In the central nervous system, axons are myelinated by oligodendrocytes (OLs). However, though our understanding of OL biology is increasing, the signals that emanate from the axons and modulate myelination are still poorly understood. Previous studies have found that HRP3-II, a newly identified isoform of the hepatoma-derived growth factor (HDGF) family, shows peak expression in the axons of spinal motor neurons before and during the myelination period. Furthermore, overexpression of HRP3-II increased Schwann cell proliferation and myelination, suggesting its importance for regulating the local pool of Schwann cells. Therefore, our goal is to determine whether HRP3-II also plays a critical role in regulating OLs in the central nervous system (CNS) using a recently developed CNS myelination model. The model is based on co-culturing mouse embryonic stem cell derived cortical neurons and OLs in microfluidic devices. We overexpressed HRP3-II in the neurons using a viral construct in the co-cultures. The average number of Myelin Basic Protein-positive OLs was significantly larger in the HRP3-II overexpressing co- cultures compared to controls; however, a similar increase was not seen on myelination in the HRP3-II overexpressing co-cultures, suggesting its role in the proliferation and/ or maturation of OLs

Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh think literature from opposite but complementary points of view. Miller is the advocate of close reading and generally an inductive approach whereby specific interpretive problems in regard to specific literary texts critically revise broader theoretical assumptions and presuppositions. Ghosh, on the other hand, plays the consummate theorist, appropriating and critically developing various concepts in dialogue with a wide range of contemporary critical voices, then applying that revised/expanded concept to the analysis of specific works. Each models a different way to move between theory and interpretation, but both ground their thinking in the strangeness of literature, what Miller calls its ‘idiosyncrasy’ and Ghosh, based on his reinvigoration of the Hindi term, sahitya, its sacredness. This piece argues for the fundamental ‘foreignness’ of literature (and culture in general) as underwriting both approaches. Following upon Voloshinov, Benjamin, and others, I situate both theory and criticism of literature within the larger problem of translation as a crossing between languages that also brings the foreign into the native tongue, an irreducibility I call literary intransigence. As opposed to platitudes about ‘world’ literature, literary intransigence implies instead a vigorous reading of all literature as foreign.

In the current context of pervasive loss and the absence of publicly commemorative rituals, this essay proposes a reading of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ that questions the presupposition that mourning must come to an end as the completed work of memories recalled only to be sent off. While melancholia may be presented as the invention of an imaginary loss, would not the real pathology of mourning be the summary or precipitous declaration of its end? Whether we understand mourning as completable in itself or as impossibly seeking an asymptote it can never reach, whether the work of mourning is terminal or interminable, the name of the deceased stands as what is left, not only as what is inscribed on a gravestone and outlasting any living memory, but also as the very bounds of memory as sense. Not so much the end of mourning, then, as its reiterative reaffirmation, commemoration comes down to a practice of active mourning (like active forgetting), not an ‘end’ but its retreat, its appearing/disappearing as the incessant redrawing of its withdrawal. Not a self-deprecating melancholia, nor the indulgent luxury of nostalgia, but the endless inscription of a name whose loss we can never stop mourning.

James Martin astutely reads the haloed place Gramsci holds in the post-war Western Marxist tradition as exactly where strident divergences in that tradition have emerged, most particularly between those who, according to him, remain mired in varying modes of left melancholia and those who have successfully mourned the loss of what we used to call the socialist alternative. My response questions the validity of this alternative by reconsidering Traverso's arguments in defence of left melancholia as a call to action, on the one hand, and by questioning why we should mourn the loss of real world socialism rather than seizing upon Gramsci's pessimistic utopianism as a way to reenergise socialist strategy in an era of escalating inequality and populist authoritarianisms.