Alexandra Watkins interviews Michelle de Kretser on 'Springtime'

Sydney in spring is a palette of luminous intensity. Fresh green spaces meet vivid blue skies. Lilac jacarandas burst into life throughout the city and its suburbs. It is time of renewal when locals and tourists take full advantage of this most favoured of seasons. It is a curious setting for a gothic tale, albeit the location for Michelle de Kretser’s latest work, Springtime: A Ghost Story. Bringing light to darkness this ‘black-spring’ interview with Michelle de Kretser questions Australian literary and cultural customs and environmental stereotypes. It also probes literary fashions, short form fiction, the Melbourne / Sydney cultural divide, gothic tropes, and the psychology of space. Through her discussion with interviewer Alix Watkins, de Kretser reflects on her interest in haunting, the influence of her Sri Lankan background, and the attraction of brevity following her previous epic Questions of Travel (Miles Franklin Award 2012).

Préférences musicales alternatives et ajustement psychosocial à la fin de l’adolescence : une approche développementale semi-paramétrique

Essai doctoral présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Docteur en psychologie (D. Psy,), option clinique

Media Gótico: O Crime e seu Duplo Ficcional na Literatura, TV e Cinema

Crime possesses a dual nature deriving from its portrayal in the media leading to duplicity in the act of witnessing crime which by showing reality inevitably transforms it into a different kind of reality. The direct relationship with the Gothic genre is very naturally justified by real crime seeming to replicate fictional crime and vice versa, thus originating various forms of the lack of distinction between reality itself and fictional reality, or between truth and falsehood, which many writers and artists associated with Gothic aesthetics have always relied on, and numerous examples of this can be found in the works of Edgar Poe, Patricia Highsmith, Chuck Palahniuk and many others. While real crime may take the Gothic novel as its prototype, it turns out that nowadays television has taken on this role. Examples of this phenomenon are the recent symptoms of obsessive dependence on TV series such as C.S.I., Criminal Minds, The X Files, The Following and Dexter, showing a tendency for television series to replace Gothic novels, thus revealing a perverse attraction for witnessing violence through the same means that transmit the daily news featuring violent events in different scenarios of war all over the world.

Calcium sulfate fillers and binders in Portuguese 15th and 16th centuries: Ground layers from a family painting workshop — Study by multianalytical spectroscopic techniques

This study presents results on a developed methodology to characterize ground layers in Portuguese workshops. In this work a set of altarpieces of the 15th and 16th centuries, assigned to Coimbra painting workshop was studied, overall the masters Vicente Gil (doc. Coimbra 1498–1525), Manuel Vicente (doc. Coimbra 1521–1530) and Bernardo Manuel (act. c. 1559–94), father, son and grandson, encompassing from late gothic to mannerist periods. The aim of the study is to compare ground layers, fillers and binders of Coimbra workshop, and to correlate their characteristics to understand the technical evolution of this family of painters, using complementary microscopic techniques. The cross-sections from the groups of paintings were examined by optical microscopy and the results were integrated through the analysis obtained by μ-X–ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X–ray Spectrometry, μ-confocal Raman and occasionally with μ-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy imaging. Ground layers are of calcium sulfate, present as gesso grosso (mainly anhydrite with small amounts of gypsum) in the first and last phases of the workshop and gesso mate (mainly gypsum with small amounts of anhydrite) in an intermediate period. Binders have protein and oleic characteristics.