2,070 research outputs found
Feeling singular: masculinity and desire in the early republic, 1786–1822
No full textWhat did it mean to feel masculine in the early United States? Although the norms of early national masculinity oriented men toward the genres of life writing—to build written monuments to themselves—that republican convention also set the stage for others to express troubling affects and orientations that positioned them on the outskirts of normative republican belonging. To trace that dynamic, this dissertation explores the life narratives of four early republic figures who aspired to become important citizens through print publication but failed to attain that status: John Fitch (1743–1798), a struggling working-class mechanic; Jonathan Plummer (1761–1819), an itinerant peddler and preacher; Jeffrey Brace (1742–1827), an emancipated slave and blind Revolutionary War veteran; and William “Amos” Wilson (1762–1821), a reclusive stonecutter known as “the Pennsylvania Hermit.” In distinct but related ways, each of these marginal figures represents a deviation from early American norms, being too prone to transgress public/private boundaries and too attached to social prohibitions. While each aspired to public legibility and social renown, all failed to secure for themselves the disinterested public influence that became a hallmark of republican masculinity, and they dwindled, instead, into cultural neglect. That neglect finds its roots in these writers’ avid expressions of private desires through public mediums. More successful early republican subjects maintained an entirely different relation between public life and interpersonal desire: Benjamin Rush, for example, wanted to have his personal life narrative limited to his family, and Alexander Graydon used his Memoirs to try to “smother that obtrusive thing called self.” But the eccentric and marginalized individuals here under consideration were, each in his own way, figures of excess rather than reluctance: they felt the need to share their written lives and textual bodies with completely uninterested, sometimes hostile reading publics. These republican ‘deviants’ not only have their own interesting stories to tell but, when placed next to their more stable and well-known early national brethren—the Washingtons and Franklins—they expose how personal life writing in the early republic transgressed public and private divisions and troubled individual and collective identifications.
Each chapter focuses on how a particular life narrative assembles a larger array of alternative social and intimate relations. Chapter One, “‘[T]his is my desire’: John Fitch and the Gender of Failure,” examines the manuscript of the contested first inventor of the steam boat, John Fitch, who complains of an interpersonal falling-out with his business partner and his partner’s lover in his multi-volume life narrative. Calling himself “one of the most singular men perhaps that has been born this age,” Fitch relies on a rhetoric of individualism that challenged normative conceptions of republican masculinity; in fact, this excessive attachment to declare publicly his own singularity led figures of actual renown to ignore him. Chapter Two, “Jonathan Plummer’s Perambulations in Print: Norms and Normativity in the Early Republic,” turns to the only remaining copy of Plummer’s life narrative (1796–98) to argue that his local notoriety as a “hermaphrodite”—a charge he helps to disseminate by choosing to deny it in print—articulates a masculinity in conflict with the norms he actively tried to achieve. Having spent the early years of his poetic career as the bard to the eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter, Plummer attempts later in life to distance himself from the very figures and tropes of non-normative belonging that had once attracted his notice. Chapter Three, “Jeffrey Brace and the Trouble with Belonging in the Early Republic,” focuses on the memoir of a former slave and black Revolutionary War veteran to argue that his desire to embody “the full authority of representative legitimacy,” in Michael Warner’s terms, brought him to identify with the very norms that marginalized him. Although that misidentification could be read as a failed assimilation, I instead show how this understudied anti-slavery narrative subverts masculine norms of republican belonging through insisting on black settlement in North America. The last chapter, “The Queer Hermit: William ‘Amos’ Wilson and the Antisocial Republic,” examines how the story of an eighteenth-century infanticide and execution transformed into a narrative about the executed woman’s brother. William Wilson became a hermit and left behind a life narrative, entitled “The Sweets of Solitude” (1822), that demonstrates changing notions regarding masculinity in the public sphere. Specifically, Wilson’s narrative suppresses the account of female sexual agency to focus on a man’s willful choice to live alone, away from the “unfeeling crowd.”Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2019-05-01The student, Benjamin Bascom, accepted the attached license on 2017-04-18 at 10:36.The student, Benjamin Bascom, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2017-04-18 at 11:06.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2017-04-18 at 16:50.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #10847 on 2017-08-10 at 14:31:12Made available in DSpace on 2017-08-10T19:52:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
BASCOM-DISSERTATION-2017.pdf: 218380772 bytes, checksum: 071f7a7cc7002546d3c1f2781a68f18e (MD5)
LICENSE.txt: 4212 bytes, checksum: ada52e3500747ffbd9548a4d023b3db3 (MD5)
Previous issue date: 2017-04-18Embargo set by: Colleen Fallaw for item 102646
Lift date: 2019-08-10T21:25:30Z
Reason: Author requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD systemLimited Restriction Lifted for Item 102646 on 2019-08-11T09:15:35Z
The modernist angel: Art at the Limits of the Human in D. H. Lawrence, H. D. and Mina Loy
No full textPhDThe subject of this thesis is a figure that might provisionally be called the *modemist
angel'. Focusing on modernist literature, and more particularly on the work of D. H.
Lawrence, H. D. and Mina Loy, it aims to isolate from the many angels found in all periods
and all types of art a historically specific and intellectually coherent paradigm: an angel of
and for its modernist times. A figure of precisely this type could be said to exist in the
form of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history'. Critics who address the question of the
modern angel in texts by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke often do so in conjunction
with the problem posed by the angel of history. Beginning with a chapter on Benjamin,
this thesis nevertheless follows a different trajectory. Over five chapters, it explores a
modernist landscape formed not only by Lawrence, H. D. and Loy, but also by European
and American writers such as A. R. Orage, Allen Upward, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens,
Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although the
angel that emerges from this investigation might, in some respects, be said to anticipate
Benjamin's later version, this figure is also very different, standing for a project that is
distinctively, and recognisably, modernist in nature. He/she (the sex of the modernist
angel is often open to question) represents an attempt to reconcile the divine
responsibilities of the artist with the material and gendered conditions of being,
specifically of being human, in the modem world. This thesis looks again at the clash of
intellectual paradigms in the early-twentieth century - notably, the confrontation of the
Romantic view of art as a superhuman or sacred undertaking with the psychoanalytical or
evolutionary idea that all human endeavour is underpinned by sub-human motives - and
suggests the angel as a new and instructive figure through which to think the perilous
limits between the human and the divine in modernist literature
Public worship and practical theology in the work of Benjamin Keach (1640-1704)
No full textThe late seventeenth century was a critical and fruitful period
for the Particular Baptists of England. Severely persecuted following
the Restoration, toleration in 1689 brought its own perils.
Particular Baptists were fortunate in having several strong leaders,
especially the London trio of Hanserd Knollys, William Kiffin, and
Benjamin Keach. Such a small and severely persecuted group as the
Baptists could afford little time for academic pursuits, thus of
necessity most of their theology was practical in nature.
Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) was the most outstanding practical
theologian among the English Particular Baptists of the late
seventeenth century. This dissertation is a study of Keach, in
particular his writings on public worship and practical theology.
Although Keach was a prolific author, he has been almost completely
neglected by scholars.
After a biographical sketch of Keach, this study considers his
writings on public worship and practical theology. In the area of
worship, Keach made two outstanding contributions: First, he was the
most vocal apologist for Baptist views on Baptism of his period.
Secondly, and more importantly, his hymn writing and defense of hymn
singing broke new ground, not just for Baptists, but for English
Protestantism, in general. In addition to his contributions in these
areas, he also dealt with the laying on of hands and the sabbath day
worship controversy.
Keach's contributions to practical theology fall into two main
groups: his writings that concern religious education and those that
deal with polity. In addition to these, Keach's vigorous advocacy of
a high Calvinist soteriology are also considered under the rubric of
practical theology. Keach's most important (although not his most
positive) contribution in this area were his soteriological writings.
Although well within the bounds of orthodoxy, some of the tendencies
in Keach's soteriology were taken up by the following generation of
Baptist leaders and developed into a stultifying hyper-Calvinism that
handicapped Baptist evangelism and missions.
In the conclusion, Keach's contributions to a theory of practical
theology are considered
'If I should die tonight' poem
No full textHumorous poem copied by Harrison Kerr and written by Benjamin Franklin King ca. 1890. The poem, titled "If I should die tonight," jokes about money owed to the author and the shock he would experience at being repaid upon his death. It was written as a parody of a serious contemporary poem of the same title.
Harrison Henry Kerr (1839-1901), born in North Georgetown, Ohio, served along with his brother, Ezra, as a private in Company D of the 58th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, Mississippi, on December 29, 1862., and held for three months before being exchanged and returning to his regiment. He was discharged on January 14, 1865. Following the war, he was married to Elizabeth (Rettig) Kerr. The two lived in Cleveland and had one son, Harrison McKinley Kerr. In 1888, he joined the Memorial Post No. 141, Grand Army of the Republic. He is buried in North Georgetown Cemetery
Substrate specificity of [alpha]-proteobacterial N-end rule adaptors
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Biology, 2016.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. "June 2016." In title on title page [alpha] appears as lower case Greek letters.Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-118).by Benjamin J. Stein.Ph. D
Letter to Ruby Doris Smith From Benjamin Brown, January 30, 1967
No full textCorrespondence from Benjamin D. Brown from the House of Representatives Atlanta House Chamber, sending well wishes to Ruby Doris Smith. 2 pages
Walter Benjamin: el naufragio ineluctable
No full textCon una nueva perspectiva sorprendente, en la que Walter Benjamin es visto como un “naufragio ineluctable”, este ensayo da cuenta del modo en que durante la agonía de la república de Weimar él había fracasado en casi todo. En el campo del trabajo, en el campo político, en el campo de su vida personal. Pero la mirada de Benjamin sobre Baudelaire vale también para él mismo: la realidad de la desdicha lejos de cancelar corrobora el hecho de que tenía todo para convertirse en una leyenda. Su naufragio revela un principio rector de la época. Un principio formulado en su obra sobre el barroco alemán: “En el Mal absoluto nuestra subjetividad reconoce su desdicha”. Benjamin describió este mundo desde la perspectiva de los marginados: la bohemia, el flaneur que se pierde en los pasajes de París, que desembocan en los grandes boulevares construidos por el barón de Hausmann. Siempre inquietado por descubrir en lo más insignificante lo más importante de un suceso. Sobre el concepto de la historia, que escribió después de su confi namiento en el campo de Nevers, en Francia, que padeció con Hannah Arendt y Arthur Köstler, vio la constitución real del mundo como un paisaje helado, donde la modernidad se transfigura en un cúmulo de ruinas. Su intervención monumental hace de él quizás el autor del que más se ha escrito en todo un siglo. Su crítica al mito del progreso lo ha convertido en un autor que sigue escribiendo incluso después de su muerte.With a surprising new perspective, in which Walter Benjamin is seen as a “ineluctable wreck”, this essay gives an account of the way that during the agony of the Weimar Republic he had failed in almost everything. In field of work, in political field and in his personal life. But Benjamin gaze´s on Baudelaire also applies to himself: the reality of the misery away from cancel corroborates the fact that he has everything to become a legend. His failure reveals a guiding principle of the age. A principle formulated in his work on the german baroque: “In the absolute Evil our subjectivity recognizes its misery”. Benjamin described this world from the perspective of the marginalized: the bohemia, the flaneur lost in the passages of Paris, which lead to the grands boulevards built by the baron Hausmann. Always attracted to discover in the most insignificant the most important of an event. On the concept of history, that he wrote after his confinement in the field of Nevers, in France, which suffered with Hannah Arendt and Arthur Köstler, he saw the constitution of the real world as a landscape ice, where modernity is transformed into a cumulus of ruins. For his intervention monumental he is perhaps the author about who exists more essays and written in a century. His criticism of the myth of progress has made him an author who keeps writing even after his death
Feeling singular: masculinity and desire in the early republic, 1786–1822
No full textWhat did it mean to feel masculine in the early United States? Although the norms of early national masculinity oriented men toward the genres of life writing—to build written monuments to themselves—that republican convention also set the stage for others to express troubling affects and orientations that positioned them on the outskirts of normative republican belonging. To trace that dynamic, this dissertation explores the life narratives of four early republic figures who aspired to become important citizens through print publication but failed to attain that status: John Fitch (1743–1798), a struggling working-class mechanic; Jonathan Plummer (1761–1819), an itinerant peddler and preacher; Jeffrey Brace (1742–1827), an emancipated slave and blind Revolutionary War veteran; and William “Amos” Wilson (1762–1821), a reclusive stonecutter known as “the Pennsylvania Hermit.” In distinct but related ways, each of these marginal figures represents a deviation from early American norms, being too prone to transgress public/private boundaries and too attached to social prohibitions. While each aspired to public legibility and social renown, all failed to secure for themselves the disinterested public influence that became a hallmark of republican masculinity, and they dwindled, instead, into cultural neglect. That neglect finds its roots in these writers’ avid expressions of private desires through public mediums. More successful early republican subjects maintained an entirely different relation between public life and interpersonal desire: Benjamin Rush, for example, wanted to have his personal life narrative limited to his family, and Alexander Graydon used his Memoirs to try to “smother that obtrusive thing called self.” But the eccentric and marginalized individuals here under consideration were, each in his own way, figures of excess rather than reluctance: they felt the need to share their written lives and textual bodies with completely uninterested, sometimes hostile reading publics. These republican ‘deviants’ not only have their own interesting stories to tell but, when placed next to their more stable and well-known early national brethren—the Washingtons and Franklins—they expose how personal life writing in the early republic transgressed public and private divisions and troubled individual and collective identifications.
Each chapter focuses on how a particular life narrative assembles a larger array of alternative social and intimate relations. Chapter One, “‘[T]his is my desire’: John Fitch and the Gender of Failure,” examines the manuscript of the contested first inventor of the steam boat, John Fitch, who complains of an interpersonal falling-out with his business partner and his partner’s lover in his multi-volume life narrative. Calling himself “one of the most singular men perhaps that has been born this age,” Fitch relies on a rhetoric of individualism that challenged normative conceptions of republican masculinity; in fact, this excessive attachment to declare publicly his own singularity led figures of actual renown to ignore him. Chapter Two, “Jonathan Plummer’s Perambulations in Print: Norms and Normativity in the Early Republic,” turns to the only remaining copy of Plummer’s life narrative (1796–98) to argue that his local notoriety as a “hermaphrodite”—a charge he helps to disseminate by choosing to deny it in print—articulates a masculinity in conflict with the norms he actively tried to achieve. Having spent the early years of his poetic career as the bard to the eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter, Plummer attempts later in life to distance himself from the very figures and tropes of non-normative belonging that had once attracted his notice. Chapter Three, “Jeffrey Brace and the Trouble with Belonging in the Early Republic,” focuses on the memoir of a former slave and black Revolutionary War veteran to argue that his desire to embody “the full authority of representative legitimacy,” in Michael Warner’s terms, brought him to identify with the very norms that marginalized him. Although that misidentification could be read as a failed assimilation, I instead show how this understudied anti-slavery narrative subverts masculine norms of republican belonging through insisting on black settlement in North America. The last chapter, “The Queer Hermit: William ‘Amos’ Wilson and the Antisocial Republic,” examines how the story of an eighteenth-century infanticide and execution transformed into a narrative about the executed woman’s brother. William Wilson became a hermit and left behind a life narrative, entitled “The Sweets of Solitude” (1822), that demonstrates changing notions regarding masculinity in the public sphere. Specifically, Wilson’s narrative suppresses the account of female sexual agency to focus on a man’s willful choice to live alone, away from the “unfeeling crowd.
Another dissertation on the mutual support of trade and civil liberty. [electronic resource] : Addressed to the author of the former.
No full textAnonymous. By Benjamin Newton.Electronic reproduction.English Short Title Catalog,Reproduction of original from British Library
Criticality of Regular Formulas
No full textWe define the criticality of a boolean function f : {0,1}^n -> {0,1} as the minimum real number lambda >= 1 such that Pr [DT_{depth}(f|R_p) >= t] = k.
In an unpublished manuscript [Rossmann, 2018], the author showed that a combination of Håstad’s switching and multi-switching lemmas [Håstad, 1986; Håstad, 2014] implies that AC^0 circuits of depth d+1 and size s have criticality at most O(log s)^d. In the present paper, we establish a stronger O(1/d log s)^d bound for regular formulas: the class of AC^0 formulas in which all gates at any given depth have the same fan-in. This result is based on
(i) a novel switching lemma for bounded size (unbounded width) DNF formulas, and
(ii) an extension of (i) which analyzes a canonical decision tree associated with an entire depth-d formula.
As corollaries of our criticality bound, we obtain an improved #SAT algorithm and tight Linial-Mansour-Nisan Theorem for regular formulas, strengthening previous results for AC^0 circuits due to Impagliazzo, Matthews, Paturi [Impagliazzo et al., 2012] and Tal [Tal, 2017]. As a further corollary, we increase from o(log n /(log log n)) to o(log n) the number of quantifier alternations for which the QBF-SAT (quantified boolean formula satisfiability) algorithm of Santhanam and Williams [Santhanam and Williams, 2014] beats exhaustive search
- …
