The Literature of Disaffection: Political Dysphoria and British Modernism after 1930

This dissertation argues that “disaffection” is an overlooked but foundational posture of mid-twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. Previously misdiagnosed as quietism or apathy, disaffection instead describes how many late modernist writers mediated between their ideological misgivings and the pressure to respond to dire political crises, from the Second World War to the creation of new postcolonial nations. Stylists of disaffection—such as Henry Green, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and V. S. Naipaul—grappled with how limiting cultural assumptions, for instance, about class and nation, seemed to inhere in particular aesthetic techniques like stream of consciousness or realism. Disaffected literature appeals to but then disrupts a given technique’s projection of these assumptions and the social totality that they imagine. This literary “bait-and-switch” creates a feeling of dysphoria whereby readers experience a text unnervingly different from what they had been led to expect. Recognizing the formative work of literary disaffection in late modernism offers an original way to conceptualize the transition between modernist and postmodernist literature in the twentieth century.

Du western au crépusculaire : textualités et narrativités du genre pour une approche de l'image-fin

Notre étude porte le western crépusculaire et cherche plus précisément à extraire le « crépusculaire » du genre. L'épithète « crépusculaire », héritée du vocabulaire critique des années 1960 et 1970, définit généralement un nombre relativement restreint d'œuvres dont le récit met en scène des cowboys vieillissants dans un style qui privilégie un réalisme esthétique et psychologique, fréquemment associé à un révisionnisme historique, voire au « western pro-indien », mais qui se démarque par sa propension à filmer des protagonistes fatigués et dépassés par la marche de l'Histoire. Par un détour sur les formes littéraires ayant comme contexte diégétique l’Ouest américain (dime-novel et romans de la frontière), nous effectuons des allers et retours entre les formes épique et romanesque, entre l’Histoire et son mythe, entre le littéraire et le filmique pour mieux saisir la relation dyadique qu’entretient le western avec l’écriture, d’une part monumentale et d’autre part critique, de l’Histoire. Moins intéressée à l’esthétique des images qu’aux aspects narratologiques du film pris comme texte, notre approche tire profit des analyses littéraires pour remettre en cause les classifications étanches qui ont marqué l’évolution du western cinématographique. Nous étudions, à partir des intuitions d’André Bazin au sujet du sur-western, les modulations narratives du western ainsi que l’émergence d’une conscience critique à partir de ses héros mythologiques (notamment le cow-boy). Notre approche est à la fois épistémologique et transhistorique en ce qu’elle cherche à dégager du western crépusculaire un genre au-delà des genres, fondé sur une incitation à la narrativisation crépusculaire de la part du spectateur. Cette dernière, concentrée par une approche deleuzienne de l’image-cristal, renvoie non plus seulement à une conception existentialiste du personnage dans l’Histoire, mais aussi à une mise en relief pointue du hors-cadre du cinéma, moment de clairvoyance à la fois pragmatique et historicisant que nous définissons comme une image-fin, une image chronogénétique relevant de la contemporanéité de ses figures et de leurs auteurs.

Idiosyncratic psychological aspects in entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is having the courage to transform an idea in reality and with it achieve personal, nancial and recognition satisfaction. The psychological ability to handle failure has proven essential in success. We analysed the importance of idiosyncratic psychological aspects in the success of entrepreneurs through an observational study accompanying 20 entrepreneurs from the idea presentation phase to company incorporation. During the observation period 4 distinct psychological phases of the entrepreneurs were observed, being it possible to describe them as follows: absorption of information and knowledge; application of the gathered knowledge to their speci c cases; frustration generated by criticism, namely from investors who didn’t recognise the value of their projects; realism and implementation of the project. Having passed more than 6 months after the analysis period, one can verify that the entrepreneurs who have travelled the 4 phases are today developing their projects being that the remaining ones are in a similar situation as at the end of the initial two months. Conclusion: The ability to cope with frustration and rejection is a determinant factor in the success of the entrepreneur. The ability to learn from rejection, more than resilience help the entrepreneur to proceed.

W stronę radykalnego pluralizmu religijnego

Książka stanowi poszerzoną i uzupełnioną wersję pracy magisterskiej, napisanej pod kierunkiem prof. Tadeusza Buksińskiego w Instytucie Filozofii im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu.

A interpretação de Copenhague e os estados relativos de Hugh Everett III : o problema do realismo científico

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília,Instituto de Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia, 2015.

Rostros y rastros del Nobel: Gabriel García Márquez veinticinco años después

Gabriel García Márquez asume la oralidad del homo caribbeans como síntoma de diversidad , por oposición a la universalizante estandarización trascendental de la escritura, en palabras del antillano Edouard Glissant, y representa una reacción a la cultura letrada establecida por el sistema imperial occidental, custodiada por los organismos reguladores del orden establecido en el centro. De este modo, la literatura oficia como archivo cultural. A la luz de la concepción de literatura como escritura, es preferible hablar de diseminación, de intertextualidad, de palimpsesto, en vez de recurrir al trajinado concepto de influencias literarias. En tal sentido, Cien años de Soledad se constituye en un canon emergente, un código maestro, un nuevo mapa cultural que permite múltiples lecturas y re-escrituras. El realismo mágico pone en crisis el concepto aristotélico de mimesis del arte verbal y exige una nueva perspectiva de analisis.Según un importante sector de la critica, la obra garciamarquiana en sus diferentes rostros, desde las tempranas producciones del ciclo Macondiano hasta la Summa Amorosa que concluye con Del amor y otros demonios, señala el tránsito de la narrativa colombiana de la modernidad a la posmodernidad . Por cierto, veinte años después del Nobel, su rastro se puede seguir desde el campo novelístico nacional contemporáneo hasta recónditas geografias literarias del globo. El realismo mágico, así como en general la literatura del boom, constituye desde la década del setenta una nueva fórmula de respuesta a la situación posmoderna, dado que reemplaza el antiguo canon colonial hegemónico y sus ecos esencialistas, realistas y nacionalistas posteriores a la independencia, y proporciona una ficción de autorrepresentación de la realidad híbrida del discurso otro latinoamericano, en la que la categoría de lo maravilloso reemplazará a la de lo sublime. Sin duda, Macondo existe, es una región de la memoria. Pero sus límites no son occidentales. Dentro del mapa literario mundial, es vecino de remotos espacios geolingüísticos y geoculturales.AbstractGabriel García Márquez assumes the oral tradition of the homo caribbeans as a symptom of diversity, by an opposition to the universalizing standardization of writing, to use the words of Antillean writer Edouard Glissant, and represents a reaction against the educated culture established by the Western imperial system and kept by the regulating organisms of the established order in the center. Thus, literature represents a cultural file.Following the notion of literature as writing, it is preferable to talk about dissemination, intertextuality, or palimpsest instead of resorting to the overused concept of literary influences. In this sense, One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes an emerging cannon, a master code, a new cultural map that allows multiple readings and re-writings. Magic realism puts into crisis the Aristotelian concept of mimicry of the verbal art and demands a new perspective of analysis. According to an important sector of critique, the Garciamarquian work– in its different phases, from the early productions of the Macondian cycle to the Summa Amorosa that finishes with Love and Other Demons, represents the path of the colombian narrative from the modernism to postmodernism. By the way, twenty years after the Nobel, its path can be followed from the novel national contemporary field to distant literary geographies of the world. Magic realism, as well as in general terms the literature of the boom, makes from the sixties decade a new form of answering to the postmodern situation, because it substitutes the old colonial hegemonic cannon and its essential , realistic and national voices after the independence. It gives a fiction of sel-frepresentation of the hybrid reality of the other Latin American discourse, in which the marvelous category will replaced that of the sublime. With no doubt, Macondo exists, it is a region of the memory. But its borders are not Western, inside the literary world map, it is a neighbor of remote geolinguistics and geocultural spaces.

El Señor Presidente y el vanguardismo surrealista

El Señor Presidente es un texto vanguardista, no según la modalidad europea, sino según la vertiente híbrida surgida en América Latina. La novela utiliza recursos y estrategias discursivas del surrealismo para redimensionar las experiencias subjetivas de unos personajes envueltos por la atmósfera pesadillesca y demoníaca de la dictadura. Como texto híbrido mezcla lo ajeno (vanguardias europeas y cristianismo) y lo propio (cultura maya-quiché); y su confluencia posibilita la colisión de tres estéticas: la corriente realista (realismo y regionalismo), el mundo animista maya-quiché y las vanguardias (surrealismo).El Señor Presidente is a vanguard text, not in the European sense, but following the hybrid form appearing in Latin America. The novel employs resources and discourse strategies of surrealism to resize the subjective experiences of some characters enveloped in the nightmarish and demonic atmosphere of the dictatorship. As a hybrid text, foreign aspects (European vanguards and Christianity) are combined with their own (Mayan-Quiche culture); and their coming together leads to the collision of three esthetic codes: realist currents (realism and regionalism), the animist Mayan-Quiche world and the vanguards (surrealism).

Religión, utopismo y realismo político en el renacimiento

This article examines the opposition between utopism and political realism in the context of Renaissance. First, it analyzes the question about the historical continuity or rupture of Renaissance from the Medieval imaginary. After that, it considers the question of religion in Moore ́s Utopia and Campanella’s City of the Sun and compares them with Machiavelli’s texts. Finally, it thinks about the relationship between Renaissance utopism and religion.

Landscaping on shifting ground: teacher education in a digitally transforming world

For almost three decades, the landscape of teacher education has been modestly shaped by the exploration of practices that made use of what were, at the time, current instances of computing and communication technologies (CCTs). More broadly and importantly however, the deployment of CCTs globally has, over the same time period (1980-2008), supported a reshaping of the planet's social, economic and political circumstances in which all forms of education operate. Despite the enormity of these shifts the focus in teacher education has remained largely at site, reflecting a similar focus in schools. In fact, the patterns of adaption and response in teacher education to each new instance of high-tech product are now quite predictable. Thus, while teacher education's engagement with CCTs can be mapped as a kind of minor landscaping, a process which attends more to appearance than substance, it is landscaping effectively premised upon a stable geography, one that resembles that of thirty years ago. This paper explores the changed and changing geography of a world heavily shaped by the ongoing deployment and use of more and more powerful CCTs. The analysis suggests that if we continue to attend only to landscaping, teacher education will be at risk of being terraformed.

Novel design of a renewable energy remote laboratory

BACKGROUND OR CONTEXT: Current work in remote laboratories focuses on student interaction in a setting that can be at times disconnected from real world systems. Laboratories have been developed that show models of a working system, focusing on a single aspect, but very few laboratories allow the user to see the outputs of a working system that interacts with the real world as would be expected outside of a laboratory setting. It was aimed with this paper to show a design of a novel approach to building a remote laboratory that would be able to interact with a fully functional renewable energy system, and to show the students the outputs of such a system in real time. It allows for the user to be presented with information in a new context.
PURPOSE OR GOAL: With this research it is hoped to achieve a remote laboratory that will be able to present students with the data from a renewable energy system live, as it is generated as well as all the logged date generated. It is aimed with this novel approach to building a remote laboratory to assist the students in learning about renewable energy systems while allowing the student to access real data, instead of simulated data. Links to increased motivation due to realism in data given as well as change in student perception on learning in remote laboratories mean that a system such as this could change the way students approach learning about renewable energy generation systems. This will require further research however.
APPROACH: This remote laboratory required gathering data from an already established system. The live results were not recorded, and a log file was generated daily, however this was not fast enough to give to students as it was generated, so a system that could maintain communication between all systems, while also polling for data itself was required. In addition to this, the system had to communicate to a server that would give students access to the live data. The server was set up in such a way that students were not required to install any programs on their computer, multiple students could access the data at any given time, and a wide range of devices, including mobile devices, could all access the remote laboratory.
DISCUSSION: Key outcomes include the design of the remote laboratory, including screenshots of data acquisition from the renewable energy system from different devices. The design is split into two sections, one covering the server side architecture while another covers the data acquisition architecture. A very brief discussion on students’ initial interaction is also undertaken.
RECOMMENDATIONS/IMPLICATIONS/CONCLUSION: Research has shown that the degree of realism in remote education can have an effect on students’ behaviors/motivation in a remote laboratory. By allowing students to knowingly access a real system that is currently being used to generate power from renewable energy sources, the methods and motivations that students use when approaching renewable energy systems may change.

Automatic generation of traditional style painting by using density-based color clustering

In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to automatically generate both watercolor painting and pencil sketch drawing, or binary image of contour, from realism-style photo by using DBSCAN color clustering based on HSV color space. While the color clusters produced by proposed methods help to create watercolor painting, the noise pixels are useful to generate the pencil sketch drawing. Moreover, noise pixels are reassigned to color clusters by a novel algorithm to refine the contour in the watercolor painting. The main goal of this paper is to inspire non-professional artists' imagination to produce traditional style painting easily by only adjusting a few parameters. Also, another contribution of this paper is to propose an easy method to produce the binary image of contour, which is a vice product when mining image data by DBSCAN clustering. Thus the binary image is useful in resource limited system to reduce data but keep enough information of images. © 2007 IEEE.

Does a combination of virtual reality, neuromodulation and neuroimaging provide a comprehensive platform for neurorehabilitation? - A narrative review of the literature

In the last decade, virtual reality (VR) training has been used extensively in video games and military training to provide a sense of realism and environmental interaction to its users. More recently, VR training has been explored as a possible adjunct therapy for people with motor and mental health dysfunctions. The concept underlying VR therapy as a treatment for motor and cognitive dysfunction is to improve neuroplasticity of the brain by engaging users in multisensory training. In this review, we discuss the theoretical framework underlying the use of VR as a therapeutic intervention for neurorehabilitation and provide evidence for its use in treating motor and mental disorders such as cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and other related clinical areas. While this review provides some insights into the efficacy of VR in clinical rehabilitation and its complimentary use with neuroimaging (e.g., fNIRS and EEG) and neuromodulation (e.g., tDCS and rTMS), more research is needed to understand how different clinical conditions are affected by VR therapies (e.g., stimulus presentation, interactivity, control and types of VR). Future studies should consider large, longitudinal randomized controlled trials to determine the true potential of VR therapies in various clinical populations.

De Pas pire à Pour sûr : faits et effets des langues chez France Daigle

La littérature de l’Acadie du Sud-Est émerge dans un contexte lui-même déjà hétérolingue (Grutman). Le chiac porte d’ailleurs les traces de cette cohabitation linguistique puisque son caractère hybride traduit la forte interaction entre les communautés de la région. Or, son usage suscite-t-il une réflexion inquiète sur la situation diglossique du français acadien ou est-il strictement créatif ? Le présent mémoire porte sur le rapport à la langue dans les romans récents de France Daigle, soit Pas pire (1998), Un fin passage (2001), Petites difficultés d’existence (2002) et Pour sûr (2011), en mettant au jour les particularités sociolinguistiques et la façon dont le texte « parle la langue » (Gauvin). Bien qu’il mette à distance les présupposés idéologiques, l’œuvre de Daigle demeure extrêmement sensible au contexte socioculturel d’où il émerge. Ainsi, si l’œuvre s’affranchit d’un réalisme sociolinguistique, c’est afin de créer une « fiction linguistique » (Baetens Beardsmore) qui reconfigure l’imaginaire social de Moncton tout en intégrant certaines inquiétudes bien « réelles ». Qui plus est, la prise en compte de la polyphonie structurelle de l’œuvre permet de s’affranchir de la lecture ethnographique. 

Still entrenched in the conflict/cooperation dichotomy? EU–Russia relations and the Ukraine crisis

The article highlights that the traditional conflict/cooperation dichotomy which characterised the dynamic of European Union (EU)–Russia relation during the post-Cold War period has remained stable throughout the Ukraine crisis. It identifies a pattern of continuity rather than change in the main characteristics of the traditional conflict/cooperation dichotomy: the post-Cold War order on the European continent, values and worldviews, perceptions of self and other, and policies towards each other and post-Soviet space. Secondly, in tune with neoclassical realism the article aims to account for the relative persistence of the conflict/cooperation dichotomy. It argues that the dynamic of EU–Russia relations remained rather stable due to the fact that neither the EU nor Russian foreign policy has undergone major transformations (of both power, scope and organisation) that would provide incentive or constrains for a complete overhaul of the conflict/cooperation dichotomy. Moreover, the article claims that the relative stability of world politics since the start of the Ukraine crisis has not given any the EU and Russia incentives – or constrained them – to seek to change the overall dynamic of their relationship.

De Pas pire à Pour sûr : faits et effets des langues chez France Daigle

La littérature de l’Acadie du Sud-Est émerge dans un contexte lui-même déjà hétérolingue (Grutman). Le chiac porte d’ailleurs les traces de cette cohabitation linguistique puisque son caractère hybride traduit la forte interaction entre les communautés de la région. Or, son usage suscite-t-il une réflexion inquiète sur la situation diglossique du français acadien ou est-il strictement créatif ? Le présent mémoire porte sur le rapport à la langue dans les romans récents de France Daigle, soit Pas pire (1998), Un fin passage (2001), Petites difficultés d’existence (2002) et Pour sûr (2011), en mettant au jour les particularités sociolinguistiques et la façon dont le texte « parle la langue » (Gauvin). Bien qu’il mette à distance les présupposés idéologiques, l’œuvre de Daigle demeure extrêmement sensible au contexte socioculturel d’où il émerge. Ainsi, si l’œuvre s’affranchit d’un réalisme sociolinguistique, c’est afin de créer une « fiction linguistique » (Baetens Beardsmore) qui reconfigure l’imaginaire social de Moncton tout en intégrant certaines inquiétudes bien « réelles ». Qui plus est, la prise en compte de la polyphonie structurelle de l’œuvre permet de s’affranchir de la lecture ethnographique.