Epidemiology and Risk Factors for Resistance to Treatment of Kawasaki Disease in Cyprus.

Background: Kawasaki disease (KD) is one of the most common vasculitides of early childhood and the first cause of acquired heart disease in developed countries. There are no previous studies on KD in Cyprus. The aim of this study was to evaluate the epidemiology of KD in Cyprus, risk factors for resistance to treatment and the development of cardiac complications. Lastly, the Kobayashi and Egami scoring systems were evaluated in our population.Methods: This is a retrospective multicenter study of pediatric patients with KD hospitalized between January 2000 and-December 2019. The data were collected from medical records. Results: A total of 136 patients with KD were included in the study. 83% of patients were <5 years of age and 10% were <6 months. Median duration of fever before treatment was 6 days. 108/129 patients responded to initial treatment with IVIG. Thirty patients (22%) developed coronary artery lesions. Serum sodium ≤133mmol/L, albumin ≤ 3.2 g/dl, ALT≥ 80 U/L and neutrophils percentage≥ 80% at diagnosis, were identified as risk factors for resistance to IVIG. The Kobayashi and Egami scoring systems had low sensitivity of 57% and 62% respectively and a medium specificity of 76% and 76% respectively in predicting IVIG resistance.Conclusion: Clinical and epidemiological characteristics of KD in Cyprus population were similar to those reported in the literature. Although the majority of cases received appropriate treatment in time, cardiac complications still occurred. The Kobayashi and Egami scoring systems cannot be used in our population in order to predict responsiveness to IVIG.

Eisenstein’s Philosophy of Film

This chapter offers an organized account of Eisenstein’s film theory which attempts to demonstrate that although Eisenstein gives the appearance of being a medium specificity theorist in terms of montage, he is actually developing a very different kind of theory of film than that attributed to other classical film theorists like Arnheim and Balász.

The Return of Medium Specificity Claims and the Evaluation of the Moving Image

This chapter reviews the traditional notion of medium specificity and its relevance to evaluation, along with recent revivals of the thesis in the work of Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes. The chapter criticizes various versions of the medium specificity thesis – both past and present -- and offers an alternative approach to the evaluation of moving images.

‘There Was Modernism. Then There Was Digital:’ Kenneth Goldsmith and the Updating of Literature

The notion of literature as an obsolete form, out of sync with its own time, has been a familiar one ever since modern media displaced the literary from its previous centrality in culture. Expounding on poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s express ambitions of bringing literature up to date with contemporary media culture, this article engages the larger stakes of his work with a view to an ‘updated literature’ – a literature, as it is here considered, 'beyond textuality.' Informed by the theoretical perspectives of Friedrich Kittler and the broader field of media archeology, the article posits literature’s turn toward the generalized ‘informational milieu’ of contemporary network culture and its concomitant break with modernist notions of medium specificity. Although the provocations of both Goldsmith and Kittler have received much previous attention; in seeking here to bring them together in a committed way, this article also moves beyond the limits of their approaches to rethink the problem of literature’s dubious distinctness in our age of networks.

Adaptation in the digital era: The case of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf

From fidelity discourse, through medium specificity discourse, to intertextuality and remediation approach, adaptation studies have dynamically evolved and recently have responded with particular flexibility to the advent of the digital era. Even adaptations of classical literary texts, confronting the authority of their hypotexts, have daringly broken away from their fidelity constraints and ventured onto paths facilitated by the development of new media. This article discusses Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 adaptation of Beowulf and examines this film’s potential for illustrating the manifestations of digitality in adaptation discourses. A film that did not make it (in)to the box office, and an adaptation that makes literary fans cringe, it is still a fascinating cultural intertext: a radical reinterpretation of the Old English heroic poem, a star-studded special-effect cinematic extravaganza of an adventurous director, an illustration of adaptation going remediation and an inclusive transmedia hybrid.

From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-garde Film, Medium Specificity and Intermediality, 1970–2015

This chapter surveys an important shift in the last fifty years in the study of avant-garde film within academia. It explores the move from study at the margins of widely separated disciplines, notably Art History and the nascent field of Film Studies, to the interstices between increasingly connected disciplines, but focused upon English and Modern Languages. As a consequence of this move, the author argues, avant-garde film has become the object of a form of scholarship that scrutinises the intermedial relations of films and texts. With this attention, mostly from scholars trained in literature and textual analysis, there is a risk of losing the technical competence in film analysis that characterised the earlier mode of scholarship. In the 1960s and 70s, much of the crucial work in the field was undertaken by practising, experimental filmmakers who understood the material possibilities and constraints of their medium. Both approaches and sites of scholarship bring particular benefits and problems, and contemporary study of the intermedial relationships of experimental film in the wider, intermedial, culture needs to account for both in its historiography.

‘The Historical Approach’ and ‘The Historian’s Journey’, from History: The Last Things Before the Last (Kracauer 1968)

This chapter is a close analysis of the two chapters from Kracauer’s 1968 book History: The Last Things Before the Last. The chapter covers the influence of Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt on Kracauer’s conception of history and explores Kracauer’s notion of ‘ante-room history. Here, Kracauer compares film and photography with historiography, and sets out a conception of non-linear historical time. The notion of the historian, and the exile, as ‘palimpsest’, is also considered. The influence of the art theorist Clement Greenberg on Kracauer’s application of notions of medium specificity to film, photography and historiography is also considered