252 research outputs found
Polyphony and the anxiety of influence in the fiction of Henry James
Get PDFJames's fiction, especially in the Middle Phase, centres
on the figure of the artist and is characterized by, the two
interrelated aspects which previous criticism has largely
overlooked: the Bakhtinian 'polyphonic' -creation of
'author-thinkers'; and the conflict between ephebes and
precursors, for which Harold-Bloom's concept of 'the-anxiety of
influence' is the most illuminating model. Polyphony is the
narrative mode, and influence is the intra-artistic, theme.
These, as the Introduction to the thesis makes clear, are
rehearsed in James's inaugural novel, Roderick Hudson. Rowland
Mallet is an author-thinker, and his failure is caused by
authorial limitations. His monologism -is impaired by his
mistaking empathy for the authorial sympathy. Likewise,
Hudson's failure does not arise from a mercurial temperament,
but from a polyphonic shortcoming: not possessing the power of
fiction to contain the fiction of power in, his mentor. And the
relationships among the three artists - Gloriani, Hudson and
Singleton - perfectly exemplify the Bloomian-theme. It is these
two concepts, polyphony and influence, which are the major
preoccupation in the Middle Phase; as, the works chosen
demonstrate. These are a novella, a novel, and a number of
short stories all of which have been unjustifiably neglected.
Chapter One, on The Aspern Papers, argues that Tina Bordereau,
far from being, the artless victim seen by many critics,
actually challenges and defeats the narrator by the very form
of her narrative. Her 'realist' discourse undermines his
language of 'romance', and shows up its internal unstability.
Chapter Two is an extensive study of the critical reception of
The Tragic Muse. The most common areas of critical attention
have been its contemporary topicality, its relation to previous
novels on similar themes, and the possible genealogy of Gabriel
Nash. Those have all missed the core of the work. - Chapter Three
demonstrates how polyphony and the anxiety of influence make
the novel what it really is. Influence arises from the
juxtaposition of, and the wrestling between, artistic ephebes
and their precursors (Nick and Nash,, Miriam and Madame Carre).
The dialogic quality defined by Bakhtin is crucial to the
proper, and even-handed, characterization of all, the conflicts
in the novel. And since most of James's tales in the eighties
and nineties -are about 'masters - and acolytes, the anxiety of
influence remains central. Chapter Four is a study of 'The
Author of Beltraffiol' and 'The Lesson of the Master'. Again the
characters' manipulations are a crucial focus in a way that
G6rard Genette's terminology helps to illuminate. The fact that
the ephebe is the author-thinker emphasizes the inextricability
of the Bakhtinian and the Bloomian in James. Just as
polyphony offers a different focus for explicating the poetics
of James's fiction; so the ephebal conflict provides the basis
for a fresh perception of James's own artistic struggle
A spectroscopic investigation of gallium lanthanum sulphide based glasses for optical devices
No full textThe optical communications network requires an efficient and cost effective 1.3 #mu#m optical fibre-amplifier. The Praseodynium ion (Pr"3"+) 1.3 #mu#m transition is the best candidate but requires a glass host with low phonon energy to produce a high radiative efficiency. Gallium Lanthanum Sulphide (GLS) based glasses are investigated as potential low phonon energy hosts. The work reported aims to link the spectroscopic results to the observed physical and optical properties and to the composition and atomic structure of the glasses. The Pr"3"+ doped GLS glass shows a high radiative quantum efficiency (RQE) for the 1.3 #mu#m transition and the lifetime of the transition is also long indicating a potentially useful glass dopant system. The Pr"3"+ enters the glass with a large coordination number and is sulphur coordinated. The Pr"3"+ doped GLS glass spectroscopic, optical and physical properties are found to be extremely susceptible to oxide impurities and added La_2O_3. In the Gallium Lanthanum Oxy-Sulphide (GLSO) glass the Pr"3"+ spectroscopy becomes excitation wavelength dependent. The temperature range of glass formation is increased as more oxide is added whilst the RQE and lifetime of the 1.3 #mu#m transition are strongly reduced. This is explained through new oxide coordination for the Pr"3"+, which experiences a higher energy phonon and a different nephelauxetic shift of the Stark levels. The increased temperature range for glass formation of the GLSO glass is beneficial since the range of GLS glass is small. By adding metal halides to the GLS glass it was hoped that the improved glass forming properties of the GLSO glass could be kept along with the high RQE and lifetime of the 1.3 #mu#m transition. The metal halide CsCI provided the largest increase in glass forming temperature range. The RQE was slightly reduced from the GLS value but much larger than the GLSO value. The lifetime was the longest measured. The dependence of the physical and optical properties on amount of metal halide was explained by changes in the bonding of the glass formers whilst the spectroscopic properties were most strongly influenced by bulk glass effects indicating a similar coordination for the Pr"3"+ in the GLS and CsCI GLS glasses. The doped GLS glass was not found to obey the simple multiphonon non-radiative decay formula with each rare-earth transition needing to be assessed individually. (author)SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN027875 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Review of \u3ci\u3eHe Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western\u3c/i\u3e by Roderick McGillis
Get PDFIt takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Bob Steele, and Johnny Mack Brown. John Wayne began in B westerns but graduated to the top of the bill in John Ford\u27s Stagecoach. Like author Roderick McGillis, I remember when B westerns were a staple of early afternoon television programming on just about every local channel. I also recall realizing by the time I was ten that these films, though bearing different titles, were so limited by generic conventions they were sometimes hard to tell apart: white hats versus black hats, the same set and stock footage, the inevitable chase on horseback, the climactic fight between hero and villain. For McGillis, the nostalgia for a mythic, morally unambiguous American past communicated by these movies reinforces his own nostalgia for them as a crucial part of his boyhood
Displaced medial clavicle fractures: operative treatment with locking compression plate fixation
No full textObjectives: Medial clavicle fractures are rare injuries and historically treated non-operatively. Displaced medial clavicle fractures, however, have a higher incidence of delayed- or non-union compared to non- displaced medial clavicle fractures and might benefit from operative treatment. We describe below a new technique for treating intra-articular fractures or extra-articular fractures with a small medial fragment using special locking plates and present the results of our operatively treated patients. Methods: First we describe our technique for treating very medial fractures with the radial (VA)-LCP™ Distal Humerus Plate (DePuy Synthes, Switzerland). Second, a retrospective cohort study was performed. All patients operated on for a displaced medial clavicle fracture between 2010 and 2017 were included. Primary outcome was the QuickDASH score and the Subjective Shoulder Value (SSV). Secondary outcomes were operative complications including mal- or non-union and implant removal. Results: All 15 patients were available for follow-up. Fourteen patients were included in our analysis. One patient was excluded due to severe concomitant injuries. Six patients were treated with the radial (VA)-LCP™ Distal Humerus Plate, eight patients with the LCP™ Superior Anterior Clavicle Plate with lateral extension (DePuy Synthes, Switzerland) and one with a LCP 3.5 plate. The mean follow-up was 39 months (range 9–79). The mean QuickDASH score was 0.81 (range 0–4.50, SD ± 1.44) and the mean SSV was 96 (range 80–100, SD ± 6.53). One patient had an early revision operation and developed an infection after 1.5 years. No mal- or non-unions occurred. Eight patients had their implants removed. Conclusions: Operative treatment of displaced medial clavicle fractures with well-fitting ‘small fragment’ locking plates provides an excellent long-term functional outcome. Intra-articular fractures or extra-articular fractures with a small medial fragment can be treated with the radial (VA)-LCP™ Distal Humerus Plate
On English Pygmies and Giants: the Physical Stature of English Youth in the late-18th and early-19th Centuries
Get PDFThe physical stature of lower- and upper-class English youth are compared to one another and to their European and North American counterparts. The height gap between the rich and poor was the greatest in England, reaching 22 cm at age 16. The poverty-stricken English children were shorter for their age than any other European or North American group so far discovered, while the English rich were the tallest in their time: only 2.5 cm shorter than today’s US standards. Height of the poor declined in the late-18th century, and again in the 1830s and 1840s conforming to the general European pattern, while the height of the wealthy tended rather to increase until the 1840s and then levelled off
Arthur William Upfield: a biography
Get PDFThis dissertation is an exhaustive account of the life and work of Arthur William Upfield (1890-1964). It is presented as a critical biography and narrates the life of the writer, in his socio-cultural milieu, from birth. It also positions Upfield as a writer who dealt with issues of Aboriginality at a time when this was a singularly polemical subject. My work is informed by the theory of Zygmunt Bauman and others and is posited in the context of late-modern biography theory.
English-born, Upfield arrived in Australia in 1911 and took work in the bush, serving overseas with the Australian army at the outbreak of World War I and marrying an Australian army nurse in Egypt. Returning with his wife and son to Australia in 1921 he intermittently carried his swag until he was employed patrolling the Western Australian number 1 rabbit-proof fence for three years to 1931. By that time he had published four novels, including two crime novels featuring his fictional creation, the part-Aboriginal, part-European, Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ('Bony'), arguably the first fully-developed character in Australian popular fiction.
Leaving the fence, Upfield settled with his family in Perth and wrote full-time until joining the Melbourne Herald in 1933. Retrenched, he resumed career writing to be further interrupted by a war-time intelligence posting in 1939. In 1943 the first Bony mysteries were published in America, where Upfield's critical success was maintained until his death. In 1945 he left his wife for Jessica Uren, to whom he remained devoted.
Upfield's in all twenty-nine Bony novels, many of which have been translated across eleven languages, afforded him notable success both at home and abroad, in good part due to his descriptive gifts and the uniqueness of his fictional character, the part-Aboriginal Bony
On English Pygmies and Giants: the Physical Stature of English Youth in the late-18th and early-19th Centuries
Get PDFThe physical stature of lower- and upper-class English youth are compared to one another and to their European and North American counterparts. The height gap between the rich and poor was the greatest in England, reaching 22 cm at age 16. The poverty-stricken English children were shorter for their age than any other European or North American group so far discovered, while the English rich were the tallest in their time: only 2.5 cm shorter than today’s US standards. Height of the poor declined in the late-18th century, and again in the 1830s and 1840s conforming to the general European pattern, while the height of the wealthy tended rather to increase until the 1840s and then levelled off.Height; Biological Standard of Living; Anthropometry; Inequality; Industrial Revolution
Writing and the rights of reality: usurpation and potentiality in Derrida, Plato, Nietzsche, and Beckett
Get PDFThe thesis critically evaluates Jacques Derrida's conferral of the rights of reality on writing, focussing on his theory of an arche-text in light of the speculative nature of this theory. The theory is initially considered in the context of Derrida's elucidation of the usurpatory status of writing within the Platonic and Nietzschean texts. This consideration reveals an admission of writing's usurpatory status by both writers while at the same time demonstrating their awareness of the intrinsically speculative nature of this view, the significance of writing lying in its ability to exteriorise the radically indeterminate status of consciousness m relation to reality rather than its ability to displace consciousness or reality The analyses, therefore, not only bring the Derridean hypothesis of a repressive or phonocentric metaphysical episteme into question but also exhibit the historical and philosophical role of potentiality in relation to writing, writing's ultimate significance lying in its capacity to exteriorise our existence as a mode of potentiality. Accordingly, in the second half of the thesis the Derridean theory of writing is countered with a specifically Aristotelian theory of the text as it is exhibited in the prose of Samuel Beckett, an author whose significance lies in his close alignment with Derridean theory within contemporary criticism. It is demonstrated that this identification has obviated an awareness of the significance of potentiality within the Beckettian text, his work consequently being appraised in the previously neglected context of Aristotelian metaphysics
Clavicle fractures in adults; current concepts
No full textBackground: For decades, clavicle fractures have been treated conservatively. In the last 20 years, however, non-union rates after conservative treatment appear higher than previously reported and more evidence regarding operative treatment has become available. This has led to a paradigm shift towards an increase in operative treatment. The aim of this review is to present the current concepts and available evidence regarding clavicle fracture treatment. Methods: Conservative and operative treatment options together with their indications for medial, shaft and lateral clavicle fractures are discussed. For all three anatomical locations, a treatment algorithm is proposed. Conclusion: In general, non-displaced fractures are treated conservatively. Operative treatment has to be discussed with patients with displaced clavicle fractures, especially in the young and active patient
The isolated posterior malleolar fracture and syndesmotic instability: A case report and review of the literature
No full textINTRODUCTION: Ankle fractures are among the most common type of fractures in the lower extremity. A posterior malleolar fracture is frequently part of a more complex ankle fracture and only in rare cases it occurs as isolated injury. Posterior malleolar fractures often occur with associated injuries, such as a Maisonneuve fracture or with bi- or trimalleolar ligamentous injuries. Knowledge about these associated injuries is essential to prevent missed diagnoses. The aim of this article is to describe the isolated posterior malleolar fracture, the possible associated injuries, the diagnostic work-up and therapeutic consequences. PRESENTATION OF CASE: We present a case of a 26-year-old male patient who sustained an isolated posterior malleolar fracture with 4.5 years follow-up. DISCUSSION: Isolated fractures of the posterior malleolus are uncommon injuries. Diagnosis, treatment and outcome can seldom be extracted from large series. However, several cases have been described in literature, which we have summarized. CONCLUSION: This case report and literature review shows that isolated posterior malleolar fractures might occur as part of a more complex ankle injury, in combination with a fracture of the lower leg or after high energy trauma. Physicians should be aware of these associated injuries. Diagnostic work-up should include X-rays of the knee and lower leg and a CT scan of the ankle. If diagnosed and treated properly, isolated posterior malleolar fractures have a good long-term functional outcome
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