Marguerite Duras and colonialist discourse: an intertextual reading of 'L'Empire français' and 'Un barrage contre le Pacifique'

This article examines the intertextual relationship between Marguerite Duras' pro-colonialist, propagandist text, L'Empire français (1943), and her seemingly anti-colonialist novel, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950). It explores both the transformative and the emulative uses to which descriptive elements, borrowed from the precursor text, are put in the novel's depictions of colonial Indochina. Going against prevalent critical readings of Barrage, the article highlights the ambivalent and ultimately only partial nature of Duras' apparent ideological volte-face

Writing, death and absence in 'Tim' by H.O. Sturgis

There has been a considerable critical interest in the representation of death in Children's Literature, with an increasingly prevalent move to read it as granting the child the status of object. Thus, for example, Judith Plotz takes it to 'increase [the] presence' of the child. Through a detailed reading of one late C19th school story, I suggest that such readings proceed through a resistance to textuality. This essay offers a reading of death as bound up with the play of the text, deferred, shifting and retrospectively constructed rather than a state of simple, recoverable objecthood.

Chaucer's presence in songes and sonettes

In an elegy to Wyatt published in Tottel’s Miscellany, Surrey claims that Wyatt ‘reft Chaucer the glory of his wit’. This statement, which both lauds and resists Chaucer, is a microcosm of the way Chaucer is treated throughout the Miscellany. In examining the collection’s paradoxical attitude to Chaucer, this essay focuses particularly on the Squire’s Tale, the Franklin’s Tale, Anelida and Arcite, the Legend of Good Women, and several short lyrics. In its interest in courtly love poetry and Petrarch, the Miscellany follows a trajectory in English poetry set by Chaucer. Its courtly verse is saturated with words, phrases, and tropes from his poetry. Rhyme royal, which he introduced into English poetry, is widely used. The Canterbury Tales has been fully assimilated and can be referred to allusively with the same confidence of the audience’s knowledge as is the case when referring to classical myth; in Wyatt’s ‘Myne owne Jhon Poins’, the speaker, disclaiming deceitfulness, says that he cannot ‘say that Pan/ Passeth Appollo in musike manifold:/ Praise syr Topas for a noble tale,/ And scorne the story that the knight tolde’ (lines 48-50). However, Chaucer’s poetry is also downplayed and contested in the Miscellany. ‘Truth’, the only poem of his which appears in the volume, is disingenuously placed in the ‘Uncertain Authors’ section. In addition, some of the most important elements of his work are strongly resisted in the Miscellany, either ignored, dismissed or challenged. These elements include Chaucer’s interest in variety of voice, his sympathetic engagement with women, particularly wronged women, and his interest in female speech and particularly female complaint. The Miscellany, by contrast, is dominated by male-voiced lyrics preoccupied with the pain inflicted on the lover by a lady who is frequently unfeeling, cruel, or faithless. Chaucer’s frequent focus on the cynical seduction and betrayal of female by male is reversed in the Miscellany, and the language and metaphors he uses to express male cruelty (e.g. the word ‘newfangleness’ and images of hooks, nets and traps) are usurped to describe the lady’s cruelty to the suffering lover. On occasion, poems in the Miscellany challenge specific Chaucerian texts; ‘On His Love Named White’ throws down a gauntlet to The Book of the Duchess, while two of Surrey’s poems implicitly take issue with the female falcon’s voice in the Squire’s Tale, giving the deceitful tercelet the opportunity to shout down the falcon’s charges. The essay thus shows that in many respects Tottel’s Miscellany is only superficially Chaucerian, and that it both passively and actively takes issue with Chaucer’s work.

"You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets": the literary and political hinterland of T.S. Eliot's 'Coriolan'

There has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T.S. Eliot's unfinished sequence, Coriolan (1932)—interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writing's particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. Coriolan emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot's sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot's journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engagement and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing Coriolan poems.

Benchmarking energy use in licensed restaurants and pubs

Commercial kitchens often leave a large carbon footprint. A new dataset of energy performance metrics from a leading industrial partner is presented. Categorising these types of buildings is challenging. Electricity use has been analysed using data from automated meter readings (AMR) for the purpose of benchmarking and discussed in terms of factors such as size and food output. From the analysed results, consumption is found to be almost double previous sector estimates of 6480 million kWh per year. Recommendations are made to further improve the current benchmarks in order to attain robust, reliable and transparent figures, such as the introduction of normalised performance indicators to include kitchen size (m2) and kWh per thousand-pound turnover.

The syntax-semantics of bare and definite plural subjects in the L2 Spanish of English natives

This study investigates the extent to which advanced native-English L2 learners of Spanish come to acquire restrictions on bare plural preverbal subjects in L2 Spanish (e.g. gatos “cats” vs. definite plurals such as los gatos “the cats”). It tests L2 knowledge of available semantic readings of bare plurals and definite plurals in Spanish, where [+specific] and [+generic] interpretations are syntactically represented differently from English. Assuming L1 transfer, and in view of a potential subset/superset relationship of the two grammars, the learning task in this domain is not a straightforward one. Target acquisition requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Spanish definite plural subjects require the addition of an L1-unavailable [+generic] reading, while a loss of an L1-available [+generic] reading for preverbal subject bare plurals is required. The results and analysis show that advanced L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) can circumvent a superficial subset/superset learnability problem by means of feature resetting in line with the Nominal Mapping Parameter.

The consolidation and bond strength of rafted sea ice

The consolidation and bond strength of rafted sea ice were investigated through a series of experiments undertaken in the Ice Physics Laboratory at the UCL. To simulate a section of rafted sea ice, blocks of laboratory grown saline ice were stacked in an insulated tank with spacers between adjacent blocks to allow saline water to flood in. The rate of consolidation was then monitored using a combination of temperature readings recorded in the ice and liquid layer, salinity measurements of the liquid layer, and cores taken at specific times of interest. Two states of consolidation were observed: thermodynamic consolidation where the ice blocks were physically bonded but the bond strength was weak, and mechanical consolidation where the bond had reached full strength. Results showed that the rafted ice had physically bonded in less than a day, however it took many more days (6 to 30 depending on the environmental conditions) for the bond to reach maximum strength. Increasing the thickness of the ice, the salinity of the water and the inter-block gap size all increased the consolidation time. Once consolidated, ice cores were taken and sheared using the asymmetric four-point bending method to measure the strength of the bond between the ice blocks. These were then compared to the shear strength of solid ice blocks simulating level sea ice. Our results show that the shear strength of the bond between the rafted ice blocks is about 30% weaker than that of level ice.

Poetry of social conscience, poetry of transition: Ann Hawkshaw's 'Introductory Stanzas' and 'The Mother to her Starving Child'

Through close readings of Ann Hawkshaw's poetry in the context of industrial Manchester in the 1840s, this article highlights the interaction of form and content in poetry that makes use of the idea of the past to question or complicate the politics of the present.

Cortical hot spots and labyrinths: why cortical neuromodulation for episodic migraine with aura should be personalized

Stimulation protocols for medical devices should be rationally designed. For episodic migraine with aura we outline model-based design strategies toward preventive and acute therapies using stereotactic cortical neuromodulation. To this end, we regard a localized spreading depression (SD) wave segment as a central element in migraine pathophysiology. To describe nucleation and propagation features of the SD wave segment, we define the new concepts of cortical hot spots and labyrinths, respectively. In particular, we firstly focus exclusively on curvature-induced dynamical properties by studying a generic reaction-diffusion model of SD on the folded cortical surface. This surface is described with increasing level of details, including finally personalized simulations using patient's magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner readings. At this stage, the only relevant factor that can modulate nucleation and propagation paths is the Gaussian curvature, which has the advantage of being rather readily accessible by MRI. We conclude with discussing further anatomical factors, such as areal, laminar, and cellular heterogeneity, that in addition to and in relation to Gaussian curvature determine the generalized concept of cortical hot spots and labyrinths as target structures for neuromodulation. Our numerical simulations suggest that these target structures are like fingerprints, they are individual features of each migraine sufferer. The goal in the future will be to provide individualized neural tissue simulations. These simulations should predict the clinical data and therefore can also serve as a test bed for exploring stereotactic cortical neuromodulation.

Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and Henry Parker's adjudicative standpoint

Discussions of popular sovereignty in early modern England have usually been premised upon a sharp distinction between ‘legal/constitutional’ forms of discourse (which merely interpret the law) and ‘political’ ones (which focus upon the right to make it). In such readings of the period, Henry Parker has a pivotal position as a writer who abandoned merely legalistic thinking. This chapter takes a different view. It argues that Parker’s major intellectual achievement was not so much to abandon legal/constitutional discourse as to offer a theorisation of its most distinctive features: he offered an account of a new kind of politics in which concern for ‘interests’ in property and in self-preservation replaced humanist concern with promotion of virtue. Parker drew upon ideas about representation best expressed by Sir Thomas Smith and ideas about law best expressed by Oliver St John. The theory he developed was not intended as a justification of legislative sovereignty, but of adjudicative supremacy. His picture of the two Houses as supreme adjudicators was meant to block the path to direct democracy. But the adjudicative standpoint they came to occupy presupposed that freeborn adults had ‘interests’ in life, liberty, and possessions. This had democratising implications.

Gender, childhood and children’s literature: the CIRCL approach

This paper explores the unique approach to childhood and children’s literature of the research and teaching of the ‘Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL)’. CIRCL follows in its work the arguments of UK critical theorist Jacqueline Rose in her seminal 1984 book The case of Peter Pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. Rose’s work has been widely and routinely referenced in Children’s Literature studies particularly, but CIRCL interprets her arguments as having quite different implications than those usually assumed. Rose is generally attributed with having pointed out that ‘childhood’ is not one, homogenous category, but that childhood is divided by gender, race, and ethnic, political and religious (and so on) identities. But for CIRCL this is only a first step in Rose’s arguments and certainly one not unique to her work anyway: the perception of various cultural and historical childhoods is widely held. Instead, my paper explores how Rose’s arguments are centrally about how ‘childhood’ itself cannot be maintained in the face of division, a division, moreover, which operates inevitably at every level, and which derives from Rose’s interpretation of psychoanalysis as formulated by Sigmund Freud, which Rose derives in turn from her readings of the interpretations of Freud by French analyst Jacques Lacan and French critical theorist Jacques Derrida. Finally, my paper argues how Rose’s position is about any ‘identity’, including gender and that this allies her work closely to that of the famous gender theorist Judith Butler, whose arguments are often (mis) understood in the same ways as those of Rose.

An Alternative Section Method for Casting and Posterior Laser Welding of Metallic Frameworks for an Implant-Supported Prosthesis

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare the accuracy of fit of three types of implant-supported frameworks cast in Ni-Cr alloy: specifically, a framework cast as one piece compared to frameworks cast separately in sections to the transverse or the diagonal axis, and later laser welded. Materials and Methods: Three sets of similar implant-supported frameworks were constructed. The first group of six 3-unit implant-supported frameworks were cast as one piece, the second group of six were sectioned in the transverse axis of the pontic region prior to casting, and the last group of six were sectioned in the diagonal axis of the pontic region prior to casting. The sectioned frameworks were positioned in the matrix (10 N(.)cm torque) and laser welded. To evaluate passive fit, readings were made with an optical microscope with both screws tightened and with only one-screw tightened. Data were submitted to ANOVA and Tukey-Kramer`s test (p < 0.05). Results: When both screws were tightened, no differences were found between the three groups (p > 0.05). In the single-screw-tightened test, with readings made opposite to the tightened side, the group cast as one piece (57.02 +/- 33.48 mu m) was significantly different (p < 0.05) from the group sectioned diagonally (18.92 +/- 4.75 mu m) but no different (p > 0.05) from the group transversally sectioned (31.42 +/- 20.68 mu m). On the tightened side, no significant differences were found between the groups (p > 0.05). Conclusions: Results of this study showed that casting diagonally sectioned frameworks lowers misfit levels of prosthetic implant-supported frameworks and also improves the levels of passivity to the same frameworks when compared to structures cast as one piece.

Modified section method for laser-welding of ill-fitting cp Ti and Ni-Cr alloy one-piece cast implant-supported frameworks

P>This study aimed to verify the effect of modified section method and laser-welding on the accuracy of fit of ill-fitting commercially pure titanium (cp Ti) and Ni-Cr alloy one-piece cast frameworks. Two sets of similar implant-supported frameworks were constructed. Both groups of six 3-unit implant-supported fixed partial dentures were cast as one-piece [I: Ni-Cr (control) and II: cp Ti] and evaluated for passive fitting in an optical microscope with both screws tightened and with only one screw tightened. All frameworks were then sectioned in the diagonal axis at the pontic region (III: Ni-Cr and IV: cp Ti). Sectioned frameworks were positioned in the matrix (10-Ncm torque) and laser-welded. Passive fitting was evaluated for the second time. Data were submitted to anova and Tukey-Kramer honestly significant difference tests (P < 0 center dot 05). With both screws tightened, one-piece cp Ti group II showed significantly higher misfit values (27 center dot 57 +/- 5 center dot 06 mu m) than other groups (I: 11 center dot 19 +/- 2 center dot 54 mu m, III: 12 center dot 88 +/- 2 center dot 93 mu m, IV: 13 center dot 77 +/- 1 center dot 51 mu m) (P < 0 center dot 05). In the single-screw-tightened test, with readings on the opposite side to the tightened side, Ni-Cr cast as one-piece (I: 58 center dot 66 +/- 14 center dot 30 mu m) was significantly different from cp Ti group after diagonal section (IV: 27 center dot 51 +/- 8 center dot 28 mu m) (P < 0 center dot 05). On the tightened side, no significant differences were found between groups (P > 0 center dot 05). Results showed that diagonally sectioning ill-fitting cp Ti frameworks lowers misfit levels of prosthetic implant-supported frameworks and also improves passivity levels of the same frameworks when compared to one-piece cast structures.

Thermoluminescence, electron paramagnetic resonance and optical absorption in natural and synthetic rhodonite crystals

Thermoluminescence, electron paramagnetic resonance and optical absorption properties of rhodonite, a natural silicate mineral, have been investigated and compared to those of synthetic crystal, pure and doped. The TL peaks grow linearly for radiation dose up to 4 kGy, and then saturate. In all the synthetic samples, 140 and 340 degrees C TL peaks are observed; the difference occurs in their relative intensities, but only 340 degrees C peak grows strongly for high doses. Al(2)O(3) and Al(2)O(3) + CaO-doped synthetic samples presented several decades intenser TL compared to that of synthetic samples doped with other impurities. A heating rate of 4 degrees C/s has been used in all the TL readings. The EPR spectrum of natural rhodonite mineral has only one huge signal around g = 2.0 with width extending from 1,000 to 6,000 G. This is due to Mn dipolar interaction, a fact proved by numerical calculation based on Van Vleck dipolar broadening expression. The optical absorption spectrum is rich in absorption bands in near-UV, visible and near-IR intervals. Several bands in the region from 540 to 340 nm are interpreted as being due to Mn(3+) in distorted octahedral environment. A broad and intense band around 1,040 nm is due to Fe(2+). It decays under heating up to 900 degrees C. At this temperature it is reduced by 80% of its original intensity. The pink, natural rhodonite, heated in air starts becoming black at approximately 600 degrees C.