Key figure of mobility : The pedestrian

Peer reviewed

Heaven's Sense: a novel / At hand-grips with ruin: the psychology of writer's block

There is a significant attitude of scepticism when it comes to belief in the existence of writer's block as a valid psychological phenomenon, alongside what might be described as the "Tortured Artist Personality". It is contended here that both writer's block and the "Tortured Artist Personality" do exist in a minority of professional and aspiring fiction writers, and furthermore that these phenomena are forms of personality behaviour that have already been well-catalogued by the academic fields of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy: specifically, writer's block is a form of unconscious maladaptive procrastination - expressed through avoidance coping or escape coping behaviour - which in turn arises from the fully-accepted personality trait of perfectionism. Aspects of perfectionism, together with various sub-scale traits and mediators, are also the key components in at least one form of "Tortured Artist Personality". This paper lays out the extensive evidence for these assertions, using existing research in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and neuroscience.

Estudio crítico sobre Roberto Bolaño : Literatura, identificaciones imaginarias y registros modélicos

El artículo analiza la figura de escritor de Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), a partir de su surgimiento en los medios literarios, en función de lo que el discurso de la crítica cataloga y aborda en diferentes momentos en cuanto a la evolución del autor y de su obra. Lo que planteamos averiguar es lo que sucede con el caso "Bolaño", cuya contemplación supone atender la situación particular de una figura paradigmática que construye una subjetividad notable evocada en su obra como una articulación esencial para la afirmación del individuo que escribe, quien se sustrae de los tradicionales ideales estético-literarios que funcionan para otros autores latinoamericanos contemporáneos.

Estudio crítico sobre Roberto Bolaño : Literatura, identificaciones imaginarias y registros modélicos

El artículo analiza la figura de escritor de Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), a partir de su surgimiento en los medios literarios, en función de lo que el discurso de la crítica cataloga y aborda en diferentes momentos en cuanto a la evolución del autor y de su obra. Lo que planteamos averiguar es lo que sucede con el caso "Bolaño", cuya contemplación supone atender la situación particular de una figura paradigmática que construye una subjetividad notable evocada en su obra como una articulación esencial para la afirmación del individuo que escribe, quien se sustrae de los tradicionales ideales estético-literarios que funcionan para otros autores latinoamericanos contemporáneos.

Estudio crítico sobre Roberto Bolaño : Literatura, identificaciones imaginarias y registros modélicos

El artículo analiza la figura de escritor de Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), a partir de su surgimiento en los medios literarios, en función de lo que el discurso de la crítica cataloga y aborda en diferentes momentos en cuanto a la evolución del autor y de su obra. Lo que planteamos averiguar es lo que sucede con el caso "Bolaño", cuya contemplación supone atender la situación particular de una figura paradigmática que construye una subjetividad notable evocada en su obra como una articulación esencial para la afirmación del individuo que escribe, quien se sustrae de los tradicionales ideales estético-literarios que funcionan para otros autores latinoamericanos contemporáneos.

Une littérature du décloisonnement : la construction de la figure de l'écrivain et du littéraire dans Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer et Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit? de Dany Laferrière

Dany Laferrière, récemment admis à la prestigieuse Académie française, a produit une œuvre considérable au cours des trente dernières années. Deux de ces premiers romans, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer et Cette grenade dans la main du jeune Nègre est-elle une arme ou un fruit?, sont caractérisés par une intertextualité riche et variée. La trame narrative de ces deux romans est construite par fragments. Dans le premier texte, on retrouve un écrivain fictif qui procède à l’écriture d’un roman qu’il nomme Paradis du dragueur nègre. Dans le deuxième roman, nous retrouvons le même écrivain, mais ce dernier est plutôt employé par un magazine de la côte est afin de rédiger un reportage sur l’Amérique. Dans les deux cas, il y a une mise en scène de l’écriture par un écrivain fictif qui présente beaucoup de ressemblances avec Laferrière lui-même. Le lecteur assiste à la construction du récit qu’il est en train de lire à travers une autofiction originale. Il y a donc une multitude de ressemblances, et mêmes correspondances, entre les deux récits. Les deux romans de Laferrière s’inscrivent par leur thème, leur style et leur genre dans une « généalogie » de textes qui peuvent être regroupés en « familles » littéraires. Nous tenterons, dans le mémoire qui suit, de définir et de comprendre le rôle de ces « familles » et d’illustrer comment l’appropriation de ces textes permet à l’auteur à la fois de s’en inspirer et de s’en distancer. Il s’agira donc, dans les deux premiers chapitres, d’étudier les références intertextuelles appartenant à ces deux « familles » d’écrivains pour ensuite étudier plus particulièrement la construction de la figure de l’écrivain et de son espace littéraire à travers ces deux œuvres. MOT-CLÉS : Dany Laferrière ; intertextualité ; autofiction ; roman contemporain ; littérature québécoise.

The Effect of SIFT Features as Content Descriptors in the Context of Automatic Writer Identification in Malayalam Language

The span of writer identification extends to broad domes like digital rights administration, forensic expert decisionmaking systems, and document analysis systems and so on. As the success rate of a writer identification scheme is highly dependent on the features extracted from the documents, the phase of feature extraction and therefore selection is highly significant for writer identification schemes. In this paper, the writer identification in Malayalam language is sought for by utilizing feature extraction technique such as Scale Invariant Features Transform (SIFT).The schemes are tested on a test bed of 280 writers and performance evaluated

Is it appropriate protective figure "Plant Micro-Reserves" to protect tree species? The example of Betula pendula subsp. fontqueri in "La Garganta de los Caballeros" (Ávila)

The figure of protection "micro-reserves" was created in the Region of Valencia (ANONYMOUS, 1994) with the aim of protecting endangered plant species. This is one of the areas of greatest floristic richness and uniqueness of the western Mediterranean. In this area rare, endemic or threatened vascular flora has a peculiar distribution: they appear to form small fragments spread over the entire region (LAGUNA, 1994; LAGUNA, 2001) The protection of every these small populations of great scientific value has significant challenges. It doesn´t try to protect every species that set out in Annex IV of the by then existing Law 4 / 1989 (repealed in 2007), or to protect to the most ecological level with the creation of Natural Protected Area but an intermediate level: the plant community of small size. According to the decree: “as Micro-Reserve will be declared the natural parcels of land under 20 hectares that contain a high concentration of rare plants, endemic, threatened or of high scientific interest” (ANONYMOUS, 1994) . Of course, the statement of an area as micro-reserve carries certain prohibitions that are harmful to the vegetal community

Near-infrared third-order nonlinearity of PbO-GeO(2) films containing Cu and Cu(2)O nanoparticles

We report measurements of the nonlinear (NL) refractive index n(2) of lead-germanium films (LGFs) containing Cu and Cu(2)O nanoparticles (NPs). The thermally managed eclipse Z-scan technique with 150 fs pulses from a laser operating at 800 nm was used. The NL refractive index measured, n(2)=6.3x10(-12) cm(2)/W has electronic origin and the NL absorption coefficient alpha(2) is smaller than 660 cm/GW. The figure of merit n(2)/lambda alpha(2) is enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude in comparison with the result for the LGFs without the copper based NPs. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics.

Atomistic origins of the phase transition mechanism in Ge(2)Sb(2)Te(5)

The fast and reversible phase transition mechanism between crystalline and amorphous phases of Ge(2)Sb(2)Te(5) has been in debate for several years. Through employing first-principles density functional theory calculations, we identify a direct structural link between the metastable crystalline and amorphous phases. The phase transition is driven by the displacement of Ge atoms along the rocksalt [111] direction from stable octahedron to high energy unstable tetrahedron sites close to the intrinsic vacancy regions, which generates a high energy intermediate phase between metastable and amorphous phases. Due to the instability of Ge at the tetrahedron sites, the Ge atoms naturally shift away from those sites, giving rise to the formation of local-ordered fourfold motifs and the long-range structural disorder. Intrinsic vacancies, which originate from Sb(2)Te(3), lower the energy barrier for Ge displacements, and hence, their distribution plays an important role in the phase transition. The high energy intermediate configuration can be obtained experimentally by applying an intense laser beam, which overcomes the thermodynamic barrier from the octahedron to tetrahedron sites. The high figure of merit of Ge(2)Sb(2)Te(5) is achieved from the optimal combination of intrinsic vacancies provided by Sb(2)Te(3) and the instability of the tetrahedron sites provided by GeTe.

Conformations of cyclic octapeptides and the influence of heterocyclic ring constraints upon calcium binding

A comparison is made between the structures and calcium binding properties of four cyclic octapeptides that differ in the number of heterocyclic thiazole and oxazoline ring constraints. The conformations of the naturally occurring cyclic octapeptides ascidiacyclamide 1 and patellamide D 2, which each contain two oxazoline and two thiazole rings, are compared by H-1 NMR spectroscopy with the analogues cyclo(Thr-D-Val(Thz)-Ile)(2) 3 with just two thiazoles, and cyclo(Thr-D-Val-alpha Abu-Ile)(2) 4, with no 5-membered rings. The conformations observed in the solid state for ascidiacyclamide (saddle) and patellamide D (twisted figure of eight) were retained in solution, whilst peptide 3 was found to have a chair shape and peptide 4 displayed a range of conformations. The solid state structure of 4 revealed that the peptide takes a relatively planar conformation with a number of transannular hydrogen bonds, which are apparently retained in solution. Complexation studies utilising H-1 NMR and CD spectroscopy yielded 1∶1 calcium-peptide binding constants (log K) for the four peptides (2.9 (1), 2.8 (2), 4.0 (3) and 5.5 (4)) as well as a 1 : 2 metal-peptide binding constant for 3 (log K = 4.5). The affinity for Ca2+ thus decreases with increasing number of 5-membered ring constraints in the macrocycle (4 > 3 > 2 approximate to 1).