Soup, Bones, and Shakespeare: Literary Authorship and Allusion in Middle-earth

Examines Tolkien’s theory of authorship and storytelling by exploring the literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Witch-king’s fall and the theory of creation in Tolkien’s description of the Silmarils. Tolkien alludes to Macbeth to undercut both the modern view of the author as an isolated genius and to critique the approach to literary allusion that reinforces this view. Fëanor’s creation of the Silmarils serves as a symbolic representation of modern authorship, suggesting that Tolkien not only disagrees with a singular model of authorship but also believes it to be a manifestation of corrupted artistry. Ultimately, both the Witch-king and Silmaril passages reveal that Tolkien believed modern interpretations of authorship had become too narrow and failed to reflect the multiply-sourced nature of storytelling

Torture, Literature, and History in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Leather Funnel”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Leather Funnel” is a brief, rather ghastly tale that centers on a dream vision of a woman being brutally tortured. Doyle’s other major publication of 1902, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, was his defense of the British army against claims made by W. T. Stead in Methods of Barbarism (1901) that Boer women and children had been the victims of war crimes and systematic torture. Doyle structures the story so that the narrator’s naïve response of moral outrage at seeing a woman being tortured gradually develops into a more sophisticated understanding of justice as his vision is placed in its proper legal and historical context. Taken together, “The Leather Funnel” and The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct offer useful insights into Doyle’s understanding of the relationship between literature and history, and the deployment of state power through written language

Neo-Statecraft Theory, Historical Institutionalism and Institutional Change

This article provides a critical examination of the contribution that statecraft theory, which has been subject to recent revision and development, makes to the literature on institutional change. It articulates an emergent neo-statecraft approach that offers an agent-led form of historical institutionalism. This overcomes the common criticism that historical institutionalists underplay the creative role of actors. The article also argues that the approach brings back into focus the imperatives of electoral politics as a source of institutional change and provides a macro theory of change which is also commonly missing from historical institutionalist work. It can therefore identify previously unnoticed sources of stability and change, especially in states with strong executives and top-down political cultures

Embedding right-angled Artin groups into Brin-Thompson groups

Funding: UK EPSRC grant EP/R032866/1.We prove that every finitely-generated right-angled Artin group embeds into some Brin–Thompson group nV. It follows that any virtually special group can be embedded into some nV, a class that includes surface groups, all finitely-generated Coxeter groups, and many one-ended hyperbolic groups.PreprintPostprintPeer reviewe

Centerscope

Centerscope, formerly Scope, was published by the Boston University Medical Center "to communicate the concern of the Medical Center for the development and maintenance of improved health care in contemporary society.

Global Governance Behind Closed Doors : The IMF Boardroom, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, and the Intersection of Material Power and Norm Change in Global Politics

Up on the 12th floor of its 19th Street Headquarters, the IMF Board sits in active session for an average of 7 hours per week. Although key matters of policy are decided on in the venue, the rules governing Boardroom interactions remain opaque, resting on an uneasy combination of consensual decision-making and weighted voting. Through a detailed analysis of IMF Board discussions surrounding the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF), this article sheds light on the mechanics of power in this often overlooked venue of global economic governance. By exploring the key issues of default liability and loan conditionality, I demonstrate that whilst the Boardroom is a more active site of contestation than has hitherto been recognized, material power is a prime determinant of both Executive Directors’ preferences and outcomes reached from discussions. And as the decisions reached form the backbone of the ‘instruction sheet’ used by Fund staff to guide their everyday operational decisions, these outcomes—and the processes through which they were reached—were factors of primary importance in stabilizing the operational norms at the heart of a controversial phase in the contemporary history of IMF concessional lending

World radiocommunication conference 12 : implications for the spectrum eco-system

Spectrum allocation is once more a key issue facing the global telecommunications industry. Largely overlooked in current debates, however, is the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC). Decisions taken by WRC shape the future roadmap of the telecommunications industry, not least because it has the ability to shape the global spectrum allocation framework. In the debates of WRC-12 it is possible to identify three main issues: enhancement of the international spectrum regulatory framework, regulatory measures required to introduce Cognitive Radio Systems (CRS) technologies; and, additional spectrum allocation to mobile service. WRC-12 eventually decided not to change the current international radio regulations with regard to the first two issues and agreed to the third issue. The main implications of WRC-12 on the spectrum ecosystem are that most of actors are not in support of the concept of spectrum flexibility associated with trading and that the concept of spectrum open access is not under consideration. This is explained by the observation that spectrum trading and spectrum commons weaken state control over spectrum and challenge the main principles and norms of the international spectrum management regime. In addition, the mobile allocation issue has shown the lack of conformity with the main rules of the regime: regional spectrum allocation in the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) three regions, and the resistance to the slow decision making procedures. In conclusion, while the rules and decision-making procedures of the international spectrum management regime were challenged in the WRC-12, the main principles and norms are still accepted by the majority of countries

On the notion of home and the goals of palliative care

The notion of home is well known from our everyday experience, and plays a crucial role in all kinds of narratives about human life, but is hardly ever systematically dealt with in the philosophy of medicine and health care. This paper is based upon the intuitively positive connotation of the term “home.” By metaphorically describing the goal of palliative care as “the patient’s coming home,” it wants to contribute to a medical humanities approach of medicine. It is argued that this metaphor can enrich our understanding of the goals of palliative care and its proper objectives. Four interpretations of “home” and “coming home” are explored: (1) one’s own house or homelike environment, (2) one’s own body, (3) the psychosocial environment, and (4) the spiritual dimension, in particular, the origin of human existence. Thinking in terms of coming home implies a normative point of view. It represents central human values and refers not only to the medical-technical and care aspects of health care, but also to the moral context

International Nonregimes: A Research Agenda1

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146934/1/j.1468-2486.2007.00672.x.pd