This essay proposes to retrace some aspects of the “ethical turn” that affects the humanities today to the codification of “sympathy” in what Geoffrey Hartman has described as Wordsworth’s “rhetoric of community.” Focusing on the figure of the infant in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems, the essay argues for a recovery in Wordsworth’s text of the critique of sympathy accompanying the ideology of sympathy of which he has become a canonical representative. While the ideology of sympathy typically denies the difference sympathy is said to celebrate, Wordsworth’s text is read here as a timely record of this defensive encryption inviting resistance to the current privatization of sympathy as surrogate justice. Ortwin de Graef is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at KU Leuven. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has published widely on Romantic and post-Romantic writing ranging from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and George Eliot through Virginia Woolf and Pearl S. Buck to Hafid Bouazza and Alan Warner. His principal research interests are the Very-Long-Nineteenth-Century ideologies of sympathy, science, and the State reflected and refracted through the transmission technologies of the literary. Updated March 5, 2014 |
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The ability of a mixed lipid bilayer composed of neutral and charged lipids to encapsulate an oppositely charged protein is studied with use of a simple theoretical model. The free energy of the bilayer-enveloped protein complex is expressed as a sum of electrostatic and curvature elasticity contributions, and compared to that of a protein adsorbed on a mixed planar bilayer. The electrostatic adsorption energy on the planar bilayer is calculated by using an extended Poisson-Boltzmann approach, which allows for local lipid charge modulation in the adsorption zone. We find that the electrostatic interactions favor the wrapped state, while the bending energy prefers the planar bilayer. To enable the transition from the adsorbed to enveloped protein geometry, there is a minimal necessary protein charge. This ‘‘crossover’’ charge depends on the bending rigidity of the lipid membrane and the (composition dependent) spontaneous curvature of its constituent monolayers. The values for the crossover charge predicted by the theory are in line with the charge necessary for peptide shuttles to penetrate cell membranes.
Prominent blood and tissue eosinophilia is manifested in a number of inflammatory states, particularly in allergic diseases. Eosinophils are a source of numerous cytokines and growth factors, thus in principle they can display both pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory activities as well as immunoregulatory ones. In this review, we will discuss the cross-talk between eosinophils and other cell types that they come in contact with in the inflammatory milieu, such as mast cells, fibroblasts and endothelial cells. 'New' roles for eosinophils in cancer and novel activatory signals will also be described.
Makom, die Schriftenreihe des Franz Rosenzweig-Forschungszentrums für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte an der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem, wird herausgegeben von Yfaat Weiss. In der jüdischen Überlieferung ist der Begriff Makom ("Ort") einer der Namen Gottes, bezeichnet aber zugleich den Raum der schriftlichen und mündlichen Tradition. Die Veröffentlichungen der Reihe sollen zum fortdauernden Kommentar dieser Tradition beitragen. Aufgenommen werden zum einen Bände, die zentrale Erfahrungen des deutschen Judentums dokumentieren oder sie im Rahmen der neueren deutschen Kulturgeschichte analysieren. Da die Werke deutscher Juden stets auch ein Spiegel für übergreifende Phänomene der europäischen Moderne waren, werden zum anderen Texte in der Reihe veröffentlicht, die sich mit Themen wie kulturelle Erinnerung, Assimilation oder Säkularisation beschäftigen.
Much of the intense current interest in collective memory concerns the politics of memory. In a book that asks, "Is there an ethics of memory?" Avishai Margalit addresses a separate, perhaps more pressing, set of concerns. The idea he pursues is that the past, connecting people to each other, makes possible the kinds of "thick" relations we can call truly ethical. Thick relations, he argues, are those that we have with family and friends, lovers and neighbors, our tribe and our nation--and they are all dependent on shared memories. But we also have "thin" relations with total strangers, people with whom we have nothing in common except our common humanity. A central idea of the ethics of memory is that when radical evil attacks our shared humanity, we ought as human beings to remember the victims. Margalit's work offers a philosophy for our time, when, in the wake of overwhelming atrocities, memory can seem more crippling than liberating, a force more for revenge than for reconciliation. Morally powerful, deeply learned, and elegantly written, The Ethics of Memory draws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others.
