The Literary Madness: Language as an Indicator of Insanity in the Fiction of the 20th Century (1920s)

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of insanity in the artistic discourse of the 1920s. Such a literary reception is interesting because, on the one hand, it goes against the dominant clinical approaches at that time, which emphasized the medical aspect of the problem, and on the other hand, it anticipates the antipsychiatric philoophical theories, whereby the marginal figure of the madman was gradually included in the social space. Using the example of three iconic works of modernist literature, the article demonstrates how innovative techniques of working with language make the speech of a mentally ill person distinctly audible. Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway” conveys the disastrous experience of the First World War through the stream of consciousness of the mentally traumatized character Septimus Smith. Woolf puts an anti-militaristic appeal into the mouth of a madman and thus makes him the herald of a simple truth that reasonable people, however, prefer not to notice. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Cogwheels” reproduces the experiences of the author, who feels the approach of insanity. Madness opens up as a borderline case that reveals its deep kinship with the source of writing, understood as a lack of form, lack of meaning, lack of creation. William Faulkner in the novel “The Sound and the Fury” gives the gift of speech to the weak-minded Benji, who doesn’t talk. His im-possible narrative offers an alternative to the linear logic, which clarify Benji’s confusing narration but fail to rival it in conveying the directness of human suffering or happiness.

A Framework of Simulation and Gaming for Enhancing Community Resilience Against Large-Scale Earthquakes: Application for Achievements in Japan

Background. The significance of mutual-help in communities for disaster management is a fundamental important concept. However, the current societal state does not reflect this lesson. S&G (Simulation and Gaming) has the potential to overcome the challenges faced in promoting community-based disaster management. No scientific research is currently present that reviews their achievements in Japan. Aim. This paper analyzes the current achievements of S&G in enhancing community resilience against large-scale earthquakes in Japan. Method. The paper clarifies the theoretical advantages of S&G in enhancing community resilience in coping and adaptive capacity plus proposes a conceptual contribution framework of S&G in improving community resilience. Based on this framework, the paper analyzes some major games that tackle community resilience against earthquakes in Japan. Results. The paper demonstrates the achievements through the S&G spectrum that stresses the disastrous experience with specific resilience views on one side, while decision making for critical reflection from other players with more comprehensive resilience views on the other side. Conclusion. The paper showcases the current S&G achievements in enhancing community resilience against large-scale earthquakes in Japan using the proposed framework, which can be utilized by other disaster-prone countries to develop and evaluate applications of S&G for increasing community resilience against earthquakes.

Strzały zatrutego powietrza „na ludzie i na każdą rzecz”. Wczesnonowożytne kształtowanie doświadczenia zarazy

Artykuł stanowi krótki przegląd sposobów, w jaki wczesnonowożytna medycyna i kultura religijna interpretowały i kształtowały doświadczenie zarazy i życia w jej czasie. Część pierwsza przedstawia średniowieczne i nowożytne wyjaśnienia medyczne dotyczące pochodzenia i rozprzestrzeniania się chorób zakaźnych. Autor w drugiej części tekstu omawia nowożytne sposoby ukazania niesionej powietrzem zarazy jako zagrożenia powszechnego i wszechogarniającego oraz rekapituluje dawne teorie łączące zatrucie powietrza z działaniem gwiazd. Trzecia część artykułu jest refleksją nad tym, w jakim stopniu doświadczenie zarazy było czymś wspólnym, dotykającym w podobny sposób wszystkich mieszkańców nowożytnej Europy. Wskazuje też, że choć zaraza była zjawiskiem stale obecnym w dawnej Europie, istniały spore różnice w jej doświadczeniu w zależności od stanu społecznego. Następna część tekstu przedstawia, jak na akceptację takiego stanu rzeczy mógł wpływać proces nadawania epidemii wymiaru moralnego i religijnego. Artykuł podsumowuje zakończenie, wskazujące, jak indywidualizacja doświadczenia zarazy – symbolizowana przez strzałę – jednocześnie przynosiła ludziom otuchę i pozwalała objaśnić niszczony zarazą świat w znajomych kategoriach, a także uniemożliwiała wyobrażenie sobie innego modelu wspólnoty przeżywania zarazy. Arrows of Poisoned Air for the “People and All That Lives:” Shaping the Epidemic Experience in the Early Modern Era The paper offers a brief overview of the ways in which both early modern medical knowledge and religious culture interpreted and shaped the experience of the pestilence. The first part of the text presents medieval and early modern medical theories on the origins and spread of the plague and other infectious diseases. The second part of the text discusses how the idea of airborne plague shaped the image of pestilence as not only a universal bane but also a somehow egalitarian experience. It also summarises the theories on the astrological origin of the disease, which were widespread in the early modern period. The third part of the text explores to what extent the early modern experience of the plague was truly egalitarian. The author points out that although the plague was commonplace at that time, the foundational inequality of the early modern society effectively differentiated the experience of the disease for its various members. The subsequent part of the text analyses how the process of ascribing a moral – and, specifically, religious – dimension to the plague and all the suffering it caused promoted acceptance of this state of affairs in the early modern society. The concluding part of the text discusses how the concept of the plague arrow served as a tool for the individualization of the experience of the disease and its consequences, which on the one hand provided some relief to the affected and helped rationalize the destruction brought to the world by the plague, but on the other successfully proscribed any potential attempts to reimagine the social order in the wake of such a disastrous experience.

Top-up

This chapter covers a range of issues that do not fit in earlier chapters. These include urban poverty, universal basic income, the Gujarat model, electoral politics, India's bullet train, the economics of corruption, the aberrations of the caste system, and India's disastrous experience with demonetisation in late 2016. The book concludes with an extended essay on “Development and Public‐spiritedness”. This essay takes issue with the notion, common in economics, that people generally act out of self‐interest. This assumption has no theoretical or empirical basis. Public‐spiritedness, in the sense of a reasoned habit of consideration for the public interest, is a common feature of social life. Expanding the scope of public‐spiritedness is an important aspect of social development.

Performance and gesture as crisis in La aldea maldita/The Cursed Village (Florián Rey, 1930)

Through a close analysis of the 1930 version of La aldea maldita, this chapter reflects on the influences ushered in by Spain’s embrace of modernity. Touted as ‘Spain’s last silent film’ as well as its most important one, La aldea maldita presents a harsh, minimalist beauty that has long been praised by audiences and critics. The chapter shows that the acting style is influenced not just by trends of the time but also by the film’s relationship to sound: after the disastrous experience with the sonorisation of a previous film, Rey decided to film La aldea maldita as if it were silent, when in fact the first showing of the film included sound. It also addresses the performance in the version of this film, questioning the sense of anachronism that now pervades them and reflecting on attitudes to aesthetics, acting and the cinematic medium itself.

“Where's My Parade?”: Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space

Margaret Cho rose to fame as the star of the first television sitcom to feature an all Asian American cast. Her one-woman show, I'm the One That I Want, recounts that disastrous experience, as it also maps American culture as a series of segregated spaces. Lee's article explores Cho's construction of her bodily excesses—her dirty vagina, collapsed bladder, inability to be decidable as either gay or straight—and theorizes these bodily tactics in terms of a spatial rather than temporal dialectic.

An Analysis of Optimal Farm Capital Structure

Use of debt in financing agricultural firms is an issue of perennial interest. Much of this interest reflects farmers’ disastrous experience with debt during the Great Depression. The foreclosed mortgages and bankruptcies of that era reaffirmed an historical feeling that achieving a level of zero debt or financial leverage was a high priority goal. E. G. Johnson, who was Chief of the Economic and Credit Research Division of the Farm Credit Administration, articulated the position in the 1940 Yearbook of Agriculture that this goal is even more important than increasing profits: “It may be well to emphasize again that while credit properly used may help farmers to increase their income and raise their standard of living, the fact must not be overlooked that more credit will not cure all the ills of agriculture. The greatest need is to assist the farmers in getting out of debt, not deeper into it,” [6, p. 754]. As memories of the Great Depression faded, agricultural economists tended to emphasize the effect of debt on farm size and therefore net income.