On the life of Nund-Rishi, Nund-Rishi, Muslim saint from Jammu and Kashmir and Kashmiri poet.

The authors explore the relation between the way different family firms are named, and the shareholder value impact of these firms’ new product introductions. Using an event study of 1,294 product introduction announcements of 107 publicly listed U.S. family firms, the authors find that the presence of the founding family’s name as part of a family firm’s name acts as a valuable firm resource, increasing the abnormal stock returns surrounding the firm’s new product introductions. Superior returns to family-named firms’ new (...) product introductions are partially mediated by these firms’ history of ethical product-related behavior: family-named firms, particularly those with corporate branding, and those wherein a founding family member holds the CEO or chairman position, are more likely to exhibit a history of avoiding such product-related controversies as product safety issues, and deceptive advertising. The authors highlight the managerial and theoretical contributions of this research. (shrink)

This paper identifies brand age as an important factor in consumers’ brand evaluations following unethical firm behavior. In two experiments, we assess the effect of brand age on three types of brand evaluations: perceived quality, brand credibility, and behavioral intentions following a brand crisis. The findings suggest that disclosing an older brand’s age can not only improve consumers’ brand evaluations in general, but can also provide a buffering effect when the firm is involved in unethical behavior. Moreover, the relationship between (...) brand age and consumers’ post-crisis intentions is mediated by perceived brand credibility. By exploring consumers’ attitudes following the most common firm response strategies, this research also identifies a boundary condition of the mitigating effect of brand age. Several significant implications for practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

Speakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way and whether they use space in a contrastive way when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ overall (...) tendency to use the same hand = 13.12, p =.001, 95% CI [.31,.43], d = 2.53) and same location = 7.47, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: = 4.19, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

For over four decades, the topic of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation has attracted considerable attention from the fields of economics, finance, management, public policy, law, and business ethics. As scholarly interest in CEO pay has increased, so has public concern about the ethics of high CEO pay. Despite growing interest and pressure among the public and government to reduce CEO pay, it has continued to increase. Using a multi-method design incorporating a pilot study, two online experiments, and an event (...) study, we investigate the impact of CEO pay on consumer purchase intent and find that this negative relationship is magnified under conditions of brand crisis. We also find that the negative interaction of high CEO pay and brand crisis on purchase intent is more negative when the brand has strong equity. Finally, when the CEO is awarded high pay while the firm they manage is undergoing a brand crisis, consumers lose trust in the firm’s brand which reduces consumer purchase intent. This research provides insight on how governance decisions can impact consumer perceptions of corporate brands and consumer behavior, with implications for public policy leaders, boards of directors, CEOs, and Chief Marketing Officers regarding how to manage and message CEO pay. (shrink)

We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of Rāmacandra–Guṇacandra’s theory of aesthetics in light of the Kashmiri rasa ideology and demonstrates that the Jain authors offer a new and original conceptualization of aesthetic experience, in which the spectator remains cognitively active in the course of watching the drama. In their model, the relationship between rasa and pleasure is mediated by a cognitive error, and the feeling of pleasure does not coincide with the savoring of rasa but emerges after the savoring of (...) rasa ceases. This paper argues that Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra demystify the Kashmiri theory of aesthetics by identifying affinities between the lived world and the fictive world of drama and by rendering the regular means of knowledge, such as inference and memory, as instrumental for the experience of rasa. It further suggests that this new conceptualization, in which pleasure is contingent upon the dissolution of illusion, may have facilitated the development of playwrighting among Jain monks from the twelfth century on. (shrink)

Child Labour in Kashmiri Society: A Socio-human Rights Study The Constitution of India guarantees fundamental rights and the full freedom to enjoy childhood. In spite of that millions of children are being put to arduous work for short and narrow gains. By 1989, the standards concerning children were brought together in a single legal instrument agreed to by the international community. It unambiguously spelt out the rights to which every child is entitled, regardless of place of birth, descent, sex, (...) religion, or social origin. A number of aspects, such as gender, family background, cultural acceptance, issues of health and recreation, the legal aspect and so on, have been covered. The life worlds of working children, legal protection to children from exploitation and the human rights perspective of child labour is the main focus of this article. (shrink)

Formulating a definition of ‘good’ poetry is, and should be, impossible. Yet women's poetry of the First World War seems generally to have been condemned as ‘bad’. It inspires an ambiguous response from readers who recognize the value of its historical, social and psychological content, but shudder at the limitations of its form. However, I believe that a much more fruitful reading of these ‘recalcitrant’ texts is possible. It is not my intention to deny either their problematic nature, or the (...) diversity and complexity of male responses to the war, but rather to emphasize that women's experience of the First World War was radically different from that of men, and we should not therefore be constrained by the traditional parameters of 1914–18 criticism when we explore these works. This article examines a selection of this poetry in the light of the psychological processes of grief and bereavement, and in so doing indicates other areas in which constructive readings of these texts might be made. Why do we expect the articulation of a radically new and uniformly consistent poetic voice from what was a large and diverse group of women? The expectations of modernism ironically have created a literary ‘mainstream’ out of a selection of experimental, and largely male, writing. I hope to show that the ‘failure’ of these women to conform to our textual ‘great expectations’ is irrelevant. The single most characteristic feature of these women's experience of war was isolation. Their position had neither the homogeneity of the trenches, nor the intense intellectualism of experimental circles. Predominantly middle class, alienated by absence and bereavement, they attempted to articulate the unprecedented nature of their experience. That their experiments were not wholly successful is perhaps indicative of the near impossibility of the task they undertook. (shrink)

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif. : Stone Bridge Press, 1994.

The likeness of sound between rhyming words is arbitrary, but words have meanings. Thus rhyme schemes carry an implicit meaning over against the explicit meaning of the lines in which they occur. The use of "death" and "breath" and other rhymes in Swinburne illustrates this duality, especially in his great sonnet addressed to Death. This prompts a discussion of the role of meter and rhyme in the physiology of dreams and memory, the human propensity to make rules, translations of Dante, (...) the comic rhymes of Noel Coward, and the real meaning of Seinfeld. (shrink)

The poet Tony Harrison has created work for the stage and television, and even assumed the role of poet/journalist, writing newspaper reports in verse from war-torn Bosnia. His work is underpinned by a belief in the political nature of the act of writing. He has generally attracted a non-working-class readership; nevertheless, he has never abandoned his quest for a ‘democratic’ poetry. Much of his work has taken the form of a poetry of immediate response to current events. He has also (...) been insistent, at times, on where his poetry should be published. When he wrote ‘Initial Illumination’ for The Guardian, for example, he argued it should not appear in the ‘literary’ section, but on the news pages. Harrison sees himself as a ‘war poet. He uses his position as a public intellectual to engage in a struggle against dominant discourses and ways of seeing and to bring audiences to confront the horror of war. The article focuses in particular on his Gulf War poem, ‘A Cold Coming’, in which he uses strategies such as ekphrasis, to position the reader as a kind of ‘secondary witness’ of a war that had been turned by the media into a distant, anaesthetised spectacle. (shrink)

There are two problems discussed in the article. The first one is the phenomenon of mass literature and semiotic approach to it. According to Lotman, mass literature of the 20th (and 21st) centuries is not so much an object of semiotics as of sociology. However, it is possible to consider mass literature of earlier times as an object of semiotics of culture. Lotman discusses Russian mass literature of the 18th and 19th centuries as such an object in the article “Massovaya (...) literatura kak istoriko-kulturnaya problema”. Considering mass literature a dynamic factor of the semiotic system, Lotman distinguishes its main features: a high degree of automatization and syndrome of retardedness. In the second part of the article the author discusses the phenomenon of mass poetry in contemporary Lithuania. This kind of mass literature is much more similar to the phenomenon discussed by Lotman than to the mass literature of the postmodernist epoch. Lithuanian mass poetry employs the codes of national romanticism (the end of 19th century) and considers itself an ignored part of high culture. This sort of poetry unknown to Western societies exhibits archaising tendencies in the modern postsoviet culture. (shrink)

Poets, like other men, have their speculative moods. Some poets have been widely read in the literature of philosophy and have wrestled continuously with the intellectual problems of their times. From Euripides to Mr. Eliot large expanses of dialectical argument have appeared in verse, and in our own tongue Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth and many other supreme writers have questioned the semblance of nature and mind, and have sought to trace the ideal forms of reality. Men of letters in every (...) generation have naturally discussed the problems of knowledge and existence and have offered emphatic opinions on them. The views of poets have been accorded particular honour and attention. Illustrious poets have declared that poetry opens a more penetrating road to truth than that which is provided by science or academic philosophy. Certain modern critics repeat these claims. “The mind of man,” writes one, “has a knowledge of truth beyond the near-truths of science and society. Poetry tells us this truth.” I will not pause here to inquire whether anything of value can be observed of poetry in general any more than can be stated of prose in general. Nor do I wish to enter into the subject of poetic truth. The questions I desire to raise concern assumptions about the philosophical ideas of poets. Recent criticism has shown a notable tendency to fasten on these ideas. The tendency revives the practice of the nineteenth century when theologians, philosophers and literary thinkers were fond of expounding the rational systems of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. The present vogue of this prosaic treatment of poetry may be due to a strong recoil from the literary fashion prevalent a generation ago which minimized the intellectual feature in the art of poetry. (shrink)

The design process in Kashmiri carpet weaving is a distributed process encompassing a number of actors and artifacts. These include a designer called naqash who creates the design on graphs, and a coder called talim-guru who encodes that design in a specific notation called talim which is deciphered and interpreted by the weavers to weave the design. The technological interventions over the years have influenced these artifacts considerably and triggered major changes in the practice, from heralding profound cognitive accomplishments (...) in manually driven design process causing major alterations in the overall structure of the practice. The recent intervention is by the digital technology: on the one hand, it has brought precision and speedy processing in the design process, and on the other, it has eliminated some of the crucial actors from the practice. This paper, which forms part of a larger study on the situated and distributed cognitive process in Kashmiri carpet-weaving practice, describes the technological makeover of the design artifacts involved in this practice over the years and their resultant cognitive impact on the design process as well as on the practice. (shrink)

Interpretations of Plato’s consideration of poetry often see his position either as a rejection or an admittance of only a certain kind. This article offers a more complex analysis: questions concerning the nature of justice and poetry should be taken as mutually illuminating inquiries. This constitutes Plato’s hermeneutics which shows how understanding poetry ideally effects a metanoia (new understanding) that requires the harmony between ethical deliberation and narrative self-understanding. The dialogue is a mimesis of this process, and the conclusion in (...) Book X does not represent Plato’s final position but the trajectory of the dialogue when such a metanoia is incomplete. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to familiarize the Polish reader with Poets and the Poetry of Poland, the first extensive anthology of the Polish literature published in English in the United States by Paweł Sobolewski. Particular emphasis was placed on the characteristics of this work, recreating the traces of reception of this work and showing the most important sources on which the author relied. The presented article also points out the importance of Sobolewski’s literary and cultural activity, as he (...) initiated multifaceted, often pioneering projects, becoming one of the leading Polish diaspora activists in the 19th century’s United States, also active in the American community. This paper was partially based on the source materials collected by Mieczysław Haiman at the Polish Museum in America, to which the access was possible thanks to a Kościuszko Foundation scholarship. The historical analysis of the sources based on the descriptive-historical paradigm was adopted as the basic tool. Noteworthy, the Poets and Poetry of Poland was the crown work of Sobolewski’s many-year mission, related to the desire to make Americans familiar with the Polish culture and to present it in representative forms. The anthology, including the translations of the works of 60 authors from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, gave an insight into the multi- faceted recognition of the biographies and literary works of eminent Polish poets, mostly belonging to the times of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Despite the strong inspiration from Rycharski’s textbook and other sources, the final shape of the volume was influenced by the editor’s personal experiences, his reading preferences and contact with the authors. The selection of works and the structure of the conducted argument reflect the spirit of affirmation for the great tradition created by the first generation of romantics and the significance of the November Uprising, in which Sobolewski took part. (shrink)