Regendering modernism: the woman artist in Irish women’s fiction

The period between 1922 and 1960 is often characterized as one of social and cultural stagnation in Ireland. Irish fiction was dominated by an avant-garde writing in exile and the local dominance of the short story. Attention to the non-canonical fiction of women during the period, however, reveals a literature that exceeds this paradigm. Meaney focuses on two novels, The Troubled House by Rosamond Jacob and As Music and Splendour by Kate O’Brien, which both feature women as artists. This figure provides in both cases a mode of combining a commitment to narrative realism with a self-reflexive exploration of the role of art, thus evading the fictional polarities of the period. The woman artist as fictional character also offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics and art. The linkage between sexual dissidence and aesthetic freedom is a persistent trope of modernism in the Irish context, even if it is often critically submerged under the figure of exile. Both The Troubled House and As Music and Splendour might be considered to be supplements to Irish modernism in the Derridean sense, ‘an originary necessity and an essential accident’. Through the figure of the woman artist, both of these marginal novels transgress the configurations of gender at the heart of that modernism’s aesthetic project. Both link transgressive sexuality with artistic production. In doing so they posit a very different relationship between sexuality, aesthetics and politics.     

Error Reduction, Patient Safety and Institutional Ethics Committees

Institutional ethics committees remain largely absent from the literature on error reduction and patient safety. In this paper, the author endeavors to fill the gap. As noted in the Hastings Center's recent report, "Promoting Patient Safety," the occurrence of medical error involves complex web of multiple factors. Human misstep is certainly one such factor, but not the only one. This paper builds on the Hastings Center's report in arguing that institutional ethics committees ought to play an integral role in the transformation of a "culture of blame" to a "culture of safety" in healthcare delivery.     

Predicting Phenotype from Genotype: Normal Pigmentation*

Abstract: Genetic information in forensic studies is largely limited to CODIS data and the ability to match samples and assign them to an individual. However, there are circumstances, in which a given DNA sample does not match anyone in the CODIS database, and no other information about the donor is available. In this study, we determined 75 SNPs in 24 genes (previously implicated in human or animal pigmentation studies) for the analysis of single‐ and multi‐locus associations with hair, skin, and eye color in 789 individuals of various ethnic backgrounds. Using multiple linear regression modeling, five SNPs in five genes were found to account for large proportions of pigmentation variation in hair, skin, and eyes in our across‐population analyses. Thus, these models may be of predictive value to determine an individual’s pigmentation type from a forensic sample, independent of ethnic origin.     

Frederic Eggleston on International Relations and Australia's Role in the World

Frederic Eggleston was a prominent public intellectual whose reflections on international relations constitute one of the most important records by an Australian liberal thinker during the first half of twentieth century. Eggleston wrote extensively, and hopefully, about the capacity of international organisations to discipline the behaviour of nation-states; but his hopes were tempered in his writing also about the descent to wars, including the early Cold War period in which his support for American foreign policy grew stronger. His liberal outlook was also informed by his sense of Australia's Britishness, Australia's location in the Pacific, and Australia's future relations with Asian countries.     

Lessons from the Sustainability Movement: Toward An Integrative Decision-Making Framework for Nanotechnology

The author argues that bioethicists must develop alternative approaches to facilitate the study of the conditions for the responsible development of nanotechnologies. Proponents of "sustainability" have developed a useful model to integrate multiple perspectives into the evaluation of the impact of technologies on global ecological integrity under conditions of uncertainty.