Books on the topic 'Dominance hierarchy'

The concept of the literary canon is one of the most debated and controversial in the western intellectual tradition. This book offers ten contributions by Italian scholars of Anglo-American culture addressing the way in which the concept of the literary canon holds out against areas traditionally considered as external or extraneous to it. The essays range over different topics: the etymological analysis of the term "canon"; the relations between canon and performativity; paraliterature – a universe populated by non-hierarchic genres; the relations between post-colonial literature and the canon; postmodern biofiction; studies on translation and finally gay and lesbian literature. The book ends with a meditation on the innovations wrought on the Anglo-American canon by the virtual world of Internet and with a reading proposal originating from a different area of literary studies. Taken as a whole, the intention of the book is to pave the way to democratisation and pluralism in literary studies, going beyond the limitations set by the traditional scale of values of the "western canon". It proposes a frequentation of the geographical and cultural borderlines and hence of the areas of resistance that such borderlines pose to the dominant conceptual hierarchies within and around us, enabling us to glimpse an original future for literature and for western culture in a broader sense.

La accesibilidad de un término para participar en una operación gramatical como la asignación de Sujeto está condicionada por restricciones jerárquicas, funcionales e intrínsecas que favorecerán la asignación de la función de Sujeto al primer argumento, resultando en una oración activa, o a un término distinto al primer argumento, obteniéndose una construcción pasiva. Estas restricciones se representan en forma de jerarquías de carácter tipológico cuya relevancia ha sido enfatizada tanto en la teoría de la Gramática Funcional (Dik, 1978, 1989) como en la Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (Hengeveld y Mackenzie, 2008, 2011) y cuya validez no solo está demostrada en estudios realizados entre lenguas, sino también en el caso de lenguas individuales al permitir determinar qué categorías son estadísticamente más frecuentes y consecuentemente menos marcadas en una lengua en particular. A través de un estudio cuantitativo y multidimensional basado en el análisis de un corpus escrito formado por oraciones activas transitivas y pasivas en lengua inglesa, estudiamos la incidencia directa de siete jerarquías de prioridad en la selección de Sujeto: Jerarquía de Funciones Semánticas, de Definición, de Persona, de Animacidad, de Número, de Entidades/ Abstracción, de Predicación y la Jerarquía de Términos. Los resultados demuestran que se observan preferencias de unas jerarquías sobre otras a la hora de determinar la accesibilidad de los términos a la función sintáctica de Sujeto. Basándonos en los niveles de frecuencia y de dominancia registrados entre las jerarquías, presentamos una nueva jerarquía que predice qué prioridades son más dominantes en esta operación gramatical. Estas prioridades se agrupan y ordenan jerárquicamente en tres grandes bloques atendiendo al tipo de restricciones que expresan: restricciones relacionadas con la complejidad estructural y movilidad sintáctica del término; restricciones intrínsecas del término asociadas con operadores gramaticales; y restricciones atribuibles al referente del término. Accessibility to the Subject function in the English language: functional, intrinsic and hierarchical restrictions The accessibilty of terms in grammatical operations such as Subject assignment is constrained by hierarchical, functional and intrinsic restrictions that will either trigger the assignment of the Subject function to a first argument resulting in an active sentence, or to a non-first argument, which will produce a passive sentence. These restrictions are represented in the form of typological hierarchies whose relevance has been stressed both in the theory of Functional Grammar (Dik, 1978, 1989) and in Functional Discourse Grammmar (Hengeveld y Mackenzie, 2008, 2011), and whose validity has been tested not only in studies across languages but also in the case of individual languages since they are able to determine what categories are statistically more frequent and, as a result, less marked in a particular language. Through a quantitative and multidimensional study based on a written corpus of active and passive sentences in English, we explore the direct impact of seven priority hierarchies on Subject selection: the Semantic Function Hierarchy, the Definiteness Hierarchy, the Person Hierarchy, the Animacy Hierarchy, the Number Hierarchy, the Entities/Abstraction Hierarchy, the Predication Hierarchy and the Term Hierarchy. The results reveal that preferences of some hierarchies over others can be observed when determining the accessibility of terms to the Subject function. Taking as a basis the frequency and dominance levels registered for the different hierarchies, we present a new hierarchy that predicts what priorities are more dominant in this grammatical operation. These priorites are grouped and ordered in a hierarchical fashion into three big blocks according to the type of constraints they express: restrictions related to the structural complexity and syntactic mobility of the term; intrinsic restrictions of the term associated with grammatical operators; and restrictions related to the referent of the term.

This chapter discusses theories of the prison from the 1930s to the present and the contribution of feminist scholarship to understanding power relations in criminal punishment. The central issue in this literature is how imprisonment shapes identities and inequalities, including gender, class, and race. Feminist scholars show that prison regimes impose restrictive gender norms that encourage normative gender expression and disadvantage those who do not comply. The penal system is also shaped by gender stereotypes about crime. Women are often seen as in need of protection from male criminals by the state-legitimated violence of male police and prison guards, which can further subordinate women while reinforcing violent forms of masculinity. Intersectional feminist analysis also demonstrates that prisons uphold class and racial hierarchy, which particularly harms women of color. This literature raises questions about how effectively prison systems protect women, and suggests that prisons may reinforce male dominance.

The executive branch in Western democracies has been handed a virtually impossible task. Expected to ‘imperially’ direct the life of the nation through thick and thin, it is concurrently required to be subservient to legislation meted out by a sovereign parliament. Drawing on a general argument from constitutional theory that prioritizes dispersal of power over concepts of hierarchy, the book argues that the tension between the political dominance of the executive branch and its submission to law is maintained by the adoption of various forms of fuzziness, under which a guise of legality masks the absence of substantive limitation of power. Under this 'internal tension' model, the executive branch is concurrently subservient to law and dominant over it, while concepts of substantive legality are compromised. Drawing on legal and political science research, the book classifies and analyses thirteen forms of fuzziness, ranging from open-ended or semi-written constitutions to unapplied legislation. The study of this unavoidable yet problematic feature of the public sphere is addressed descriptively and normatively. Adding detailed examples from two fields of law, emergency and air-pollution law, in two systems (the UK and the US), the book ends with a call for raising the threshold of judicial review, grounded in theories of participatory and deliberative democracy. This innovative book, concerned with an area that has been surprisingly under-researched on a general level beyond extensive studies of national executives, offers a theoretical foundation that should ground all analyses of the arguably most powerful branch of modern government.

This chapter examines administrative rationalism, a discourse of environmental problem solving which captures the dominant governmental response to the onset of environmental crisis. Administrative rationalism emphasizes the role of the expert rather than the citizen or producer/consumer in social problem solving, and which stresses social relationships of hierarchy rather than equality or competition. The chapter first considers the manifestations of administrative rationalism in various institutions and practices, including environmental impact assessment, planning, and rationalistic policy analysis techniques, before discussing the discourse analysis of administrative rationalism. It then explains the justification of administrative rationalism and problems of administrative rationalism, caused in part by its association with bureaucracy. It also explores the implications of the transition from government to governance for administrative rationalism.

The dominant view amongst contemporary analytic metaphysicians working on notions of metaphysical dependence and the overarching structure of reality is one according to which that reality is hierarchically structured (the hierarchy thesis), well-founded (the fundamentality thesis), populated by merely contingent fundamentalia (the contingency thesis), and consistent (the consistency thesis). The introduction to this volume addresses the reasons commonly offered in defence of these theses and evaluates their merits. If it is correct that these are the core commitments of the metaphysical foundationalist, then it is proposed that the view is not nearly on such firm footing as one might suppose. The chapter also argues that the alternatives to this view—metaphysical infinitism and metaphysical coherentism—ought to be taken more seriously.

This introductory chapter offers a brief overview on the sources of international law. It first highlights the importance of and the controversies surrounding the sources of international law, touching upon the nature, legality, normativity, and legitimacy of international law, as well as the sites and tools of its contestation. The chapter then turns to the historical origins of the sources of international law, asserting that the sources of international law are in fact a product of the Enlightenment project and, arguably, of the liberal doctrine of politics. Finally, the chapter takes a look at how the dominant adherence to the sources of international law has been accompanied by constant contestation among international lawyers about their origins, criteria, functions, unity, and hierarchy. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the following chapters.

Many of the world's states—from Algeria to Ireland to the United States—are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. This book offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation, focusing on the internal balance of power among nationalist groups, who cooperate with each other to establish a new state while simultaneously competing to lead it. The most powerful groups push to achieve states while they are in position to rule them, whereas weaker groups unlikely to gain the spoils of office are likely to become spoilers, employing risky, escalatory violence to forestall victory while they improve their position in the movement hierarchy. Hegemonic movements with one dominant group are therefore more likely to achieve statehood than internally competitive, fragmented movements due to their greater pursuit of victory and lesser use of counterproductive violence.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Rather than applying a pre-given philosophical framework to literature and visual culture, Becoming Human provides a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises, interventions, and implications of these forms and traditions. Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into the dominant conception of “the human” but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining a black person as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. In complementary but highly distinct ways, the literary and visual texts in Becoming Human articulate being (human) in a manner that neither relies on animal denigration nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). What emerges from this questioning is a radically unruly sense of being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”

The prolific Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) published books on natural philosophy as well as stories, plays, poems, orations, allegories, and letters. Her mature philosophical system offered a unique vitalist materialist theory of Nature as composed of a continuous, non-atomistic, perceiving, knowing matter. In contrast to the dominant philosophical thinking of her day, Cavendish argued that all matter has free will and can choose whether or not to follow Nature’s rules. The Well-Ordered Universe explores the development of Cavendish’s natural philosophy from the atomism of her 1653 Poems, and Fancies to the vitalist materialism of her 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy and argues that her natural philosophy, her medical theories, and her social and political philosophy are all informed by an underlying concern with order, regularity, and rule-following. This focus on order reveals interesting connections among apparently disparate elements of Cavendish’s philosophical program, including her views on gender, on animals and the environment, and on sickness and health. Focusing on the role of order in Cavendish’s philosophy also helps reveal some key differences between her natural philosophy and her social and political philosophy, where Cavendish tended to be quite conservative. Cavendish thought that humans’ special desire for public recognition often leads to an unruly ambition, causing humans to disrupt society in ways not seen in the rest of Nature. The Well-Ordered Universe thus defends reading Cavendish as a royalist who endorsed absolute monarchy and a rigid social hierarchy for maintaining order in human society.

The book studies narrative pluralism in the Commedia by Dante Alighieri with the aim of opening up the poem to alternatives to the dominant narrative embedded in the text, which it terms ‘Dante’s masterplot’. This is the teleological trajectory that subordinates the past to the revisionist gaze of a new endpoint. The introduction analyses the masterplot’s workings and its role in the interpretation of the poem, documenting its overwhelming influence on readings of the Commedia. The body of the book then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its hegemony, which are enacted by (i) paradoxes, (ii) alternative endings and parallel lives, and (iii) the future. Paradoxes neutralize the teleological hierarchy and thus allow Dante to represent contradictory ideas and experiences; through counterfactuals and parallel episodes, Dante creates an affective space in the text, where narrative necessity and moral normativity are momentarily suspended; lastly, the future constitutes teleology’s blind spot and thus exposes the poem’s, and its author’s, vulnerability to time and circumstance. By focusing on non-linear modes of storytelling or taking teleological linearity to its extreme consequences, the monograph questions interpretations of the Commedia that favour one normative master truth, and highlights instead the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions which, due to the masterplot’s influence, are often overlooked. The book concludes with a proposal that, alongside traditional notions of Dante’s plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante’s narrative pluralism can and should play a key role in readings of the Commedia.