1,720,979 research outputs found
The Internal Conflict of Identity in Paul Auster´s City of Glass and Ghosts
No full textThe search for a meaning and substance is fundamental for the two protagonists in Paul Auster´s "City of Glass" and "Ghosts". Just as the reader they are left without a solution concerning the cases. As a postmodern writer, Auster tries to destroy logocentrism, the search for truth and questions the written word as being a portrayal of the signified. In using theories from Blanchot, this essay concentrates on the interaction between author/reader, writer/characters and how the books´ protagonists disappear as a fictional dissolving
Competing mechanisms in markets for lemons
Full text linkWe study directed search equilibria in a decentralized market with adverse selection, where uninformed buyers post general trading mechanisms and informed sellers select one of them. We show that this has differing and significant implications with respect to the traditional approach, based on bilateral contracting between the parties. In equilibrium, all buyers post the same mechanism and low‐quality sellers receive priority in any meeting with a buyer. Also, buyers make strictly higher profits with low‐ than with high‐type sellers. When adverse selection is severe, the equilibrium features rationing and is constrained inefficient. Compared to the equilibrium with bilateral contracting, the equilibrium with general mechanisms yields a higher surplus for most, but not all, parameter specifications
Crisis and Search of Identity: A Postmodernist Analysis of Paul Auster´s Leviathan
Full text linkThis dissertation analyses the existential crisis which the character Benjamin Sachs, the protagonist of Paul Auster´s novel Leviathan (1992), undergoes. Being a postmodernist work, the research uses the features of this literary movement as its central axis to study the characterization of the hero. It is structured around two postmodern themes: existential agony to find inner stability and the true identity of the self and the effects of fate and contingency in the development of a vital dilemma. Through a close reading of the passages of the text which deal with the individual under analysis, an insight on his psychology, mentality and concerns will be achieved obtaining a better understanding of Auster´s creation of postmodernist characters.Este Trabajo de Fin de Grado analiza la crisis existencial que sufre el personaje Benjamin Sachs, protagonista de la novela Leviatán (1992), de Paul Auster. Al tratarse de una obra postmodernista, la investigación utiliza los rasgos de este movimiento literario como eje central para estudiar la caracterización del héroe. Se estructura en torno a dos temas postmodernos: la agonía existencial de encontrar la estabilidad interior y la verdadera identidad del ser y los efectos del destino y la contingencia en el desarrollo de un dilema vital. A través de una atenta lectura de los pasajes del texto que tratan sobre el individuo a analizar, se logrará una visión sobre su psicología, mentalidad y preocupaciones obteniendo una mejor comprensión de la creación de personajes postmodernistas por parte de Auster.Departamento de Filología InglesaGrado en Estudios Inglese
Three Postmodern Detectives Teetering on the Brink of Madness in Paul Auster´s New York Trilogy : A Comparison of the Detectives from a Postmodernist and an Autobiographical Perspective
No full textAs the title suggests, this essay is a postmodern and autobiographical analysis of the three detectives in Paul Auster´s widely acclaimed 1987 novel The New York Trilogy. The focus of this study is centred on a comparison between the three detectives, but also on tracking when and why the detectives devolve into madness. Moreover, it links their descent into madness to the postmodern condition. In postmodernity with its’ incredulity toward Metanarratives’ lives are shaped by chance rather than by causality. In addition, the traditional reliable tools of analysis and reason widely associated with the well-known literary detectives in the era of enlightenment, such as Sherlock Holmes or Dupin, are of little use. All of this is also aggravated by an unforgiving and painful never-ending postmodern present that leaves the detectives with little chance to catch their breath, recover their balance or sanity while being overwhelmed by their disruptive postmodern objects. Consequently, the three detectives are essentially all humiliated and stripped bare of their professional and personal identities with catastrophic results. Hence, if the three detectives start out with a reasonable confidence in their own abilities, their investigations lead them with no exceptions to a point where they are unable to distinguish reality from their postmodern paranoia and madness. And in the meantime, no crime is resolved and no social order restored. The autobiographical back drop of the three detectives and protagonists in the three novellas is the author´s own life in the late seventies and early eighties. In that sense the three protagonists all illustrate the parallel lives the author could have had, if chance and trivial every day decisions had not turned Auster´s life around, at certain critical junctures during the darkest moments of his life in connection with the painful divorce from his first wife.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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