Home Is Where the Self Is: Monodrama, Journey-Play Structure, and the Modernist Fairy Tale

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of two of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever produced. L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wizard of Oz and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play each gave rise to many adaptations, including, well beloved film versions, and both have become a deeply ingrained part of the cultural memory and construction of childhood in both Europe and the United States. And while these works are deeply original in content and detail, the structure of these works harkens back to the form of the journey play (traceable, on some level, back to the medieval morality play Everyman), a form that had undergone a considerable revival in the second half of the nineteenth century in the work of writers such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. This article explores the structural and conceptual links between Baum and Maeterlinck’s children’s classics, Ibsen’s Norwegian folk play Peer Gynt, and August Strindberg’s Lucky Per’s Journey and The Road to Damascus, Part I. In these works, the protagonists, disenchanted with their homes or current situations, set out on an epic journey in which they come upon characters and situations that act as commentary upon their situations before the journey. Ultimately, the characters return to where they started, with the journey seeming to have been a dream or merely a pointless excursion. But in these journeys of self-discovery, the protagonist that emerges at the end has undergone a significant transformation, a process at the heart of all of these works.

Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era

Climate model projections suggestwidespread drying in the Mediterranean Basin and wetting in Fennoscandia in the coming decades largely as a consequence of greenhouse gas forcing of climate. To place these and other “Old World” climate projections into historical perspective based on more complete estimates of natural hydroclimatic variability, we have developed the “Old World Drought Atlas” (OWDA), a set of year-to-year maps of tree-ring reconstructed summer wetness and dryness over Europe and the Mediterranean Basin during the Common Era.
The OWDA matches historical accounts of severe drought and wetness with a spatial completeness not previously available. In addition, megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries
reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes. The OWDA provides new data to determine the causes of Old World drought and wetness and attribute past climate variability to forced and/or internal variability.

Local object gist: meaningful shapes and spatial layout at a very early stage of visual processing

In his introduction, Pinna (2010) quoted one of Wertheimer’s observations: “I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky. Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of color. Do I have ‘327’? No. I have sky, house, and trees.” This seems quite remarkable, for Max Wertheimer, together with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Koehler, was a pioneer of Gestalt Theory: perceptual organisation was tackled considering grouping rules of line and edge elements in relation to figure-ground segregation, i.e., a meaningful object (the figure) as perceived against a complex background (the ground). At the lowest level – line and edge elements – Wertheimer (1923) himself formulated grouping principles on the basis of proximity, good continuation, convexity, symmetry and, often forgotten, past experience of the observer. Rubin (1921) formulated rules for figure-ground segregation using surroundedness, size and orientation, but also convexity and symmetry. Almost a century of research into Gestalt later, Pinna and Reeves (2006) introduced the notion of figurality, meant to represent the integrated set of properties of visual objects, from the principles of grouping and figure-ground to the colour and volume of objects with shading. Pinna, in 2010, went one important step further and studied perceptual meaning, i.e., the interpretation of complex figures on the basis of past experience of the observer. Re-establishing a link to Wertheimer’s rule about past experience, he formulated five propositions, three definitions and seven properties on the basis of observations made on graphically manipulated patterns. For example, he introduced the illusion of meaning by comics-like elements suggesting wind, therefore inducing a learned interpretation. His last figure shows a regular array of squares but with irregular positions on the right side. This pile of (ir)regular squares can be interpreted as the result of an earthquake which destroyed part of an apartment block. This is much more intuitive, direct and economic than describing the complexity of the array of squares.

Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung schriftlicher Arbeiten in Studiengängen der Abteilung Information und Kommunikation der Fakultät III der Fachhochschule Hannover

Die für die Abteilung Information und Kommunikation der Fakultät III, Medien, Information und Design – MID (im Folgenden: Abteilung IK) der Fachhochschule Hannover erarbeiteten „Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung schriftlicher Arbeiten“ bieten Anregungen und Erläuterungen zur formalen Gestaltung von schriftlichen Arbeiten, die von den Studierenden im Laufe ihres Studiums an der Abteilung IK als Studien- oder Prüfungsleistungen zu erbringen sind. Sie bringen teilweise ausführliche Beispiele und legen beson-deres Gewicht auf eine Darstellung der Zitiertechnik und der Zitierregeln (auch von Internet-Dokumenten). Weitere Schwerpunkte dieser Empfehlungen sind besondere Richtlinien für die Gestaltung von Diplom- oder Bachelorarbeiten, eine Auflistung der diesen Empfehlungen zugrunde gelegten Literatur und Anhänge (mit Beispielen zur Gestaltung von Titelseiten und Inhaltsverzeichnissen).

Julietta May 12, 14, 15, 1988

Concert Program for Julietta May 12, 14, 15 1988

Detection of micrometastases in sentinel lymph nodes from melanoma patients: direct comparison of multimarker molecular and immunopathological methods.

The technique of sentinel lymph node (SLN) dissection is a reliable predictor of metastatic disease in the lymphatic basin draining the primary melanoma. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is emerging as a highly sensitive technique to detect micrometastases in SLNs, but its specificity has been questioned. A prospective SLN study in melanoma patients was undertaken to compare in detail immunopathological versus molecular detection methods. Sentinel lymphadenectomy was performed on 57 patients, with a total of 71 SLNs analysed. SLNs were cut in slices, which were alternatively subjected to parallel multimarker analysis by microscopy (haematoxylin and eosin and immunohistochemistry for HMB-45, S100, tyrosinase and Melan-A/MART-1) and RT-PCR (for tyrosinase and Melan-A/MART-1). Metastases were detected by both methods in 23% of the SLNs (28% of the patients). The combined use of Melan-A/MART-1 and tyrosinase amplification increased the sensitivity of PCR detection of microscopically proven micrometastases. Of the 55 immunopathologically negative SLNs, 25 were found to be positive on RT-PCR. Notably, eight of these SLNs contained naevi, all of which were positive for tyrosinase and/or Melan-A/MART-1, as detected at both mRNA and protein level. The remaining 41% of the SLNs were negative on both immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR. Analysis of a series of adjacent non-SLNs by RT-PCR confirmed the concept of orderly progression of metastasis. Clinical follow-up showed disease recurrence in 12% of the RT-PCR-positive immunopathology-negative SLNs, indicating that even an extensive immunohistochemical analysis may underestimate the presence of micrometastases. However, molecular analyses, albeit more sensitive, need to be further improved in order to attain acceptable specificity before they can be applied diagnostically.

Management of fragility fractures in Switzerland: results of a nationwide survey.

A nationwide survey was conducted in Switzerland to assess the quality level of osteoporosis management in patients aged 50 years or older presenting with a fragility fracture to the emergency ward of the participating hospitals. Eight centres recruited 4966 consecutive patients who presented with one or more fractures between 2004 and 2006. Of these, 3667 (2797 women, 73.8 years old and 870 men, 73.0 years old in average) were considered as having a fragility fracture and included in the survey. Included patients presented with a fracture of the upper limbs (30.7%), lower limbs (26.4%), axial skeleton (19.5%) or another localisation, including malleolar fractures (23.4%). Thirty-two percent reported one or more previous fractures during adulthood. Of the 2941 (80.2%) hospitalised women and men, only half returned home after discharge. During diagnostic workup, dual x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) measurement was performed in 31.4% of the patients only. Of those 46.0% had a T-score < or =-2.5 SD and 81.1% < or =-1.0 SD. Osteoporosis treatment rate increased from 26.3% before fracture to 46.9% after fracture in women and from 13.0% to 30.3% in men. However, only 24.0% of the women and 13.8% of the men were finally adequately treated with a bone active substance, generally an oral bisphosphonate, with or without calcium / vitamin D supplements. A positive history of previous fracture vs none increased the likelihood of getting treatment with a bone active substance (36.6 vs 17.9%, ? 18.7%, 95% CI 15.1 to 22.3, and 22.6 vs 9.9%, ? 12.7%, CI 7.3 to 18.5, in women and men, respectively). In Switzerland, osteoporosis remains underdiagnosed and undertreated in patients aged 50 years and older presenting with a fragility fracture.

Argyros Forum, Schweitzer bust dedication

Dr. Kurt Bergel speaking at the podum during the unveiling ceremony of the Albert Schweitzer sculpture on the Argyros Forum patio, November, 1992. The sculture was created by the Swiss artist Sandro da Verscio Muller for the 1990 United Nations colloquium on peace.

Schweitzer bust unveiling, Argyros Forum patio

Unveiling ceremony for the Albert Schweitzer bust on the Argyros Forum patio, Chapman University, Orange, California, November, 1992. Dr. Kurt Bergel is speaking at the podium. The sculpture was created by the Swiss artist Sandro da Verscio Muller for the 1990 United Nations colloquium on peace.

Frailty, an Emerging Research and Clinical Paradigm: Issues and Controversies

Ne pas citer. Version pour diffusion uniquement. Citer l'article une fois publié. / Not to be cited. For distribution only. Cite article once published.

Winterreise et Die sieben Todsünden : un regard sur l’aliénation du sujet moderne

La version intégrale de cette thèse est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

By indirections find directions out : thinkable worlds in Abbott and Vonnegut

This thesis is concerned with the interaction between literature and abstract thought. More specifically, it studies the epistemological charge of the literary, the type of knowledge that is carried by elements proper to fictional narratives into different disciplines. By concentrating on two different theoretical methods, the creation of thought experiments and the framing of possible worlds, methods which were elaborated and are still used today in spheres as varied as modal logics, analytic philosophy and physics, and by following their reinsertion within literary theory, the research develops the theory that both thought experiments and possible worlds are in fact short narrative stories that inform knowledge through literary means. By using two novels, Abbott’s Flatland and Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, that describe extra-dimensional existence in radically different ways, respectively as a phenomenologically unknowable space and as an outward perspective on time, it becomes clear that literature is constitutive of the way in which worlds, fictive, real or otherwise, are constructed and understood. Thus dimensions, established through extensional analogies as either experimental knowledge or modal possibility for a given world, generate new directions for thought, which can then take part in the inductive/deductive process of scientia. By contrasting the dimensions of narrative with the way that dimensions were historically constituted, the research also establishes that the literary opens up an infinite potential of abstract space-time domains, defined by their specific rules and limits, and that these different experimental folds are themselves partaking in a dimensional process responsible for new forms of understanding. Over against science fiction literary theories of speculation that posit an equation between the fictive and the real, this thesis examines the complex structure of many overlapping possibilities that can organise themselves around larger compossible wholes, thus offering a theory of reading that is both non-mimetic and non-causal. It consequently examines the a dynamic process whereby literature is always reconceived through possibilities actualised by reading while never defining how the reader will ultimately understand the overarching structure. In this context, the thesis argues that a causal story can be construed out of any one interaction with a given narrative—underscoring, for example, the divinatory strength of a particular vision of the future—even as this narrative represents only a fraction of the potential knowledge of any particular literary text. Ultimately, the study concludes by tracing out how novel comprehensions of the literary, framed by the material conditions of their own space and time, endlessly renew themselves through multiple interactions, generating analogies and speculations that facilitate the creation of new knowledge.