Ghosts in contemporary African diasporic literature : re-visioning history, memory and identity

Starting from the observation that ghosts are strikingly recurrent and prominent figures in late-twentieth African diasporic literature, this dissertation proposes to account for this presence by exploring its various functions. It argues that, beyond the poetic function the ghost performs as metaphor, it also does cultural, theoretical and political work that is significant to the African diaspora in its dealings with issues of history, memory and identity. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) serves as a guide for introducing the many forms, qualities and significations of the ghost, which are then explored and analyzed in four chapters that look at Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and a selection of novels, short stories and poetry by Michelle Cliff. Moving thematically through these texts, the discussion shifts from history through memory to identity as it examines how the ghost trope allows the writers to revisit sites of trauma; revise historical narratives that are constituted and perpetuated by exclusions and invisibilities; creatively and critically repossess a past marked by violence, dislocation and alienation and reclaim the diasporic culture it contributed to shaping; destabilize and deconstruct the hegemonic, normative categories and boundaries that delimit race or sexuality and envision other, less limited and limiting definitions of identity. These diverse and interrelated concerns are identified and theorized as participating in a project of "re-vision," a critical project that constitutes an epistemological as much as a political gesture. The author-based structure allows for a detailed analysis of the texts and highlights the distinctive shapes the ghost takes and the particular concerns it serves to address in each writer's literary and political project. However, using the ghost as a guide into these texts, taken collectively, also throws into relief new connections between them and sheds light on the complex ways in which the interplay of history, memory and identity positions them as products of and contributions to an African diasporic (literary) culture. If it insists on the cultural specificity of African diasporic ghosts, tracing its origins to African cultures and spiritualities, the argument also follows gothic studies' common view that ghosts in literary and cultural productions-like other related figures of the living dead-respond to particular conditions and anxieties. Considering the historical and political context in which the texts under study were produced, the dissertation makes connections between the ghosts in them and African diasporic people's disillusionment with the broken promises of the civil rights movement in the United States and of postcolonial independence in the Caribbean. It reads the texts' theoretical concerns and narrative qualities alongside the contestation of traditional historiography by black and postcolonial studies as well as the broader challenge to conventional notions such as truth, reality, meaning, power or identity by poststructuralism, postcolonialism or queer theory. Drawing on these various theoretical approaches and critical tools to elucidate the ghost's deconstructive power for African diasporic writers' concerns, this work ultimately offers a contribution to "speciality studies," which is currently emerging as a new field of scholarship in cultural theory.

After Satan : Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth

This volume is the result of a collective desire to pay homage to Neil Forsyth, whose work has significantly contributed to scholarship on Satan. This volume is "after" Satan in more ways than one, tracing the afterlife of both the satanic figure in literature and of Neil Forsyth's contribution to the field, particularly in his major books The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton University Press, 1987, revised 1990) and The Satanic Epic (Princeton University Press, 2003). The essays in this volume draw on Forsyth's work as a focus for their analyses of literary encounters with evil or with the Devil himself, reflecting the richness and variety of contemporary approaches to the age-old question of how to represent evil. All the contributors acknowledge Neil Forsyth's influence in the study of both the Satan-figure and Milton's Paradise Lost. But beyond simply paying homage to Neil Forsyth, the articles collected here trace the lineage of the Satan figure through literary history, showing how evil can function as a necessary other against which a community may define itself. They chart the demonised other through biblical history and medieval chronicle, Shakespeare and Milton, to nineteenth-century fiction and the contemporary novel. Many of the contributors find that literary evil is mediated through the lens of the Satan of Paradise Lost, and their articles address the notion, raised by Neil Forsyth in The Satanic Epic, that the literary Devil-figures under consideration are particularly interested in linguistic ambivalence and the twisted texture of literary works themselves. The multiple responses to evil and the continuous reinvention of the devil figure through the centuries all reaffirm the textual presence of the Devil, his changing forms necessarily inscribed in the shifting history of western literary culture. These essays are a tribute to the work of Neil Forsyth, whose scholarship has illuminated and guided the study of the Devil in English and other literatures.

After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth

This volume is the result of a collective desire to pay homage to Neil Forsyth, whose work has significantly contributed to scholarship on Satan. This volume is "after" Satan in more ways than one, tracing the afterlife of both the satanic figure in literature and of Neil Forsyth's contribution to the field, particularly in his major books The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton University Press, 1987, revised 1990) and The Satanic Epic (Princeton University Press, 2003). The essays in this volume draw on Forsyth's work as a focus for their analyses of literary encounters with evil or with the Devil himself, reflecting the richness and variety of contemporary approaches to the age-old question of how to represent evil. All the contributors acknowledge Neil Forsyth's influence in the study of both the Satan-figure and Milton's Paradise Lost. But beyond simply paying homage to Neil Forsyth, the articles collected here trace the lineage of the Satan figure through literary history, showing how evil can function as a necessary other against which a community may define itself. They chart the demonised other through biblical history and medieval chronicle, Shakespeare and Milton, to nineteenth-century fiction and the contemporary novel. Many of the contributors find that literary evil is mediated through the lens of the Satan of Paradise Lost, and their articles address the notion, raised by Neil Forsyth in The Satanic Epic, that the literary Devil-figures under consideration are particularly interested in linguistic ambivalence and the twisted texture of literary works themselves. The multiple responses to evil and the continuous reinvention of the devil figure through the centuries all reaffirm the textual presence of the Devil, his changing forms necessarily inscribed in the shifting history of western literary culture. These essays are a tribute to the work of Neil Forsyth, whose scholarship has illuminated and guided the study of the Devil in English and other literatures.

Variants : The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship

This volume is the 10th issue of Variants . In keeping with the mission of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, the articles are richly interdisciplinary and transnational. They bring to bear a wide range of topics and disciplines on the field of textual scholarship: historical linguistics, digital scholarly editing, classical philology, Dutch, English, Finnish and Swedish Literature, publishing traditions in Japan, book history, cultural history and folklore. The questions that are explored - what texts are worth editing? what is the nature of the relationship between text, work, document and book? what is a critical digital edition? - all return to fundamental issues that have been at the heart of the editorial discipline for decades. With refreshing insight they assess the increasingly hybrid nature of the theoretical considerations and practical methodologies employed by textual scholars, while reasserting the relevance and need for producing scholarly editions, whether in print or digital, and continuing advanced research in bibliographical codes, textual transmissions, genetic dossiers, the fluidity of texts and other such subjects that connect textual scholarship with broader investigations into our nations' literary culture and written heritage.

Influence de deux milieux séquentiels pour la culture d'embryons sur la production d'hormone gonadotrophine chorionique et de progestérone par des cellules JEG-3 et BeWo [Effects of different embryo development media on hCG and progesterone release by JEG-3 and BeWo cells]

Current in vitro fertilisation (IVF) practice requires synchronisation between the¦environment of cultured oocytes and embryos and the surroundings to what they would have¦been exposed to in vivo. Commercial, sequential media follow this requirement but their exact¦composition is not available. We have compared two widely used IVF culture media systems using¦the two choriocarcinoma cell lines JEG-3 and BeWo. The two hormones hCG and progesterone¦were determined in the culture supernatants as endpoints. In both cell lines, but in a more¦pronounced way in JEG-3, progesterone rather than hCG production was stimulated, and a¦higher hormone release was observed in the fertilisation than in the cleavage media. Differences¦between manufacturers were small and did not favour one system over the other. We conclude¦that both sequential media systems can be equally well used in current IVF laboratory practice.¦© 2012 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Les juifs et l'idée de Bildung dans l'Allemagne de culture protestante : chronique d'un mésamour à travers le long XIXe siècle

Des années 1780, quand surgit la question de l'émancipation des juifs, à la Première Guerre mondiale, qui dément l'optimisme de la perfectibilité du genre humain cultivé par la Bildung, le « long » XIXe siècle est la scène sur laquelle se déploient les efforts d'intégration des juifs dans la société et la culture allemandes, où la Bildung, intimement liée à l'esprit du protestantisme allemand qui l'a profondément marquée de son empreinte, tient lieu de médiation. Fil conducteur de ma recherche, la Bildung me permet de montrer en quoi son idéal est devenu un élément constitutif de l'identité des juifs allemands, en même temps qu'il cesse, sous les effets de la nationalisation d'une culture allemande devenue un outil au service d'un peuple particulier, d'être le projet, certes d'une communauté donnée, mais porteur d'universalisme. De fait, tout en adhérant à sa définition originale, les juifs ont su réinterpréter l'idée de Bildung en désamorçant l'alliance entre culture, germanité et nationalisme, afin de construire une nouvelle identité judéo-allemande qui réponde aux enjeux et aux exigences de la modernité ainsi qu'aux évolutions du temps, tout en visant à la reconnaissance des valeurs et du statut du judaïsme. Dans la mesure où cet idéal de la Bildung, sous les coups du nationalisme allemand, a perdu sa portée universelle pour, dans un processus de germanisation, devenir un instrument au service du projet nationaliste, les juifs vont progressivement se voir exclus de la nation allemande, quand bien même ou précisément parce qu'ils se sont identifiés à tel point au projet initial de la Bildung qu'ils en sont devenus les garants. From the 1780s, when the question of the emancipation of the Jews emerged, until World War I-a disappointment for those who were optimistic about cultivating a perfected humanity through Bildung (education)-the "long" nineteenth century is the stage on which the efforts to integrate the Jews into German society and culture took place. In this context, Bildung, which was decidedly bound to and profoundly marked by the German Protestant spirit, served as mediation. The underlying theme of Bildung in my research enables me to show how its ideal became the constitutive element of German Jewish identity. Concurrently, under the effects of the nationalization of German culture that became a tool in the service of a specific folk, the ideal of Bildung ceased to be a project that conveyed universal meaning. In fact, although the Jewish people agreed with its original definition, they succeeded in reinterpreting the idea of Bildung by neutralizing the alliance between culture, being German, and nationalism in order to elaborate a new German-Jewish identity in reply to the challenges and requirements of modernity and the evolution of society while still recognizing the values and status of Judaism. Inasmuch as the ideal of Bildung lost its universal significance for serving the nationalist project under the influence of German nationalism, the Jews were gradually excluded from the German folk, which took place despite, or precisely because, they identified to such an extent with the original aims of Bildung that they became the guarantors for it. Das ,,lange" 19. Jahrhundert bildet die Kulisse der Integrationsbemühungen der Juden in die deutsche Gesellschaft und Kultur, von den 1780er Jahren, als die Frage nach der Judenemanzipation zutage kommt, bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, der den Optimismus der menschlichen Verbesserungsfahigkeit durch die Bildung widerlegt. Die mit dem Geist des deutschen Protestantismus eng verbundene Bildung dient hier als Mediation. Der rote Faden der Bildung ermöglicht mir zu zeigen, inwiefern ihr Ideal wesentlich für die jüdische Identität geworden ist. Zur gleichen Zeit hat das Bildungsideal, unter der Wirkung der Nationalisierung der deutschen Kultur, die zum Werkzeug eines eigenartigen Volkes gemacht wurde, sein universales Wesen verloren. In der Tat, obwohl die Juden dem ursprünglichen Bildungsideal zustimmten, haben sie die Bildung neu interpretiert, indem sie die Verbindung zwischen Kultur, Germanentum und Nationalismus entschärft und eine neue deutsch-jüdische Identität gebildet haben, die den Herausforderungen und den Ansprüchen der Moderne sowie dem Gesellschaftswandel entsprach und gleichzeitig darauf abzielte, die Werte und den Status des Judentums zu anerkennen. Insoweit, als das Bildungsideal seine universale Geltung unter dem Einfluss des deutschen Nationalismus verloren hat, um den nationalistischen Absichten zu dienen, wurden die Juden nach und nach vom deutschen Volk ausgeschlossen, selbst wenn oder gerade weil sie sich dermassen mit dem ursprünglichen Zweck der Bildung identifiziert haben, dass sie ihre Garanten geworden sind.

Effects of the naturally occurring food mycotoxin ochratoxin A on brain cells in culture.

The potential of ochratoxin A (OTA) to damage brain cells was studied by using a three-dimensional cell culture system as model for the developing brain. Aggregating cell cultures of foetal rat telencephalon were tested either during an early developmental period, or during a phase of advanced maturation, over a wide range of OTA concentrations (0.4 nM to 50 microM). By monitoring changes in activities of cell type-specific enzymes (ChAt and GAD, for cholinergic and GABAergic neurones, respectively, GS for astrocytes and CNP for oligodendrocytes), the concentration-dependent toxicity and neurodevelopmental effects of OTA were determined. OTA proved to be highly toxic, since a 10-day treatment at 50 nM caused a general cytotoxicity in both mature and immature cultures. At 10 nM of OTA, cell type-specific effects were observed: in immature cultures, a loss in neuronal and oligodendroglial enzyme activities, and an increase in the activity of the astroglial marker glutamine synthetase were found, Furthermore, at 2 and 10 nM of OTA, a clustering of microglial cells was observed. In mature cultures, OTA was somewhat less potent, but caused a similar pattern of toxic effects. A 24 h-treatment with OTA resulted in a concentration-dependent decrease in protein synthesis, with IC50 values of 25 nM and 33 nM for immature and mature cultures respectively. Acute (24 h) treatment at high OTA concentrations (10 to 50 microM) caused a significant increase in reactive oxygen species formation, as measured by the intracellular oxidation of 2',7'-dichlorofluorescin. These results suggest that OTA has the potential to be a potent toxicant to brain cells, and that its effects at nanomolar concentrations are primarily due to the inhibition of protein synthesis, whereas ROS seem not to be involved in the toxicity mediated by a chronic exposure to OTA at such low concentrations.

Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry for direct bacterial identification from positive blood culture pellets.

An ammonium chloride erythrocyte-lysing procedure was used to prepare a bacterial pellet from positive blood cultures for direct matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry analysis. Identification was obtained for 78.7% of the pellets tested. Moreover, 99% of the MALDI-TOF identifications were congruent at the species level when considering valid scores. This fast and accurate method is promising.

Differentiation of rat striatal embryonic stem cells in vitro: monolayer culture vs. three-dimensional coculture with differentiated brain cells.

Several groups have demonstrated the existence of self-renewing stem cells in embryonic and adult mouse brain. In vitro, these cells proliferate in response to epidermal growth factor, forming clusters of nestin-positive cells that may be dissociated and subcultured repetitively. Here we show that, in stem cell clusters derived from rat embryonic striatum, cell proliferation decreased with increasing number of passages and in response to elevated concentrations of potassium (30 mM KCl). In monolayer culture, the appearance of microtubule-associated protein type-5-immunoreactive (MAP-5(+)) cells (presumptive neurons) in response to basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) was reduced at low cell density and with increasing number of passages. In the presence of bFGF, elevated potassium caused a more differentiated neuronal phenotype, characterized by an increased proportion of MAP-5(+) cells, extensive neuritic branching, and higher specific activity of glutamic acid decarboxylase. Dissociated stem cells were able to invade cultured brain cell aggregates containing different proportions of neurons and glial cells, whereas they required the presence of a considerable proportion of glial cells in the host cultures to become neurofilament H-positive. The latter observation supports the view that astrocyte-derived factors influence early differentiation of the neuronal cell lineage.

Differentially expressed gene profile in the 6-hydroxy-dopamine-induced cell culture model of Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta with unknown aetiology. 6-Hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) treatment of neuronal cells is an established in vivo model for mimicking the effect of oxidative stress found in PD brains. We examined the effects of 6-OHDA treatment on human neuroblastoma cells (SH-SY5Y) and primary mesencephalic cultures. Using a reverse arbitrarily primed polymerase chain reaction (RAP-PCR) approach we generated reproducible genetic fingerprints of differential expression levels in cell cultures treated with 6-OHDA. Of the resulting sequences, 23 showed considerable homology to known human coding sequences. The results of the RAP-PCR were validated by reverse transcription PCR, real-time PCR and, for selected genes, by Western blot analysis and immunofluorescence. In four cases, [tomoregulin-1 (TMEFF-1), collapsin response mediator protein 1 (CRMP-1), neurexin-1, and phosphoribosylaminoimidazole synthetase (GART)], a down-regulation of mRNA and protein levels was detected. Further studies will be necessary on the physiological role of the identified proteins and their impact on pathways leading to neurodegeneration in PD.

The Hindu Model of Social Organization and the bhakti Movement : the Example of Vallabha's sampradāya

(Résumé de l'ouvrage) This volume addresses research topics within the field of Bhakti literature, the devotional poetry and other compositions of devotional character in the earlier literature of the modern South Asian languages. Its papers range from the roots of the Bhakti tradition in the early history of Krsna to its modern adaptations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. Geographically, they span Bengal to Sind, Panjab to Maharashtra. Contemporary study of the modern Indian languages has broadened the scope of scholarship to consider today's Hindu attitudes, and those of a mixed society, against the background of ancient culture. Here, materials in six modern Asian languages are discussed: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi in its main literary forms, Marathi, Panjabi and Sindhi; with assessment also of material in Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese. In addition to studies of literary (and orally transmitted) works in the Krsna or Rama traditions, and of Sufi compositions and their interpretation, there are papers on the early history of sacred sites, the emergence of the religion of Rama, later religious formulations throughout the subcontinent, and the interaction of the Islamic and the Hindu.