Feeling New York: Classless urban geographies and affective capitalist reconciliation in Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick

Acknowledging the productive impulses of the affective turn, this paper examines the affective impacts of urban architecture conveyed by Horatio Alger in his novel Ragged Dick. Without any strict adherence to a particular school of thought, I draw instead on those concepts and theories that promise enriching for an analysis of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and its socio-spatial representation of New York's architecture, for instance Central Park and Wall Street. The results underline the flexibility of the affective nexus used in literary geographies, finding the metropolis not as a passive dramaturgical backdrop but as an active agent, whose structural composition works towards the integration of its literary subjects into the affective discourses of its historical period and literary genre. Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick directs this very agency towards the protagonist's integration into the hegemonic structures of sentimentality. In the story, this becomes visible in the mythical abilities of empathy to transcend class divisions and the reconciliatory appeal of the capitalist ideology. Ultimately, affect and emotionality are used to maintain and perform the proper feelings for certain architectural structures, manifesting themselves as a sentimental performance of systemic allegiance.     

THE THEOLOGICAL ETHICS OF HERBERT McCABE, OP: A REVIEW ESSAY

Herbert Mc Cabe, OP (d. 2001), was a significant theological figure in England in the last century. A scholar of Aquinas, he was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Marx, his reading of whom helped him articulate a distinctive Thomistic account of human embodiment that serves as a critique of other dominant approaches in ethics. This article shows McCabe's contribution to moral theology by placing his work in conversation with other important approaches, namely, situation ethics, proportionalism, and the New Natural Law Theory.     

Evidence for differentiation of right hemisphere visual-perceptual functions

Performance on tasks sensitive to right hemisphere dysfunction (facial discrimination and perceptual closure) are reported in eight patients with right hemisphere lesions. Patients demonstrated an apparent double dissociation of performance on the two measures. Site-by-task specificity for the closure task was strongly suggested. Implications for right hemisphere organization and underlying psychological processes are considered.     

Stimulus factors and listening strategies in auditory memory: A theoretical analysis

A theory for the temporal course of perceptual coding during auditory short-term memory tasks is described. A low-level “sensor” and a high-level “identifier” process item and order information from stimulus word-strings. Both word durations and interword pauses are needed for this processing, and if adequate processing time is unavailable, perceptual delays will lead to degraded recall performance. Stimulus parameters and subject strategies interact to determine the quality and the order in which stimulus items are coded. These hypotheses are supported both by experiments using grammatical sentences and those using lists of unrelated words.     

Differences in baseline drinking behavior between New Zealand alcoholics and normal drinkers

Details of alcohol drinking by 12 New Zealand hospitalized alcoholics and 12 normal drinkers from the local community were compared in an experimental bar-and-lounge environment. Differences between the drinking behavior of the two groups were found to be statistically significant on measures of total alcohol consumed, sip size and rate of alcohol ingestion (speed of drinking). The drinking pattern exhibited was similar to that reported in baseline studies of North American drinkers, as reported by Schaefer et al. (1971). This similarity was discussed in terms of a behavioral profile of alcoholics as compared with normal drinkers for the diagnosis of problem drinking.