Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Religious Geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine

The introduction of Protestantism into the Middle East by American missionaries in the nineteenth century met with limited success while the responses and internalizations of local converts proved incredibly diverse. The two resultant theological descendants are Palestinian Christian Zionists and Palestinian Liberation Theologists. The article provides a short history of these two movements and highlights influential voices through interviews and media analysis. This article argues that hybrid religious identifications with nation and place has transcended, in some cases, political struggle for territory.

State power matters: power, the state and political struggle in the post-war American novel

This article is concerned with resituating the state at the centre of the analytical stage and, concomitantly, with drawing attention to the dangers of losing sight of the state as a locus of power. It seeks to uncover the relationship between two related lines of critical inquiry: Marxist and Foucauldian theories of the state; and the attempts by three postwar American novelist (Ken Kesey, William Burroughs and E.L. Doctorow) to determine the nature and extent of this power and to consider under what conditions political struggle might be possible. It argues that such a move is needed because recent critical analysis has been too preoccupied by corporeal micropolitics and global macropolitics, and that the postwar American novel can help us in this move because it is centrally concerned with the repressive potentiality of the US state. It maintains that the resuscitation of Marxist state theories in early 1970s and a debate between Poulantzas and Foucault is intriguingly foreshadowed and even critiqued by these novels. Consequently, it concludes that these novels constitute an unrecognized pre-history of what would become one of the key intellectual debates of the late twentieth century: an engagement between Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of the power and resistance.

AA and the Redeployment of Temperance Literature

This essay is an examination that, primarily comparativist in its approach, links publication materials from the temperance and Prohibition periods with the Big Book to show how AA's narrative antidotes to the traumas of modernity (sited in alcohol abuse) were as much the product of premodernist and turn-of-the-century hysteria as they were an attempt to write a new chapter in America's relationship with alcohol based on contemporary medical and social research.

A systematic literature review of surgical interventions for limbal stem cell deficiency in humans

PURPOSE: To evaluate the relative benefits and to identify any adverse effects of surgical interventions for limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD).

DESIGN: Systematic literature review.

METHODS: We searched the following electronic databases from January 1, 1989 through September 30, 2006: MEDLINE, EMBASE, Science citation index, BIOSIS, and the Cochrane Library. In addition, reference lists were scanned to identify any additional reports. The quality of published reports was assessed using standard methods. The main outcome measure was improvement in vision of at least two Snellen lines of best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA). Data on adverse outcomes also were collected.

RESULTS: Twenty-six studies met the inclusion criteria. There were no randomized controlled studies. All 26 studies were either prospective or retrospective case series. For bilateral severe LSCD, keratolimbal allograft was the most common intervention with systemic immunosuppression. Other interventions included eccentric penetrating keratolimbal allografts and cultivated autologous oral mucosal epithelial grafts. An improvement in BCVA of two lines or more was reported in 31% to 67% of eyes. For unilateral severe LSCD, the most common surgical intervention was contralateral conjunctival limbal autograft, with 35% to 88% of eyes gaining an improvement in BCVA of two lines or more. The only study evaluating partial LSCD showed an improvement in BCVA of two lines or more in 39% of eyes.

CONCLUSIONS: Studies to date have not provided strong evidence to guide clinical practice on which surgery is most beneficial to treat various types of LSCD. Standardized data collection in a multicenter LSCD register is suggested.

Sample size in studies on diagnostic accuracy in ophthalmology:A literature survey

Aim: To assess the sample sizes used in studies on diagnostic accuracy in ophthalmology. Design and sources: A survey literature published in 2005. Methods: The frequency of reporting calculations of sample sizes and the samples' sizes were extracted from the published literature. A manual search of five leading clinical journals in ophthalmology with the highest impact (Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Ophthalmology, Archives of Ophthalmology, American Journal of Ophthalmology and British Journal of Ophthalmology) was conducted by two independent investigators. Results: A total of 1698 articles were identified, of which 40 studies were on diagnostic accuracy. One study reported that sample size was calculated before initiating the study. Another study reported consideration of sample size without calculation. The mean (SD) sample size of all diagnostic studies was 172.6 (218.9). The median prevalence of the target condition was 50.5%. Conclusion: Only a few studies consider sample size in their methods. Inadequate sample sizes in diagnostic accuracy studies may result in misleading estimates of test accuracy. An improvement over the current standards on the design and reporting of diagnostic studies is warranted.