17 research outputs found
Melody Makers: Gonzalo Tena on Gertrude Stein
No full textA guide to the exhibition "Stanzas" comprising works by Spanish artist Gonzalo Tena and inspired by the writings of American author Gertrude Stein. The exhibition was held in Barcelona, at Galeria Maeght
Language and Public Culture
No full textLanguage and Public Culture is a resource for the study of English. The result of two courses taught by the author at Sapienza University of Rome, the book draws on a variety of texts to enhance students' critical reading skills. The volume is divided into two parts and approaches linguistic analysis from the vantage point of recent debates on key cultural issues, such as power and gender. Part I, "Political Language and Phantasy," discusses twentieth-century controversial figures of British Prime Ministers. Part II, "Masculinity, Femininity, and the Language of the Press," takes on gender representations in verbal and visual media texts and includes discussions of key twentieth-century American writers like Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.The book has a two-part structure. In Part I, “Political Language and Phantasy,” I draw on the resources of psychoanalysis to discuss the language and persona of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I propose that political discourse is a public version of the individual drama of an ego that, by saying ego, comes into public being. Following up on this analysis, Part II of the book invites students who, in the majority of cases, had not been exposed to discussions of gender, to analyse verbal and visual texts to see how they enforce certain dominant views of identities of masculinity and femininity
Persuasion and critical-theoretical thought
No full textMy contribution takes on the notion of persuasion from the vantage point of the more theoretical developments of literary criticism, from poststructuralism to the present. I take my cue from the current debate on “postcritique” (Rita Felski 2015; R. Felski and Elizabeth Anker 2017), a label that comprises a heterogeneous set of trends all of which nevertheless share the common task of re-evaluating the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeking alternatives to it. Discussion highlights the widespread need for more ethical ways of reading after poststructuralism (Eve K. Sedgwick 1997, 2002; Amanda Anderson 2006); the fact that this ethical turn seems to require new styles of argumentation (Pardis Dabashi 2020) offers here the opportunity to look back at a central tenet of classical argumentation, persuasion, to reflect on its role in the transformation of Anglophone literary criticism. The contribution is articulated in three sections – “Publicness,” “Paranoia and Persuasion,” and “The solitude of the critic” – whose overall aim is to illustrate the progressive withdrawal of persuasion from the oratorical public setting theorized by Aristotle, which presupposes a uniform collectivity, to a much more shadowy subjective dimension of tensions and conflicts. T
The first section builds on a reading of Austen’s novel Persuasion (1818), which marks a rupture with the traditional notion of persuasion steeped in the constraints of oratorical interaction and inaugurates the “privatization of literary expression” with the rise of an absorbed cultural observer capable of distancing herself from her immediate environment and scrutinize its works both from the margins and from the outside. This part connects Austen’s withdrawal from a uniform publicness with the twentieth-century emergence of the notion of discourse with a reading of Foucault’s “Discourse on Language,” the inaugural lecture livered at the Collège de France in 1970. The reading of Foucault expands on the progressive withdrawal from a problematic publicness inherited from the rhetorical tradition and transfers the withdrawal to the figure of the literary theorist. In section 2, “ Paranoia and Persuasion,” the work of theorist Eve K. Sedgwick exemplifies those practitioners who sought relief from persuasion as it was actualized by the exigencies of pluralism in the second half of the twentieth century (for example with the notion of communion between an implied author and an implied reader) and further break away from the rhetorical bond between author and reader, insisting that finding oneself outside the discursive community is a real possibility. But the work of Sedgwick also points to an impasse: on the one hand, rhetorical persuasion has waned in modern criticism, on the other hand, the latter’s theoretical transformation seems to have internalized persuasion. Hinged on the link power-knowledge, the poststructuralist posture of the knowledge seeker depends on an always already persuaded audience who is uniformly convinced that our symbolic, cultural productions are entangled in relations of power.
While this contribution tracks the disentanglement of criticism from the classical oratorical tradition, the poststructuralist impasse invites a re-examination of persuasion in the ways we read and argue in the academic public sphere
“Atomic Wonders: Radioactive Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction”
No full textIn the words of American historian Henry Adams, when in 1898 Marie Curie extracted from uranium ore the two ‘new’ elements that she (and Pierre Curie and later Gustave Bémont) called polonium and radium, an entirely new age began. Adams calls the more intriguing ‘matter’, radium, a “metaphysical bomb”. Indeed, as Lawrence Badash has made clear, after the tremendous craze for Roentgen’s X-Ray photography in the late 1890s, radium had to wait before it eventually made a similar scientific and epistemic global impact. And yet, in the words of historian of science Luis Campos, it was “the most wonderful and perplexing thing the modern world had ever seen – or had never seen...”. A substance both new and old, rare and unprecedently powerful, it seemed to offer amazement and riches, even at a time (from the late nineteenth century to the Thirties) when its tremendous potential for damage was unknown. Already in 1895, had the novel The Crack of Doom by Irish author Robert Cromie portrayed an atomic explosion, one year ahead of Becquerel’s discovery of ‘radioactivity’. But it was after 1898, on the spur of the international mania for radium as spectacle and as commodity, that literature recorded and responded to such amazing scientific discoveries with works that read it as a potential instrument for destruction, as a very vibrant matter enmeshed in a global market of imperial exploitation, but also as a literal source of future political revolution. In this chapter I read both Tono-Bungay (1909) and The World Set Free (1914) by HG Wells, who certainly read and appreciated physicist Frederick Soddy’s 1909 work The Interpretation of Radium and who imagines a world paradoxically made free by unleashed atomic energy in a fictional ‘world to end all wars’. But I also attend to a very different and controversial voice, that of Marie Corelli, whose interest in science, and radioactivity in particular, is less obviously well-known. Her novels The Life Everlasting (1911) and The Young Diana (1918) offer a different view of radium, by depicting it as a source of “life”, with vitalizing and rejuvenating effects which were also experimented upon in laboratories around the world
Mycobacterial infection induces a specific human innate immune response
No full textInternational audienceThe innate immune system provides the first response to infection and is now recognized to be partially pathogen-specific. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is able to subvert the innate immune response and survive inside macrophages. Curiously, only 5-10% of otherwise healthy individuals infected with MTB develop active tuberculosis (TB). We do not yet understand the genetic basis underlying this individual-specific susceptibility. Moreover, we still do not know which properties of the innate immune response are specific to MTB infection. To identify immune responses that are specific to MTB, we infected macrophages with eight different bacteria, including different MTB strains and related mycobacteria, and studied their transcriptional response. We identified a novel subset of genes whose regulation was affected specifically by infection with mycobacteria. This subset includes genes involved in phagosome maturation, superoxide production, response to vitamin D, macrophage chemotaxis, and sialic acid synthesis. We suggest that genetic variants that affect the function or regulation of these genes should be considered candidate loci for explaining TB susceptibility
Author response image 1.
No full textComparative genomics studies in primates are extremely restricted because we only have access to a few types of cell lines from non-human apes and to a limited collection of frozen tissues. In order to gain better insight into regulatory processes that underlie variation in complex phenotypes, we must have access to faithful model systems for a wide range of tissues and cell types. To facilitate this, we have generated a panel of 7 fully characterized chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines derived from fibroblasts of healthy donors. All lines appear to be free of integration from exogenous reprogramming vectors, can be maintained using standard iPSC culture techniques, and have proliferative and differentiation potential similar to human and mouse lines. To begin demonstrating the utility of comparative iPSC panels, we collected RNA sequencing data and methylation profiles from the chimpanzee iPSCs and their corresponding fibroblast precursors, as well as from 7 human iPSCs and their precursors, which were of multiple cell type and population origins. Overall, we observed much less regulatory variation within species in the iPSCs than in the somatic precursors, indicating that the reprogramming process has erased many of the differences observed between somatic cells of different origins. We identified 4,918 differentially expressed genes and 3,598 differentially methylated regions between iPSCs of the two species, many of which are novel inter-species differences that were not observed between the somatic cells of the two species. Our panel will help realise the potential of iPSCs in primate studies, and in combination with genomic technologies, transform studies of comparative evolution
Properties of Divergence-Free Kernel Methods for Approximation and Solution of Partial Differential Equations
No full textabstract: Divergence-free vector field interpolants properties are explored on uniform and scattered nodes, and also their application to fluid flow problems. These interpolants may be applied to physical problems that require the approximant to have zero divergence, such as the velocity field in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the magnetic and electric fields in the Maxwell's equations. In addition, the methods studied here are meshfree, and are suitable for problems defined on complex domains, where mesh generation is computationally expensive or inaccurate, or for problems where the data is only available at scattered locations.
The contributions of this work include a detailed comparison between standard and divergence-free radial basis approximations, a study of the Lebesgue constants for divergence-free approximations and their dependence on node placement, and an investigation of the flat limit of divergence-free interpolants. Finally, numerical solvers for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in primitive variables are implemented using discretizations based on traditional and divergence-free kernels. The numerical results are compared to reference solutions obtained with a spectral
method.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Applied Mathematics 201
Predator traits influence uptake and trophic transfer of nanoplastics in aquatic systems–a mechanistic study
No full textISSN:2662-496
Predator traits influence uptake and trophic transfer of nanoplastics in aquatic systems–a mechanistic study
No full textPredicting the response of aquatic species to environmental contaminants is challenging, in part because of the diverse biological traits within communities that influence their uptake and transfer of contaminants. Nanoplastics are a contaminant of growing concern, and previous research has documented their uptake and transfer in aquatic food webs. Employing an established method of nanoplastic tracking using metal-doped plastics, we studied the influence of biological traits on the uptake of nanoplastic from water and diet in freshwater predators through two exposure assays. We focused on backswimmers (Anisops wakefieldi) and damselfly larvae (Xanthocnemis zealandica) - two freshwater macroinvertebrates with contrasting physiological and morphological traits related to feeding and respiration strategies. Our findings reveal striking differences in nanoplastic transfer dynamics: damselfly larvae accumulated nanoplastics from water and diet and then efficiently eliminated 92% of nanoplastic after five days of depuration. In contrast, backswimmers did not accumulate nanoplastic from either source. Differences in nanoplastic transfer dynamics may be explained by the contrasting physiological and morphological traits of these organisms. Overall, our results highlight the importance and potential of considering biological traits in predicting transfer of nanoplastics through aquatic food webs
Professional Work in Health Care Organizations: The Structural Influences of Patients in French, Canadian and American Hospitals
No full textAlthough there are several studies of the impact of employment of health professionals in large bureaucratic organizations, there has been significantly less research focused on the structural influence of patients on this relationship. In this paper we present comparative qualitative data gathered on the work experiences of health care professionals in Canadian, U.S. and French hospitals. We elaborate specifically on a typology of structural influence of clients on health care professionals work in hospitals in terms of open and closed units.health professions, health care organizations, patients, hospitals, physicians, nurses, comparative perspectives
