Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Long Hoeveler
Keyword(s):  
Human Population ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Human Behaviors ◽  
Sexual Deviancy ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy.

Wave of the Future? Reconsidering the Neuroscientific Turn in Art History

Leonardo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Kate Mondloch
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Taking ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
The Brain

This essay examines the much-contested “neuroscientific turn” in art history, taking the cues of the best of the turn while rejecting its false starts. The most promising transdisciplinary encounters spanning the brain sciences and the humanities begin from the premise that human experience is embodied, but the “body” itself is interwoven across biological, ecological, phenomenological, social and cultural planes. Certain media artworks critically engaged with neuroscience productively model such an approach. Taking Mariko Mori’s brainwave interface and multimedia installation Wave UFO (1999–2002) as a case study, the author explores how works of art may complicate and augment brain science research as well as its dissemination into other social and cultural arenas.

Shaping the Brain: Science or Politics?

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Brain Science ◽  
The Brain

scholarly journals Basal Ganglia Herniation into the Fourth Ventricle

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mensura Altumbabic ◽  
Marc R. Del Bigio ◽  
Scott Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Basal Ganglia ◽  
Intracerebral Hemorrhage ◽  
Fourth Ventricle ◽  
Transtentorial Herniation ◽  
Intracerebral Bleeding ◽  
Rare Phenomenon ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACT:Background:Transtentorial herniation of large cerebral fragments is a rare phenomenon.Method:Case StudyResults:Examination of the brain of a 35-year-old male showed massive intracerebral hemorrhage resulting in displacement of basal ganglia components into the fourth ventricle.Conclusions:Sufficiently rapid intracerebral bleeding can dissect fragments of cerebrum and displace them long distances across the tentorial opening.

V. The Liberal Revival in Northamptonshire, 1880–1895: A Case Study in Late Nineteenth Century Elections

1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Howarth
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Voting Behaviour ◽  
English History ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Local Pressures

There can be few fields in modern English history in which the historian is so frustrated by lack of evidence as in the study of elections between the introduction of the secret ballot and the coming of the opinion polls. For threequarters of a century after the Ballot Act was passed there is no precise quantitative evidence relating to movements of opinion or the voting behaviour of different groups within the electorate. We cannot even hope for conclusive evidence of what, in general terms, the determinants of voting behaviour were in this period; how to balance the importance of the national party competition and of local pressures; of the ‘image’ and the leadership of the parties and their programmes; of class loyalties and religious loyalties; of electoral persuasion and the fluctuations of a still unmanaged economy. These questions are strictly unanswerable, for there are no pollbooks from which we can deduce the opinions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century electors, and they are beyond the reach of questionnaires. The only statistics we possess are the bare figures for votes cast for each party in contested elections, and the number of registered electors in each constituency (from which we can calculate the percentage of voters who went to the poll).

Four ways mind–body infused coaching approaches sharpen executives’ performance

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 282-289
Author(s):  
Alison Horstmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Intelligence ◽  
Work Performance ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Personality Types ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Body Practices ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose This paper aims to describe mind–body infused coaching and to explain four distinct effects it can have on organizational executives and employees. Design/methodology/approach A review of theory and research on mind–body practices, emotional intelligence and work performance was conducted. A case study from the author’s experience also is included. Findings Mind–body infused coaching activates employees’ awareness, ignites a strengths-based approach, improves inner workings of the brain, boosts emotional intelligence and promotes curiosity. Practical implications HR professionals and managers are encouraged to obtain training in evidence-based mind–body principles to improve and sustain outcomes when coaching organizational executives and employees. Originality/value Conventional coaching approaches tend to be highly reductionistic by focusing solely on employees’ personality types, soft skills or achievement of specific goals. This paper discusses a holistic approach to coaching the whole person and outlines four specific benefits that could be anticipated as a result.

Sport and the Imperial Bond: The 1911 ‘All-India’ Cricket Tour of Great Britain

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Prashant Kidambi
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Summary This article explores the interplay of sport, politics and public diplomacy through a case study of the first ‘Indian’ cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an extraordinary venture peopled by an improbable cast of characters. Led by the young Maharaja Bhupindar Singh, the newly enthroned ruler of the princely state of Patiala, the team contained in its ranks cricketers who were drawn from different Indian regions and religious communities. The article examines the politics of this intriguing cricket tour against a wider backdrop of changing Indo-British relations and makes three key points. First, it suggests that the processes of ‘imperial globalization’ that were presided over by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked an important epoch in the evolving relationship between sport and diplomacy. In particular, it highlights the role of sporting tours as instruments of public diplomacy in the age of empire. Second, it shows how the organization of the 1911 tour reflected the workings of a trans-national ‘imperial class regime’ that had developed around cricket in colonial India from the late nineteenth century onwards. Finally, the article considers the symbolic significance that came to be attached to the tour, both in imperial Britain and in colonial India.

The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Race Mixing

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

scholarly journals Doing Theatre: Theatre Pedagogy through the Folktale

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-91
Author(s):  
Jean Small
Keyword(s):  
Procedural Memory ◽  
West African ◽  
French Language ◽  
The West ◽  
Repeated Interaction ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Theatre Pedagogy ◽  
The Brain

Theatre Pedagogy holds that cognition is body-based. Through performance the body’s unconscious procedural memory learns. This information learned through repeated interaction with the world is transmitted to the brain where it becomes conscious knowledge. Theatre Pedagogy in this case study is based on the implementation of a Caribbean cultural art form in performance, in order to teach Francophone language and literature at the postsecondary level in Jamaica. This paper describes the experience of “doing theatre” with seven university students to learn the French language and literature based on an adaptation of two of Birago Diop’s folktales. In the process of learning and performing the plays, the students also understood some of the West African cultural universals of life which cut across the lives of learners in their own and in foreign cultural contexts.

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