English

Studies of emotion signaling have proven critical to scientific advances in understanding emotion, informing claims about the evolutionary origins of different emotions1, the central and peripheral nervous system correlates of emotion 2 3 and even which states warrant consideration in emotion taxonomies 4. An initial wave of empirical studies of emotion-related facial expression5 and vocalization 6 7 has concentrated almost exclusively on a limited set of emotions - anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, and tenderness. More recent work on emotional facial expressions has expanded this framework, documenting reliable displays of other emotions like embarrassment and shame 8, pride 9, and love and desire 10 . Here, we present two studies that evaluate the voice's ability to communicate 22 different emotions, including positive emotions like awe, love and sensory pleasure as well as self-conscious emotions like embarassment and guilt. These studies show that vocal bur...

In this comprehensive thesis, I re-frame David Jones' modern First World War epic poem In Parenthesis while deploying theories of conceptual metaphor, mental spaces, and perception of time, much as Jones re-framed the War within his distinct style of form and narrative. Rich with illustrated figures, my argument is not only built from the careful consideration of ideas put forth by literary critics like T.S. Eliot, but it is also grounded with work by renowned cognitive scientists like George Lakoff and (monk riddle teller) Gilles Fauconnier. The ability to analyze literature systematically and in bio-psychological context is a true innovation, much like David Jones’ exquisite poem itself.

The field of cognitive poetics encourages us to experiment in literary criticism. Psychology has unearthed so much about consciousness and unconsciousness in recent decades that we can effectively go backward in time to use that new knowledge as a lens to observe what unconscious and conscious motivations may lay within an author’s mind as he pens a work. Enjoy.

This essay delves into the inescapably close interpersonal relationships that exist among the male characters in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Through this close examination, we will find the relationships to be less homoerotic than they are often described in criticism concerning this play, but instead they are based on an unconventional marriage to war itself. This polyamorous marriage links all of the characters in a web of war, blood, and lust.

My research tracks the narrative afterlife of the Elizabethan pamphleteer and proto-novelist, Thomas Deloney. Though thought of as a simplistic writer during his life, my research seeks to prove that he was not only wildly popular during his lifetime, but also widely influential with some of the most well-known playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

The poetry of John Donne functions in many of the same ways as a kaleidoscope. With a kaleidoscope, loose lenses of colored glass are set against mirrors at various angles in order to manufacture form where before there was nothing but a chaotic slurry of colors. John Donne uses deictic references in his poems in a similar manner, in that, his words point both inside and outside the textual context of his poetry in order to form new

This paper argues that Müller combines the comparative etymological method in a scientific spirit conjoined with Romantic Idealism to trace Greek mythology—and, by extension, primitive mythology—back to its origin: personified narration of natural phenomena, especially solar phenomena that evoke religious reverence for higher powers. With the evolution of language and thought in history, this origin later grows (that is, decays) into fully-grown myths of gods, owing to fundamental misunderstandings of originally personified language. In Müller’s term, mythology is a ‘disease of language’; while thus disease of language encroaches humans’ understanding of religious reverence for higher powers, it presupposes a healthy, religious substratum—a ‘perception of the infinite’ intimated by nature and embodied in personified language.

With all its flaws, Müller’s theory of Mythology maintains and develops its above theses, forwarding multi-faceted contributions to British Mythography. In the 1850s and 1860s, it played a pioneering and liberating role. In the early 1870s, with the rise of Cultural Anthropology, his Comparative Mythology reaches its zenith and starts to descend in academic popularity. However, it is worth noting Müller’s cautious open-mindedness to anthropological materials and alternative approaches to primitive myths. In the 1890s, Müller’s Comparative Mythology arrived at its tragic ending, eclipsed by the anthropological study of mythology. Müller is generally portrayed as a defeated enemy of Victorian anthropologists, but Müller’s insightful responses to anthropological conjectures are overlooked. In the finale of Müller’s Science of Mythology, there are the beginnings of a reconsideration of Victorian anthropology in the future. 78

Zhang Taiyan’s idea on “linguistic root” is a key innovation in his linguistic philology. Its origin and growth was inspired by philology in the West in the 19th century.Although it has remarkable similarities with Max Müller’s “on the powers of roots,” it does not derive from Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language. Zhang Taiyan’s idea on “root” has its germ in his translating Herbert Spencer’s “Progress: Its Law and Cause” and “On Manners and Fashion”. Explanation of how a primitive root evolves into various words of allied meanings in the former one inspires Zhang Taiyan, so does etymological analysis in “On Manners and Fashion”. Inspirations from these two articles can be traced in Zhang Taiyan’s works, especially in his “Rectification of Words”, “On Language Studies”, “A Letter to Mr. Wu Junsui”, and“Address to Chinese Students in Tokyo”.

缪勒神话学以 “太阳神话说” 和 “语言疾病说” 著称。 这两大学说 虽有局限, 也被人类学派超越, 但蕴含有关语言隐喻性的洞见, 对神话研究至今 仍有启迪价值。 百余年来, 中国学界对缪勒神话学的态度呈现多元演进态势, 这 也与语言学、 宗教学等学科思潮的演变密切关联。 神话学界从 20 世纪早期间接 译介、 摒弃缪勒神话学到 20 世纪中后期对它更加直接、 客观的译评, 再到 21 世 纪的多维重思和批判性借鉴, 这一演变历程主要基于对缪勒 《比较神话学》 的 研究。 中国学界还需依据缪勒的其他神话学原作, 适度跨越学科边界, 更系统深 入地研究缪勒神话学, 以取其精华。 这有益于开放、 独立、 审慎地发展中国神 话学。

This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuro-science, but also in continental theory and philosophy-challenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion that are actually and technically rhetorical and poetic. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His commitment to presenting science in, or better as, poetry constitutes a neurologically informed pedagogical strategy: a means of setting readers' sensoria in motion, premised on the fundamental educability of bodies that can live.

At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”

This essay explores Percy Shelley’s "The Triumph of Life" as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period’s pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic of both historiography and vitalist biology in the post-Waterloo period. Representing aging faces as mutable registers of the ‘‘living storm’’ of a post-Napoleonic interval, The Triumph depicts the face-giving trope of prosopopoeia as the unintended work of multitudes—demonstrating a nineteenth-century possibility of thinking biological, historical, and rhetorical materialisms together.

Goethe’s late life science project, the journal On Morphology – and the living specimens it investigated – were unusually heterogeneous and decadent forms. This piece examines Goethe’s neglected essay on the botany of “Dissipation” for the way it subverts vitalist and idealist discourses in biology to rethink living form under the aspect of its material dispersion. Here Goethe begins to substitute events that are non-procreative, but perhaps communicative, for the questions of embryogenesis and organization that had been foundational to the early life sciences. What, the morphologist asks instead, might life look like from the perspective of the particulate losses that mediate between beings? What forms of representation would be adequate to this view?

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.