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G. B. Shaw's Heartbreak House (1919) and Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) are two of twentieth-century British dramas premier plays. Shaw's debt to Chekhov's Cherry Orchard is too well known for rehearsal here, while the Pinter play mines preoccupations displayed as early as The Room, reflecting his indebtedness to Samuel Becket's fiction among others. Though nearly half a century separates these two works and though Shaw had no discernable influence on Pinter, a side-by-side comparison illuminates not only their differences but underlying preoccupations they share, emanating from formal and social values. Both playwrights are outsiders, Shaw famously considering himself a "downstart" Irish protestant, and Pinter a secular Jew. Born in 1930, twenty years before Shaw's death, Pinter, like Shaw, works within the conventions of fourth-wall realism. As Christopher Innes says of Pinter, both plays are "models of power structures," though unlike Shaw, Pinter depicts "political themes in purely personal terms." (1) Shaw views his play as a scrim through which to visualize a corrupt, demoralized European society, emphasizing his point through his lengthy commentary and ship interior set standing in for imperial England. Pinter's down-at-the-heels setting obliquely acknowledges a larger urban context, but reduces "politics to a worm's eye view." (2) If we consider how interchangeable the two plays' titles are, their underlying similarities reverberate even more meaningfully. Both plays exploit an enduring archetype deeply rooted in the dramatic form: the impact of one or more outsiders on a closed, emotionally conflicted family group, eliciting long-buried antagonisms and flimsy lies, the unforeseen death of a minor character and, in both plays, futile attempts, after the departure or expulsion of an outsider, at reforming the shattered social group. Quite ironically, both playwrights work twists on this time-honored plot device: Shaw's "outsider" Ellie becomes through "heartbreak" an "insider," in effect the third of Shotover's daughters, defeating her rival, Hesione Hushabye, and discarding her putative lover, Mangan. In The Homecoming, Ruth rejects her husband, Teddy, who may have offered marriage as a form of redemption. She then seamlessly re-enters her former profession on her own terms. Neither Shaw nor Pinter has available the highly artificial Elizabethan convention of the soliloquy, which allowed characters to reveal their inner thoughts to the audience. However, characters in both their plays feel driven to embarrassing, self-abnegating confessions that serve much the same purpose. Their enigmatic characters let slip buried snippets of memory, giving the audience few guideposts to distinguish truth from fiction--if Pinter even considers the distinction meaningful. Shaw's characters are knowable, if complex and neurotic, occasionally breaking into recitations of agonized, but recognizably truthful insights into their pasts. Pinter's characters, like Shaw's, are often self-deluded but even more distanced from reality, both theirs and ours: they are all unreliable narrators at times. Where Shaw overexplains, Pinter's dialogue is spare, even cryptic. What Shaw achieves in scope and breadth, Pinter gains in depth and ambiguity. Their plays can be called "comedies of implosion" as, despite the final offstage explosions in Shaw, the characters in self-destructing reveal the emptiness they had struggled to conceal from both themselves and us. Rolf Fjelde approvingly quotes R. D. Laing's definition of "implosion" as "the final precipitation of a state of dread which experiences the full terror of the world as liable at any moment to crash and obliterate all identity," (3) language that aptly describes the moods of both the Shaw and Pinter plays. In dismissing Pinter's Jessie as "no more than an offstage, inarticulate figure" (italics mine), Mireia Aragay slights the grip offstage, unseen characters exert on the behavior of both playwrights' onstage figures. …

This brief report provides a narrative perspective on autism and poetry. A brief review of selected poets identifies how each one was able to use his/her writing to break out of isolation and influence society's perception of autism.

Although neuropathologic studies have centered on small samples, it is accepted that brains of autistic individuals tend to be large, on average. Knowledge regarding the cause of this macrocephaly is limited. Postmortem studies reveal little in terms of cortical dysplasia. Some of these studies suggest increased cell-packing density in subcortical structures. These neuronomorphometric studies have been subjective or based their conclusions on measures of neuronal density. Our study sought the possible presence of increased cell-packing density by using the Gray Level Index. The Gray Level Index is defined as the ratio of the area covered by Nissl-stained elements to unstained area in postmortem samples. Analyzed images included Brodmann's cortical areas 9, 21, and 22 of 9 autistic patients (7 males, 2 females; mean age of 12 years, with a range of 5 to 28 years) and 11 normal controls (7 males, 4 females; mean age of 14 years, with a range of 3 to 25 years). The overall multivariate test revealed significant differences both between autistic patients and controls (P = .001) and between hemispheres (P = .025). Follow-up univariate tests showed significant diagnosis-dependent effects in feature distance (P = .005), the standard deviation in distance (P = .016), and feature amplitude (P = .001). The overall mean Gray Level Index was 19.4% in controls and 18.7% in autism (P = .724). In autism, an increased number of minicolumns, combined with fewer cells per column (or their greater dispersion), results in no global difference in neuronal density. (J Child Neurol 2002;17:515-521).

Our study performed a quantitative investigation of minicolumns in the planum temporale (PT) of human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey brains. This analysis distinguished minicolumns in the human cortex from those of the other nonhuman primates. Human cell columns are larger, contain more neuropil space, and pack more cells into the core area of the column than those of the other primates tested. Because the minicolumn is a basic anatomical and functional unit of the cortex, this strong evidence showed reorganization in this area of the human brain. The relationship between the minicolumn and cortical volume is also discussed.

The Internet is a network of interconnected computers used primarily for commerce, communication, and information exchange. As of July 1998, the Internet consisted of nearly 37 million connected computers, and it is growing at a rate of 40% to 50% annually. Although commercial sites now dominate the information superhighway, some potholes mar the openness of the Internet's information exchange. The authors found a veritable explosion of gigabytes of pornographic material on the Internet when using several search engines or portals (Netscape, Internet Explorer, and so on). Some of these activities, especially those depicting the sexual exploitation of children, are both unsavory and illegal. Globally, governments, policing agencies, and commercial organizations have attempted with growing success to limit access to child pornography. To cope with the growing technological sophistication of childporn purveyors, greater interagency and international cooperation will be needed.

The Homecoming (1964) is Harold Pinter’s most philosophical play, including an academic philosopher, Teddy, among its cast, who occasionally debate philosophical issues. Extending the play’s range, the characters are preoccupied with status and respect, hunger, sexual frustration, rage within and from others, as well as fears of decrepitude and powerlessness. Like Pinter, Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice (2009) exposes people’s deficient capabilities for functioning, their abilities to choose and do what they value or have reason to value. A crucial debate between Teddy and Lenny gives Ruth the last word, followed by the defeated Teddy’s retaliatory theft of a cheese roll. Underlying their conflict and the play in general is an issue roiling economic philosophy: are people’s choices guided by reason or by passion and impulse? The play’s action reduces the issue to a rhetorical question.

The minicolumn is an anatomical and functional unit of the brain whose genesis accrues from germinal cell divisions in the ventricular zone of the brain. Disturbances in the morphometry of minicolumns have been demonstrated recently for both autism and Down's syndrome. We report minicolumnar abnormalities in the brain of a dyslexic patient. The corresponding developmental disturbance (ie, large minicolumns) could account for the perceptual errors observed in dyslexia.

From 1952, when Pinter began writing his only novel, The Dwarfs, until the mid-1970s, Pinter invoked a food–love–clothing–honesty cluster to ground his characters’ feelings and anxieties in sensuous metaphors. Whereas food and costume had practical functions in his plays, they usually had wider significance regarding his characters’ likes and dislikes, memories of the past and aspirations for the future. Imagery in Harold Pinter’s early drama links the scarcity of food and drink to lovelessness, a loss of psychological underpinnings, and social instability. Disorder, uneasiness, and distaste often emerge in food imagery, as food providers give or withhold food in lieu of love. Manipulating food involves the exercise of power, ways of taking advantage, or showing approval or disdain. Pinter also uses clothing symbolically, not only to shield nakedness but as a stand-in for society’s weakening repressions. Clothing is a proxy for lying, gratuitous display, subjugation, spurious self respect, and social hypocrisy. Pinter’s food–clothing clusters vanish in the mid-1970s when his character orientation shifts from lower- to middle-class.

This article uses a computerized style checker—RightWriter® 4.0—to analyze 14 direct-mail letters used to market books to a middle-class female audience. This study outlines methods for correlating stylistic traits with sales success. For this product and audience, letter effectiveness is enhanced by lowering readability levels, as well as by limiting the use of negative words and modifiers. In addition, writers for this audience should avoid words that are too easy or too difficult. However, no correlations emerged between success and letter length, strength of style, sentence length, or percentage of prepositions.

Asperger's disorder or syndrome is characterized by impaired social interaction, normal intelligence, and adequate language skills in the areas of grammar and vocabulary. The symptoms are pervasive in nature and usually manifested in childhood. Despite the gravity and chronicity of the condition, the medical literature remains sparse and offers no information about possible neuropathologic underpinnings. The present study is a case report on two patients with Asperger's syndrome. Neuropathologic examination revealed no degenerative changes or gliosis. A more detailed assessment with computerized image analysis indicated abnormalities in the minicolumnar organization of the three areas examined (9, 21, 22) (P = .032). Specifically, minicolumns were smaller, and their component cells were more dispersed than normal. A similar neuropathology has recently been reported for autism and disputes the uniqueness of these findings. The minicolumnar changes provide a possible link to receptive field abnormalities and a useful clinicopathologic correlate to Asperger's syndrome. (J Child Neurol 2002;17:142-145).

No one has examined the configuration of the minicolumns in Down's syndrome (DS) brains even though these are a basic functional unit of the cortex. In the present study, the authors used computerized imaging to examine minicolumns in the posterior superior temporal gyrus in both the brains of patients with DS and normal controls. They compared the brains of children aged 4 and 6 years with those of adults for both people with DS and the normal population. Columns in the brains of two DS children aged 4 and 6 years were almost the same size as those of the adults with DS. The neuropil space in the periphery of the columns was also considerably wider. In contrast, minicolumns in aged-matched control children were smaller, both relatively and absolutely, when compared to the mean size of adult columns. The size of the minicolumns in the normal children apparently corresponded to the overall brain size, whereas the large columns in children with DS appeared to be independent of brain size, at least in area Tpt. This seems to reflect a rapid ageing process that is striking when compared to normal controls. Columns in adults with DS were large and less cell dense, while brain volumes were significantly smaller than in controls. This combination suggests reduced neuronal complexity based on a decrease in processing units, which supports previous findings of decreased cell numbers and synaptic diminution in DS brains.

Gross analyses of large brain areas, as in MRI studies of macroanatomical structures, average subtle alterations in small regions, inadvertently missing significant anomalies. We developed a computerized imaging program to microscopically examine minicolumns and used it to study Nissl-stained slides of normal human, chimpanzee, and rhesus monkey brains in a region of the planum temporale. With this method, we measured the width of cell columns, the peripheral neuropil space, the spacing density of neurons within columns, and the Gray Level index per minicolumn. Only human brain tissue revealed robust asymmetry in two aspects of minicolumn morphology: wider columns and more neuropil space on the left side. This asymmetry was absent in chimpanzee and rhesus monkey brains.

We present a quantified imaging method that describes the cell column in mammalian cortex. The minicolumn is an ideal template with which to examine cortical organization because it is a basic unit of function, complete in itself, which interacts with adjacent and distance columns to form more complex levels of organization. The subtle details of columnar anatomy should reflect physiological changes that have occurred in evolution as well as those that might be caused by pathologies in the brain. In this semiautomatic method, images of Nissl-stained tissue are digitized or scanned into a computer imaging system. The software detects the presence of cell columns and describes details of their morphology and of the surrounding space. Columns are detected automatically on the basis of cell-poor and cell-rich areas using a Gaussian distribution. A line is fit to the cell centers by least squares analysis. The line becomes the center of the column from which the precise location of every cell can be measured. On this basis several algorithms describe the distribution of cells from the center line and in relation to the available surrounding space. Other algorithms use cluster analyses to determine the spatial orientation of every column.

these units. Initial studies have focused on prefrontal cortex, areas 9 and 46. We investigated a small population of normal controls (n 5 13) and schizophrenia patients (n 5 7), diagnosed according to DSM III—R criteria. Patients and controls were age and sex matched. Photomicrographs of the posterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus (area Tpt) were taken at 1003 magnification. Among the features examined was the amount of neuropil space in the periphery of cell columns where local circuits, synapses, and dendritic branches predominate. We also measured the amount of spacing between cell soma within the cell-dominant portion of the columns, and the distance separating cell columns in the horizontal plane. All the values for spacing distances and neuropil space were less in schizophrenic brains. Significant findings resulted when we combined the data for the right and left sides of both schizophrenics and controls. We conclude that neuropil space is decreased in Tpt in schizophrenia patients, with the greatest reduction occurring within the core of the cell column. The finding infers a generalized distribution of interneuronal space reduction in the schizophrenic brain.

WITHIN THE LAST THREE DECADES' the martyrdom of Thomas Becket has furnished dramatic material for notable plays of T. S. Eliott Christopher Fry, and Jean Anouilh. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and all of Fry's work including Curtmantle (19,61) stem directly from Eliot's determination to have a poetic drama. Although Anouilh's play Becket2 or the Honor of God (1961) owes little or nothing to Eliot or a theory of poetic drama, all three writers have dissociated themselves from modern realism. As Francis Fergusson has said in another context, they use the stage, the characters, and the story to demonstrate an idea which they take to be the undiscussible truth. Eliot takes dramatic root in classical Greek and medieval morality plays, the Elizabethans and metaphysicals. Fry is distinctly Shavian, and Anouilh has singled out a performance of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for its seminal impact on his work. Just as significant is the fact that although both Murder and Curtmantle are the culminations of a long and publicly debated process of theory and experimentation, they are apparently both dead-ends. Eliot never again used either a martyrdom or such a dazzling array of verse so prominently. Fry's play-which appeared after a "crisis of confidence" lasting nine years-may have ended his playwriting career. Anouilh's Becket, on the other hand, is still another illustration of human alienation from a sterile universe but one presenting a more mature, positive hero than had his earlier plays.

AN INDUCTIVE STUDY of the imagery of Fry's comedies reveals a great deal about the closeness of his theory and practice, his place in the metaphysical tradition, and the workings of the creative imagination. Far from an automatic versifier, Christopher Fry is a deliberate craftsman who works by design. Although his second religious play, The Firstborn, was begun in 1938, it was not published until 1946 or produced until 1948; moreover, it has been revised twice, in 1952 and in 1958. Curtmantle was only recently produced (1961) although it was reported "in progress" ten years ago. In An Experience of Critics, Fry has sharply defined the painstaking deliberation of playwriting

Beneath Christopher Fry's passion for shaping diversity into unity, for finding some transcendent place to stand from which he might move his world, is a richly figurative, half-acknowledged universe of inchoate suggestiveness. It is a shifting, open world which transforms itself without being emptied of its cruellest actualities. In a spasm of mock-pathos, the heroine of his earliest published comedy, A Phoenix too Frequent (1946), bewails her sense that

The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921-22), are Eugene O'Neill's most successful experiments in expressionism. Considering the similarities in their cyclical structures, mock-heroic protagonists and archetypal symbolism, they are mirror plays whose aspects parallel or complement one another's correspondences. In Emperor, Jones is forced to flee his erstwhile subjects in a quest through a nightmarish, menacing dark night of the soul (Walpurgisnacht). Once he has exhausted the mana or vital force attached to his silver bullet, he is forced to return to the sun-lit world of death. The Hairy Ape duplicates this order of events while inverting the symbolic content. Yank Smith, the protagonist, is almost immediately deprived of his persona through female duplicity. Emerging from his ship's womblike stokehold, he searches for rebirth through the labyrinthine bowels of the City. Repeatedly eluded by his lost identity, he finally enters the deathly embrace of his alter ego, the gorilla in the zoo. Both plays demonically parody the tragic ritual pattern which has been defined as a "transition by which through the processes of separation, regeneration, and the return on a higher level both the individual and the community are assured their victory over the forces of chaos which are thereby kept under control."! Although Yank Smith has some claims to tragic stature, being described by O'Neill as "a symbol in a sort of modern Morality play,"2 and both protagonists engage in conflicts which probe the mysteries of the corrupted human will, the society of neither play is changed. Yank refuses to return at all, and the victory over chaos which "society" achieves through Jones's assassination re-establishes a cabal of Calibans, a mindless gang of Yahoos. Nor do Jones and Smith achieve significant recognitions. Moreover, the expressionistic devices take effect less through the access to the unconscious supposedly provided by allegorical characters, anti-realistic staging, and unexpected transformations than through esthetic distancing. As in tragicomedy, which both plays closely resemble, the audience remains at a distance, yet within immediate call impersonal, yet strangely involved.3

ALTHOUGH CHRISTOPHER FRY HAS CALLED HIS NON-RELIGIOUS PLAYS "comedies" and has repeatedly used the term in his infrequent but incisive criticism, all his plays except perhaps Curtmantle belong to the tradition of tragicomedy. It is a form which has also been called "problem play" (in Shakespeare), "dark comedy" or, by Suzanne Langer, "averted tragedy." Fry's term, of course, is "comedy of mood." If as Eric Bentley suggests, the two most successful types of tragicomedy are tragedy with a happy ending and comedy with an unhappy ending, Fry writes the former.

and illuminating examination of Shakespeare. In this very difficult and enigmatic play, as in Hamlet, fathers and sons clash over their claims to mother-figures and their differing valuations of her. Moreover, the oedipal issues in the play are tinged (to a degree unusual in Shakespeare) with the unresolved issues of earlier phases of childhood development. That is, all the characters in Troilus and Cressida are working out in adulthood and middle age the issues of the anal stage of infancy, namely the problem of autonomy. Erik Erikson has stressed in a series of works the critical importance of that stage of life when we must learn to exercise free choice: when we dis

Seen from the inside the typical play by Eugene O'Neill recapitulates the ritual conflict of winter and summer, death and rebirth which both the early Greek and Christian drama inherited and extended. Found out in his lust for a forbidden love object, a son figure is expelled from his primal social group. In order to return and grasp his never fading Edenic vision of purity, he embarks on a quest pursued by inner and outer erinyes. As O'Neill has commented in his "Memoranda on Masks," "One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life passes in a solitude bounded by the masks of oneself." His dark voyage may take him inward through the spiraling entrails of the racial unconscious or outward through the labyrinthine windings of a Necropolis, figured scenically as an urban slum, ship, brothel or home. In his role as marked down prey, he vicariously enjoys the law-giver's power and endures the criminal's aggrieved sufferings. Finally exhausted but clear eyed, he achieves a blissful Liebestod with the long sought mother breast. Most critics have recognized that O'Neill's career began with an early period of seascape realism, evolved through a most uneven middle stage of sometimes labored symbolism, and returned finally to the conventions of his beginnings. Yet the pervasive thrust of his drama is non-realistic and negative, sadistic and melodramatic, as Leslie Fiedler has characterized American fiction. Even when his