The Werewolf: From Damned Degradation to Romantic Reversion

One can better understand the evolving role of the werewolf in folklore by examining its development over time. This development has constantly shifted to address multifarious needs, underpinned by equally transformative religious systems. Where religion has gone, so too has the werewolf. Each of the transformations the werewolf has undergone abstractly mirrors the prevailing religious and spiritual conditions – fears, anxieties, and desires – at the time. This essay begins by focusing on the earliest accounts of the werewolf stories where man’s expressed apprehension of the wild supplied the rudimentary components from which said stories were composed. Imagined out of fear and anxiety, werewolves were an aggrandizement of wolves proper, already contextualized in early human life. The werewolf then developed as a tool with which man could communicate his relationship with the natural world and the place he had in it. The utility of the werewolf became ever more direct under the influence of large religious bodies, chiefly Christianity. In this religious milieu, the idea of man degraded to his natural state became channeled through the werewolf’s beastly, yet uncanny human qualities. Now occupying an intermediary place between what men then viewed as natural depravity and their ideals regarding morality and civility, the werewolf represented man’s tendency to regress into wanton behaviors of previous times. The last part of the essay charts the course werewolves have hitherto taken in contemporary works of literature. Having departed from religion’s dominating sphere of influence, modern interpretations of the werewolf have lost the qualities of baseness, depravity, and carnal immorality in the truest sense. Added on to the list of meanings communicated by werewolves are the myriad environmental issues found in modern political and scientific discourse, breaching more and more into the secular realm. While all evolutions of the werewolf are valid in their respective contexts, ultimately, none offers ample satisfaction of or answers to the concerns they address. Instead, the metamorphoses temporarily assuage the spiritual and religious needs of human thought. What each progression of the werewolf has in common rests in the cycle of tension and uncertainty that mankind unendingly labors to cope with by telling captivating stories

Beckett's Spectral Silence: Breath and the Sublime

Of Samuel Beckett’s late plays, the one that most eloquently resists presentation, that retires from visibility, remaining almost completely hidden except for faint light and a brief cry over a glimpse of detritus is Breath. Though regarded as a ‘logical terminal point in Beckett’s writing for theatre’ when it appeared, it wrong-footed critical expectation, pointing instead to the much reduced plays of the 1970s. The paper examines Beckett’s Breath, theatre productions of the play––in particular that of Amanda Coogan––and the film version of Breath directed by Damien Hirst, in terms of Kant’s analytic of the sublime, in particular Kant’s idea of the sublime as that which is beyond the limits of size and representability. Drawing on Longinus, Lyotard and Derrida, the paper argues, through Beckett, for a reconfiguration of the sublime in terms of an absolute minimum

Predictable stimulus onsets improve memory

Exploring and remembering are fundamental to many human activities. Characterizing influences on recognitionmemory can help clarify the workings of memory systems and facilitate design of effective learning environments. Studies ofself-directed learning show that a key determinant of self-directed benefits is in choosing when to see the next stimulus, butthese results do not establish whether it is the act of choosing or the knowledge of stimulus arrival times that primarily matters.We disentangle these factors by asking whether predictable stimulus timing that is not under participant control still leads to amemory benefit. Participants saw pictures of objects one at a time with either a constant or unpredictable inter-stimulus interval(ISI) and showed better memory with constant timing across a range of ISIs. These results speak to interactions betweenattention and memory, the efficiency of study protocols, and the factors influencing effective self-directed learning

Which drugs are most effective for recurrent herpes labialis?

Evidence based answer: Daily oral acyclovir or valacyclovir may help prevent herpes simplex labialis (HSL) recurrences (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B, meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials [RCTs] with heterogeneous results). No trials compare oral or topical treatments for HSL outbreaks against each other. Oral antivirals modestly reduce healing time and duration of pain, varying according to the agent used: valacyclovir reduces both healing time and duration of pain, famciclovir reduces both in one dosage form but not another, and acyclovir reduces only pain duration (SOR: B, single RCTs). Several topical medications (acyclovir, penciclovir, docosanol) modestly decrease healing time and pain duration--typically by less than a day-- and require multiple doses per day (SOR: B, multiple RCTs)

Samuel Beckett and Sonic Art

The intermedial nature of Beckett’s corpus, and his innovative engagement with avant garde media––to the extent that his later prose and dramatic work compromise and transgress boundaries of genre and discipline––are significant determining factors that explain Beckett’s position as a key figure, and a vital force, for contemporary artists in the expanded field of visual and aural culture. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s “The Poetics of the Open Work” I argue that Beckett’s writing forms an opera aperta or “open” score for the compositional and performance strategies of contemporary sonic art, and that his engagement with sound and acts of listening complicates the relational and phenomenological interaction between bodies, objects and space which finds it most sustained exploration in contemporary sound art

Vain Reasonings: Not I

A critical analysis of Samuel Beckett's play Not I that integrates the performative and the textual