36 research outputs found
Major element geochemistry of sediments from the Ross Sea, Antarctica
No full textIndicates the silicate composition of the examined sediments. The different concentrations of the major elements, their geographical distribution and inter-relations allowed the distinction of three populations of samples with specific geochemical characteristics and locations. -from Author
Competing models of socially constructed economic man : differentiating Defoe's Crusoe from the Robinson of neoclassical economics
No full textDaniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has seldom been read as an explicitly political text. When it has, it appears that the central character was designed to warn the early eighteenth-century reader against political challenges to the existing economic order. Insofar as Defoe’s Crusoe stands for "economic man", he is a reflection of historically-produced assumptions about the need for social conformity, not the embodiment of any genuinely essential economic characteristics. This insight is used to compare Defoe’s conception of economic man with that of the neoclassical Robinson Crusoe economy. On the most important of the ostensibly generic principles espoused by neoclassical theorists, their "Robinson" has no parallels with Defoe’s Crusoe. Despite the shared name, two quite distinct social constructions serve two equally distinct pedagogical purposes. Defoe’s Crusoe extols the virtues of passive middle-class sobriety for effective social organisation; the neoclassical Robinson champions the establishment of markets for the sake of productive efficiency
Evaluating Communication in the British Parliamentary Public Sphere
No full textThis article begins with a re-evaluation of political communication research based on Habermas' original theory of the public sphere. It presents Habermas' alternative framework for assessing communication in contemporary ‘actually existing democracies’. The model is then tested with a case study of the UK parliamentary public sphere based on 95 semi-structured interviews with political actors (politicians, journalists and officials). It concludes that parliament today operates rather better, according to public sphere norms, than the public sphere described in Habermas' accounts of 18th and 19th-century England. Such a finding, on its own, is clearly at odds with public perception. The research accordingly offers two explanations for this disparity and the (perceived) crisis of political legitimacy in UK politics
Recommended from our members
Rural life in English poetry of the mid-eighteenth century
No full textThis thesis examines several mid-eighteenth century poems, assessing their portrayal of rural life, its literary and historical significance, and the aesthetic and ideological issues it presents. An introductory essay on developments in rural poetry sets the scene for two extended essays. The first essay is a comparative reading of the subject of rural labour in three poems: James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726-44), Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730, 1736) and Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour (1739). The viewpoints of a professional poet (Thomson), a farm labourer (Duck), and a working woman (Collier) are compared in relation to kinds of work all three address as well as to individual labouring subjects. The responses of the three poets to such related issues as folk traditions, forms of charity and other ‘compensations’, are also compared. Some surprising similarities as well as instructive differences are located; and an interesting picture of idealistic and realistic, male-oriented and female-oriented attitudes to labour and labour-related themes emerges
"Oscar e il Signor V.H.: ridefinizioni identitarie in 'Son of Oscar Wilde' di Vyvyan Holland"
No full textGiocando sull’allusività dell’espressione “Signor V.H.” – “Il ritratto di Mr. W.H.” è un noto esperimento narrativo e critico-saggistico di Oscar Wilde e un’opera che lo stesso figlio Vyvyan avrebbe curato per una delle varie edizioni postume (London: Methuen, 1958) il presente contributo si propone di indagare il difficile, a tratti accorato e amaro, percorso di ridefinizione identitaria intrapreso da Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde (1886-1967), il secondogenito del celebre autore irlandese. “Son of Oscar Wilde” (1954) si profila sin dal titolo come una testimonianza auto/biografica in cui le vite di padre e figlio inevitabilmente si intrecciano, pur sotto la cifra della tragica e lacerante cesura determinata dalla carcerazione e dall’esilio dell’artista. Il risultato è una sorta di memoir o, meglio, ciò che G. Thomas Couser definirebbe una “filial narrative”, un racconto di vita consustanziale rispetto ai rapporti con la figura genitoriale e la famiglia nel suo complesso: un racconto nel quale Vyvyan avrebbe “esorcizzato i ricordi amari di quegli anni lontani grazie alla loro trasposizione scritta, a futura memoria, e all’effetto catartico che ne è conseguito” (Merlin Holland, “Prefazione” a “Son of Oscar Wilde” [London: Robinson, 1999; traduzione mia). Allontanato dall’Inghilterra e privato, insieme al fratello Cyril, del cognome legittimo (a “Wilde” subentrò “Holland”, da un antico ramo della famiglia materna), Vyvyan ricostruisce qui un cammino tormentato in cui si impegna a mettere a fuoco situazioni, momenti ed epifanie del proprio vissuto, soprattutto in relazione a ciò che ai due bambini inconsapevoli era apparso, negli anni ’90 dell’Ottocento, come il “dileguarsi” ingiustificato, indicibile e misterioso del padre. Sarà dunque interessante individuare le tappe progressive di una parabola (socio-affettiva ed ermeneutica) in cui il “Signor Vyvyan Holland”, proiettandosi nel passato, si trasformerà nel senso autentico del termine in un figlio pronto a comprendere e perdonare l’Oscar condannato alla gogna, come suggerisce uno dei passi dell’opera più emotivamente connotati: “Lo ricordo come un gigante sorridente, sempre vestito con raffinata eleganza, che camminava carponi insieme a noi in camera, avvolto in un’atmosfera densa di fumo di sigaretta e acqua di colonia. Negli ultimi anni della sua vita eravamo sempre presenti nei suoi pensieri; chiedeva di continuo a Robert Ross di portagli qualche notizia su come stavamo e sui nostri progressi scolastici” (Son of Oscar Wilde [London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954], p. 200; traduzione mia).Playing on the allusiveness of the expression “Mr. V.H.” – “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” being a well-known experiment in fiction, criticism, and essay-writing by Oscar Wilde, and a work edited by Vyvyan himself for one of the several posthumous Wildean reprints (London: Methuen, 1958) – this paper aims at investigating the difficult, at times mournful and lacerating, reassessment of identities enacted by Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde (1886-1967), the second son of the famous Irish author. As suggested by its title, “Son of Oscar Wilde” (1954) proves to be an auto/biographical testimony in which the father’s and son’s lives are inextricably bound up, if in the wake of the tragic separation caused by the imprisonment and following exile of the artist. The text reads like a sort of memoir, or rather what G. Thomas Couser has called a “filial narrative”, a piece of life writing where the “I” would lose much of his ontological and ideological essence if severed from the father figure and, in general terms, the family circle. Here Vyvyan is said to have “laid to rest the bitter memory of those early years by the cathartic effect of recording them for posterity” (Merlin Holland, “Foreword” to “Son of Oscar Wilde” [London: Robinson,1999], p. 1). Eventually driven away from England and, together with his brother Cyril, bereft of his official surname (“Wilde” being replaced by “Holland”, an old family name from Constance Lloyd’s side), Vyvyan painfully sets out to highlight situations and epiphanic moments connected with what the two bewildered little boys perceived in the 1890s as the unutterable and mysterious disappearance of their father. It will thus be interesting to point out the progressive stages of a socio-affective and hermeneutic parable where “Mr. Vyvyan Holland” is seen as turning into a caring son, now mature enough to understand and forgive a pilloried Oscar, as witnessed by one of the most emotionally charged passages in the text: “I remember him as a smiling giant, always exquisitely dressed, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigarette-smoke and eau-de-cologne. During his last years we were constantly in his thoughts; he was always asking Robert Ross to try and find out something about us, how we were and how we were getting on at school” (“Son of Oscar Wilde” [London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954], p. 200).
Voices of inheritance : aspects of British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s
No full textDuring the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted
category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie
within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of
heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature
established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in
British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with
inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to
what is passed on from the past and endures in the present.
The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and
constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts
begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and
moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently
conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then
situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates
concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined
British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent
and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My
corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited
pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing
publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions
from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources
which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s
