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Pacific Skies: American Flyers in World War II
Jerome Klinkowitz
From 1941 to 1945 the skies over the Pacific Ocean afforded the broadest arena for battle and the fiercest action of air combat during World War II. It was in the air above the Pacific that America's involvement in the war began. It was in these skies that air power launched from carriers became a new form of engagement and where the war ultimately ended with kamikaze attacks and with atomic bombs dropped over Japan.
Throughout the conflict American flyers felt a compelling call to supplement the official news and military reports. In vivid accounts written soon after combat and in reflective memoirs recorded in the years after peace came, both pilots and crew members detailed their stories of the action that occurred in the embattled skies. Their first-person testimonies describe a style of warfare invented at the moment of need and at a time when the outcome was anything but certain.
Gathering more than a hundred personal narratives from Americans and from Japanese, Pacific Skies recounts a history of air combat in the Pacific theater. Included are the words of such famous aces and bomber pilots as Joe Foss, Pappy Boyington, Dick Bong, and Curtis Lemay, as well as the words of many rank-and-file airmen. Together their stories express fierce individualism and resourcefulness and convey the vast panorama of war that included the skies over Pearl Harbor, Wake, and Guadalcanal and missions from Saipan and Tinian.
As Pacific Skies recounts the perilous lives of pilots in their own words, Jerome Klinkowitz weaves the individual stories into a gripping historical narrative that exposes the shades of truth and fiction that can become blurred over time. A book about experiencing and remembering, Pacific Skies also is a story of unique perspectives on the war.
Jerome Klinkowitz, a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, is the author of forty books, including such World War II titles as Their Finest Hours, Yanks over Europe, and With Tigers over China. -- Provided by publisher -
The Vonnegut Effect
Jerome Klinkowitz
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors. In this innovative study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible. -- Provided by publisher
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Homo Narrans: Texts and Essays in Honor of Jerome Klinkowitz
Jerome Klinkowitz, Zygmunt Mazur, and Richard J. Utz
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West African Kingdoms, 500-1590
Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
World Eras is patterned after the award-winning American Decade's series. Covering areas often overlooked by other publications, World Eras provides a multicultural approach that directly reflects changing curriculum standards, with a cross-disciplinary overview of world history and a strong emphasis of daily life and social history.
Each volume in this set contains in-depth coverage of one era and is organized into ten chapters: World events -- A Chronology; Geography; The Arts -- Sculpture, Architecture, Painting and Music; Communications, Transportation and Exploration; Social class Systems and the Economy -- focusing on social-economic hierarchy ; Politics, Law and the Military; Leisure, Recreation and Daily life -- housing, clothing, food, education, etc.; Family and Social Trends -- customs, beliefs, roles and responsibilities; Religion and Philosophy; Science, Technology and Health.
Each volume includes an introductory essay that provides context and overview of the era written by a scholar in the field and will contain 150 photographs, line drawings, diagrams, illustrations and sidebars. Each chapter within a volume includes an introductory essay, a timeline, entries on specific topics, events or movements, biographies of prominent individuals, and important publications of the era. A glossary of subject-specific terms appears at the end of the book.
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Ghost Wars
Vince Gotera
Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Award for Poetry, Ghost Wars brings together sixteen new and previously published poems that work to understand the effects of war on all who are touched by it. As a Vietnam era veteran, as well as the grandson, son, and brother of combat veterans, Gotera writes from experience on the contradictory psychological demands made of soldiers. In Ghost Wars men in combat exist in the moment, capturing and being captured by the power of violence. But the individuals of war s aftermath live with the implications of their actions, struggling with an always-present past as they endeavor to carve out moments of understanding, of forgiveness, and of love.
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Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe
Grant A. Tracey
Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe is a novel that is often like a short story collection--it begins with a family of Macedonian-Canadians, the Traicheffs. One son stays in a working class suburb of Toronto, driving a cab while he tries to decide what to do with his life. His brother marries a middle-class Iowan and takes to writing sports for the Waterloo paper. He writes about hockey, the Canadian national game, which has also emigrated. And Tracey writes about the players on the team and their coaches and fans, about the kids the brothers knew in school, and about the music and movies they use as points of reference on their way to adulthood. I read it all at once, almost afraid to pause to look back at a book so undeniably real. Like life, perusal has no time outs. -- Provided by publisher
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Courtiers, Courtesans, Picaros, and Prostitutes: the art and artifice of selling one's self in Golden Age Spain
Jennifer Jo Cooley
This work examines the place of literature in Golden Age Spain by exploring the implications of the shifting means of evaluating the worth of the individual in a culture bent on preserving traditional societal divisions. A blend of textual analysis of canonical literature and theoretical concerns, the examination of traditionally divergent sets of literary genres explores two disparate worldviews, the cultural elite versus the marginalized. The book analyzes questions of social mobility and linguistic performance: how battles for the acquisition and preservation of status lead to the ultimate revelation of the ‘self’s’ verbal and intellectual skills as merely a ruse. The emergence of a ‘self’ defined by its success in social exchange then becomes a parallel for commercial exchange in a developing capitalist society.
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Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate
Georgiana Donavin, Carol Poster, and Richard Utz
These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective and it challenges today's dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poetry. In contrast to these tendencies, the contributions to this volume afford a view which enables readers to recognize that the manifold formalized discursive practices of positing a thesis, constructing a counter antithesis, and then finding a synthesis permeated not only the cathedral schools and universities and their direct textual products (commentaries, formal disputations, sermons, and so forth), but were received by a wide range of other discursive realms. Especially in the high and late Middle Ages the academic disputation gradually moved from the isolation of the universities and toward extracurricular forms of debate between theologians (e.g., the public quaestiones disputatae; epistolary theological debates between Christians and Muslims) and in literary genres (e.g. querelle, debate poem). By confronting sample investigations from all these related forms of medieval argument, the volume examines the ways in which disputational forms - sometimes directly dependent on academic practices, sometimes showing organizational, structural, and discursive parallels - established themselves as a central mode of thinking for Western society. To achieve this goal, the volume unites contributions from the English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian traditions of the disputational mode and discusses central issues of academic, political, theological, courtly and literary debates. -- Provided by publisher
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Shelley's Textual Seductions: Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
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Filmography of American History
Grant A. Tracey
Containing over 200 films, this resource is ideal for students, teachers, and other viewers who are interested in using films to enhance their knowledge of American historical events and periods. Along with traditional historical categories, such as the two World Wars, the Civil War, and the Great Depression, the book emphasizes immigrant, multicultural, and women-centered films to portray the fullness of the American experience. It also analyzes representations of people and events across different films for a variety of viewpoints, and considers how films reconfigure a past era through the issues of the day in which they were produced.
For ease of use, the book is organized into time periods. Each entry contains:
-- the setting
-- director
-- cast
-- credits
-- the year of production
-- distributor
Ratings are supplied to identify audience-appropriateness. The detailed narrative supplies a brief plot summary along with a thesis supported by strong examples from the film, such as excerpts of dialogue and factual details from history. The entries encourage readers to view the film through the lens of history and to consider it within the larger nexus of films listed in that particular chapter. Frequently, the historical focus considers both the time period depicted in the film and the time period in which it was made. The running times provide readers with a quick access to key scenes for further study. Each entry also concludes with sources for further reading, and indexes identify those films with multicultural and women's themes. -- Provided by publisher
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Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793-1948
Richard Utz
In her magisterial study, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900, Caroline Spurgeon stated that 'The work done on Chaucer by scholars in modern Germany is so vast that it would need a volume to itself to deal adequately with it'. This study fills this scholarly desideratum by surveying the genesis and development of the largest body of non-Anglophone Chaucer criticism from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1945. Such a history of Chaucer reception mirrors the general cultural and political developments in Germany and in German academia from the revolutionary and liberal Chaucer of the 'Vormaerz' (pre-March 1848) period, the conservative Chaucer of the post-1848 restoration, the 'Germanization' of Chaucer after the country's formation as a nation state (1871), the demise of German Chaucer studies after World War I and during the Weimar Republic, the ideological utilization of Chaucer during the Third Reich, to the sporadic Chaucer criticism after 1945. A strong focus will be upon the 'Chaucerphilologie' (1870-1914) when philological positivism evolved and triumphed, and how even today positivism and philological source study and editorial work is esteemed above 'foreign' (non-German) scholars who engage in aestheticist, essayistic and hence 'unscientific' approaches. The study follows German Chaucer criticism in a largely chronological manner, with biographies of key scholars (Ten Brink, Koch, Zupitza) and studies of specific philological feuds (Lange vs. Langhans on the authenticity of Chaucer's translation of the Roman de la Rose; Curtius vs. Glunz on the superiority of philology over literary aesthetics). The investigation is based on the theories of Anglo-American 'Medievalism' (and 'New' Medievalism/Philology) and its German sibling 'Mittelalter-Rezeption', the reception theories of Iser, Jauss and Fish, and discourse theories of Foucault. -- Provided by publisher
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You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature
Jerome Klinkowitz
Drawing on his own experience in the profession, veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based “story of English” is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production.
Despite almost universal agreement that literary studies fail both writers and students, solutions have been limited to suggestions by superstar theorists teaching cream-of-the-crop students at elite universities. Klinkowitz aims not at the elite but at the ordinary student in an introduction to literature class. His goal is to introduce teachers to a new philosophy of teaching literature and to further deepen students’ natural love for the subject. He also seeks to revive the love of fine writing in those whose joy in the subject fell victim to obtuse teaching methods. Uniquely, his is not an esoteric theory developed by the best academics for elite students but a commonsense approach that works well in the kind of schools most students attend. -- Provided by publisher -
Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky
Mario Roberto Morales and Edward Waters Hood
Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky is a novel that accurately depicts the horrors of the Guatemalan civil war fought out in the 1980s. In these pages we encounter the distinct voices of the elderly, the children, and the men and women whose stories from the Left and from the Right which Mario Morales collected and then wove together in this articulate, powerful, candid, vividly recounted, memorable work. -- Provided by publisher
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Owning a Piece of the Minors
Jerome Klinkowitz
Owning a Piece of the Minors is by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team. When Jerry Klinkowitz joined the group that ran the Waterloo, Iowa, Diamonds in the 1970s, ownership of a minor league baseball franchise conferred little mystique. Neglected for a half century, minor league baseball was at best obscure. Yet in the purchase of fantasy, what difference if your desire is out of style?
Klinkowitz continued his work with the Diamonds through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. In Owning a Piece of the Minors, he maps out his personal journey through baseball and probes his fluctuating fortunes and those of his team as he evolves from a fan to a team executive and, most important, to a writer writing about baseball. This baseball story begins with a nine-year-old Klinkowitz who is elated when Milwaukee lures the Braves from Boston; this story of a love affair with baseball might have died—and in fact suffered a ten-year hiatus—when the apostate Braves fled to Atlanta in 1965.
Klinkowitz rediscovered the joy of being at the baseball park when, as a middle-aged professor, he took his own children to the Waterloo Diamonds games. Gradually his involvement with the Diamonds grew deeper until he owned the team. His immersion into team activities was complete, from shagging batting practice and working the beer bar to struggling with the Cleveland Indians and then the San Diego Padres as minor league affiliates to accommodate baseball's resurgence.
Klinkowitz writes of loss—first the Braves and later the Diamonds; of writing baseball fiction; of attending the 1982 World Series back in Milwaukee; of the great old ballparks around the country, including Wrigley, Fenway, and old Comiskey Park; of fictional and factual accounts of how the Diamonds franchise was lost; of friendships among season ticket holders in "Box 28"; and of Mildred Boyenga, the club president and Baseball Woman of the Year. A first-rate stylist, Klinkowitz shows the problems and perks and, most rewarding, the priceless relationships made possible in the world of baseball. -- Provided by publisher -
With the Tigers Over China, 1941-1942
Jerome Klinkowitz
In the twelve months centered around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a diverse group of American and British flyers fought one of the most remarkable air campaigns of WWII. Pilots including Claire Chennault, "Pappy" Boyington, and Art Donahue bought time for an Allied regrouping against Japan's relentless assault in the China-Burma-India theater. In the face of the 1941 bombings, Chiang Kai-shek turned to air power to survive, which he did thanks to Chennault's rebuilding of the Chinese Air Force and the leadership of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG. Formed by Chennault, the AVG, also known as the Flying Tigers, were contract employees working for the Chinese government. As a result, they received virtually no official American recognition for their efforts. The group was known for their romantic, reckless spirit. They performed remarkably with outdated planes and equipment in ill-repair, were almost always heavily outnumbered in battle, and were seen by outsiders as hard-drinking rebels. Whatever their image, the Flying Tigers were highly effective. In the words of Air Force Major General Charlie Bond, "During that first week of action the AVG destroyed fifty-five enemy bombers and fighters while losing only five Tomahawks. Unfortunately, two of our colleagues were killed, but at the same time two hundred enemy airmen were either killed or captured. We were shattering the myth that the Japanese Air Force was invincible." Jerome Klinkowitz, whose earlier books focused on flyers' attitudes toward the air war in Britain and Europe, continues his work with an exceptionally interesting group of Pacific warriors. He brings together not only the commanders' stories but the often more colorful--and sometimes more accurate--accounts of life and battle by the men who flew these planes and the women who participated on the ground. -- Provided by publisher
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Everything Paid For
Robley Wilson
Robley Wilson’s third book of poems is written in a delightful variety of forms--syllabics, couplets, nonce sonnets, internal rhymes, and a marvelously supple blank verse. His concerns are the age-old concerns of being human: the difficulty of loving and communicating, the maddening challenges of living a "normal" life in suburbia, the ripple effect of our every act on others. But there is nothing dour in his approach. His tone is often wry and witty, always thoughtful. He digs deep and comes up with poems written from totally unexpected perspectives--the Kent State massacre from the point of view of one of the now-aging National Guardsmen; World War II from the point of view of a German girl chosen to present flowers to General Himmler; or a man living (literally) on the moon. Wilson has published four books of stories, and his gift as a storyteller is apparent in these poems. He sets the scene, gives us the facts--of a life, a mood, a moment--and we are drawn into the world of each separate poem. "Judge not . . ." is implicit, and we see ourselves in these poems and learn about ourselves as we read. Robley Wilson, editor of the North American Review, is professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. He has published two previous books of poetry, Kingdoms of the Ordinary (1987) and A Pleasure Tree (1991). -- Provided by publisher
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The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story
Rick Feddersen, Susan Lohafer, Barbara Lounsberry, and Mary Rohrberger
The 1990s have seen a renaissance in short fiction studies. Today's short story writers are testing the boundaries of short fiction through minimalist works; extended short story cycles; narrative nonfiction forms, such as histories, memoirs, and essays; and even stories created interactively with readers on the computer. Short story critics, in turn, are viewing the short story from the perspective of genre, history, cultural studies, and even cognitive science. This volume brings together the opinions, theories, and research of many of today's best-known short story writers, theorists, and critics. Contributors include some of the most widely read contemporary authors, such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Gay Talese, W. P. Kinsella, Robert Coover, Barry Hannah, and Leslie Marmon Silko.
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Keeping Literary Company: Working with Writers Since the Sixties
Jerome Klinkowitz
Starting in the 1960s, a group of radically new fiction writers began having success at reinventing the novel and short story for postmodern times. These writers found an ally in a young reader named Jerome Klinkowitz. Beginning in 1969 he published the first scholarly essays on Vonnegut, Kosinski, Barthelme, and the others in turn. Keeping Literary Company details Klinkowitz's work with these writers - not just researching their fiction and other publications, but introducing them to one another and taking part in the business-world activities that spread news of their innovations. He shows how what they wrote was so much a part of those turbulent times that a new literary generation found itself defined in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five, Being There, and Snow White. Here is a fascinating first-person account of what these important figures wrote, how they wrote it, and what it means in the development of American fiction. -- Provided by publisher
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Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction
Jerome Klinkowitz
In this volume, Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced his rapidly dying short-story market. Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. The investigation of the writer's extensive nonfiction provides a key to understanding his distinctively inventive novels and the manner in which his public spokesmanship influenced his artistic expression. -- Provided by publisher
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Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman
Richard Utz, T. A. Shippey, and Leslie J. Workman
This interdisciplinary collection of essays from leading scholars in Europe, North America, and Australia examine the phenomenon of medievalism from the perspective of history, politics, scholarship, art, and literature.
The twenty-six essays in this volume examine the process of creating the Middle Ages. In doing so, they honour Leslie Workman, who has led the revival of the study of medievalism in the past two generations, and leads this sub-discipline towards the comprehensiveness that Lord Acton as early as 1859 had promised: ´Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery: antiquity and the Middle Ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society.` While using different approaches and discussing topics in a variety of specialised fields, the contributions clearly centre on negotiating the reception of medieval culture in the Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary periods, thus presenting a broad and representative picture of current research in medievalism.--From the publisher.
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Nominalism And Literary Discourse: New Perspectives
Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard Utz
Influential accounts of European cultural history variously suggest that the rise of nominalism and its ultimate victory over realist orientations were highly implemental factors in the formation of Modern Europe since the later Middle Ages, but particularly the Reformation. Quite probably, this is a simplification of a state of affairs that is in fact more complex, indeed ambiguous. However, if there is any truth in such propositions - which have, after all, been made by many prominent commentators, such as Panofsky, Heer, Blumenberg, Foucault, Eco, Kristeva - we may no doubt assume that literary texts will have responded and in turn contributed, in a variety of ways, to these processes of cultural transformation. It seems of considerable interest, therefore, to take a close look at the complex, precarious position which literature, as basically a symbolic mode of signification, held in the perennial struggles and discursive negotiations between the semiotic 'twin paradigms' of nominalism and realism.
This collection of essays (many of them by leading scholars in the field) is a first comprehensive attempt to tackle such issues - by analyzing representative literary texts in terms of their underlying semiotic orientations, specifically of nominalism, but also by studying pertinent historical, theoretical and discursive co(n)texts of such developments in their relation to literary discourse. At the same time, since 'literary nominalism' and 'realism' are conceived as fundamentally aesthetic phenomena instantiating a genuinely 'literary debate over universals', consistent emphasis is placed on the discursive dimension of the texts scrutinized, in an endeavour to re-orient and consolidate an emergent research paradigm which promises to open up entirely new perspectives for the study of literary semiotics, as well as of aesthetics in general. Historical focus is provided by concentrating on the English situation in the era of transition from late medieval to early modern (c. 1350-1650), but readers will also find contributions on ChrÉtien de Troyes and Rabelais, as well as on the 'aftermath' of the earlier debates - as exemplified in studies of Locke and (post)modern critical altercations, respectively, which serve to point up the continuing relevance of the issues involved. A substantial introductory essay seeks to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the study of nominalism and literary discourse, in addition to offering an in-depth exploration of the 'nominalism/realism-complex' in its relation to literature. An extensive bibliography and index are further features of interest to both specialists and general readers. -- Provided by publisher -
Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce's Ulysses
Jean Kimball
The result of the interaction between Bloom and Dedalus, Kimball argues as a central tenet in her unique reading of Ulysses, is the gradual development of a relationship between the two protagonists that parallels C. G. Jung’s descriptions of the encounter between the Ego and the Shadow in that stage of his theoretical individuation process called "the realization of the shadow." These parallels form a unifying strand of meaning that runs throughout this multidimensional novel and is supported by the text and contexts of Ulysses. Kimball has provided the first comprehensive study of the relationship between Jungian psychology and Joyce’s Ulysses. Bucking critical trends, she focuses on Stephen rather than Bloom. She also notes certain parallels—synchronicities—in the lives of both Jung and Joyce, not because the men influenced one another but because they speculated about personality at the same historical time. Finally, noting that both Jung and Joyce came from strong Christian backgrounds, she asserts that the doubleness of the human personality fundamental to Christian theology is carried over into Jung’s psychology and Joyce’s fiction. -- Provided by publisher
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Ready-To-Use Activities for Teaching Much Ado About Nothing
John Wilson Swope
Each volume contains more than 100 classroom-tested whole-language activities ranging from role-playing, response journals, character study, and language exploration. Includes extended activities, reproducible maps, and background information. -- Provided by publisher
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