Realism in Victorian novels is often understood in relation to the increasingly professionalized disciplines of science—especially biology—which achieved a near monopoly on defining reality by the ...end of the period. In this narrative, novels that depart from the models of naturalistic science may be allegorical, speculative, or Romantic, among other options, but are not realistic. Narrative Energy offers a revision of this account, arguing that the diversity of theories, practices, and philosophies within nineteenth-century science necessitate a broader understanding of the relationship between science and the real in Victorian literature. In particular, I examine the influence of physics, which offered a vision of reality that integrated theological and secular approaches to knowledge-making. This dissertation therefore asks, how were changing definitions of the scientific real received in and developed by novels? It suggests that two central concepts in nineteenth-century physics, energy and ether, provided a discourse through which to unite exceptionality and realism, inspiring new modes of investigation, allowing for the formation of uncanny connections between disparate characters, and modelling novel ways of reading the natural world. Each chapter examines a novel or set of novels—The Woman in White, Daniel Deronda, King Solomon’s Mines, and She—that are not neatly categorized as realistic, tracing their engagement with energy and ether to explore their construction of a real that has since become unfamiliar to modern readers.
Japan is becoming a popular travel destination for more and more architects today. With its wide variety of architecture, it is both a source of fascination and inspiration. Over a number of years, ...the review Detail has been consistently documenting the construction activities which have taken place in Japan, and this book draws on the best of their experience and connections to present and analyse with plans and details the most interesting buildings from various architectural trends in contemporary Japan, including Ando s Museum for Contemporary Art in Naoshima, Toyo Ito s Mediathek, a residential building by Kazuyo Sejima, and a temple gallery in Kyoto by Takashi Yamaguchi. Introductory essays discuss the developments in Japanese architecture, and together with portraits of not only well-known Japanese architects and offices, but also young offices such as Atelier Bow Wow, this volume provides a stimulating discussion of current Japanese building in the context of traditional architecture.
Der Poststrukturalismus dekonstruiert liberal-demokratische Begriffe und lehnt Letztbegründungen für normative Ordnungen ab. Kritiker werfen ihm daher eine Unvereinbarkeit mit einer demokratischen ...Haltung vor. Derrida, Butler, Laclau und Mouffe vertreten dennoch eine zukünftige und radikale Demokratie. Wie ist dieser "ethical turn" zu beurteilen? Wie gelangen die Wissenschaftler von einer behaupteten Grundlosigkeit zu Gründen für die Demokratie? Luzia Sievi liefert eine detaillierte Analyse sowohl zu den Kritiken an der Demokratie als auch zu den Demokratieentwürfen der genannten Denker - und zeigt, welche Werte und Erkenntnisse bewirken, dass aus scharfen Kritikern starke Verfechter der Demokratie werden.
Juggling Ghosts Steffler, Margaret
Canadian Literature,
06/2014
221
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Doubleday $29.95 In The Juggler's Children and The Hungry Ghosts, finalists for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Awards in the categories of non-fiction and fiction, Carolyn Abraham and Shyam ...Selvadurai offer personal family stories within the context of larger public narratives of colonialism, diaspora, and immigration. The incorporation of storytelling in Abrahams work and the autobiographical elements in Selvadurai's novel blur the distinctions between memoir and fiction in ways that enhance the overlapping of the intimate stories with the more public backdrops.
Writing an introduction for a journal that presents a particular topic or a work on a biannual basis, our most desired task remains presenting a variety of approach, unfolding a gamut of thoughts, ...and keeping the questions of closure open. ...the dialogic also allows a certain multiplicity of voices to exist, which in a recalcitrant manner of being dismantles all possibilities of authoritative diktats in language as well as society. If this is the case, a radical conception of democracy would have to account for a shift of emphasis from the locus of governance to that of resistance and co-option. In our sour and hungry times, when state aggression is overpowering the geographical marking (Russia's in Ukraine or Israel's in Palestine), or strangling the voice of internal resistance (North Eastern regions in India), not to mention religious fundamentalism, we need to rethink the old questions of democracy and resistance. ...to come back, the questions that we seek to enquire are: is literature only a representational archive of resistance as practice or does the literary have a democratic practice endemic to itself? What does the dead and reborn literary author have to say about the unstable fulcrum of democracy and authoritarianism? "Sahitya," the Sanskrit word for "literature" is replete with suggestions of the collective and that of togetherness and this brings us back to the fundamental question: what is the nature of the "community" literature and other aesthetic practices can open up? The slogans, banners and popular rhetoric in protest marches...
The paper analyzes the elements that constitute Native American identity in Thomas King’s
Green Grass, Running Water
(1993). In the novel, King juxtaposes two ethnic identities, white Christian ...American, representing the majority in the American society, and Native American, representing a minority. King portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the US and Canada to define their identity given the historically long rift between their native heritage and the white culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship. King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their position in both and usually not belonging to either. By focusing on the world of the reservation, Native American spirituality, tribal tradition of storytelling, and creation myths, King examines different aspects of Native American ethnic identity and, through juxtaposition of the Native American ethnic identity with that of the dominant society, reevaluates the marginalized position of the Native Americans.
This essay explores the formal means by which Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), a novel set in the Sundarbans islands, articulates an environmental politics that reconciles social justice and ...ecological concerns. However, the novel’s internal contradictions surface in its treatment of South Asian fisherman Fokir as an idealized peasant whose fixity is in marked contrast with the fluid subjectivities of the metropolitan characters. I argue that Fokir’s idealization is a problematic way in which the novel mourns the loss of peasant culture in the context of neoliberalism’s destruction of rural ecologies.
The backside of the house was neither field, garden nor orchard, or rather it was both field, garden and orchard; for as soon as the descending of the stairs had delivered them down, they came into a ...place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits; but scarcely they had taken that into their consideration but that they were suddenly stept into a delicate green; of each side of the green a thicket, and behind the thickets again new beds of flowers, which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion and they to the trees a mosaical floor, so that it seemed that Art therein would needs be delightful by counterfeiting his enemy Error and making order in confusion. (73) This traditional pastoral landscape, where nature is tamed by art, is in its calm order a mental space apparently independent of, and oppositionally conceived from, that brief shipwreck which opened the carefully revised text of the Arcadia. "Building an integration network involves setting up mental spaces," they conclude, "matching across spaces, projecting selectively to a blend, locating shared structures, projecting backward to inputs, recruiting new structure to the inputs or the blend, and running various operations in the blend itself" (44).
Recent experimental results with direct bearing on theories of cosmological dark matter/energy, as well as continuing work on neutrino masses and mixing, have invigorated both particle physics and ...cosmology, and should continue to do so well into the 21st century, thereby launching a beautiful new epoch for these fields. The expert contributions from this conference took stock of these developments. This volume contains papers by over 40 physicists that summarize and interpret the newest findings, and suggest future avenues to be explored. A number of new theoretical ideas are also presented, dealing with progress in understanding the dynamics and symmetries of strings and branes, renormalization in quantum field theory, possible Lorentz violation effects, and related problems. Ongoing and next generation gravitational and neutrino experiments are described, and the issues of unification are dealt with in the context of, and beyond, the standard model. Together, the contributions provide a useful blend of experimental and theoretical physics from many prominent physicists, including three Nobel Laureates. The volume also contains information of an historical nature, concerning the contributions to physics by Paul Frampton, on the occasion of his 60th year, and summarizing the career of Behram Kursunoglu (1922–2003).
