Spezielle Anatomie von Lunge, Brusthöhle und Zwerchfell bei Hund und Katze

The interrelatedness of text and performance is a feature of semiotic approaches to drama and semioticians’ interest in processes of signification, decodification and interpretation. In recent years theater semioticians have turned their attention from texts to contexts, from descriptive and theoretical approaches towards socio-cultural methodologies that consider intertextuality as an important factor in the process of analysis. Dramatic texts are among the most complex of written works and highly sensitive to socio-cultural context. A dramatic text is ‘staged’ in readers’ imaginations, in contexts which may differ greatly from the playwright’s context. The interaction of real and not-real in the text, along with references to different sign-systems outside the written text, confronts readers with a complex and multifaceted but communicative semiosphere full of paradox. This thesis considers how dramatic texts anticipate and interact with this embedding of theater in context. In order to investigate the sophisticated dramatic writing by the contemporary American playwright, Sam Shepard, the thesis develops an eclectic semiotic approach based on a restricted Lotmanian notion of the semiosphere in the play world, as a simulacrum of the real world in which communication is possible between characters who are defined by their individual Mit-welts. Mit-welt is a term formulated specifically for this thesis to explain characters’ conceptualization of the world, how they model the outside world and respond to it within a play. The thesis uses Mit-welt to suggest that there is a socio-semiotic interaction which takes place because of the environments that characters ‘bring with them’ in their interaction with others. The thesis also recognizes the problem of dealing with primarily dramatic texts by reviving and extending the semiotic notion of foregrounding, which is used to analyze how the text embodies the playwright’s choices. In particular, this raises the issue of how stage directions function as a focalizing element of the text. This thesis argues that, rather than just being a thin metonymy of the complex signification of the performed text, stage directions are already important to the interpretive possibilities of a play and deserve greater attention than they normally receive. The second half of the thesis is an analysis of four plays by Sam Shepard from a semiotic perspective, concentrating on the dramatic texts as versatile and complex forms of communication. The four selected plays span the four decades of Shepard’s prolific writing career: The Unseen Hand (1969), Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Kicking a Dead Horse (2007). Shepard is a semiotically aware playwright whose plays have a distinctive richness in their use of sign-systems. The thesis demonstrates how Shepard makes innovative use of social, cultural and mythical codes in his plays. In them familiar elements of everyday life appear to co-exist paradoxically with defamiliarizing or hyper-real elements. The thesis argues that a new semiotic approach to the dramatic text can thus identify distinctive features of Shepard’s writing

A educação cívica nos países democráticos

Este artigo aborda as transformações das nações modernas e os problemas surgidos no ensino da educação cívica e da transmissão do sentido de pertença à colectividade nacional. Em primeiro lugar a autora reflecte nas condições que propiciaram o nascimento das nações europeias para, a s egui r , anal i sar a cons t rução europe ia e as cons equênc ias da despolitização das democracias modernas. A questão fundamental do artigo reside na forma como se devem transmitir os valores comuns que permitem cimentar as sociedades democráticas, concluindo que a educa- ção para a cidadania deve transmitir o sentido dos valores cívicos, a ligação legítima de cada povo ao seu passado

Legal Ethics and the Government Lawyer

All litigation presents to some degree, real though not always perceived, a conflict between each attorney\u27s responsibility as a representative of his or her client and as an officer of the court. Winning the case and seeing that justice is done must be inconsistent goals for counsel on at least one side in a case, if not on both. However substantial this problem may be regarded, it is certainly more complex for counsel for the government. Unlike a private attorney subject to dismissal for ignoring a client\u27s wishes, counsel for the government often has, subject to the variables of intragovernmental relations, the power to take a course of action or accept a settlement contrary to the wishes of the agency officials involved. In addition, government counsel owes some arguable duty to the opposing party, not only as a citizen and taxpayer of the entity for which he or she works, but also because that party seeks to invoke the same laws as those which he or she is committed, in theory if not by oath, to enforce. The relationship of agency officials to government counsel is not that of client and attorney in any ordinary sense, for the identities and desires of those officials may vary with popular opinion, the vote of the electorate, or the whims of their superiors, while the law to which both officials and counsel owe their allegiance remains unaltered. Although attitudes on this problem vary significantly among and within government law offices, the general practice of government counsel seems to be to refrain from making any independent judgment on the merits of the agency\u27s position, or to argue for that position even when the lawyer believes it is wrong

Platform Accountability: Gonzalez and Reform

Section 230(c)(1) was adopted for the purpose of distinguishing between conduct of third parties and conduct of internet companies themselves. Its familiar language provides that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The last four words are central to the limitation on the defense created by the statute; it is only regarding information created by “another” that the defense may be available. Section 230(e)(3) makes clear that even a partial role played by an internet company in the creation of harmful material would fall outside the protections of the statute. Section 230(f)(3) defines the term “information content provider” as “any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provide through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

Affirmative Action and the Legislative History of the Fourteenth Amendment

This article contends that the legislative history of the fourteenth amendment is not only relevant to but dispositive of the legal dispute over the constitutional standards applicable to race-conscious affirmative action plans. From the closing days of the Civil War until the end of civilian Reconstruction some five years later, Congress adopted a series of social welfare programs whose benefits were expressly limited to blacks. These programs were generally open to all blacks, not only to recently freed slaves, and were adopted over repeatedly expressed objections that such racially exclusive measures were unfair to whites. The race-conscious Reconstruction programs were enacted concurrently with the fourteenth amendment and were supported by the same legislators who favored the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. This history strongly suggests that the framers of the amendment could not have intended it generally to prohibit affirmative action for blacks or other disadvantaged groups. Part I of this article details the legislative history of eight Reconstruction measures establishing programs limited, in varying degrees, to blacks. The most important of these measures is the 1866 Freedmen\u27s Bureau Act, which provoked the most detailed arguments for and against race-conscious programs, and which Congress considered and approved at the same time as the fourteenth amendment. Part II discusses the debates in Congress on the fourteenth amendment, and the relationship of those debates to the race-conscious programs of the Reconstruction era. Part III examines the constitutionality of present-day affirmative action in light of this legislative history

Two Categories of Discriminatory Intent

This Article suggests that the Court\u27s current confusion derives in part from its failure to distinguish between two categories of discriminatory intent, which may be termed goal discrimination and means discrimination. Goal discrimination involves the invidious consideration of race in the selection of the objective which a government policy seeks to achieve. Means discrimination occurs when there is an invidious consideration of race in selecting or weighing the method to be used in achieving that objective. Both forms of discrimination fall within the equal protection clause\u27s prohibition against discriminatory government action, but they involve different circumstances and thus must be proved in somewhat different ways. Recognition of the distinction between the two categories leads to a more objective method of analyzing evidence of intentional discrimination and contributes to a greater understanding of the meaning of the equal protection clause