No ‘Help to the Imagination’: Kate O'Brien and the Emergency

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
Anna Teekell

Kate O'Brien's 1943 The Last of Summer has been read as the novelist's riposte to an insular island that stifled both her publishing (through censorship) and her imagination (through cultural conservatism). Set on the eve of the neutral ‘Emergency’, O'Brien's sixth novel actually depicts Ireland as a complex space of negotiation, simultaneously desirable and condemnable, that challenges, rather than stifles, the individual imagination. The Last of Summer is a love triangle and a battle of wits, pitching a stage actress, the French ingénue Angèle, against an accomplished domestic performer, her potential mother-in-law, Hannah Kernahan. In the end, it is Hannah who wields ‘neutrality’ – both Ireland's in the war and her pretended neutrality in family matters – as a form of coercive power.

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-202
Author(s):  
Rachel Muers

AbstractWhat might be learned, for theology, from recent interest in the complex love triangle of Nelly Barth, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth? I explore some aspects of how the story has been told, in and since Christiane Tietz's 2016 presentation and article, and argue that they expose deep-seated issues in and for the discipline of systematic theology. In particular, I draw attention to the focus on preserving the authority of the individual (male/masculine) author as the exemplar of theological practice; and to the reluctance to recognise the social, political and economic dimensions of sexuality and ‘domestic’ life. I argue that a properly ‘systematic theological’ approach to the Barth-von Kirschbaum story would involve critical and constructive theological reflection on theology's conditions of production: using historical contexts to help us recognise and respond to contemporary issues, without reducing such reflection to stories about individual authors.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin E. Spencer

In an essay on the Nambikuara of the Mato Grosso, Lévi-Strauss revives in an interesting fashion the problem of the Social Contract. Among the Nambikuara are found the most primitive forms of social and political structure. In the words of Lévi-Strauss: “No social structure is weaker and more fragile than the Nambikuara band” (I). The Nambikuara abandon their semi-permanent dwellings at the end of the rainy season in April or early May and divide into bands which are formed on the basis of free choice. The nucleus of the band is a leader who directs the movements and the hunting, fishing, and food-gathering activities of the group for the duration of its nomadic life during the dry season. The leader, however, disposes of no coercive power: he must derive his authority from the continual active consent of those subject to it. The price of leadership is the welfare of the group. If the band is badly managed and food is scarce the individual members of the group may leave to join other, more prosperous bands. Thus bands are always in the process of organizing and growing, or fragmenting and disappearing, with the vicissitudes of leadership. In return for his services the chief enjoys the privilege of having two or more wives, a prerogative shared only with the shamans. As Lévi-Strauss describes the situation of the leader, he appears to be a man forever hustling to provide his subjects with food and entertainment. He is in effect always running for office.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yawei Cheng ◽  
Judith Chou ◽  
Róger Marcelo Martínez ◽  
Yang-Teng Fan ◽  
Chenyi Chen

AbstractCoercive power has different effects on individuals, and which were unable to be fully addressed in Milgram’s famous studies on obedience to authority. While some individuals exhibited high levels of guilt-related anxiety and refused orders to harm, others followed coercive orders throughout the whole event. The lack of guilt is a well-known characteristic of psychopathy, and recent evidence portrays psychopathic personalities on a continuum of clustered traits, while being pervasive in a significant proportion in the population. To investigate whether psychopathic traits better explain discrepancies in antisocial behavior under coercion, we applied a virtual obedience paradigm, in which an experimenter ordered subjects to press a handheld button to initiate successive actions that carry different moral consequences, during fMRI scanning. Psychopathic traits modulated the association between harming actions and guilt feelings on both behavioral and brain levels. This study sheds light on the individual variability in response to coercive power.


Res Publica ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Hans De Witte ◽  
Jaak Billiet ◽  
Peer Scheepers

On the basis of the research literature, five aspects of the extreme right-wing ideology were distinguished : racism, extreme ethnic nationalism, the preference for a strong leadership, anti-parliamentarianism, and an anti-left attitude. The data of a postal survey in the spring of 1991 of a representative sample of the Flemish population in Belgium show that the items with which these extreme right-wing topics were operationalized show a one dimensional structure. About 10% to 25% of the interviewees agree with the individual items and about 20% of the subjects scored on the extreme right-wing side of the scale.  The 'hardcore' of extreme right-wing respondents is, however, much smaller (about 1% to 2%), and does not seem to be higher in Flanders than in most of the surrounding countries. The right-wing extremism scale developed correlates as expected with a previously developed typology that integrates the attitude with respect to autochthons and allochthons.  The analysis confirms that the voters for the Vlaams Blok - taken as a whole - may not be considered right-wing extremists, as suggested by previous research. Right-wing extremism correlates with a large number of attitudes and seems to be embedded in the broader opinion dimension of socio-cultural conservatism. This may also explain why it is associated primarily with the age, educational level, and religiosity of the respondents.


Author(s):  
C.N. Sun

The present study demonstrates the ultrastructure of the gingival epithelium of the pig tail monkey (Macaca nemestrina). Specimens were taken from lingual and facial gingival surfaces and fixed in Dalton's chrome osmium solution (pH 7.6) for 1 hr, dehydrated, and then embedded in Epon 812.Tonofibrils are variable in number and structure according to the different region or location of the gingival epithelial cells, the main orientation of which is parallel to the long axis of the cells. The cytoplasm of the basal epithelial cells contains a great number of tonofilaments and numerous mitochondria. The basement membrane is 300 to 400 A thick. In the cells of stratum spinosum, the tonofibrils are densely packed and increased in number (fig. 1 and 3). They seem to take on a somewhat concentric arrangement around the nucleus. The filaments may occur scattered as thin fibrils in the cytoplasm or they may be arranged in bundles of different thickness. The filaments have a diameter about 50 A. In the stratum granulosum, the cells gradually become flatted, the tonofibrils are usually thin, and the individual tonofilaments are clearly distinguishable (fig. 2). The mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum are seldom seen in these superficial cell layers.


Author(s):  
Anthony J. Godfrey

Aldehyde-fixed chick retina was embedded in a water-containing resin of glutaraldehyde and urea, without dehydration. The loss of lipids and other soluble tissue components, which is severe in routine methods involving dehydration, was thereby minimized. Osmium tetroxide post-fixation was not used, lessening the amount of protein denaturation which occurred. Ultrathin sections were stained with 1, uranyl acetate and lead citrate, 2, silicotungstic acid, or 3, osmium vapor, prior to electron microscope examination of visual cell outer segment ultrastructure, at magnifications up to 800,000.Sections stained with uranyl acetate and lead citrate (Fig. 1) showed that the individual disc membranes consisted of a central lipid core about 78Å thick in which dark-staining 40Å masses appeared to be embedded from either side.


Author(s):  
Anthony A. Paparo ◽  
Judith A. Murphy

The purpose of this study was to localize the red neuronal pigment in Mytilus edulis and examine its role in the control of lateral ciliary activity in the gill. The visceral ganglia (Vg) in the central nervous system show an over al red pigmentation. Most red pigments examined in squash preps and cryostat sec tions were localized in the neuronal cell bodies and proximal axon regions. Unstained cryostat sections showed highly localized patches of this pigment scattered throughout the cells in the form of dense granular masses about 5-7 um in diameter, with the individual granules ranging from 0.6-1.3 um in diame ter. Tissue stained with Gomori's method for Fe showed bright blue granular masses of about the same size and structure as previously seen in unstained cryostat sections.Thick section microanalysis (Fig.l) confirmed both the localization and presence of Fe in the nerve cell. These nerve cells of the Vg share with other pigmented photosensitive cells the common cytostructural feature of localization of absorbing molecules in intracellular organelles where they are tightly ordered in fine substructures.


Author(s):  
William W. Thomson ◽  
Elizabeth S. Swanson

The oxidant air pollutants, ozone and peroxyacetyl nitrate, are produced in the atmosphere through the interaction of light with nitrogen oxides and gaseous hydrocarbons. These oxidants are phytotoxicants and are known to deleteriously affect plant growth, physiology, and biochemistry. In many instances they induce changes which lead to the death of cells, tissues, organs, and frequently the entire plant. The most obvious damage and biochemical changes are generally observed with leaves.Electron microscopic examination of leaves from bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) and cotton (Gossipyum hirsutum L.) fumigated for .5 to 2 hours with 0.3 -1 ppm of the individual oxidants revealed that changes in the ultrastructure of the cells occurred in a sequential fashion with time following the fumigation period. Although occasional cells showed severe damage immediately after fumigation, the most obvious change was an enhanced clarity of the cell membranes.


Author(s):  
D. E. Becker

An efficient, robust, and widely-applicable technique is presented for computational synthesis of high-resolution, wide-area images of a specimen from a series of overlapping partial views. This technique can also be used to combine the results of various forms of image analysis, such as segmentation, automated cell counting, deblurring, and neuron tracing, to generate representations that are equivalent to processing the large wide-area image, rather than the individual partial views. This can be a first step towards quantitation of the higher-level tissue architecture. The computational approach overcomes mechanical limitations, such as hysterisis and backlash, of microscope stages. It also automates a procedure that is currently done manually. One application is the high-resolution visualization and/or quantitation of large batches of specimens that are much wider than the field of view of the microscope.The automated montage synthesis begins by computing a concise set of landmark points for each partial view. The type of landmarks used can vary greatly depending on the images of interest. In many cases, image analysis performed on each data set can provide useful landmarks. Even when no such “natural” landmarks are available, image processing can often provide useful landmarks.


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