Eleanor Elsner’s Discordant Discourse and Split Subjectivity in The Magic of Morocco (1928)

On board the Macoris, the British woman traveller Eleanor Elsner peregrinated into French Morocco, landing in Casablanca in 1928. Elsner’s The Magic of Morocco is about the author’s search for the atavistic at a time when the European colonial power structure and the rise of tourism had transformed the exotic referent into the familiar sign of Western hegemony. Elsner could not help but experience a sense of displacement in time and space, an experience that produced either a sense of disorientation and loss, or an obsessive urge to discover the “authentic” Other. Elsner’s account is imbued with discursive ambivalences and ideological uncertainties. Her discourse is complicitous as she vociferously lauds the French colonial enterprise in the person of General Lyautey, the engineer of the “peaceful pacification.” The present paper focuses on Elsner and her account as a staunch advocate of the French colonial enterprise in Morocco and her quest for elsewhere. This paper explores Elsner’s discordant practices and discourses as a split subject/traveller in Protectorate Morocco.

Nisargopchar Ashram: Gandhi’s Legacy and Public Health in Contemporary India

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a staunch advocate for nature cure. He promoted the use of earth, air, sunlight, water and diet not only to treat medical problems but also as an integral feature of a programme for comprehensive public health reform. As such, Gandhi conceptualised healthcare as an encompassing, biomoral project designed to produce Swaraj in the broadest sense of the term. Nature cure was, in other words, fundamental to sarvodaya as a form of praxis. This essay focusses on Gandhi’s establishment of Nisargopchar, a nature cure ashram in the Uruli Kanchan village, and the conceptualisation of the ashram within the framework of the constructive programme and rural development more broadly. This focus not only highlights fundamental tensions and contradictions of social class within the Gandhian project but also sheds light on the way in which Gandhi’s vision of biomoral reform provides a perspective on how these contradictions and tensions, which are especially visible in contemporary India, reflect larger, more encompassing global problems of consumption, development and progress measured in terms of material wealth.

Calming a Parent's Vaccine Fears

P.A. Offit - Head of Infectious Diseases at the Children 's Hospital of Philadelphia, leading advocate and has done more for promoting vaccination than anybody else I know in the world. He has been a staunch advocate of helping kids receive necessary vaccines and has been a pioneer himself in vaccine research. In an interview, Dr. Offit explain what can be done to calm parents who are worried and hear such things as, «My child got sick after a vaccination»?

‘Our own fastidious John Jordan’: Poet, Literary Editor, Critic

For more than three decades, John Jordan (1930–88) was one of the most astute and perceptive literary critics in Ireland. As editor of the magazine Poetry Ireland in the Sixties he helped to revive Dublin as a significant literary centre, maintaining friendships with Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Austin Clarke. Himself a poet in the late modernist mode and a writer of witty and idiosyncratic short stories about the bohemian Dublin of the Forties and Fifties, Jordan was equally well-known as a drama critic, a staunch advocate of the later plays of Sean O'Casey, a defender of Joyce and Beckett, and a champion of the work of women authors including Kate O'Brien and the playwright Teresa Deevy. A child prodigy who corresponded with the famous English drama critic James Agate and evaluated play scripts for Edwards and MacLiammóir at the Gate Theatre, where he also acted, John Jordan distinguished himself as a scholarship student at Pembroke College Oxford and at UCD, where he lectured brilliantly on English literature. He was also a noted broadcaster on radio and TV programmes such as the Thomas Davis Lectures, Sunday Miscellany, and the TV book programme Folio.

Rossini's noisy bodies

Rossini's comic finales consistently foreground the propensity of noise to overwhelm the senses, to both signify and induce madness or confusion, and to transform the bodies on stage into noisy automata. Such mechanical noisiness may appear ‘naturally’ comic and dramatically appropriate – and therefore hardly in need of comment. But the din of Rossini's operas was a point of contention for critics; even Stendhal, normally the composer's staunch advocate, displays a kind of ambivalence about the sheer physical force of Rossini's music. This ambivalence mirrors a larger division between fans and critics, a bifurcation that produced an immense volume of printed matter as Rossini's music became a nexus for debates about the place of reason versus sensation and the troubled relationship between physiological and moral stimulation. These tensions are especially apparent in two operas from 1817, La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra. Both works tend to subvert the conventions of sentimental comedy by ironizing sentimental display, mocking tender feelings or, most tellingly, juxtaposing tears with violent cacophony – tactics that did not always sit well with critics. Using Stendhal's Vie de Rossini as a focal point, this essay situates Rossinian noise and the controversy surrounding it in the context of pervasive concern about the sensible body in a post-sentimental era. Because it seemed to act on the body in such powerful ways, noise very easily allowed commentators to invoke a whole panoply of overlapping discourses – of politics, sentimentality and sensibility, morality, medicine and physiology – in their attempts to account for Rossini's popularity.

Prospective Autonomy and Critical Interests: A Narrative Defense of the Moral Authority of Advance Directives

In the mid to late 1980s a debate arose over the moral and legal authority of advance medical directives. At the center of this debate were two point-counterpoint law journal articles by Rebecca Dresser and Nancy Rhoden. What appeared to have the makings of an ongoing critical dialogue ended with the untimely death of Nancy Rhoden. Rebecca Dresser, however, has continued her challenge of advance directives in numerous publications, most recently in a critique of Ronald Dworkin's Life's Dominion. Like Rhoden, Dworkin has been a staunch advocate of advance directives as an exercise of what has come to be referred to as prospective or precedent autonomy. In this paper I will consider a number of the issues that Dresser has repeatedly raised about the infirmities of advance directives, and suggest that it is from an understanding of and appreciation for the narrative dimension of the life of a person that advanced directives draw one of their most powerful justifications.

Pioneers of genetics: a comparison of the attitudes of William Bateson and Erwin Baur to eugenics

The John Innes Centre has a large collection of the correspondence of William Bateson (F.R.S., 1894), its first Director, who worked at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, Merton, Surrey, from 1910 until his death in 1926 at the age of 64. Previous to this appointment, Bateson was Professor of Biology at Cambridge and an enthusiastic promulgator of the new science of genetics. Indeed, he actually coined the term genetics , in 1905. Whilst studying the genetics of Antirrhinum , Bateson came into contact with a colleague in Germany, Erwin Baur (1875-1933), who was also a staunch advocate of Mendelian genetics. The two biologists became friends and confidants.

XVIII. Bishop Moriarty on disestablishment and the union, 1868

The following letter is to be found among the Gladstone papers in the British Museum. Its recipient, William Monsell, M.P. for county Limerick and one of the most prominent Irish liberals, evidently felt it was of sufficient interest to send on to the leader of his party. At the time it was written, Gladstone had already declared himself in favour of disestablishment, though as he was still in opposition he was not yet in a position to give effect to his sympathies.It comes as no surprise to find Dr Moriarty holding the opinions that he proclaims in this letter. The bishop of Kerry was well known as a staunch advocate of the British connexion. He had been the fiercest of all the bishops in his denunciations of fenianism; and a few years later he was publicly to condemn the home rule movement. But in none of his published utterances, probably, did he state so frankly the reasons for his point of view. In a public manifesto addressed to a people critical of his ideas, he would have concentrated on those arguments which might have some appeal for them. In a private letter such as this one, addressed to a person in full sympathy with him, he was hindered by no diplomatic considerations from giving a frank account of his opinions.