Positioning, linguistic theory and Orwell's short nonfiction

It is argued, making reference to an Orwell text sample, that linguistic theory illuminates "positioning" (as term and concept), that positioning's flexibility contributes to critical textual analysis and to attempts to understand complex human processes, but how far language may constrain as well as facilitate such understanding must remain open.

Fictional endstates

Studies the intellectual in power striving to realise the universal State or Empire. Examines this theme through the medium of four fictional narratives: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave new world, Arthur Koestler's Heart of darkness, and George Orwell's Nineteen eighty-four. The hypothesis of the inquiry is that all four of these texts provide fictional redescriptions of a crisis of confidence in the Enlightenment ideal of progress.

Fear and manipulation in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four and Alan Moores V for Vendetta

O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar a questão da política do medo e das várias formas de manipulação da realidade encontradas nas narrativa de 1984 (1949), de George Orwell, assim como na narrativa gráfica de V de Vingança tanto na sua versão em quadrinhos, de Alan Moore (1982-88), quanto na sua adaptação cinematográfica, escrita pelos Wachowskis (2005). Em particular, tenta demonstrar similaridades nas técnicas usadas, assim como na análise dos personagens, procurando embasar certos questionamentos com a ajuda de filósofos políticos, estudos de psicologia, culturais, e distópicos. Ao final, este trabalho tenta identificar a importância da influência dos autores estudados, assim como outros autores distópicos, na criação e desenvolvimento de uma nova geração social de mentalidade inconformista

Lonely voices of the south: exploring the transnational dialogue of Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Connor

Accepted Version

Adorno reframed

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of ‘high art’, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book challenges this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Adorno Reframed is not only a comprehensive introduction to the reader coming to Adorno for the first time, but also an important re-evaluation of this founder of the Frankfurt School. Using a wealth of concrete illustrations from popular culture, Geoff Boucher recasts Adorno as a revolutionary whose subversive irony and profoundly historical aesthetics defended the integrity of the individual against social totality.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Novels as an Early Paradigm of Racial Toleration

The Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) provide an early paradigm of racial toleration by displacing the heterogeneous race conflicts of the U. S. to an interplanetary location. There, the protagonist John Carter, representing Burroughs himself, introduces a level of racial acceptance and integration almost unheard of on the Earth of that era (the early twentieth century).

George Meredith, his life and art in anecdote and criticism,

Mode of access: Internet.

Milton and romance: vernacular romance and chivalric traditions in Paradise Lost

The thesis examines Milton's strategic use of romance in Paradise Lost, arguing that such a handling of romance is a provocative realignment of its values according to the poet’s Christian focus. The thesis argues that Milton's use of romance is not simply the importation of a tradition into the poem; it entails a backward judgement on that tradition, defining its idealising tendencies as fundamentally misplaced. The thesis also examines the Caroline uses of romance and chivalry in the 1630s to provide a vision of British unification, and Milton's reaction to this political agenda.

Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

Light emission from gold and silver thin films in a scanning tunneling microscope: role of contamination and interpretation of grain structure in photon maps

Scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) tip-induced light emission from Au and Ag has been studied. Thin film samples similar to100nm thick were prepared by thermal evaporation at 0.5nm/s onto a room-temperature glass substrate to produce grains of 20-50nm in lateral dimension at the surface. Light emission from the samples in the STM was quasi-simultaneously recorded with the topography, at 1.8V tip bias and 3-40nA current, alternating pixel by pixel at the same bias. Typically, a surface scan range of 150 nm x 150 nm was surveyed. Au, W and PtIr tips were used.

The constitution of the United States, a critical discussion of it'sgenesis, development, and interpretation

UANL