1,721,022 research outputs found
Postmodernist rereadings of Virginia Woolf's to the lighthouse
Full text linkThis thesis deals with those contemporary novels, known as biofictions, which not only rewrite the lives of historical, canonical authors in a fictional way, but also engage in a dialogue with their precursors’ texts. Biofictions have extended the tradition of life writing and, through the practice of rewriting, have made a significant contribution to reading the past in relation to the present.
Since, in recent years, Virginia Woolf has been the protagonist of many biofictions and several of her novels and themes have been reworked in a variety of different ways, I chose to investigate the reason for her appeal to contemporary tastes. Thus, I focused on her most autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, in which Virginia Woolf openly drew inspiration from her own life experience, her memories and feelings, and transformed biographical facts into fiction, so much so that it is certainly a novel about her family, childhood and her struggles to become an artist.
My choice was guided by the awareness that life writing has been reconfigured from a postmodernist perspective, and, since Woolf’s life and work are continuously being rewritten, I wanted to examine whether To the Lighthouse, a personal real life history rewritten as fiction, could be read as an antecedent of contemporary biofictions. Virginia Woolf herself, in fact, engaged with the question of life writing, extended its range and explored the relationship between auto/biography and fiction, a tradition that Postmodernism has further developed. To the Lighthouse uses auto/biography, but extends its limits and turns it into something between biography and fiction. Virginia Woolf borrows elements and events from her own life and “recycles” them to offer her own vision of the world, to the extent that To the Lighthouse can be read both as pure fiction and as fictional autobiography.
The effects of Woolf’s experiments in life writing and of her blurring the rigid borders between fact and fiction are central to those postmodernist novels, which deal with the complex relationship between life and fiction. Her novel is definitely a work of fiction, but I argue that being so full of both life (bio) and personal history, it allows us to draw a connection between her form of life writing and contemporary biofictions.
I hope to contribute to this field by discussing two postmodernist biofictions: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Susan Sellers’ Vanessa and Virginia, which I read not only as an evident rewriting of Woolf’s life, but also as a dialogue, more or less obvious, with To the Lighthouse. In doing so, I adopt an intertextual approach, which places these biofictions in relation not only to Woolf’s life, but also to her novel.
I follow two main routes of exploration: the first is to see how in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf mixes real facts from her life with events and thoughts she only imagines, thus creating a work of fiction. The second is to see how the two postmodernist novels, the object of this thesis, bestride two fields: the bio-fictional, which engages with Woolf’s life, mixes real and imaginary experiences and recreates her thoughts, and the intertextual, which engages significantly with Woolf’s work, namely with To the Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf in Manhattan and Vanessa and Virginia, with their many references to To the Lighthouse illuminate Woolf’s continuous interest in life writing, which she revealed in many essays and her significant experiment in “using” life in her novel. Thus, they make a contribution to the refashioning of To the Lighthouse: both novels centre around such themes as family ties, personal losses, the effort that artistic creation requires and the value of fame, which are pivotal in To the Lighthouse and adopt Woolf’s pioneering technique of exploring the inner life of her characters. Their books are thought-provoking and raise serious questions about our relationship with Virginia Woolf and, more specifically, with To the Lighthouse
Bistability of the climate around the habitable zone: A thermodynamic investigation
No full textThe goal of this paper is to explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We apply our methodology to the Earth system, but our investigation has more general relevance. A thorough investigation of the thermodynamics of the climate system is performed for very diverse conditions of energy input and infrared atmosphere opacity. Using PlaSim, an Earth-like general circulation model, the solar constant S* is modulated between 1160 and 1510Wm-2 and the CO2 concentration, [CO2], between 90 and 2880ppm. It is observed that in such a parameter range the climate is bistable, i.e. there are two coexisting attractors, one characterised by warm, moist climates (W) and one by completely frozen sea surface (Snowball Earth, SB). The tipping points of both the transitions (W→SB and SB →W) are located along straight lines in the (S*,log[CO2]) space. The dynamical and thermodynamical properties - energy fluxes, Lorenz energy cycle, Carnot efficiency, material entropy production - of the W and SB states are very different: W states are dominated by the hydrological cycle and latent heat is prominent in the material entropy production; the SB states are eminently dry climates where heat transport is realised through sensible heat fluxes and entropy mostly generated by dissipation of kinetic energy. We also show that the Carnot efficiency regularly increases towards each transition between W and SB, with a large discontinuous decrease at the point of each transition. Finally, we propose well-defined empirical functions allowing for expressing the global non-equilibrium thermodynamical properties of the system in terms of either the mean surface temperature or the mean planetary emission temperature. While the specific results presented in this paper depend on some characteristics of the Earth system (e.g. rotation rate, position of the continents), this paves the way for the possibility of proposing efficient parameterisations of complex non-equilibrium properties and of practically deducing fundamental properties of a planetary system from a relatively simple observable. As a preliminary result, we obtain that when reducing the rotation rate of the planet by a factor of two, the multistability properties, the quantitative estimators of the thermodynamics of the system, and the approximate parameterisations in terms of the surface of emission temperature are only weakly affected. © 2013
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
Habitability and multistability in earth-like planets
No full textIn this paper we explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation has more general relevance and aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with exoplanets. We describe a formalism able to provide a thorough analysis of the non-equilibrium thermodynamical properties of the climate system and explore, using a flexible climate model, how such properties depend on the energy input of the parent star, on the infrared atmospheric opacity, and on the rotation rate of the planet. We first show that it is possible to reproduce the multi-stability properties reminiscent of the paleoclimatologically relevant snowball (SB)-warm (W) conditions. We then characterise the thermodynamics of the simulated Wand SB states, clarifying the central role of the hydrological cycle in shaping the irreversibility and the efficiency of the W states, and emphasizing the extreme diversity of the SB states, where dry conditions are realized. Thermodynamics provides the clue for studying the tipping points of the system and leads us to constructing empirical parametrizations allowing for expressing the main thermodynamic properties as functions of the emission temperature of the planet only. Such empirical functions are shown to be rather robust with respect to changing the rotation rate of the planet from the current terrestrial one to half of it. Furthermore, we explore the dynamical range where the length of the day and the length of the year are comparable. We clearly find that there is a critical rotation rate below which the multi-stability properties are lost, and the ice-albedo feedback responsible for the presence of SB and W conditions is damped. The bifurcation graph of the system suggests the presence of a phase transition in the planetary system. Such critical rotation rate corresponds roughly to the phase-lock 2:1 condition. Therefore, if an Earth-like planet is 1:1 phase-locked with respect to the parent star, only one climatic state would be compatible with a given set of astronomical and astro-physical parameters. These results have relevance for the general theory of planetary circulation and for the definition of necessary and sufficient conditions for habitability. © 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
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