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World literature has continued to draw attention in humanities research. Since the possibility of world literature rests on international circulation, translation has a pivotal role to play. However, in recent years, serious doubt has been cast on the meaningfulness of this role, foregrounding the chronic issue of untranslatability that is seen to undermine the chance of world literature. There is no denying that if the role of cross-cultural communication is played inadequately or unsatisfactorily, the circulation of national literatures is impeded to become world literature. Through the heterogeneity of different context dimensions, cross-cultural interpretations and forms of mediating cultures in various manifestations are brought to the fore about the essential need for further investigation and research. This paper attempts to frontally address the issues raised by scholars working in the field of world literature in relation to renewed challenges to translation and for that matter, Translation Studies. Translation happens at a specific location and time, which in turn govern and determine what happens to and in translation. The quality, or rather acceptability, of translation for the purpose of enabling the circulation of literary texts across national boundaries will be re-examined in connection with world literature, the success of which necessitates cross-cultural transformation as exemplified in inscribing the putative literary value into translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional discourses upon literature have been predicated upon the ability to refer to a text that others may consult (Landow, 1994, p. 33). Texts that involve elements of feedback and non-trivial decision-making on the part of the reader (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1) therefore present a challenge to readers and critics alike. Since a persuasive case has been made against a critical method that sets out to ``identify the task of interpretation as a task of territorial exploration and territorial mastery'' (Aarseth, p. 87), this paper proposes the use of readers in an empirically based approach to hypertext fiction. Meta-interpretation, a method that combines individual responses to a text, reading logs, screen recordings and limited qualitative/quantitative analysis, and critical interpretation is outlined. By analysing readers' responses it is possible to suggest both the ways that textual elements may have influenced or determined readers' choices and the ways that readers' choices ``configure'' the text. The method thus addresses Espen Aarseth's concerns and illuminates interesting features of interactive processes in fictional environments. The paper is divided into two parts: the first part sketches out meta-interpretation through consideration of the main problems confronting the literary critic; the second part describes reading research aimed at generating data for the literary critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response paper explores the significance of Judit Bokser Liwerant, not just as an individual researcher and theorist, but as a highly collaborative intellectual who is able to bring together scholars from the social sciences, history, and the humanities. Literary and cultural critics would benefit from Liwerant’s guidance to move away from ingrained “methodological nationalism” and to take into account the increasingly transnational flow of creative people, cultural products, and ideas. I sketch out some avenues of research that might be pursued by applying Liwerant’s concepts to the study of Jewish Latin American literary and cultural phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Do cement nanotubes exist?' is a question that has recently been asked. The answer is yes, they do exist. The evidence is in the literature, in tens of papers showing in detail chemical garden-type tubes in cement from the nanoscale upwards that were published in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, we present a nano-review of the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relaxed controls are widely used to analyze the existence of optimal controls in the literature. Though there are many optimal control problems admitting no optimal control, rare examples were shown. This paper will solve a particular optimal control problem by analyzing the optimal relaxed controls, showing the ideas we used to study such kind of problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to criticism of the Kripkean account of logical truth in first-order modal logic. The criticism, largely ignored in the literature, claims that when the box and diamond are interpreted as the logical modality operators, the Kripkean account is extensionally incorrect because it fails to reflect the fact that all sentences stating truths about what is logically possible are themselves logically necessary. I defend the Kripkean account by arguing that some true sentences about logical possibility are not logically necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Susanne K. Langer contributed an exhaustive account of aesthetics, Feeling and Form, in which she articulated her schema of the virtual and wove together the aesthetic elements of music, visual arts, dance, and literature/theater. This analysis of her work centers on two key concepts within her philosophy: the virtual as the aesthetic effect of the work and the perception of the work through intuition. In this paper, I re-read Langers philosophy through a perspective built on intersections between phenomenology, pragmatism, and post-structuralist theory in order to reveal the relevance of her work to current understandings of how the dancing body produces and conveys meaning. I endeavor to show how her work provides a practical, conceptual system for understanding dance as an a-linguistic form of meaning-making, bodily experience, and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes our recent developments in automatic extraction of translation equivalents from parallel corpora. We describe three increasingly complex algorithms: a simple baseline iterative method, and two non-iterative more elaborated versions. While the baseline algorithm is mainly described for illustrative purposes, the non-iterative algorithms outline the use of different working hypotheses which may be motivated by different kinds of applications and to some extent by the languages concerned. The first two algorithms rely on cross-lingual POS preservation, while with the third one POS invariance is not an extraction condition. The evaluation of the algorithms was conducted on three different corpora and several pairs of languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1979 the author spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Princeton with Richard Rorty, an experience which had numerous consequences, including a very Rortyan paper subsequently published in Human Studies called "Social theory," without wholes. Over this summer he has also worked on a manuscript that grew out a long article published in Human Studies on Max Weber and the fact-value distinction entitled "The limits of reason and some limitations of Weber's morality." The research that he was doing in the Princeton library was primarily concerned with filling in the context in which Weber had made his famous statements about fact and value, and also with examining the sequel of those writings in subsequent philosophy. This topic represents an important and distinctive strand in the tradition of continental philosophy, something that has now increasingly come to be recognized.

In this paper I explore Nietzsche's thinking on the notions of nobility and the affirmation of life and I subject his reflections on these to criticism. I argue that we can find at least two understandings of these notions in Nietzsche's work which I call a 'worldly' and an 'inward' conception and I explain what I mean by each of these. Drawing on Homer and Dostoyevsky, the work of both of whom was crucial for Nietzsche in developing and exploring his notion of worldly nobility and affirmation, I then go on to argue that Nietzsche provides us with no concrete examples of worldly nobles and that, given his historicism, he cannot. Thus Nietzsche's thinking here is broken-backed. I turn, therefore, to explore the inward notions of nobility and affirmation. Discussing Montaigne and Napoleon in the context of Nietzsche's philosophy, I argue that we can make good sense in Nietzschean terms of someone's affirming his own life in an inward sense. This, however, opens up the difference between someone's affirming his own life and his affirming life überhaupt, and I argue that Nietzsche needs to be able to make sense not just of the former but also of the latter. Referring once again to Dostoyevsky, I suggest that Nietzsche can only do so by accepting the idea that all human beings possess dignity qua human beings. This thought is, however, one that he rejects. Thus Nietzsche's reflections in this area cannot be rendered finally plausible since they depend upon something which can find no room in his philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]