigma theory as a theoretical framework and starting point to discuss methods in relation to managing risk and stigma(tization) processes. The current debate around how to regulate prostitution is presented through a review of feminist perspectives on prostitution. An (inter)national exchange of social work practice in the field of sex work is performed through consideration of the Swedish approach to regulate prostitution. This thesis draws two conclusions. Firstly, it issues a clear call for decriminalization of sex work since restrictive regulations lead to harsh conditions for the most vulnerable, as was observed in the urban quarter of St. Georg in Hamburg. Secondly, it calls for the German prostitution law in force today to be extended, since it currently consists only of three paragraphs, additionally for all federal states to adequately and consistently implement it

Refusing Consumption and Querying Genre: A Partial Reading of Marie NDiaye

Even thinking (at) the border of thought, images and dreams (perhaps semi-fictions), inevitably raises questions of genre and how we read: what is the effect of the words (syllables, letters, sounds), and what is their affect? Does the phrase 'unidentifiable literary object' help us imagine both the impossibility of identifying or deciding, and the inevitability, need or desire to figure something out? The dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous is sometimes framed as an encounter between a man and a woman, friends for life or 'till death do us part'. What's the difference? Cixous, Derrida says, does not believe in death-while he keeps reminding her of the inevitable parting too soon-which of course she knows, and writes about, very well. I shall track these questions in a novel identified as contemporary 'Francophone women's writing'. There is plenty of food for thought (of life, of death) in NDiaye's La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière (2016), a novel which perversely stages (perhaps literary inter alia) creation by first the cooking of a dead chicken, and then eventually the serving up of the imaginary of a chicken by gazing on living chickens. Consuming flesh and consuming words or stories, the gift of creativity, intersects with genre in both its meanings-I try to do justice to the complexity of the textual e/affects. Even thinking (at) the border of thought (what we might call semi-theory), or writing or speaking words, images, or dreams (perhaps semi-fictions 1), inevitably raises questions of genre, in both senses, and how we read: what is the effect of the words (syllables, letters, sounds), and what is their affect, the passions evoked and aroused? Does the phrase 'unidentifiable literary object [objet littéraire non identifiable]' 2 (ULO) help us imagine both the delirious impossibility of identifying or deciding (la folie), and also the inevitability, need or desire to play the rational detective, to figure something out? The dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous is sometimes framed as an encounter between a man and a woman, or a philosopher and a poet, friends for life or 'till death do us part'. What's the difference? Is it positively feminine to say yes, to give life rather than death (it works better in French)? Cixous, Derrida says, does not believe in death-while he keeps reminding her of the inevitable parting too soon-which of course she knows, and writes about, very well. 3 In his H.C. for Life, That is to Say… [H.C. pour la vie, c'est à dire…] 'C. pour la vie'suggests that 'Cixous' is 'pour la vie'; she's for life, on the side of life; the homophone 'c'est pour la vie' suggests it's for life, in more senses than one-including a friend for life. Derrida's typically patient unpicking of his title, and of her titles, is an emblem of slow reading, the banner then unfurled as he lovingly cites (sides, at her side, on her side) 4 from within. The attention at the level of the letter, or the syllable, intertwines with the spirit ('et pour l'esprit et pour la lettre de la lettre [both for the spirit and for the letter of the letter]'), heightening the poetry embedded in the prose.

Disorderly eating in Marie NDiaye’s ‘La Gourmandise’, or The solitary pleasure of a Mère de famille

NDiaye’s typically subtle and polysemic story ‘La Gourmandise’ (1996) can be interpreted as the cautionary tale of a housewife’s short-lived frenzy that could have ended with a descent into madness brought on by the escalation of a destructive secret passion (binge eating). It also represents, writ large, everywoman’s everyday battle with food. A third approach might see the protagonist, working-class drudge Antoinette who has little cultural capital, striking out for her own space, creativity and luxurious pleasure in a tragi-comic re-writing not only of Emma Bovary, but of Marie-Antoinette, legendary for promoting cake, or Virginia whose intellectual ambitions necessitate a room of her own. The text asks, with Antoinette, what is gluttony and why is it a deadly sin? ‘La Gourmandise’ moves craftily between the everyday human (woman), the animal and the sacred. An ‘idiot boy’, Edo, is the pendant to fleshy Antoinette, her grotesque shadow, and the threshold figure who acts to safeguard the moral community which in the end will keep her in her place, her crazy bid for freedom forgotten

Disorderly eating in contemporary women’s writing: Introductory essay

The Introduction presents the rationale for the special issue, and engages with key scholarship in the field. It makes the case for considering eating disorders in the wider context of ‘disorderly eating’, both as a sociological phenomenon and a recurrent literary concern, granted the importance of ordering and regulating food consumption for community cohesion. It is particularly concerned to ask what is, and what is not, specific about the contemporary late-capitalist period, which has seen such an explosion of eating disorders, in the context of ever more disorderly eating. We ask what we can learn from the elaboration of the disorderly preparing, serving, sharing and eating of food specifically in contemporary women’s writing in French, Spanish, English, Italian and German. The Introduction adopts a cross-cultural perspective to suggest both some commonalities and some contextual specificities to the lived and represented experience of eating and disorder across sexes, classes, generations and ethnicities

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Enlightenment hospitality

Hospitality, in particular hospitality to strangers, was promoted in the eighteenth century as a universal human virtue, but writing of the period reveals many telling examples of its abuse. Through analysis of encounters across cultural and sexual divides, Judith Still revisits the current debate about the social, moral and political values of the Enlightenment. Focussing on (in)hospitality in relation to two kinds of exotic Other, Judith Still examines representations of indigenous peoples of the New World, both as hosts and as cannibals, and of the Moslem ‘Oriental’ in Persia and Turkey, associated with both the caravanserai (where travellers rest) and the harem. She also explores very different examples of Europeans as hosts and the practice of ‘adoption’, particularly that of young girls. The position of women in hospitality, hitherto neglected in favour of questions of cultural difference, is central to these analyses, and Still considers the work of women writers alongside more canonical male-authored texts. In this thought-provoking study, Judith Still uncovers how the Enlightenment rhetoric of openness and hospitality is compromised by self-interest; the questions it raises about attitudes to difference and freedom are equally relevant today. 1. Introducing Enlightenment hospitality 2. The New World: received as gods 3. The New World: eating the other 4. Enlightenment Persia 5. Turkish travels: hospitable harems and good guests 6. The other as guest: the special case of adoption and sexual predation 7. Revolution and rights Concluding questions: now and then Bibliography Index<br/

Derrida and other animals : the boundaries of the human

Analyses Derrida’s late writings on animals, especially his seminars The Beast and the SovereignMakes extensive reference to the two volumes of Derrida’s seminar series The Beast and the SovereignPays particular attention to Derrida's intertexts, such as Defoe, Hobbes, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Agamben and HeideggerTwo chapters explore contemporary women’s animal fictions, and imagined metamorphoses, looking at work by Carter, Cixous, Darrieussecq, Duffy, NDiaye, Tsvetaeva and VivienJudith Still offers a comprehensive discussion of Derrida’s contribution to the long-standing philosophical and political debate which insists on defining ‘man’ against ‘the animal’. She makes extensive reference to the two volumes recently published, in French and English, of Derrida’s seminar series The Beast and the Sovereign, with particular attention to his source texts such as Defoe, Hobbes, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Agamben and Heidegger. Added to this close reading of Derrida is a consideration of contemporary women’s writings on animals, including work by Carter, Cixous, Darrieussecq, Duffy, NDiaye, Tsvetaeva and Vivien