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In the Conclusion, I record the rival fates of Giovanni and Giorgio Amendola since 1980, whether in scholarship, public memory or Italian streetscapes. In each regard, the liberal democrat Giovanni Amendola has moved up and the communist Giorgio Amendola down. The (humane) communist world Giorgio believed in has all but totally disappeared. But liberal democracy, however much transmuted by an all but totalitarian neoliberalism, has prospered and, perhaps, triumphed. Certainly, when the centenary of Giovanni’s death occurs in 1926, it is likely that he will be celebrated as a father of his patria. What might be viewed as the historical limitations of his understanding of where the world was going, his all but non-existent commentary on capitalism and finance, his patriarchalism, his positive view of Italian imperialism – these no longer matter. He can take the leading place as his country’s most admirable saint and martyr of Anti-Fascism.
Chapter 4 examines the relationship between Giovanni Amendola and Nelia Pavlova, born 1895. This complex love story has been all but entirely ignored by Italian scholarship on Giovanni and in the national memory. Apparently, the couple had a son who died of meningitis at the age of six in 1929. In Giovanni’s papers there is evidence of the love affair but no acknowledgement of the child. Since Nelia also claims on occasion to have been ‘married’ to Giovanni, some doubt must remain about the veracity of her account. She was a young woman who resembled Eva Kühn in quite a few ways: foreign, multilingual, independent, from her country’s leading political classes, intellectually able. Nelia was one the three people at Giovanni’s deathbed in Cannes (Giorgio was another). Over time, however, the Amendolas, as they put it, ‘lost contact’ with her. Yet she made for herself a distinguished career as a Paris journalist, an expert in Eastern Europe. While the Amendola sons became communists, she remained a liberal democrat, as well as a woman who always remembered Giovanni as her man. Her death probably occurred in 1940. She should not have been forgotten as easily as she has been.
Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.
We will turn now to two symbolic images: The allegory of Injustice in the Arena Chapel (Padua) by Giotto di Bondone (1303–1305) and the allegory of War in the Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–1339). They are major milestones in the visualization of rape in European art, condemnatory representations intended for a public audience. Despite the extensive secondary literature on these sites, the representations of sexual violence have never been examined or compared to each other, even in specialist studies. They can potentially reconfigure our views of wartime rape before modernity.
Anna Akhmatova is a prominent presence in international canons of war poetry, yet her range and significance as a war poet remains underappreciated. Akhmatova is unique among Russian poets, given the Soviet emphasis on 1917 as historical watershed, in identifying 1914 in hindsight as the start of the ‘real’ twentieth century. This chapter situates Akhmatova’s tragic, patriotic view of war in its contemporary intellectual context, and in that of scholarship on gender and war poetry. It examines key lyrics, focusing on religious and pastoral motifs, and highlights Akhmatova’s distinctive approach through comparison with the poetry of her soldier husband, Nikolai Gumilev. Overall, it argues that the war marked an important transition in Akhmatova’s writing, allowing her to develop the characteristic blending of individual with collective voice – and ethical emphasis on memory and bearing of historical witness – that are commonly associated with her later work and which continue to resonate now.
Retrieved memories of emotionally laden events are likely to influence the ongoing emotional state and behaviour of animals. If animals consciously experience memories and/or associated emotions, then recall of aversive or pleasurable events will affect their welfare. Even if they do not, retrieval of these (non-conscious/implicit) memories may result in behaviour, such as attempts to escape, that could lead to injury and damage. There is growing evidence that emotionally laden events are more readily stored in memory than neutral ones, and that the neurophysiological basis of this, involving acute elevations of the classic stress hormones and the action of the amygdala, is similar in humans and other vertebrate species. Thus, in humans and animals, emotional memories are likely to be stored as priority information and may readily be retrieved in the presence of relevant cues. If so, an important practical goal is to minimize the chances of negative emotional memories being cued inappropriately, especially for animals in captivity. Disruption of memory formation and retrieval is also important in an animal welfare context. Chronic or very high elevations of stress hormones appear to have both short- and long-term effects on brain structure and function that can interfere with efficient storage of information. Environmental disturbances, including common husbandry procedures, can also disrupt memory formation through retroactive interference effects. Elevated stress levels may both increase the chances of retrieval of negative information while hampering the retrieval of positive or neutral information. These effects may lead to poor learning abilities, selective or disrupted memory retrieval, and consequent inappropriate behaviour with adverse welfare consequences. If we understand them, we may be able to recommend housing or husbandry procedures that minimize the likelihood of their occurrence.
Focusing on the various rounds of debates between the 1620s and 1640s on whether or how to seek peace or truce in the war with the Dutch Republic, this explores how agents and counsellors from different parts of the Spanish monarchy navigated the conflict between ideology and necessity-driven pragmatism in contexts of concrete decision-making. Directed at preserving and re-establishing dominion over the various realms of the monarchy, reason of state was at the heart of this weighing of principle and pragmatism. Agents were at the centre of a constant cycle of collecting and assessing information, projecting likely future courses and searching for the utmost expedience within the boundaries of royal conscience and obligations. What solutions were conceivable when attempts to preserve dominion over the Low Countries ran contrary to the demands of the Catholic faith and the preservation of the rest of the monarchy? Could special circumstances allow for special measures or concessions that might deviate from the princely obligations towards justice and the Faith? The chapter shows that as each decade of the war added to its own history, pragmatic arguments and solutions were often inspired by experience, together with a notion of extenuating necessity.
This chapter focuses on how Bolaño’s short novel Amulet (1998) approaches the tumultuous period of Mexico 1968, with its effervescent student movement and the subsequent violent governmental repression that led to the military occupation of the country’s most important university, UNAM, as well as the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2nd. Through the narration of Auxilio, an Uruguayan poet who remained locked in a women’s bathroom at UNAM during the two week span of the university’s occupation, the novel reconstructs this period yet shies away from a linear, chronological narration with a transparent claim to truth. On the contrary, by intertwining historical facts with fiction, Amulet’s unreliable and anachronistic narrator works against closure, embracing political defeat as a means to propose listening as a form of continued engagement.
The Greeks often saw Egypt as a model of long-term cultural stability; in fact, Egyptian history is full of ruptures – periods of instability or external invasions – and a major theme in Egyptian literature is the methods by which such threats to continuity were resisted. This chapter looks at several modes of resistance illustrated by Greco-Egyptian literature of the first millennium. It looks at three topics: first, heroes of the Egyptian resistance to Persia (in Herodotus and the Inaros Cycle); secondly, resistance narratives in the Ptolemaic Period: the story of Nectanebo’s Dream (which probably presented the Ptolemies as re-establishing legitimate kingship in Egypt after the Persians) and the apocalyptic Oracles of the Potter and the Lamb (probably directed at the ‘Typhonian’ Ptolemies). The chapter closes by looking at Manetho’s narrative of Egyptian resistance to the foreign Hyksos rulers, which corresponds to events in the mid-second millennium BCE and the foundation of the New Kingdom. It asks whether Manetho’s narrative should be interpreted as reflecting contemporary concerns with foreign rule and resistance to it.
Chapter 3 tests our theory against the historical record. It introduces readers to a few contentious episodes in recent Ukrainian history, focusing on three major crises between 1991 and 2014. Our analytic narrative emphasizes that Russian-speaking communities can embrace “the Russian narrative” at critical junctures theatrically, in order to maximize their bargaining leverage or demonstrate an ability to destabilize Ukrainian national politics, and then be bought off. In each of three case studies, we document Russian-speaking elites bargaining in strikingly similar ways: provoking crises at the center, knowing that Russias military casts a shadow over regional bargaining dynamics. The Party of Regions is described as a machine for aggregating preferences across multiple constituencies with a strong base in the Donbas – the primary driver of the controversial language law of 2012.
Roberto Bolaño’s writing emphasizes the ways exile shapes individual and collective responses to traumatic losses, which are often produced by state violence. The dispersive nature of these responses demands an approach to collective memory that resists the purported coherence of the national narrative. My analysis considers the effort to establish coherency in By Night in Chile in contrast to the calls for openness that characterize the other texts I analyze: The Spirit of Science Fiction, “Visit to the Convalescent,” and Woes of the True Policeman. In reference to discussions of memory and trauma by Adeila Assmann and Nelly Richard, my reading of Bolaño’s texts pairs a critique of authorial coherence with a critique of national coherence. I focus especially on narrative boundaries and fissures, including the motifs of holes and storms. I conclude that an open, interrelational textual analysis of a single author’s work enables a critique of that work that, in turn, strengthens a critique of national narratives and their propensity to conceal traumatic pasts.
The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.
After many years of living the Bohemian life of a poet in Mexico, Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) moved to Spain and decided to make a living out of literature. Sophie Podolski´s motto, “Writing is a living thing,” was Bolaño´s unique way of approaching literature while practicing literary criticism, rewriting the literary history of Spanish Letters and reconfiguring the Western literary canon in a global world. Soon after the end of the millennium, he became a global literary superstar and the most recognized Latin American contemporary writer. In this chapter, Bolaño´s journey – from an unknown brave poet to a celebrated barbarian novelist – is mapped out through three novellas: Amulet (1999), Distant Star (1996) and Monsieur Pain (1999 [1981–82]). The protagonists of these texts, poets and poetry, show the underlying intense eroticism of power through violence, malice, horror, agony, but also, love, joy, generosity, and tenderness. Making zig-zags, shifts and displacements, the analysis weaves his migrant memories through several geocultural leaps – from Mexico City to Santiago de Chile, and then to Paris – while accentuating the most hideous horrors of a more-than-symbolic modern twentieth century to critique the unfolding of Western civilization through pivotal temporal clusters – the 1960s, 1970s, 1930s–40s.
Individuals avoid objects that have been in physical contact with morally offensive or disgusting entities. This has been called negative magical contagion, an implicit belief in the transmission of essence by physical contact. Alternatively, individuals may avoid a negatively contaminated object because: 1) the object is a strong reminder of the original contagion source (association account); or 2) the act of interacting with the object signals specific information about the self (social communication account). We report that: 1) people often prefer to interact with an entity that they believe is more associated with a negative source rather than an entity that is less associated but has made physical contact with the same negative source; 2) while an associative account requires that contact enhances association, a study of memory for visual pairings of objects indicates that when objects are touching, their associative link (recall) is no greater than when they are in proximity; and 3) subjects continue to show aversion to (prefer to wear gloves to handle) an object that contacted a negative entity even if they are handling the object in order to physically destroy it, hence strongly signaling their rejection of that object. Association and social communication are at best partial accounts for contagion effects.
Neonate rats have played an important and unique role within the memory literature. Specifically, they are relatively naïve to experience, can be trained in an ethologically-valid way, using a single trial, which is not aversive and can demonstrate retention for at least 24 h, post-training. As such, they have provided salient insights into the biological mechanisms underlying the memory trace and brain development. The task of choice for rat pups is one using odour preference requiring the removal of each pup from the nest/dam for a ten-minute training trial. For such young animals this may reasonably lead to undue stress and the potential of subsequent rejection by the dam. Little research has considered whether the training duration could be substantially shortened to provide significant animal welfare benefits while maintaining, if not improving, task efficacy. This issue was addressed in the current paper using six-day old Wistar rats (n = 175) exposed to a single-trial, odour-preference task using either a standard ten-minute training trial or a shorter two-minute training trial. Exposing rat pups to the training odour for two minutes did not compromise the level of discrimination observed at test 24 h later. This finding suggests that significantly shorter training trials can be used without compromising retention levels at test. This not only has obvious welfare benefits, but may reasonably be considered to reduce pups’ stress levels which are known to alter both the strength and timing of the memory trace.
Understanding how sustainable preference change can be achieved is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work shows that merely responding or not responding to objects during go/no-go training can influence preferences for these objects right after the training, when people choose with a time limit. Here we examined whether and how such immediate preference change in fast choices can affect choices without time limit one week later. In two preregistered experiments, participants responded to go food items and withheld responses toward no-go food items during a go/no-go training. Immediately after the training, they made consumption choices for half of the items (with a time limit in Experiment 1; without time limit in Experiment 2). One week later, participants chose again (without time limit in both experiments). Half of the choices had been presented immediately after the training (repeated choices), while the other half had not (new choices). Participants preferred go over no-go items both immediately after the training and one week later. Furthermore, the effect was observed for both repeated and new choices after one week, revealing a direct effect of mere (non)responses on preferences one week later. Exploratory analyses revealed that the effect after one week is related to the memory of stimulus-response contingencies immediately after the training, and this memory is impaired by making choices. These findings show mere action versus inaction can directly induce preference change that lasts for at least one week, and memory of stimulus-response contingencies may play a crucial role in this effect.
Combining meaning, memory, and development, the perennially popular topic of intuition can be approached in a new way. Fuzzy-trace theory integrates these topics by distinguishing between meaning-based gist representations, which support fuzzy (yet advanced) intuition, and superficial verbatim representations of information, which support precise analysis. Here, I review the counterintuitive findings that led to the development of the theory and its most recent extensions to the neuroscience of risky decision making. These findings include memory interference (worse verbatim memory is associated with better reasoning); nonnumerical framing (framing effects increase when numbers are deleted from decision problems); developmental decreases in gray matter and increases in brain connectivity; developmental reversals in memory, judgment, and decision making (heuristics and biases based on gist increase from childhood to adulthood, challenging conceptions of rationality); and selective attention effects that provide critical tests comparing fuzzy-trace theory, expected utility theory, and its variants (e.g., prospect theory). Surprising implications for judgment and decision making in real life are also discussed, notably, that adaptive decision making relies mainly on gist-based intuition in law, medicine, and public health.
The collective recognition heuristic is a simple forecasting heuristic that bets on the fact that people’s recognition knowledge of names is a proxy for their competitiveness: In sports, it predicts that the better-known team or player wins a game. We present two studies on the predictive power of recognition in forecasting soccer games (World Cup 2006 and UEFA Euro 2008) and analyze previously published results. The performance of the collective recognition heuristic is compared to two benchmarks: predictions based on official rankings and aggregated betting odds. Across three soccer and two tennis tournaments, the predictions based on recognition performed similar to those based on rankings; when compared with betting odds, the heuristic fared reasonably well. Forecasts based on rankings—but not on betting odds—were improved by incorporating collective recognition information. We discuss the use of recognition for forecasting in sports and conclude that aggregating across individual ignorance spawns collective wisdom.
The emergence of a leading alternative during the course of a decision is known to bias the evaluation of new information in a manner that favors that alternative. We report 3 studies that address the sensitivity of predecisional information distortion and its effects in hypothetical risky decisions with regard to 4 potential influences: choice domain, repeated choice, memory requirements, and intermediate progress questions. In Experiment 1 (N = 515), the magnitude of information distortion was similar in 5 choice domains (varied between participants) involving monetary gambles, song downloads, frequent-flyer miles, political decisions, or medical decisions. Information distortion mediated the relationship between our manipulation of initial preferences and participants’ final choices, with the magnitude of the indirect effect being roughly similar across domains. These results replicate and extend previous findings. Additionally, distortion decreased significantly over 4 similar decision problems (within participants), but remained significant in the fourth problem. In Experiment 2 (N = 214), information distortion increased significantly when previously viewed information remained available, apparently because reiterating that information strengthened emerging preferences. In Experiment 3 (N = 223), the removal of intermediate progress questions that measure information distortion and emerging preferences did not significantly affect final choices, again replicating previous results. We conclude that predecisional information distortion is a relatively stable and robust phenomenon that deserves a prominent role in descriptive theories of choice.
The recognition heuristic models the adaptive use and dominant role of recognition knowledge in judgment under uncertainty. Of the several predictions that the heuristic makes, empirical tests have predominantly focused on the proposed noncompensatory processing of recognition. Some authors have emphasized that the heuristic needs to be scrutinized based on precise tests of the exclusive use of recognition. Although precise tests have clear merits, I critically evaluate the value of such tests as they are currently employed. First, I argue that using precise measures of the exclusive use of recognition has to go beyond showing that the recognition heuristic—like every model—cannot capture reality completely. Second, I illustrate how precise tests based on response times can lead to unsubstantiated conclusions if the fact that the recognition heuristic does not model the recognition judgment itself is ignored. Finally, I highlight two key but so far neglected aspects of the recognition heuristic: (a) the connection between recognition memory and the recognition heuristic; and (b) the mechanisms underlying the adaptive use of recognition.