Relaying Aversive Ultrasonic Alarm Calls Depends on Previous Experience. Empathy, Social Buffering, or Panic?

Ultrasonic vocalizations are among the oldest evolutionarily forms of animal communication. In order to study the communication patterns in an aversive social situation, we used a behavioral model in which one animal, the observer, is witnessing as his cagemate, the demonstrator, is experiencing a series of mild electrical foot shocks. We studied the effect of the foot shock experience on the observer and the influence of a warning sound (emitted shortly before the shock) on USV communication. These experiments revealed that such a warning seems to increase the arousal level, which differentiates the responses depending on previous experience. This can be identified by the emission of characteristic, short 22 kHz calls of a duration below 100 ms. Two rats emitted calls that overlapped in time. Analysis of these overlaps revealed that in ‘warned’ pairs with a naive observer, 22 kHz calls were mixed with 50 kHz calls. This fact, combined with a high fraction of very high-pitched 50 kHz calls (over 75 kHz), suggests the presence of the phenomenon of social buffering. Pure 22 kHz overlaps were mostly found in ‘warned’ pairs with an experienced observer, suggesting a possible fear contagion with distress sharing. The results show the importance of dividing 22 kHz calls into long and short categories.

The Transformation of the ‘Flaneur’ Figure to Bourgeois in Julian Barnes’s Metroland: A Critical Analysis

Charles Baudelaire employs the notion of flaneur as an idle wanderer and a passionate observer of the city life in the context of nineteenth-century Paris. Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century revisits the same notion in a slightly different manner. For Benjamin, flaneur, on the one hand, can be overwhelmed by the phantasmagoria of the city life and can develop a ‘shock experience' and on the other hand, can respond to the stimuli of the urban ambiance and can exhibit instrumental means of thinking to cope with the altered environment. In this circumstance, the latter, as Benjamin argues, is also evocative of the prospect of the flaneur’s conversion into a commodity. Following the argument of Walter Benjamin, the present paper aims to analyze the mobility and transformation of the central character, Christopher, in Julian Barnes’s novel Metroland (1980). This paper also reinforces that the character’s transformation is influenced by the societal structures as propounded by the structural Marxists like Louis Althusser.

Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity

This chapter addresses Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charlie Chaplin as a project to rehabilitate allegory in the 20th century. This project is evaluated in connection with Kafka and Brecht, since Benjamin approached all of these figures through the concept of Gestus. Benjamin discerned in film the prospect of undoing the numbing of the senses, which had become deadened as a consequence of the shock experience of modern life. In connection with Kafka and Brecht, this chapter analyses Chaplin as a paradigmatic cinematic figure to counteract the alienation of human beings in a technologically saturated modernity through his gestic and allegorical performance.

Beyond the Ideological Siege: A Critical Reading of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

The current paper is set to investigate the clash of ideologies and culturesas encoded in the American novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This qualitative study aims at analysing the narrative text, from Marxist perspective and Foucault’s views on power and knowledge. It is hypothesized that knowledge and anti-knowledge reshape the clash of cultures in human communities. The objectives of this research paper are to investigate the clash of ideologies or, more specifically, the clash of epistemic systems in a dystopian society, as well as to unmask the games played by the political powers to annihilate human awareness and identity to convince the community to practice the culture of bourgeoisie. As a mass consumption community, this anti-intellectual ideology results in the sterility of life. One finding of the study is that the cultural shock experience by, Montag, the protagonist enables him to resist and break the ideological siege which is imposed by power. He became the modern hero of the culture who joined the elite or the sophisticated culture experiences by the Book people or the renegade intellectuals who believe in the progress of mankind through the sophisticated philosophy of loving and reading books.