In the second chapter, on Jewish GDR identities, we encounter a Holocaust survivor memoir by Fred Wander in the context of a repressive GDR state apparatus that frequently sought to conceal Jewish identity. Reading Der siebente Brunnen (a novel first published in 1971 but reissued in 2005) through the lens of prominent GDR writer Christa Wolf’s commentary shows how Jewish voices became nevertheless distinct, even in a suppressed form, in contexts of religious denial and censorship. A brief recap from the previous chapter of Benjamin Stein’s post-1990, paratextually wrought vision of the GDR shows a divided memory between Eastern and Western rehearsals of migration and authenticity in Holocaust memory. In Barbara Honigmann’s works, spanning pre-1990 and post-1990 Holocaust memory discourse, a self-conscious departure from GDR history and memory carves out a strikingly new migratory space for both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Holocaust remembrances. Finally, the family memory of Jews being silenced by GDR doctrine provides a retrospective narrative of female and Jewish emancipation in Julia Franck’s newest novel, showing the future of Jewish remembrance in post-GDR Berlin.

We introduce ray optics and show how to derive the eikonal equation from the Schrödinger and Maxwell equations. This is the first step needed to derive the radiative transfer equation. The Hamilton description of optical rays and the Wigner function are detailed.

Māori health models have introduced cultural philosophies or principles into an otherwise monocultural Aotearoa New Zealand healthcare landscape. These models seek to extend our thinking and actions around the micro-, meso- and macro-level influences of hauora Māori and to address topics that reflect Indigenous Māori health aspirations. They each represent pathways towards mauri ora, including improving the quality of engagement with Māori when they are accessing healthcare services. As guaranteed in the nation’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the protection of hauora Māori is a health equity imperative. However, persistent disparities in health outcomes between Māori and non-Māori continue to demonstrate inequities in the social determinants of health as well as unequal access to healthcare services and safe, high-quality care. In addition to biomedical, social and political factors that shape Indigenous health inequities, cultural factors also play a significant role. The challenge for health professionals and the wider healthcare system is to include, or actively engage with, Māori cultural understandings and practical applications.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ equivocal position within the American literary canon, examining both the institutional challenges to his inclusion and the theoretical strategies scholars have used to argue for his legitimacy. Sean Bolton traces critical attempts to align Burroughs with modernism, postmodernism, and even a proposed “amodernist” tradition, while also acknowledging the persistent difficulty of assimilating his work into stable frameworks of interpretation. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s aesthetics of canonicity, poststructuralist theory, and his own concept of “narrative revolution,” Bolton contends that Burroughs’ formal innovations – particularly the cut-up method and fragmented subjectivities – both exemplify and exceed existing literary categories. Ultimately, the chapter questions whether Burroughs needs the canon at all, suggesting that his enduring cultural influence may rest precisely on his resistance to assimilation. For readers and scholars alike, Burroughs remains an outsider by design, a figure whose work continues to provoke, disturb, and inspire on its own uncompromising terms.

This chapter shows how, under certain circumstances, a social planner problem offers the same outcomes as a competitive equilibrium. This fact is useful as competitive equilibria are complicated objects to work with. If a social planner problem yields the same optimal choices as the competitive equilibrium, then it makes sense to work from a planner’s perspective. The chapter emphasizes the conditions that guarantee this equivalence holds, and introduces a working example that remains useful throughout the book.

We detail some of the theoretical aspects of spin glass theory while keeping in mind its photonic applications. The derivations reported are specialized to the Sherrington–Kirkpatrick model, representing mode pairs as spins. Beyond the optical interpretation, the technical aspects follow well-established treatments reported in books of statistical mechanics. The phase diagram and various steps of replica symmetry breaking are discussed.

Extending Calvin and Perception’s argument to the level of form, this chapter asks how the vivid and severe stylistic features of Calvin’s prose address the imaginative and thus perceptual dysfunction Calvin attributes to his readers. By connecting Renaissance rhetorical theory to early modern premises about language’s ability to create vivid phantasms upon the imagination, it presents Calvin’s “straightedge prose” as an intervention in unconscious perception – a way not only to persuade the reader of doctrinal content, but to counteract delusion while stimulating the accurate perception of accommodations that elicits piety.

This chapter discusses how corpus stylistics relates to other fields in terms of methodologies and explanatory purposes. It proposes a specific take on corpus stylistics, which makes it possible to both focus on meanings in individual texts and identify features that are shared across texts. This approach brings considerations of register and style together, and it has clear relevance to literary scholarship. To illustrate this kind of corpus stylistics, the chapter presents Mahlberg (2013) as a case study on patterns of characterization in works by Charles Dickens. Mahlberg (2013) addresses the following question: In a corpus of texts by Dickens, can textual patterns be identified that have discernible functions in the creation of fictional worlds? The study uses the concept of local textual functions to combine corpus linguistic and literary perspectives in the analysis of n-grams, and it proposes a novel approach to characterization in Dickens. What this case study illustrates for corpus stylistics more widely is how the application of relative basic corpus linguistic methods can support the creation of a coherent theoretical approach to explain meanings in texts.

Since the 19th century, the U.S. military has grown increasingly adept at saving the lives of troops injured in combat. Yet rising survivability rates, coupled with social attitudes linking disability to diminished manhood and economic dependency, contributed to a perceived national crisis about what came to be known as the “problem of the disabled veteran” (PDV). What is U.S. federal policy toward disabled veterans? What is its aim—to keep veterans alive or to help them reintegrate into postwar society? And how might the U.S. military curb disability in future conflicts? Drawing upon works in disability studies, military history, and war and society studies, this chapter surveys the evolution of U.S. efforts to solve the PDV, from the colonial era to the present. In World War I, when the term originated, anxieties about war disability prompted the federal government to embrace the policy of veterans’ rehabilitation. In later years, the military would explore other ways to limit U.S. wartime casualties, disabled or otherwise. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the PDV stems from the United States’ failure to come to terms with the violence and trauma of military conflict.

Chapter 1 reconstitutes Cuban and US history from 1898 to the 1970s, with sexuality at the center, focusing on the New Deal, Cold War, Red/Lavender Scare, first two Cuban Republics, and the Cuban Revolution. It tells the story of how the Cuban homosexual acquired a specific meaning associated with the prerevolutionary experience of US imperialism.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ lifelong obsession with disease – particularly cancer and viruses – as a central metaphor in his critique of power, control, and modernity. Polina Mackay and James Mackay argue that Burroughs’ engagement with medicine, from his early syphilis diagnosis to his interest in Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories, shaped his representation of illness as both literal and ideological contagion. From Junky to Naked Lunch, the cut-up texts, and Blade Runner: A Movie, Burroughs portrays medical institutions and bureaucracies not as healing forces but as agents of repression, manipulation, and decay. The chapter shows how Burroughs’ writing fuses Reichian thought, alternative medicine, and paranoid systems theory into a distinctive epidemiology of language, addiction, and social control. While his metaphoric conflation of disease and power reveals the limits of postwar biopolitics, it also risks collapsing critical inquiry into conspiracy. Ultimately, Burroughs’ viral imagination oscillates between incisive cultural diagnosis and reactionary anxiety, offering a vision of medicine as both metaphor and battleground.