Michael Gilmore – författare

In recent years, as the centrality of race and gender has been established in literary studies, class has often been seen as a crude and reductionist concept. For this volume, the editors have commissioned essays arguing for the continuing vitality as well as the energizing problematics of the category of class. The book's introduction addresses the ways that the concept of class has been employed in both literary and historical analysis, and the importance of a renewed interest in class in the current trend toward historicism. The first section of the book restores class to its moment of inception as both a theoretical construct and an objectively descriptive category. In the second section, the contributors test some of the general propositions set forth by examining the categorization of class as itself a history and a problematic. The text concludes by asking how the category of class can enrich and complicate our response to specific literary texts.

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that America and England are two cultures separated by a common language. In this innovative attempt to place the movies and theater in the larger context of American and English cultural differences, Michael Gilmore demonstrates that the most interesting way to understand the distinctions between the two cultures is by looking closely at each country's favorite art form. Differences in the Dark is a fresh, wide-ranging look at the meaning of America's fascination with movies and movie stars, and the way the soul of Britain is reflected in its tenacious love affair with the stage. Gilmore shows how the characteristic features of American experience are inscribed in how movies, the quintessentially American idiom, are made and viewed. In the private, solitary nature of film-viewing (in contrast to the more communal, interactive experience of seeing a play), and in American actors' tendency to play themselves, not their characters, from role to role, American movies express a strong sense of individualism and a tendency to escape the limits of time for the freedom of space.An art form built of sophisticated technology and cutting and splicing of time and space, Gilmore argues, resonates deeply in the country of reinvented lives and wide-open spaces. At the same time, the English tradition of class and collective memory is perfectly served by an art form that requires disciplined memorization and the submergence of the individual within a role that, in many cases, existed before the actor was born. Unlike the mechanical products of Hollywood or Disneyland, drama by its very nature cannot be mass-produced. Bringing together such diverse topics as theme parks, realism, and social class, as well as the role of Jewish immigrants in the making of Hollywood (and their virtual exclusion from Great Britain) and the connection between the movies and the African-American community, Differences in the Dark is one of the most original and engaging cross-cultural studies to appear in many years.

Most studies of bacterial or fungal infectious diseases focus separately on the pathogenic microbe, the host response, or the characterization of therapeutic compounds. Compartmentalization of pathogenesis-related research into an analysis of the “pathogen”, the “host,” or the “antimicrobial compound” has largely been dictated by the lack of model systems in which all of these approaches can be used simultaneously, as well as by the traditional view that microbiology, immunology, and chemical biology and pharmacology are separate disciplines. An increasing number of workers from different fields have turned to insects, fish, worms and other model hosts as facile, ethically expedient, relatively simple, and inexpensive hosts to model a variety of human infectious diseases and to study host responses and innate immunity. Because many of these hosts are genetically tractable, they can be used in conjunction with an appropriate pathogen to facilitate the discovery of novel features of the host innate immune response.This book provides a series of reports from the 1st International Conference on Model Hosts. This first of its kind meeting focused on invertebrate, vertebrate and amoeboid systems used for the study of host-pathogen interactions, virulence and immunity, as well as on the relevance of these pathogenesis systems and mammalian models. Importantly, a common, fundamental set of molecular mechanisms is employed by a significant number of microbial pathogens against a widely divergent array of metazoan hosts. Moreover, the evolutionarily conserved immune responses of these model hosts have contributed important insights to our understanding of the innate immune response of mammals.This book provides a series of reports from the 1st International Conference on Model Hosts. This first of its kind meeting focused on invertebrate,vertebrate and amoeboid systems used for the study of host-pathogen interactions, virulence and immunity, as well as on the relevance of these pathogenesis systems and mammalian models. Importantly, a common, fundamental set of molecular mechanisms is employed by a significant number of microbial pathogens against a widely divergent array of metazoan hosts. Moreover, the evolutionarily conserved immune responses of these model hosts have contributed important insights to our understanding of the innate immune response of mammals.