Academic literature on the topic 'James Wilson (Fictitious character)'

Although contemporary Americans take it for granted that a “constitution” is a written document, written constitutions were almost unprecedented at America's founding. James Wilson, one of the most significant yet overlooked of America's founders, offers a comprehensive theory of America's written constitution. Wilson argues that the written-ness of the U.S. Constitution serves two essential functions. As an initial matter, it memorializes the primacy of liberty by announcing that the authority of government derives only from a free people. Perhaps more importantly, however, the written constitution uplifts and refines the character of its citizens, and thus helps to constitute a people. A review of Wilson's writings and speeches reveals how, even in a rights-centric political order, the written constitution helps to cultivate moderate and civic-minded citizens without diminishing the fundamental importance of individual rights.

The present paper deals with modern narrative theory concentrating on focalisation and its facets in the short story A Painful Case by James Joyce. The cognitively minded narratological notion of focalisation, a term coined by Genette (1983), developed by Uspenski? (1973) and broadened and refined by Rimmon-Kenan (2003), discusses the perceptual, psychological, and ideological positions adopted by the narrator(s) or character(s) in the tale (s). In recent years, there has been considerable interest in focalisation and its implications for narrativity and fictionality. The present paper is an endeavour to analyse the short story A Painful Case by James Joyce through perceptual, psychological, and ideological facets of focalisation. The reader can better understand the text and deduce how the characters at the two levels of discourse and story view the fictitious world and how they are connected via this study. In conclusion, the study of focalization enables us to perceive the story as a network with several layers and consolidates our appreciation of Joyce’s narrative environment design.

The image of a country conveyed by the international media is increasingly important in a globalised and interdependent world. Some of these international outlets have a special role to play in this process, and the British weekly The Economist is certainly one of them. For more than a century and a half, the publication founded by James Wilson in 1843 has been a reference for politicians, opinion leaders and businessmen around the world. For this reason, it is of particular interest to understand the magazine’s special way of contextualising news events in different latitudes from the perspective of each country’s ‘national character.’ From this perspective, we analyze the image of Spain offered by The Economist throughout its history from the understanding of the interest that has always had for the professionals of the British weekly the interpretation of current affairs in the context of the so-called ‘national character’ of a country. After the thematic analysis of nine supplements on Spain published by the weekly between 1972 and 2018, six features have been highlighted that would consistently configure the ‘national character’ of this country for the weekly. These six traits are: a country in transition; a diverse country; a festive, hospitable and tolerant country; a country with an inefficient administration; a country with a weak economy; and an artistic and unscientific country. A better understanding of these stable features can be of great importance for better managing a country’s international projection.

The economic and political arguments for the market principle over alternative forms of economic organization are to my mind irrefutable. It is on the moral level that the perplexing concerns about capitalism center, concerns that have been raised from the beginnings of the industrial era down to the present time. This essay focuses on one major aspect of the ongoing moral test of capitalism: the test of whether our major corporations can both succeed in their profit-making efforts and also serve as one of society’s chief mediating structures that stand, like family, church and community, between the individual and the state. Should the corporation serve not simply as a utilitarian arrangement for the efficient production of high quality goods and services, but also as a moral community that shapes human character and behavior? How can it do so in this age of brutal markets?James Q. Wilson, professor of management at UCLA, has no doubt about the answer. In an article last year, he said: “The problem of imbuing large-scale enterprise with a decent moral life is fundamental.” Corporations “are systems of human action that cannot for long command the loyalty of their members if their standards of collective action are materially lower than those of their individual members.” Capitalists should recognize, he concluded, “that, while free markets will ruthlessly eliminate inefficient firms, the moral sentiments of man will only gradually and uncertainly penalize immoral ones. But, while the quick destruction of inefficient corporations threatens only individual firms, the slow anger at immoral ones threatens capitalism, and thus freedom itself.”

The article studies the role of such cultural phenomena as melancholy and nostalgia in artistic and “ontological” aspects of rock music. The relevance of this study is due to a high frequency of occurrence of these phenomena in numerous types of modern art (there have been several research dedicated to this issue), as well as the growing popularity of “melancholic rock” in a wide audience. Of particular significance for the author in scientific understanding of the proposed topic were the works by S. Boym, V. Medushevsky, J. Starobinski, V. Syrov, T. Tsaregradskaya, W. Everett, K. Johannison and other researchers. The study of melancholy in rock music was based on British psychedelic and progressive rock, with a detailed review of several vivid examples of compositions by Pink Floyd, Barclay James Harvest, King Crimson, Genesis, Marillion and Steven Wilson. The main purpose of this work is to reveal the characteristic musical and stylistic features, means of expression, and thematic patterns of “melancholic rock”. Among them the most important (in the author’s opinion) are the following: the prevalence of slow tempo (non-typical of rock in general), ostinato, “lack of aspiration” (according to V. Medushevsky), distinctive modal and intonational features (minority, polymodality, lamento intonation complex), folklore and early music influences, special appeal to the “nostalgic” timbres of bowed strings, organ, and wind instruments (both in live performance and electro-mechanical playback or electronic samples), and “flickering” acoustic guitar sounds. A wide range of emotions and moods are presented, from light sadness to deep sorrow, the themes of loss, loneliness, “lost childhood”, etc. The article stresses the role of melancholy, its “emotional modus” and specific sound that overcomes the intellectuality of progressive rock (sometimes excessive), its “calculated” character. At the same time, the “lack of aspiration” can be counter-balanced by the intense dramatic development, typical of progressive rock.

SCIENCE AND THE GOOD: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky. New Haven, CT and London, UK: Yale University Press and Templeton Press, 2018. 289 pages. Paperback; $18.00. ISBN: 9780300251821. *Science and the Good is a one-volume education on the historical quest to furnish a scientific explanation of morality. It seems that the human person and morality do not comfortably fit within the model of scientific explanation. The authors chronicle the many ways in which the "new moral scientists" either overreach in interpreting the results of their experimental findings or fail to clearly define whether their experimental results have merely descriptive force (tell us what is the case) or indicate something prescriptive (tell us how we should live). Their narrative shows that what had begun around the 1600s as a quest to secure a scientific foundation for morality has, today, ended not only with the abandonment of the original project, but with a denial of the existence of morality altogether. The authors call the current state of the "abandoned" and "redirected" quest, "moral nihilism." *The book is well written, and though they engage us with complex concepts and connections, Hunter and Nedelisky prove to be good teachers, helping us along the way with copious examples from the primary sources. It is a pleasure to read because so much can be learned from it. Though their criticisms are multipronged, I shall limit myself to a discussion of one central chapter and a few telling examples to illustrate their basic contention that science is the wrong tool for furnishing an adequate account of morality. *In chapter three, the authors consider three ideas that have become central to the project of the new moral scientists: Hume's sentimentalism, Bentham's utilitarianism, and Darwin's evolution by natural selection. They also mention "one lingering and deeply disturbing worry" about the avenues these three charted which were later adopted by the new moral scientists. *Hume's sentimentalism rejects the notion that reason can motivate us to moral action or that reason plays any role in the discernment of the good, as Aristotle held. Good and bad are rooted in the pleasure or pain we feel when considering certain actions or displays of character. Feelings of pleasure and pain are tethered to what Hume calls "sympathy," the fact that others will be similarly affected by contemplating or viewing the same action or display of character. Bentham sought to formulate an intuitive, quantitative principle for all of morality, his "greatest happiness principle," in which happiness is equated with whatever promotes pleasure or prevents pain. Bentham prided himself on his democratic approach, making no distinction between what pleasures are to be pursued and what pains are to be avoided (pp. 56-57). He was a reformer and redirected the focus of morality onto action rather than the less measurable character. With his principle of utility he sought to make ethics empirical and quantifiable. Lastly, Darwin's theory of evolution explained the existence of certain social emotions as what would promote the survival and reproductive success of the species: feelings of loyalty to those of one's tribe or sensitivity to the praise or blame of others. Natural selection, a biological mechanism, could now be enlisted as furnishing a scientific explanation for various evolved human emotions and behaviors. *So, what are their "worries?" Science is adept at explaining the quantifiable, but morality does not fit comfortably into this box. The authors agree that certain brain states may be the necessary condition for morality, but morality is not reducible to brain states. Morality has something to do with pleasure and pain, but science is incapable of telling us "that some things were prohibited or compulsory regardless of how much pleasure might result or pain avoided by doing otherwise" (p. 56). Natural selection can explain the inchoate glimmerings of human morality in the social emotions but is incapable of explaining motivation in the moral life. If morality, they argue, is rooted in the first-person perspective of human beings, then the third-person perspective of the sciences cannot get us there for it is trying to explain subjects by way of objects. Hume is the crucial figure here and his position is that the third-person perspective is true, and it alone can give us access to what is real; the first-person perspective is illusory. Hume's skepticism coupled with a Darwinian explanation of ethics as tracking for survival, not the good, puts us on a trajectory toward the "moral nihilism" of the current scene. *Neuroscientist and philosopher Patricia Churchland is one of those who seem to believe that morality is reducible to talk of brain states. She appears, at first, to be interested in discussing the nature of morality from a common sense, first-person perspective when she asks, "What is it to be fair? How do we know what to count as fair?" (p. 144). But, in pursuing her answer she appeals to "the neural platform for moral behavior" (p. 144), or "values rooted in the circuitry for caring" (p. 145). Like Hume, Churchland assumes that the first-person perspective has little to offer in the way of furnishing a genuine account of morality. She assumes the third-person perspective and hopes to get to the good (fairness) by talking at length and, no doubt, accurately about the architecture and neurochemistry of the human brain. The authors contend that the answer to Churchland's question does not lie in a description of physical constituents. *Primatologist Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University finds inspiration in Hume's focus on the emotions and social sympathy and, in combination with Darwin's interest in the emotions, views the emotional life of primates as "the key link in [the] project of showing how human morality evolved ..." (p. 124). For de Waal, as for many evolutionary psychologists, the central thing that needs explaining is altruism, and so he views the ability to feel sympathy and empathy for another as "the centerpiece of human morality" (p. 124). But as the authors point out with a telling example, acts of kindness based upon feelings of sympathy for another are inadequate to explain the complex nature of the ethical lives of humans. If I feel sympathy for a neighbor who cannot pay her rent and out of emotional empathy for her anxiety and shame decide to pay it for her, such an act may be morally laudable. But now suppose my neighbor is a heroin dealer and my empathy for her plight leads me to pay her rent anyway. Surely, now our empathy is getting in the way of doing the right thing; and even though we felt these moral emotions, paying her rent does not qualify as morally right since she is endangering her own life and that of the entire neighborhood. *In a different but related point, the explanatory gap between biological altruism and fully human altruism is brought out when the authors consider the position of biologist David Sloan Wilson. Like Churchland above, Wilson makes a promising start when he defines altruism as "a concern for the welfare of others as an end in itself" (p. 148). But, in his discussion he dismisses the relevance of motivation when defining the nature of altruism on the grounds that it is incapable of empirical measurement and it is "not right to privilege altruism as a psychological motive when other equivalent motives exist" (p. 149). The difference between external, behavioristic altruism and altruism motivated by genuine concern for the other is insignificant, says Wilson, just the difference between being "paid in cash or by check" (p. 149). The authors are not impressed with this clever but spurious analogy: "Do you only care that your spouse acts as though she loves you? That she says complimentary things to you, that she appears to enjoy conversation with you ... appears to be sexually attracted to you, and remembers your birthday? What if you discovered that she does all of these things without feeling anything for you--or worse, she does all these things while secretly detesting you? Would Wilson claim that this is just a "cash or check" situation--just so long as she's doing all the observable things she would do if she really did love you, then the underlying motives, intentions, and desires are irrelevant?" (pp. 149-50). *For Hunter and Nedelisky, the new moral scientists have become "moral nihilists" precisely because morality and the good life are not suited to the methods or measurements of science, especially in their program of reductive materialism. The book fruitfully engages the sciences and humanities, and readers will come away with a healthy appreciation of the limits of science and its methodology in explaining the meaning of the moral life. *Reviewed by J. Aultman-Moore, Professor of Philosophy, Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, PA 15370.

James Q. Wilson produced a remarkably varied, influential, and profound body of scholarly work on American politics. The first part of this tribute provides an overview of his contribution to our understanding of city politics, crime and policing, voluntary organizations, bureaucracy, and the development of those character traits upon which democratic government depends. The second part of the essay describes key features of Wilson’s approach to studying politics, features notably and lamentably absent from most political science today.

Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated “of being art” in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of “introducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'” (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, “numerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variants” (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as “the most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other games” (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTs” (Wilson et al.). “Given NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for like” (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoin’s “Colored Coins”, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset “such as real estate properties, cars and bonds” (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh painting’s data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, “unlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sites” (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with “proper” art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishment’s disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of “high art” to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdington’s claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artist’s work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWitt’s certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirst’s The Currency “is composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paper” (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT “or ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artwork” (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that “Hirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal media” (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as “Thatcher’s Warhol” (Lemmey), range from indicating “greater fool theory” (Hawkins) to the questioning of a “responsibility to other NFT artists in the market” (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirst’s artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that “NFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownership” (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirst’s physical creations, where the legal tender’s conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selling point, then The Currency prompts further debate on how NFT art can, on the one hand, disrupt the way we might think about the financial systems within cryptocurrencies, and on the other hand, fuel debate on how collecting art within traditional markets has been transformed through the emergence of cryptocurrencies. These once excluded forms of money, often thought of as scams, vapourware, and Ponzi schemes from collectable trade, now dwarf digital art auction sales at an exponential margin; see, for example, the recent Christie's sale of Beeple’s NFT art. When dissecting The Currency through a conceptuality, it is important to state that this is not the first time that artists have used currency to conceptualise social questions about money. At a system level, Marcel Duchamp created his work Monte Carlo Bond (Duchamp), which “advertised a series of bonds by which he claimed he would exploit a system he had developed to make money while at the roulette wheel in Monaco” (Russeth). At an artefact level, artist Mark Wagner “deconstructed dollar bills to make portraits of presidents, recreations of famous paintings and other collages” (Ryssdal and Hollenhorst). Most notoriously, “Jens Haaning was loaned 534,000 kroner ($116,106) in cash to recreate his old artworks using the banknotes [but] pocketed the money and sent back blank canvases with a new title: "Take the Money and Run" (ABC News). If anything, The Currency is merely one of many artists' responses in a long history of exploring art and money. Yet the conceptuality of Hirst’s tender lends itself to deploying a conceptual currency system that says more about the money transactions of the art world than it does about the art sold as a financial transaction. More so, a clever subversion by Hirst, whose ongoing thematic produces artworks about mortality, life, and death, places this thematic back on the purchasers of The Currency to decide if they will “kill” the tethered artwork; that is, if they accept the NFT and not the assigned NFT art, the artwork will be destroyed by an act of burning. Hirst’s conceptuality from The Currency forces the consumer to “play God” by deciding which component is destroyed or not, posing the moral question of how we value the immorality of destroying an artwork for the sake of profitability from a born-digital token. The twist at the end is that Hirst melds such a moral choice with “an experiment in the highly irrational economics of collectibles and blockchain technology” (Hawkins). While this article acknowledges that the extreme wealth of Hirst plays a determining factor in how The Currency has been received by the public, one might argue that such polarising opinions are of no value to the critical assessment of The Currency nor the conceptualities of NFT art when determining the mechanical aspects of the artworks. The same invalidation emerged in December 2021, when “a group of Wikipedia editors ... voted not to categorize NFTs as art—at least for now” (Artnews). This standpoint contradicts the New York Times, which referred to Beeple as the “third-highest-selling artist alive” after his Christie’s sale (Artnews). Bowden and Jones provide insight into this kind of hesitation in legitimising NFT art, saying that “the tension between innovation and incumbency also contributes to the scepticism that always surrounds such new technologies” (Bowden and Jones). Another example, Beautiful Thought Coins from Australian artist Shaun Wilson, is made up of 200 digital hand-drawn colour field NFT artworks that are an allegorical investigation into bureaucracy, emotion, and currency. “The project is complete with a virtual exhibition, digital art prints, art book, and a soundtrack of AI hosted podcasts exploring everything from NFTs to chihuahuas” (Lei). As with The Currency, Beautiful Thought Coins approaches a conceptuality about NFT art through its subject, but also in the embodiment of the currency embedded within the NFT digital ecosystem. Not surprisingly, the artwork depicts coins sharing a direct relationship to the roundel paintings of Jasper John and Peter Blake, but instead with the design proportions of the iconic Type C.1 roundels adopted by the Royal Air Force between 1942 and 1947. Merging these similarities between its pop-art heritage and historical references, the allegorical discussion in Beautiful Thought Coins centres around the pretext of bureaucracy that extends to the individual artwork’s metadata. As featured on its OpenSea sales window, each of the coins has substantial metadata that, when expanded to view, reveal a secondary narrative found in the qualities each NFT has linked to its identifier. Once compared with other tokens, these metadata expand into a separate story with the NFT artworks, using fictitious qualities that link directly to the titles of each artwork in the digital collection to describe how each of the coins is feeling. One might argue that in this instance, the linking of metadata narratives to the artworks functions as an ontological framework. Wilson’s coins draw similarly to philosophical questions raised by Cross, who asks “what, exactly, is the ontological status of an NFT in relation to the work linked to it?” (Cross). Likewise, in the exhibition catalogue of Beautiful Thoughts Coins, Church states that the ontology of this series appears to be linked to a conceptuality with more questions than answers about the ‘lifestyle’ bureaucracy attached to NFT art, where the branding of the artwork by a digital token will make you feel better with the promise to also make you potentially wealthy. (Church) When considering the nature of the artwork's divisibility, ontology plays a part in finding a link between its allegory and aesthetic. Given that each image of the roundels is identical, except for the colours that fill each of its four rings, the divisibility of the hue in the subject is likened to the divisibility of the cryptocurrency that purchases NFTs. Conclusion This article has discussed NFT art in the context of its emergent conceptuality. Through assessment of the crypto artwork of Hirst and Wilson, it has proposed a way of thinking about how this conceptuality can remove NFT art from a primary attachment to financial exchange, to instead give rise to considerations of the allegory surmounting both fungible and non-fungible artefacts linked to digital tokens. Both series of works draw allegorical commentary about the nature of currency. Hirst takes a literal approach to manufacture physical artworks as a mock currency linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of money in art. Wilson manufactures digital artworks by creating images of coins linked to minted NFTs to discuss the transactions of AI-generated lifestyle bureaucracy controlling money. The assessment of both series has considered that each artist uses NFT art as modularity to represent their contexts, rather than a singularity lacking in conversation about the ontological implications of the medium. While NFT art is still in its infancy, this article invites a wider conversation about how artists can deploy crypto art in a conceptual space. It is by this factor that the plausibility of meaningful dialogue is active in determining the medium as a legitimised art form. At the same time, it explores the possibilities now and yet to come, to attest to defining a new dynamic art form, already changing the way artists think about their work as both a currency and a conceptual effect. References ABC News. “Danish Artist Takes Payment for Art, Sends Museum Blank Canvasses Titled Take the Money and Run.” 30 Sep. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-30/danish-artist-jens-haaning-take-the-money-and-run/100502338>. ———. “What’s behind the NFT Digital Craze?” 19 Mar. 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_e7TOBV43y8>. Aharon, David Y., and Ender Demir. “NFTs and Asset Class Spillovers: Lessons from the Period around the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Finance Research Letters (Oct. 2021). <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2021.102515>. Artnews. “Wikipedia Editors Have Voted Not to Classify NFTs as Art, Sparking Outrage in the Crypto Community.” 13 Jan. 2022. <https://news.artnet.com/market/wikipedia-editors-nft-art-classification-2060018>. Baur, Dirk. G., Kihoon Hong, and Adrian Lee. “Bitcoin: Medium of Exchange or Speculative Assets?” Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money 54 (2018): 117-89. Bowden, James, and Edward Thomas Jones. “NFTs Are Much Bigger than an Art Fad—Here’s How They Could Change the World.” The Conversation. 26 Apr. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/nfts-are- much-bigger-than-an-art-fad-heres-how-they-could-change-the-world-159563>. Church, Doug. 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In James Joyce’s Ulysses, I believe that Stephen Dedalus enacts a heteroglossic discourse in episode 15, “Circe,” that critiques both English imperialism and the nationalist bourgeois of Ireland. Moreover, Stephen engages not only in an aesthetic and political rebellion through the style of his discourse, but he also engages in the only anticolonial violence in Ulysses against the British soldier Private Carr. Thus, I believe that Stephen separates himself from the ideology of the colonizer and from the bourgeois nationalists through aesthetic, political, and violent means. I will conduct my examination of Stephen as a revolutionary colonial intellectual in three parts using the work of three respective theorists: Mikhail Bakhtin, Frantz Fanon, and Benedict Anderson. Ultimately, I intend to show that Stephen can be read as a gateway through which Joyce represents a new heterogeneous, anticolonial, and antinational community in Ireland.
Department of English

Trees, as threshold beings, effectively blur the line between the real world and fantastical alternate worlds, and destabilise traditional binary classification systems that distinguish humanity, and Culture, from Nature. Though the presence of trees is often peripheral to the main narrative action, their representation is necessary within the fantasy trope. Their consistent inclusion within fantasy texts of the twentieth century demonstrates an enduring arboreal legacy that cannot be disregarded in its contemporary relevance, whether they are represented individually or in collective forests. The purpose of my dissertation is to conduct a study of various prominent fantasy texts of the twentieth century, including the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert Holdstock, Diana Wynne Jones, Natalie Babbitt, and J.K. Rowling. In scrutinising these texts, and drawing on insights offered by liminal, ecocritical, ecofeminist, mythological and psychological theorists, I identify the primary function of trees within fantasy narratives as liminal: what Victor Turner identifies as a ‘betwixt and between’ state (1991:95) where binaries are suspended in favour of embracing potentiality. This liminality is constituted by three central dimensions: the ecological, the mythological, and the psychological. Each dimension informs the relationship between the arboreal as grounded in reality, and represented in fantasy. Trees, as literary and cinematic arboreal totems are positioned within fantasy narratives in such a way as to emphasise an underlying call to bio-conservatorship, to enable a connection to a larger scope of cultural expectation, and to act as a means through which human self-awareness is developed.
English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This chapter considers the final stage of the Ciceronian tradition: the American founding. Insofar as the American founding is influenced by John Locke, it is indirectly indebted to Cicero. However, John Adams and James Wilson recognize the profoundly Ciceronian character of American liberal republicanism. Both argue that the prevailing understandings of natural law, justice, liberty, and what it means to be a republic derive from Cicero’s formulation. Moreover, Adams and Wilson see the American experiment as proving Cicero right, that a republic tethered to natural law could be realized. They also see the American Founding as contributing its own innovation to this tradition: written constitutionalism. The self-conscious writing of a regime’s constitution enables the principles of a natural law republic to be fixed and formalized in a way that Cicero’s original formulation did not provide for.

Abstract These three songs have a wonderful freedom and naturalness, and the rhythm of the texts is most delicately and expertly handled. The words fit the music supremely well. As in all good vocal writing, there is physical enjoyment to be had in the action of enunciating and, in some cases, lingering over the expressive syllables of the resonant texts. The whole effect is fresh and exuberant. The drama flows with the music, as do the dynamics which are entirely appropriate at all times. The vocal range is comfortable for the singer, causing no strain or pinching on high-lying words. The musical idiom is straightforward and it has a strong individual character although the composer’s touch is light. The piano figurations are attractively varied.