1,546 research outputs found

    Rewriting history : postmodern and postcolonial negotiations in the fiction of J.G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie

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    This thesis is a study of the rewriting of history in the work of four novelists: J. G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. I argue that their work occupies a particular position that is both within contemporary British fiction, yet at one remove from it. Their work is situated within the context of critiques of history that are the source of a conflict between postmodernism and postcolonialism. I suggest that each writer engages with postmodemist aesthetics often in an attempt to produce critical histones that bear witness to the voices of those hitherto silenced in conventional historiography. However, these novelists remain anxious as to the potential consequences of mobilising postmodernist models of history, particularly as to the problems this creates concerning historical reference. The thesis aims to identify the range of related attitudes to postmodernist critiques of history at this particular juncture of contemporary fiction in English. I approach the specific position of the novelists under study through Homi Bhabha's work on the confluence of the postmodern and the postcolonial, focusing in particular on his suggestion that the postmodem refutation of Western epistemology enables a postcolonial space where a new range of histories emerge. Because each writer works between at least two cultures, and primarily within Britain, they negotiate from within received epistemology in an attempt to locate a space at its boundaries where conventional forms of knowledge no longer have efficacy. However, in contrast to Bhabha, these writers struggle to reach this space and remain sceptical as to the usefulness of postmodernism in making available new forms of historiography. Ultimately, their work enables a critique of current ways of theorising the relationship between the postmodem and the postcolonial in literary studies

    Big Data, Big Libraries, Big Problems?: the 2014 LibTech Anti-talk?

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    The desire to create automatons is a familiar theme in human history, and during the age of the Enlightenment mechanical automatons became not only an “emblem of the cosmos”, but a symbol of man’s confidence that he would unlock nature’s greatest mysteries and fully harness her power. And yet only a century later, automatons had begun to represent human repression and servitude, a theme later picked up by writers of science fiction. Man’s confidence undeterred, the endgame of the modern scientific and technological mindset, or MSTM, seems to be increasingly coming into view with the rise of “information technology” in general and “Big data” in particular. Along with those who wield them, these can be seen as functioning together as a “mechanical muse” of sorts – surprisingly alluring – and, like a physical automaton can serve as a symbol – a microcosm – of what the MSTM sees (at the very least in practice) as the cosmic machine, our “final frontier”. And yet, individuals who unreflectively participate in these things – giving themselves over to them and seeking the powers afforded by the technology apart from technology’s rightful purposes – in fact yield to the same pragmatism and reductionism those wielding them are captive to. Thus, they ultimately nullify themselves philosophically, politically, and economically – their value increasingly being only the data concerning their persons, and its perceived usefulness. Likewise libraries, the time-honored place of, and symbol for, the intellectual flowering of the individual, will, insofar as they spurn the classical liberal arts (with the idea that things are intrinsically good, and in the case of humans, special as well) in favor of the alluring embrace of MSTM-driven “information technology” and Big data - unwittingly contribute to their irrelevance and demise as they find themselves increasingly less needed, valued, wanted. Likewise for the liberal arts as a whole, and in fact history itself, if the acid of a “science” untethered from what is, in fact, good (intrinsically), continues to gain strengt

    How can allocative inefficiency reveal risk preference? An empirical investigation on French wheat farms

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    We focus on a simple framework on wheat producer behaviour in a context of price output uncertainty. More precisely, we establish a relationship between ex post output price level and allocative inefficiency that allows to characterize farmers’ risk preferences. Given this analysis, the connection between risk aversion and other socioeconomic variables (such as degree of output specialisation, total asset, debts, farmer’s age…) can furthermore empirically be explored. This relationship is empirically tested on an unbalanced panel including about 650 wheat producers located in the French Department of Meuse over 1992- 2003.Producer behaviour, allocative inefficiency, risk aversion, Crop Production/Industries, Risk and Uncertainty,

    Coal fields of Alaska

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    Cook Inlet—Susitna Lowland

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