The Languages of Charles Reznikoff

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims

The Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital: contributions from the complex plane

A controversy in capital theory concerns reswitching. When two production techniques are compared, reswitching occurs when one technique is cheapest at low interest rates, switches to being more expensive at higher rates, and then reswitches to being cheapest at yet higher rates. Some believe this inconsistency undermines neoclassical economics. The time-value-of-money (TVM) equation is at the core of the puzzle. The equation is a polynomial having n roots, implying n interest rates. In most analyses, including reswitching, one interest rate is used and the remaining rates are ignored. This analysis demonstrates that every TVM equation has a ‘dual’ form employing all interest rates. The dual of the reswitching equation explains the puzzle

Time varying costs of capital and the expected present value of future cash flows

The use of an inter-temporally constant discount rate or cost of capital is a strong assumption in many exante models of finance and in applied procedures such as capital budgeting. We investigate how robust this assumption is by analysing the implications of allowing the cost of capital to vary stochastically over time. We use the Feynman–Kac functional to demonstrate how there will, in general, be systematic differences between present values computed on the assumption that the currently prevailing cost of capital will last indefinitely into the future and present values determined by discounting cash flows at the expected costs of capital that apply up until the point in time at which cash flows are to be received. Comparisons are also made with the environmental economics literature where similar problems have been addressed by invoking a ‘gamma discounting’ methodology

Refugee Business Start-ups in the North East of England: An Impossible Dream?

Objectives and prior work - For many asylum seekers just getting to the UK is an achievement, let alone obtaining refugee status. When ‘equality’ is achieved with other immigrant workers then the settlement process begins. For some this includes starting a business but there are a number of well documented barriers to business start-up for refugees as well as black minority ethic entrepreneurs, which have been highlighted in the North East region (BRKN, 2007). Given this Northumbria University has sought to engage with these communities. This paper represents on-going research which began with a Northumbria University funded project that supported two main workshops aimed at refugees who wished to start a business. Approach - The University sought to engage with this particular part of the community through a project which aimed to contribute to the widening of business start-up for refugees at a time of increasing economic uncertainty. One practical means that had become available was the opportunity to establish a community based social enterprise. Given this an introductory workshop for refugees was organised on social enterprises. The workshop attracted over twenty-five community leader participants from ten different nations including the Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, the Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Participants requested a second workshop which then took place on ‘planning a business venture.’ Results - Questionnaire data was obtained from these workshops on business and social enterprise start-up, previous business experience and the usefulness of the workshops. Following these some of the workshop participants attended Northumbria University’s Student Law Office for advice on setting up their own businesses. Informal contact is also continuing with leading figures in these communities and through engagement with local voluntary sector groups. Implications - This paper will discuss some of the barriers that refugees face when starting a business and how their migration status impacts on this. It will also consider the recent cuts to the voluntary sector, how this has impacted on many of the groups supporting refugees and the extent to which the University is able to support these communities with business start up. Value - This research aims to identify the barriers which stand in the way of refugees trying to start up businesses, and to suggest measures which might ameliorate the situation, and enable more refugees to become successful business persons, contributing to the UK economy. BRKN (2007) Enterprise for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities, Refugees and Migrants, report by BOW Community Projects, Richardson Howarth LLP, The Knap and Northumbria University for ONE North East