130,297 research outputs found
‘A succession of incomprehensible images’ : decoud, boredom and history in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo
In an early scene in Nostromo, Emilia Gould declares that ‘nothing ever happened’ in Sulaco. ‘Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time’, the narrator adds, ‘respected the repose of the place’. The sense of historical impasse in Sulaco despite its tumultuous history is part of what I will call Nostromo’s rhetoric of boredom. I will suggest that Conrad’s novel embodies this rhetoric through Martin Decoud, the ‘idle boulevardier’ who commits suicide when marooned with the Goulds’ silver. Decoud’s weary conception of the universe as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’ marks him out as a familiar cultural trope: the Parisian flâneur. During the nineteenth-century, this famous figure was often depicted in the language of disengagement, despondency and fatigue that would become characteristic of modern boredom. By attributing these qualities to Decoud, Nostromo locates the sceptical and ahistorical philosophy that leads him to commit suicide within a specific historical context. Moreover, Nostromo’s narrative form often presents its content as ‘a succession of incomprehensible images’, depicting its characters’ perspective through the paratactic accumulation of inconsequential details. Thus, the historically-constituted experience conveyed through the rhetoric of boredom is further expressed through the novel’s dissonant mode of historical narration.peer-reviewe
Reducible systems and embedding procedures in the canonical formalism
We propose a systematic method of dealing with the canonical constrained
structure of reducible systems in the Dirac and symplectic approaches which
involves an enlargement of phase and configuration spaces, respectively. It is
not necessary, as in the Dirac approach, to isolate the independent subset of
constraints or to introduce, as in the symplectic analysis, a series of
lagrange multipliers-for-lagrange multipiers. This analysis illuminates the
close connection between the Dirac and symplectic approaches of treating
reducible theories, which is otherwise lacking. The example of p-form gauge
fields (p=2,3) is analyzed in details.Comment: Latex 23 pages, some corrections and improvements in the text. To
appear in Annals of Physic
Quantum photon emission from a moving mirror in the nonperturbative regime
We consider the coupling of the electromagnetic vacuum field with an
oscillating perfectly-reflecting mirror in the nonrelativistic approximation.
As a consequence of the frequency modulation associated to the motion of the
mirror, low frequency photons are generated. We calculate the photon emission
rate by following a nonperturbative approach, in which the coupling between the
field sidebands is taken into account. We show that the usual perturbation
theory fails to account correctly for the contribution of TM-polarized vacuum
fluctuations that propagate along directions nearly parallel to the plane
surface of the mirror.
As a result of the modification of the field eigenfunctions, the resonance
frequency for photon emission is shifted from its unperturbed value.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. To be published in Optics Communication
Metallic Continuum Quantum Ferromagnets at Finite Temperature
We study via renormalization group (RG) and large N methods the problem of
continuum SU(N) quantum Heisenberg ferromagnets (QHF) coupled to gapless
electrons. We establish the phase diagram of the dissipative problem and
investigate the changes in the Curie temperature, magnetization, and magnetic
correlation length due to dissipation and both thermal and quantum
fluctuations. We show that the interplay between the topological term (Berry's
phase) and dissipation leads to non-trivial effects for the finite temperature
critical behavior.Comment: Corrected typos, new discussion of T=0 results, to appear in
Europhys. Let
A superspace embedding of the Wess-Zumino model
We embed the Wess-Zumino (WZ) model in a wider superspace than the one
described by chiral and anti-chiral superfields.Comment: 5 pages, Revtex (multicol
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