Search

Memes offer responsive acute commentary on controversial societal matters, providing non-violent and democratic spaces of discussion for conflicts. The paper studies memes on the war in Ukraine that spread in Eastern (Russia, Estonia, Belarus) and Western Europe (Spain). We analyze who are the main actors/characters that personify the war in the memes in these countries, how these characters are represented in memes, and what are the global and local aspects of their portrayal. Personification is seen as a marker for psychological distance of the meme-makers and sharers to the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, the first presidential debate of 2020 featured a discussion about Antifa. While Biden argued that Antifa is "an idea, not an organization," Trump portrayed it as a "dangerous, radical group." The nature of Antifa sparks disagreements not only in politics but also in scholarly circles. Some view it as a loosely defined label for a fragmented collective. Others perceive it as a gang or a radical social movement. This article identifies four key factors that make it difficult to define Antifa: the anonymity of its members, the lack of identifiable representatives, the ambiguous affiliation boundaries, and the influence of external agents (including reporters, pundits, and detractors) shaping its identity. Faced with this challenge, I propose stepping back to reevaluate the underlying assumptions of the debate. I seek to complement current theories of social ontology and collective action by introducing an alternative approach centered around the concept of personification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes four selected works of Hawaiian literature, focusing on the refiguration of nature, presenting it as an active and conscious subject. Contrary to Western anthropocentrism, which instrumentalized nature, Hawaiian literature underscores the profound interconnectedness shared between humanity and the more-than-human world. This distinctive environmental imagination permeates the narratives and rejects Western distinctions between the human and non-human realms by intertwining the supernatural and human agency. The reading of selected Hawaiian literature analyzes how nature is positioned as an active subject with its agency, not merely a passive, static setting. Personification in Hawaiian literature primarily focuses on female figures, Pele as the volcano goddess and various ancestral spirits known as 'aumakua. This critique of anthropocentrism is deeply entrenched in Hawaiian cultural and spiritual traditions, where gods, goddesses, and 'aumakua personify various elements and forces within the environment. This reimagining invites us to consider a different environmental imagination, recognizing the active agency of the non-human world. In conclusion, this study highlights how the Native Hawaiians ecological discourse seeks to reorient humanity's relationship with the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the visual and material culture of sixteenth‐century elite ceremonial armours and the paradoxes inherent in using images of women to decorate them between 1525 and 1550. It argues that foreign invading forces and their allies exploited or inverted traditional gender binaries associated with the classical and humanist iconography of the Italian Renaissance, particularly its female allegorical forms, to visually signify power relationships between combatants during the Italian Wars. Rather than simply embodying masculinity, elaborate ceremonial armours with images of women are revealing of both ideals of masculinity and femininity during times of war. These portrayals were part of wider conversations about gender and power, about the strength and weaknesses of women, and, ultimately, women's inferior status to men, which were utilised in allegorical forms to make claims to authority on these elite forms of male dress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author proposes the poem "Breathing" by Denise Levertov as an antidote to violence and pain and a gesture of hope in the future relations between humans, plants and animals. The author describes the peacefulness of the imaginary landscape sketched by Levertov with her personification of trees, linking of two words by a paronomastic effect, use of verb of perception and affirmative use of the verb to express a state, a way of being, absoluteness, perfection and feeling of happiness.

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article reports that music is its own language and, if there is something that reinforces the idea, as a language of the inexpressible, it is Schubert's music. Topics include considered that anyone who wants to understand his language needs time, peace and quiet as Schubert has always been with me; for me he represents the personification of music.

Mnemosyne in Creek mythology was the daughter of Gaea and Uranus, and mother of the nine Muses, whose father was Zeus. She was the personification of memory and was connected in this way to the Arts, as artists recalled primordial memories to draw inspiration for their creations. "Damnatio memoriae", the Roman punishment meaning condemnation of memory, was an official sanction, successful in wiping out any remembrance of an individual who was convicted of being a tyrant, a traitor, or another sort of enemy of the state. The images of such condemned persons had to be destroyed, their names erased from inscriptions, and every element concerning their public presence was purged. In some cases, the residence of the condemned could be destroyed, and if the person was already dead, his grave was ruined and his last will nullified. Nowadays, the condemnation of memory could be connected to a series of incidents selected to be erased from the public conscience as if they have never happened, although they represent historical or even ordinary events - genocides, wars, migration flows, gender-based violence and others. This paper focuses on the contemporary condemnation of memory using Art as a methodological tool. We argue that art represents a way to investigate current circumstances that aim to wipe out collective memory. We probe these expressive forms that derive from historically transformed roles and compile these facts that are consigned to oblivion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pseudonymous mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki and his lesser-known counterpart E.S. Pondiczery, devised respectively in France and in Princeton in the mid-1930s, together index a pivotal moment in the history of modern mathematics, marked by international infrastructures and institutions that depended on mathematicians' willingness to play along with mediated personifications. By pushing these norms and practices of personification to their farcical limits, Bourbaki's and Pondiczery's impersonators underscored the consensual social foundations of legitimate participation in a scientific community and the symmetric fictional character of both fraud and integrity in scientific authorship. To understand authorial identity and legitimacy, individual authors' conduct and practices matter less than the collective interpersonal relations of authorial assertion and authentication that take place within disciplinary institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This article outlines how poetry is able to configure the soul of a cityscape through the modes of personification and metaphors of public space. Purpose: It argues that these modes are so intertwined in reality that it is possible to gather a sense of a city's soul through experiential, rhythmical, temporal and transmigratory images of cityscape. Design: The article applies a typology of metaphors and personification as the basis for the analysis of the soul's presence in a city Main argument and findings: The results of the study show that named and unnamed literal, figurative and personified terms help evince the transmigration of the city's soul. Originality and value: An implication arising from this finding is that figurative language offers considerable transfers of meaning from one epistemic element to another to enable a nuanced understanding of cityscapes. There appears an unassailable case for the union of cities and poetry as part of our scholarly studies on spiritual literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personification is widely acknowledged for its central role in the understanding of a nation. However, empirical evidence of its pervasiveness in authentic language data is lacking. In a self-built corpus of news report, this study coded, categorized, and analyzed the metaphoric and metonymic use of two country names: China and Australia. The distribution of the use of country names shows a continuum ranging from the literal, through metonymy, to metaphor. A clear majority of the figurative use of national names in the corpus lies in the category of metonymy, and the fuzzy area between metonymy and metaphor. In contrast, metaphors only take up a minor proportion, and most of them are based on metonymic link. By examining the mundane and seemingly literate use of country names, this study exemplifies that consistent patterns of conventional metonymy and metaphor are able to incur significant cognitive impact. Thus, this study calls for more attention on metonymy and metonymy-metaphor interaction in empirical studies on metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I narrate the story of Anfora, a personified art object considered a "witness" of gendered violence and femicide, in a political campaign organized by the feminist group Unione Donne in Italia (UDI) in 2008 and 2009. I argue that this campaign's use of "prosopopoeia" contributed to the emergence of femicide (femminicidio) as a matter of concern in Italy, to the construction of a "community of sense" around gendered violence, and to a redefinition of women as political subjects. By focusing on the representational, relational, and affective dimensions of Anfora's personification, I show how the feminists of UDI promoted an understanding of violence beyond trauma and of witnessing beyond victimhood. Both of these understandings speak to broader debates in contemporary feminism. Anfora's role was more than symbolic, in that her material presence was a form of witness. In this way, I claim, Anfora became a key element in the emergence of a new "woman question" in Italy related to gendered violence and femicide: a political enterprise pursued through what Jacques Rancière would call dissensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about Walter Pater's exploration of personification in Greek myth and religion. Topics include the association of polytheistic and monotheistic religion and their shared origin in habits of personification; personification as a sign of prosopopoeia; and abstract concepts such as love, Justice, and Temperance.

This article deals with the agon of Wealth , offering a reconsideration of Penia (Poverty). The first part tries to show that Aristophanes was consistently drawing from the comic model of philosophers for this personification. This makes Penia a negative character, preventing the audience from sympathizing with her reasons. The second part of the paper analyzes the evidence for a closer relation between Penia's arguments and those of Socrates in Plato's Republic (esp. Books 4 and 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research analyses stylistically the selected poem, Kittens, written by Maki Kureishi. The aim of this study is to explore her use of a distinct form of language in the selected poems and how she succeeded in projecting a clear picture of sufferings of the people after the partition of the Indian Sub-Continent. In order to achieve this objective, the researcher uses stylistic analysis, with its focus on the use of figures of speech in the poem. The findings of this research lead to the conclusion that the poet has utilized figures of speech like simile, personification, metaphor along with strong imagery to address her concerns regarding the condition of the people of Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main points are made in this paper about the use of metaphors in sociology. The first is that metaphors have a strong heuristic or suggestive power that can also be increased. The second is that metaphors can lead you wrong; but there exist some easy ways of proceeding to prevent this. In both cases the paper emphasizes the practical dimension of working with metaphors. The following topics are discussed as well: how to construct a new sociological metaphor; how to add to an existing one; and what exactly happens when you are led astray by a metaphor. By way of background, the paper introduces the reader to the current state of the discussion of metaphors which is interdisciplinary in nature. The ideas of I.A. Richards are singled out as being especially helpful to sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a stylistic analysis of the tasting notes (TNs) of wine writers Jancis Robinson and Terry Theise. We define linguistic style as those distinctive, consistent, and creative linguistic choices writers make beyond what is conventionally expected in a TN, which are only discernible by comparison to other wine reviewers. Using a corpus of Robinson's and Theise's TNs on German and Austrian wines 2012, we compare their TNs in terms of rhetorical and grammatical structure, use of descriptors, and other evaluative language. Robinson's elliptical note-form style is characterized by adherence to canonical rhetorical structure, verbless clauses, extensive use of conventional metaphoric descriptors and limited use of object descriptors. Theise has an effusive, people-centered additive style characterized by non-conventional rhetorical structure, multiple phrase and clause and coordination, and extensive and exotic use of diverse object descriptors, personification, and intensifier + evaluative adjective phrases. We then connect their varying linguistic styles to their differing approaches to wine tasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The physical constraints of imprisonment sometimes stand in stark relief against the artistic and imaginative creativity they can spark. During the late Middle Ages, the French poetic works of Charles d'Orléans, a prince captured at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and held captive in England for twenty-five years until 1440 when he was finally ransomed, offers an unparalleled view of this relationship in literature. Charles's prison poetry also illustrates the important shift during this time period in authorial perspective from the allegorical to the autobiographical and empirical through referential content drawn from lived experience. Charles employs combinations of allegory, personification, autobiographical identification, and real-life referents to communicate his experience of prison. In doing so, he transmits the psychological, hermeneutic processes of a retour sur soi (an inward reflection) and découverte du moi intime (a rediscovery of his inner self) that he undergoes into his poetry. Charles not only emphasizes the shift in perspective from allegory to autobiography, but he proves how both coexisted in the medium of poetry during this fifteenth-century turning point in French literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "Some Remarks on Konrad Bayer" Oswald Wiener reflects on his deceased friend and collaborator. Arguing that Bayer's personal presence was more influential than his literary work, Wiener focuses on experiments Bayer conducted in his milieu, which aimed at predicting and manipulating the behavior of others. If the other proved hard enough to predict, according to Wiener, such experiments could complicate the participants' representations of the situation to such an extent that they would induce ecstatic states. Wiener connects these experiments to epistemological questions and relates them to different literary and artistic traditions including Dark Romanticism, Surrealism, and dandyism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principally rhetoric is the technique of convincing speech and the technical use of vocabularies by people to induce actions or to shape attitudes in other people. Whereas, a rhetorical analysis requires critical reading skills and its goal is to articulate how the speaker gives speeches, rather than what he actually says. In this regard, this study examines how King Abdullah II tries to convince the audience using figures of speech such simile and personification. In analysis his simile and personification was examined. It is argued thatfigures of speech such as simile and personification is not only usedfor ornamentation to make the speeches appealing to the audience, but used to call the audience to action and convince them to adopt certain ideas. The results of this studyfound that, political speeches use rhetorical technique (i.e. simile and personification) in order to convince the listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repertoire coding certain events as humanitarian crises recognizable as such by Euro-American audiences. Conversely, the author examines how these tropes drew upon a neocolonial framing of humanitarianism, one that Ugandan and Western critics questioned and against which they offered an alternative vision of the post-civil war realities of northern Uganda. However, to avoid pictorial reification, the article's second section retraces the institutional and actor-based networks through which still and moving images from Kony 2012 and its associated campaign circulated. The concept of pictorial exponentiality is introduced to explain how these images multiplied in digital public spaces through the accelerating digital cycles. This section also examines the concept of digital feedback loops to make sense of the non-linear and institutionally 'flattened' social relations binding pictorial actors debating the video's representational content and responding to each other via social media- and web-based exchanges. Kony 2012 was a key marker of an era during which the visual politics and ethics of portrayal of the human unfold digitally, through social media and online video platforms as much as conventional institutions of image production and dissemination. By treating the video as a cultural artifact whose viral rise and fall are attributable to the pictorial conventions upon which it drew and the structure of the networks through which it circulated, the article reveals how understandings of humanity are visually constituted, contested, and undone in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the temporal dimensions of racialised and colonised embodiment. I draw on the work of Alia Al-Saji, whose phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon examines the multiple ways in which racism and colonialism affix the racialised and colonised body to that of the past; a temporalisation that serves not only to anachronise these bodies, but also to close off their projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Such a move reflects the nature of racialisation itself, which following Charles Mills, does not just exteriorise or 'other' racialised bodies, but relies equally on a forgetting, or a disavowal and leaving behind of this very process. The result, I argue, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism's history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this that I argue that the familiar exhortation to 'get over' racism whenever the charge is levelled, is not only dangerous in its denial of racism, but also disingenuous in purporting to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialised temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring audience responses to Samuel Beckett's Quad (1981) reveals the play's tendency to evoke intense but contradictory embodied affects for its spectator. Audience members recurrently testify to experiencing a heightened kinesthetic empathy that catalyzes their sense of identification with the onstage figures. However, they also repeatedly record a simultaneous impulse to recoil from the performers, a sense of revulsion or the refusal of immersive engagement with their moving bodies. A hybrid methodological framework of kinesthetic empathy and disability theory offers a means of better exploring both the generation and the consequence of Quad 's conflicting embodied affects. This framework emphasizes Quad 's foregrounding of its performers' embodiment, and permits a consequently clearer recognition of Quad 's value as a performance that demands that its spectator confront the physical fact of others' bodily existence—while acknowledging the difficulty of such engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifting views of human embodiment during the American mental hygiene movement produced a distinction between what I refer to as psychic and organic forms of mental disability. These categories are useful for better understanding the varying treatment of intellectual difference in twentieth-century Anglo-American society and modernist literature. Applying them to the parallel lives of Emily Holmes Coleman and Carrie Buck illuminates the importance of race and socio-economic class in determining which mental disabilities were diagnosed as immaterial products of the mind's processes—and therefore less dangerous to society—and which were condemned as genetic material defects. Although Coleman's novel , The Shutter of Snow (1930), depicts a psychic condition that overcomes and critiques conceptions of intellectual normalcy, her life and work ultimately suggest the extent to which both modernism and the modernist notion of liberating insanity depend on the doppelganger of an organically defective other for their meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While both Job 3 and Jeremiah 20 contain curses against the day of one's birth, the language of Job's curses resonates more forcefully than does Jeremiah's. In this study, I argue that the feature which lends Job such extraordinary power is not only the author's dramatic use of personification but specifically the author's personification of the mythologically potent figures, day and night. Among Israel's ancient neighbors, day and night were regularly regarded as deities. While Israel does not appear to have followed suit in divinizing these two, the author of Job does take advantage of their mythological background to heighten the personal nature of the entities the suffering patriarch curses. Job's treatment of night and day reveals an important nexus between personification and mythology and sheds light on other, similar examples of personification in the Hebrew Bible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being integrated into systems influencing decisions, analysing complex situations and conducting processes, which may be dangerous for humans. Yet AI is not strong enough to be able to feel or suffer and maybe it never will. However, the complexity of AI deciding will grow with the technical progress and it should be discussed, how far we are willing to integrate future AI systems into important social processes such as legal decisions or teaching. The article seeks to give an overview over constitutional problems of an integration of strong AI systems into social deciding processes. It analyses the ability of AI to have similar legal positions as natural persons and corporations in the light of the question, whether AI can be an agent for ethic. Furthermore, it presents options of a liability for damages caused by the activity of AI systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we focus primarily on the second dimension of the model designed for the comparative cross-cultural analysis of conversational humor outlined in (Béal, Christine & Kerry Mullan. 2013. Issues in conversational humour from a cross-cultural perspective: Comparing French and Australian corpora. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan & Christine Béal (eds.), Cross-culturally Speaking, Speaking Cross-culturally. 107–139. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.), namely the linguistic devices and discursive strategies used by speakers to create humor in social interaction. Using a range of illustrative examples we will show that although a number of similar strategies occur in both the French and Australian English data (play on words, personification, implicit references, borrowing words from other languages), there are also marked differences in terms of preferential choices between French and Australian speakers when it comes to the mechanisms that make a particular utterance or exchange a humorous one. In particular, the French speakers in our data displayed a greater tendency to play with the language itself, while the Australians showed a preference for incongruity and absurdity, and collaborative scenarios with escalation. A number of comparative examples of failed humor are also examined. It will be seen that the responsibility for the failure in all cases lies less with the speaker and more with the hearer; i.e. the problem is not actually with the linguistic device employed, but with the hearer's non-appreciation of the humor or lack of humor support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current linguistic examination of allegory focuses on its cognitive structure as conceptual metaphor, with its linguistic form realised in the absence of a target domain (Crisp, 2001; 2008). The present study addresses the intersection of conceptualisation and form in examining how personification allegory functions within a literary context as either fictional world or thematic elements. Central to this is the idea of lexical priming, which suggests that readers are both textually and experientially primed to interpret personified referents allegorically or non-allegorically depending on their contextual use. In this article I draw on Mahlberg and McIntyre’s (2011) framework for literary text function to take an integrated cognitive-corpus approach to exploring allegorical function through the lens of lexical priming, with corpus analysis revealing the patterns on which these cognitive primings are textually based. To this end, real-world examples of personification allegory are drawn from the Middle English allegorical poem Piers Plowman relative to a corpus of other late medieval poetic literature. My main findings suggest that the textual functionality attributed to allegorical referents is neither mutually exclusive nor directly correlative to a particular textual pattern, but rather contingent on the degree of animacy-based priming evidenced in their core semantic meaning or textual foregrounding. These results additionally indicate that function-based primings depend on the type of allegory appearing in the text (i.e. property versus class allegory). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wealth as happiness is the supreme good because it brings material prosperity, offspring, fame, loyal friends, and a long and healthy life. In this respect, the people of Hindu India are no different from the rest of humanity. What distinguishes the Hindu quest for the good life is the personification of wealth and poverty in the form of Lakshmi (good fortune) and Alakshmi (misfortune). A fickle goddess, Lakshmi leaves one's house if she finds immoral behaviour and Alakshmi moves in. The many stories about the Hindu goddess of wealth take us from the narrow realm of political economy to the broader realm of economic theology, one where economic values are part of a complex mix that includes religious values, familial values, and political values among others; but these myths vary greatly by ecological zone, class, caste, and gender as this essay, using data gathered from central India, illustrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Mosaic Research is the property of Uludag University, Mosaic Research Center and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this essay is to identify those paradoxes personified by the whistleblower. An analysis of the recent evolution of the French and international legislative framework concerning whistleblowers helps us understand what a moral paradox actually is. The general discourse around corporate ethics, the encouragement of initiative-taking and the increasing responsibility of employees, explains, in turn, a managerial paradox. The article explains how the whistleblower embodies both a moral and managerial paradox for the company. We analyze this dual paradox, in the light of recent legal developments which, to a certain extent, reinforce this state of affairs despite their existence. The article aims to better understand the reasons behind the ambiguous discourse of companies on whistleblowers, since this discourse is upheld by the very measures designed to collect and deal with warnings, which in the end? are implemented in the hope that they do not serve their purpose!. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the unappreciated joke at the start of philosopher Plato's "Symposium" dialogue that is meant as a phallic procession in honor of the god Dionysus. Topics covered include critic Joseph Cotter's suggestion to emend the text leading to a familiar accusation of homosexuality, and the personification of the erect phallus in Phales from playwright Aristophanes' "Acharnians." The author also suggests that at "Symposium" 172A the annual phallic procession is evoked by Glaucon.

This research examined how individual differences in anthropomorphic tendency (the tendency to humanize non-human agents/objects) influence how people respond to destination marketing communications. Specifically, this study examined whether individual-level anthropomorphic tendency and text-personification of destination marketing communications interact to influence destination attitude and travel intentions. Results from a study involving 210 Australian participants revealed that destination attitude and travel intentions were most favorable for people with high levels of anthropomorphic tendency and who were exposed to personified tourism messages. These findings indicate that text-personification represents a new communication tactic for tourism – particularly for target consumers who are high in anthropomorphic tendency – and one that can humanize the destination leading to more favorable attitudes and higher intentions to travel. This effect is mediated by positive emotions. People with high anthropomorphic tendency who are exposed to a personified advertisement feel more positive emotions, which lead to positive tourism outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Parental compliance is crucial to the success of mass vaccination campaigns targeting children. Relying on psychological/neuroscientific research concerning the role of personification (i.e., viewing the inanimate as human) in behavior, the authors examined the effect of parents' personification of the Israeli Ministry of Health (MoH) on compliance with a publicly controversial mass vaccination campaign, which was aimed at stopping the spread of a wild poliovirus. Methods Participants were 555 parents of children aged 9 or younger, residing in the center/north of Israel, an area covered by Phase 2 of the campaign. T1 assessment, employed two days prior to Phase 2, tapped into demographics, attitudes towards vaccination, intent to comply, and a benevolent personification of the MoH (i.e., “The MoH is caring”) vs. a malevolent personification of the MoH (“The MoH is hysteric”). T2 assessment, transpiring four months after the end of the campaign, addressed presence and reasons for (non-)compliance. Results The study's overall compliance rate was 61.8%. The principal reason for compliance was “adherence to the recommendations of the MoH” (68.49%). In a multivariate logistic regression analysis, prospective predictors of compliance were: an early intent to comply (O.R. = 2.56, p = 0.000), being male (O. R. = 1.51, p = 0.023), and a benevolent personification of the MoH (O.R. = 1.21, p = 0.019). Conclusion Parents who experienced the Israeli MoH as a benevolent protagonist were more likely to comply with the mass vaccination campaign. Findings highlight the role of leadership in public health campaigns during emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay focuses on De Sanctis' Lectures on Dante, held during his exile in Turin and Zürich, in order to show how aesthetics, politics and religion converge in his works. De Sanctis reads Dante's journey throughout Hell, Purgatory and Paradise both as a diary and a drama, which reintroduces action, passions and a multitude of feelings in the peace and stillness that rule the kingdom of God after the final Judgment. De Sanctis tries to illustrate how Dante unifies body and concept, moving from allegories and personifications towards figures and real people, such as Beatrice, Francesca, Vanni Fucci and Ugolino. Dante's conception of the relationship between history and eternity plays a leading role in De Sanctis' reworking of Hegel's Aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of Lady Justice, a white woman, sometimes appearing with her eyes veiled and other times unveiled, at times bearing scales and/or a sword in her hands, still is a common and popular feature of legal culture in many parts of the world. This is an image of justice that is found everywhere, from courthouses to cartoons. However, one may ask: 'Who is this woman?'; Is she really a worthy representative of justice?; Or even a commendable representative of women? Thus, in this article, it is proposed to question the image of Lady Justice and the interpretations that have been associated with it, as well as the standards of conduct required of, and imposed upon, women both inside and outside the legal profession. The article will consider a range of arguments related to such questions, particularly on the issues of gender and race, by using two female characters: Éowyn (from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings) and Niobe (from the Wachowskis's The Matrix). The two characters are women who have some significance in both plots. Through them, I will establish some similarities and differences with Justitia, namely the need to be disguised as men or embrace male attitudes (a similar process concerning women in the legal profession, for example); the use of weapons (specifically, the sword, and, hence, the necessary analysis of women as law breakers, in contradiction to the image of Justitia); and finally some key issues relating to the representation of women of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As today's political market change leads to the personification of politics, research conducted in various countries supports the idea that ideological differences have less influence on the electoral decisions than in the past (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004; King, 2002; McGraw, 2008; Wattenberg, 1991). On the other hand, the significance of personal characteristics is increasing, since perceived political leaders' personality traits are transmitted by voters to the parties through the process of personification (Hayes, 2005). Scientists in today's source literature haven't developed a uniform instrument for political party image assessment that considers the specificity of the subject, whereas a new proposition of such an instrument has been evolved on the base of lexical research (Gorbaniuk, Kusak, Kogut, & Kustos, 2015). The aim of the current study was to adapt the Political Party Image Assessment Questionnaire into the Lithuanian language and to evaluate its psychometric properties. Moreover, this study was conducted to answer the question if political preferences have explanatory power. Quantitative research was conducted on the sample of 300 Lithuanian students (50.5% female), who had to describe 6 well-known political parties using 25 adjectives. A confirmatory factor analysis was arranged with the complete data set. Because only the five-factor model was acceptable, the entire sample was randomly split into approximate 50% halves. The exploratory factor analysis was arranged with the training group data set, and the confirmatory factor analysis was used in the validation set. Both analyses showed that the six-factor solution ((1) strength, (2) integrity, (3) disagreeableness, (4) religious conservatism, (5) leftwing vs. right-wing, (6) backwardness vs. modernity) was regarded as an optimal model to explain the specificity of Lithuanian political party perception. Also, the measurement invariance of this instrument was tested across 6 parties. Configural, metric and factor covariance invariance were established for all parties. Explanatory power of political party image dimensions was confirmed by a multiple regression analysis. Moreover, the test-retest with 14-20 days interval between the first and the second measurements showed a satisfying stability of scores. The current study was conducted to present the Lithuanian version of the Political Party Image Assessment Questionnaire, whose psychometric properties resulted in satisfying values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1893, Théodore Flournoy published a landmark book on synesthesia —Des phénomènes de synopsie[Of Synoptic Phenomena]. The book presented a pioneering chapter on synesthetic personification, including numerous striking case examples, and it is frequently cited by twenty-first-century researchers as providing some of the earliest examples of the phenomenon. Flournoy employed a broad definition of personification — the representation of stimuli as concrete and specific individuals or inanimate objects. This definition encompassed a more extensive set of phenomena than the definition used by researchers today and was illustrated by cases that would fall outside of contemporary subtypes of synesthetic personification. Yet, Flournoy’s seminal work remains unavailable in English, and the extent of the phenomenon that he described has not been discussed in the contemporary literature. We provide an unabridged translation of Flournoy’s chapter “Des personnifications” [“Of Personifications”]. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the play "The Woman in the Moon" by John Lyly is presented. Topics discussed include the significance of idolatry in antitheatrical discourse, the depiction of a female personification of Nature in the play by Lyly, and the retelling of the creation narratives by Lyly in his play. Also mentioned are the comparison of God with a craftsman in the play, and the reference of the book of Genesis of the Bible in the play.

Background/Aims: This paper reports on analyses designed to elucidate phenomenological characteristics, content and experience specifically targeting participants with Schneiderian voices conversing/commenting (VC) while exploring differences in clinical presentation and quality of life compared to those with voices not conversing (VNC). Methods: This mixed-method investigation of Schneiderian voices included standardized clinical metrics and exploratory phenomenological interviews designed to elicit in-depth information about the characteristics, content, meaning, and personification of auditory verbal hallucinations. Results: The subjective experience shows a striking pattern of VC, as they are experienced as internal at initial onset and during the longer-term course of illness when compared to VNC. Participants in the VC group were more likely to attribute the origin of their voices to an external source such as God, telepathic communication, or mediumistic sources. VC and VNC were described as characterological entities that were distinct from self (I/we vs. you). We also found an association between VC and the positive, cognitive, and depression symptom profile. However, we did not find a significant group difference in overall quality of life. Conclusions: The clinical portrait of VC is complex, multisensory, and distinct, and suggests a need for further research into the biopsychosocial interface between subjective experience, socioenvironmental constraints, individual psychology, and the biological architecture of intersecting symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the cultural and biosemiotic bases of human attitudes towards other species. A critical stance is taken towards species neutrality and it is shown that human attitudes towards different animal species differ depending on the psychological dispositions of the people, biosemiotic conditions (e.g. umwelt stuctures), cultural connotations and symbolic meanings. In real-life environments, such as zoological gardens, both biosemiotic and cultural aspects influence which animals are chosen for display, as well as the various ways in which they are displayed and interpreted. These semiotic dispositions are further used as motifs in staging, personifying or de-personifying animals in order to modify visitors' perceptions and attitudes. As a case study, the contrasting interpretations of culling a giraffe at the Copenhagen zoo are discussed. The communicative encounters and shifting per ceptions are mapped on the scales of welfaristic, conservational, dominionistic, and utilitarian approaches. The methodological approach described in this article integrates static and dynamical views by proposing to analyse the semiotic potential of animals and the dynamics of communicative interactions in combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores women's writings about their pregnant bodies in nineteenth-century America. In an attempt to move beyond the simplistic models of "pregnancy as illness" and "pregnancy as fetal containment," this study explores how women discussed displaying their visibly pregnant bodies in public, kept track of their weights, and described what was growing inside of their expanding bodies. As legal restrictions upon fertility control increased and women's roles narrowed to an intense focus on mothering, women's descriptions of their bodies and what was residing inside them reveal a remarkable variety and fluidity in interpretations of pregnancy. Analyzing the corporeal experience of pregnancy in the nineteenth century alters our understanding of the history of body quantification, the complex process of fetal personification, and the policing of pregnant bodies, while it also forces us to confront our modern view of pregnancy and its connections to bodily control and reproductive ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its point of departure two much discussed fifth-century artifacts, an uninscribed and undated consular diptych in Halberstadt (Fig. 9), and the inscribed and (on the face of it) exactly dated consular missorium of Ardabur Aspar in Florence (Fig. 15), both hitherto presumed issued by western consuls and manufactured in western workshops. After calling into question the established criteria for distinguishing western from eastern diptychs, I propose a new set of criteria and a new date and interpretation of both objects, mainly in the light of a more comprehensive examination of the iconography of city personifications, in literature as well as art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the traditional manner of pottery-making persists, with pottery production connected to a series of other daily activities. The Wallagga region of the southwestern Ethiopian highlands, in particular, sees traditional pottery widely practiced and exclusively in the domain of women. In this society, pottery-making and the use of pottery vessels are informed and constrained by deeply-rooted metaphoric meanings connected to the technological practices. Pots are metaphorically associated with persons and the stages they pass through: youth, adulthood, old age, and death. More specifically, a wet pot metaphorically represents a baby, pots in use are associated with adults and damaged pots are linked to a deceased person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes sociological insights into the sperm banking industry, derived from a qualitative study of extended sperm donor profiles in six large American sperm banks. We content analyzed the extended profiles and baby photos of 120 randomly selected donors who appear in the catalogues. Inspired by Baudrillard's and Illouz's writings on the postmodern era, we show how sperm banks de-commodify sperm, personify donations, facilitate the romanticization of the donor–recipient bond, and add an emotional context to the economic transaction. The donors’ extended profiles constitute asimulacrumof a living male partner and fulfill recipients’ fantasies. This creates a powerful reenchantment mechanism counterbalancing the anonymity and disenchantment characterizing donor insemination technology in particular and the postmodern spirit in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a literary criticism of the book "Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward. Topics discussed include how embodiment figures in the book, and how both human and non-human bodies manifest regional stories by playing an important role alongside Southern States' particular racialized histories.

The paper traces out the place of Èshù – the Yoruba god associated with confusion, the trickster and the messenger of the gods – in the classic sources on Yoruba religion, in a postcolonial play which comments on current politics, in the formulations of Christianity and Islam, and from fieldwork on present ideas and practices of the people of two towns in Western Nigeria. It works particularly closely on the place of Èshù in the causation, diagnosis and treatment of the condition known as dàrú, disturbance or confusion, which can apply to many levels of being from the mind to the body to relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impossible fictions are not just the creations of puzzle-seeking philosophers or artists experimenting with the limits of fiction. Impossibilities can be found in relatively mundane fiction as well. This article argues that the device of personification, especially of abstract entities such as death or duty, yields impossible fictions, arguing against a number of strategies that might be tried to show that these cases of personification do not yield impossibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present research was to determine how humans represent the bodies and limbs of nonhuman mammals based on anatomical and functional properties. To this end, participants completed a series of body-part compatibility tasks in which they responded with a thumb or foot response to the color of a stimulus (red or blue, respectively) presented on different limbs of several animals. Across the studies, this compatibility task was conducted with images of human and nonhuman animals (bears, cows, and monkeys) in bipedal or quadrupedal postures. The results revealed that the coding of the limbs of nonhuman animals is strongly influenced by the posture of the body, but not the functional capacity of the limb. Specifically, body-part compatibility effects were present for both human and nonhuman animals when the figures were in a bipedal posture, but were not present when the animals were in a quadrupedal stance (Experiments 1a-c). Experiments 2a and 2b revealed that the posture-based body-part compatibility effects were not simply a vertical spatial compatibility effect or due to a mismatch between the posture of the body in the image and the participant. These data indicate that nonhuman animals in a bipedal posture are coded with respect to the "human" body representation, whereas nonhuman animals in a quadrupedal posture are not mapped to the human body representation. Overall, these studies provide new insight into the processes through which humans understand, mimic, and learn from the actions of nonhuman animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]