The Mom and the Many: Animal Subplots and Vulnerable Characters in Ducks, Newburyport

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-292
Author(s):  
Ben De Bruyn

This article examines Lucy Ellmann's encyclopedic novel Ducks, Newburyport (2019) in the context of debates on modernist legacies, animal characters, and climate fiction. It pays particular attention to the text's signature strategy of including anecdotes about nonhuman creatures exposed to distinct forms of violence, anecdotes that reveal the concerns of the human narrator and her daughter but also highlight other animals, their unfamiliar phenomenologies, and their cautious cross-species partnerships. More specifically, the article tracks individual animals across the novel's pages and reconstructs their semiautonomous subplots as they unfold in a world characterized by animal cruelty, species extinction, and industrial labor. By forcing us to consider the perspectives of creatures like Jim, Mishipeshu, Audrey, and Gracia, Ellmann's narrative reminds us that the climate emergency does not just destabilize a shared geological environment but also endangers multiple and heterogeneous biological worlds.

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 231-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Olson

AbstractA fascinating and controversial theory of religion and ritual is offered by Georges Bataille, an influential French postmodern thinker and writer In his collected works he suggests that religion, which he identifies with the sacred, can best be understood by the interconnections and workings of eroticism, violence, and sacrifice. The key to understanding Bataille's theory is to focus on his concept of eroticism, which was one of his life-long obsessions. According to Bataille, a common feature of eroticism, sacrifice, and religion is violence which represents a danger to overflow at anytime. If eroticism opens the way to death, sacrifice effects it. Unable to reject violence, Bataille maintained that human beings practice both internal and external forms of violence in sacrifice. And because the love object of a sexual encounter and the victim of a sacrifice are stripped of their identity in these respective activities, there is an intimate connection between eroticism and sacrifice. Due to the fact that Bataille does not use ample examples from various religions to support his theory, this paper tests his ideas by applying them to the Sun Dance of the Sioux. This dramatic form of sacrifice enables one to recognize the many deficiencies of Bataille's theory.


Author(s):  
Grace Chang

This chapter examines the implications of U.S. antitrafficking policy and practice for both trafficking survivors and immigrant workers across labor sectors. In U.S. media and public policy discourses alike, the term “human trafficking” has become synonymous with sex trafficking, which in turn has been equated with sexual violence and prostitution. Yet the many forms of violence enacted in human trafficking can include racial and sexual violence as well as economic and imperialist violence. This chapter argues that the current U.S. anti-sex trafficking agenda is so narrowly focused on the sex industry and instead gives more emphasis on enforcement and prosecution as well as the explicit and exclusive criminalization of prostitution. In order to highlight the dangers and pitfalls of this policy, the chapter considers a case of extreme labor abuse, tantamount to trafficking, of immigrant workers in the United States in the meatpacking industry in Postville, Iowa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-85
Author(s):  
Mondli Hlatshwayo

There is a growing literature on the conditions of Zimbabwean women working as migrant workers in South Africa, specifically in cities like Johannesburg. Based on in-depth interviews and documentary analysis, this empirical research paper contributes to scholarship examining the conditions of migrant women workers from Zimbabwe employed as precarious workers in Johannesburg by zooming in on specific causes of migration to Johannesburg, the journey undertaken by the migrant women to Johannesburg, challenges of documentation, use of networks to survive in Johannesburg, employment of the women in precarious work, and challenges in the workplace. Rape and sexual violence are threats that face the women interviewed during migration to Johannesburg and even when in Johannesburg. The police who are supposed to uphold and protect the law are often found to be perpetrators involved in various forms of violence against women. In the workplace, the women earn starvation wages and work under poor working conditions. Human rights organizations and trade unions are unable to reach the many migrant women because of the sheer volume of violations against workers’ rights and human rights.


1992 ◽  
Vol 37 (11) ◽  
pp. 1212-1213
Author(s):  
Irene Hanson Frieze
Keyword(s):  
The Many ◽  

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Ji Ma

AbstractGiven the many types of suboptimality in perception, I ask how one should test for multiple forms of suboptimality at the same time – or, more generally, how one should compare process models that can differ in any or all of the multiple components. In analogy to factorial experimental design, I advocate for factorial model comparison.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Spurrett

Abstract Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tomasello

Abstract My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: (1) the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; (2) the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not consider; (3) the possible ontogenetic roots of the sense of obligation, including especially children's understanding of groups from a third-party perspective (rather than through participation, as in my account); and (4) the relation between philosophical accounts of normative phenomena in general – which are pitched as not totally empirical – and empirical accounts such as my own. I have tried to distinguish comments that argue for extensions of the theory from those that represent genuine disagreement.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 179-187
Author(s):  
Clifford N. Matthews ◽  
Rose A. Pesce-Rodriguez ◽  
Shirley A. Liebman

AbstractHydrogen cyanide polymers – heterogeneous solids ranging in color from yellow to orange to brown to black – may be among the organic macromolecules most readily formed within the Solar System. The non-volatile black crust of comet Halley, for example, as well as the extensive orangebrown streaks in the atmosphere of Jupiter, might consist largely of such polymers synthesized from HCN formed by photolysis of methane and ammonia, the color observed depending on the concentration of HCN involved. Laboratory studies of these ubiquitous compounds point to the presence of polyamidine structures synthesized directly from hydrogen cyanide. These would be converted by water to polypeptides which can be further hydrolyzed to α-amino acids. Black polymers and multimers with conjugated ladder structures derived from HCN could also be formed and might well be the source of the many nitrogen heterocycles, adenine included, observed after pyrolysis. The dark brown color arising from the impacts of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter might therefore be mainly caused by the presence of HCN polymers, whether originally present, deposited by the impactor or synthesized directly from HCN. Spectroscopic detection of these predicted macromolecules and their hydrolytic and pyrolytic by-products would strengthen significantly the hypothesis that cyanide polymerization is a preferred pathway for prebiotic and extraterrestrial chemistry.


Author(s):  
Benjamin F. Trump ◽  
Irene K. Berezesky ◽  
Raymond T. Jones

The role of electron microscopy and associated techniques is assured in diagnostic pathology. At the present time, most of the progress has been made on tissues examined by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and correlated with light microscopy (LM) and by cytochemistry using both plastic and paraffin-embedded materials. As mentioned elsewhere in this symposium, this has revolutionized many fields of pathology including diagnostic, anatomic and clinical pathology. It began with the kidney; however, it has now been extended to most other organ systems and to tumor diagnosis in general. The results of the past few years tend to indicate the future directions and needs of this expanding field. Now, in addition to routine EM, pathologists have access to the many newly developed methods and instruments mentioned below which should aid considerably not only in diagnostic pathology but in investigative pathology as well.


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