פרסומים

Le film de propagande Der Ewige Jude (Le Juif éternel, 1940) signé par Fritz Hippler mais conçu et dirigé par Joseph Goebbels lui-même présente une liste, croissante en gravité, des méfaits commis par l’ennemi suprême, le peuple juif, tout au long de l’histoire et dans la réalité contemporaine. De terribles méfaits qui justifient amplement son extermination, proférée par Hitler à la fin du film, dans un discours à la Reichstag, le 30 janvier 1939. De tous les crimes dont on accuse le « Juif éternel[1] », le plus atroce est la cruauté supposée du peuple juif envers les animaux. Une insupportable et longue séquence montre, en temps réel, les abatteurs rituels du ghetto de Lodz défiler le couteau à la main avant d’égorger des vaches. La séquence est terrible à voir. Elle provoqua des évanouissements dans les salles où, en 1940, le film était projeté. Les vaches égorgées par des abatteurs souriants se débattent longtemps, en gros plan, dans leur sang. Le discours d’Hitler, qui suit immédiatement, réclamant l’extermination du peuple juif en tant qu’acte d’auto-défense, apparaît alors comme totalement justifié. D’ailleurs, l’interdiction de l’abattage rituel juif fut, le 21 avril 1933, une des premières lois antisémites promulguées par le régime nazi.

Même aujourd’hui, le sujet de la cruauté de l’abattage rituel, juif ou musulman, continue de préoccuper. Nombreux sont les pays européens interdisant cet abattage en raison de la souffrance qu’il entraîne : Belgique, Suède, Norvège, Islande, Danemark, Slovénie, d’autres encore. Le texte qui suit va s’interroger sur le rapport de la loi juive à la souffrance animale, le Tsaar baalé haïm, une souffrance qui, de manière plus générale, dans la Société industrielle contemporaine a pris des proportions effroyables et généralement occultées[2].

Nociceptive axons undergo remodeling as they innervate their targets during development and in response to environmental insults and pathological conditions. How is nociceptive morphogenesis regulated? Here, we show that the microtubule destabilizer kinesin family member 2A (Kif2a) is a key regulator of nociceptive terminal structures and pain sensitivity. Ablation of Kif2a in sensory neurons causes hyperinnervation and hypersensitivity to noxious stimuli in young adult mice, whereas touch sensitivity and proprioception remain unaffected. Computational modeling predicts that structural remodeling is sufficient to explain the phenotypes. Furthermore, Kif2a deficiency triggers a transcriptional response comprising sustained upregulation of injury-related genes and homeostatic downregulation of highly specific channels and receptors at the late stage. The latter effect can be predicted to relieve the hyperexcitability of nociceptive neurons, despite persisting morphological aberrations, and indeed correlates with the resolution of pain hypersensitivity. Overall, we reveal a critical control node defining nociceptive terminal structure, which is regulating nociception.

Die Arbeit schlägt einen neuen methodischen Ansatz in Bezug auf sogenannte ›frauenmystische‹ Texte des Mittelalters vor. Hierbei rückt die handschriftliche Überlieferung verstärkt in den Fokus, da der einzelne Textträger in seinen jeweiligen kultur- und literaturhistorischen Kontexten verortet wird. Am Beispiel der reichen oberdeutschen Überlieferung des Liber specialis gratiae der Mechthild von Hackeborn können auf diese Weise signifikante Einsichten in spezifische Rezeptionsdynamiken gewonnen werden. Die Arbeit ist daher nicht nur für die germanistische Mediävistik, sondern auch für die Geschichtswissenschaft, die Historischen Hilfswissenschaften, die Theologie und die Gender Studies interessant sowie für alle, die sich mit mittelalterlicher Religions- und Handschriftenkultur beschäftigen.

A Lasting Vision is dedicated to the Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa), a Sanskrit treatise on poetics composed by Dandin in south India (ca. 700 CE) and to its remarkable career throughout large parts of Asia. The Mirror was adapted and translated into several languages in the southern Indian peninsula (Kannada, Tamil) and the island of Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Pali), as well as in the Tibetan plateau far to the north (Tibetan, Mongolian). In all these receiving cultures, it became a classical text and a source of constant engagement and innovation, often well into the modern era. It also traveled to Burma and Thailand, where it held a place of honor in Buddhist monastic education and intellectual life, and likely to the islands of Java and Bali, where it contributed to the production of literature in Old Javanese. There is even reason to believe that it reached China and impacted Chinese literary culture, although far more peripherally than in other parts of Asia. It also maintained a prominent position in the Sanskrit learned discourses throughout the Indian subcontinent for at least a millennium. This multi-authored volume, organized by region and language, is the first attempt to chart and explain the Mirror’s amazing transregional and multilingual success: what was so unique about this work that might explain its near-continental conquest, how it was transmitted to and received in the many different environments, and what happened to it whenever it was being adopted and adapted.

Against the methodological context of play theory, this article revisits the theme of determinism and free will in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West. Highlighting the paradoxical coexistence of determinism and indeterminism in the book, it shows how Judge Holden abuses the appeal of play to lure the Glanton gang into his evil enterprise of a false game of war, which by necessity embraces deterministic rules and the freedom of play. The rules of this false game, however, are violated and neglected by the kid, who thus becomes a spoil-sport, endangering the continuity of the game. To protect his game the judge outlaws the kid, yet the threat will not dissolve: as long as the judge relies on the witnessing of other agents to validate his victory and his game, his self-determination is at risk.

September 2022: Wei Feng received his Ph.D. degree in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and is a professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Shandong University, China. His research interests include intercultural theatre, traditional Chinese theatre, and (post)modernist English literature. He translated Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian into Chinese.

Examining the alternative tropic imaginaries—demonic and Edenic, respectively— governing the oeuvres of playwright Tennessee Williams and director John Huston this article argues for the convergence of these visions in the context of the latter’s film, The Night of the Iguana (1964). As a means of grounding the distinction between these divergent philosophical, ideological and aesthetic traditions, I turn to the writer whose depictions of exotic, Pacific locales might be considered seminal for American literature, and foundational for both the playwright’s and the film-maker’s tropic sensibilities. Herman Melville’s depictions of the Pacific islands, whether or not they originate the American literary imagination’s readings of the exotic, at least definitively articulate and encode those readings—from the degenerate to the sublime—within literary discourse. Williams’ allusions to Los Encantadas (1854), in Suddenly Last Summer, reveal Melville’s influence upon the playwright’s treatment of the tropics' pathology. Huston, meanwhile, had first stumbled upon the Mismaloya peninsula, where he shot The Night of the Iguana, while searching (albeit abortively) for a suitable location in which to film Melville’s first novel, Typee (1846). The salvific vision of Mexico, refined throughout Huston’s oeuvre and imbued with the spirit of Typee’s tropical fantasy, complements the new optimism detectable in Williams’ Iguana, where renewal and revitalization fall within the realm of tropic possibility. 

Alex Feldman is an Alon Fellow and Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in the English Department at the University of Haifa. He completed his doctorate at Merton College, Oxford and has held posts at the University of Texas at Austin and MacEwan University, in Alberta, Canada. His research, which has been published (or is forthcoming) in Law & Literature, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Modernism/ modernity and elsewhere, is concerned with the representation of history, and most recently, legal history, on stage. He published his first book, Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: In History’s Wings with Routledge in 2012, and he is currently working on two further book projects: a co-edited collection of essays, with Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London) on the plays of Terence Rattigan, currently under contract at Cambridge University Press, and a monograph provisionally entitled The Rigging of the Law, concerned with the development of jurisprudential drama in the modern and contemporary theatre.