Subversive blood ties: gothic decadence in three characters from murnau's and coppola's renderings of bram stoker's dracula

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2013Esta dissertação consiste em investigar a construção do tema da decadência Gótica em Drácula de Bram Stoker e duas adaptações fílmicas do romance - Nosferatu, de Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, e Drácula de Bram Stoker, de Francis Ford Coppola - tendo como centro da análise como três personagens - Drácula, Jonathan Harker e Mina Harker - se relacionam com tal tema. A decadência Gótica é um padrão literário do contexto fin-de-siècle da sociedade vitoriana inspirada pela crise social que acontecia na Inglaterra no fim do século XIX (Punter e Byron 39-40). Autores como Bram Stoker escreveram histórias que refletiam medos morais e sociais da sociedade vitoriana, retratando imagens de monstros que representavam a transgressão de fronteiras morais e sexuais estabelecidas pelas tradições vitorianas (Botting 88). Tendo tal discussão em mente, este estudo busca conectar a retratação de tal tema do romance às adaptações, também utilizando uma análise fílmica para identificar técnicas que destacam a representação do tema relacionado aos três personagens, finalmente ligando tal tema a crises e confusões sociais que aconteciam nos contextos de ambos os filmes.Abstract : The present dissertation consists of an investigation of the construction of the Gothic theme of decadence in Bram Stoker's Dracula and two film adaptations of the novel - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula - having as the centre of analysis how three characters - Dracula, Jonathan Harker and Mina Harker - relate to that theme. The Gothic decadence is a literary motif from the fin-de-siècle context of the Victorian Era inspired by the social crisis that took place in England in the late nineteenth century (Punter and Byron 39-40). Authors like Bram Stoker wrote stories that reflected moral and social fears of the Victorian society, depicting images of monsters that represented the crossing of moral and sexual boundaries established by the Victorian traditions (Botting 88). Bearing that discussion in mind, this study aims at connecting the portrayal of such a theme from novel to the two adaptations, also making use of a filmic analysis to identify techniques that highlight the depiction of the theme related to the three characters, ultimately linking such a thematic depiction to crises and social commotions that were taking place in both films' social contexts

Thermoresponsive poly(N-vinylcaprolactam) as stationary phase for aqueous and green liquid chromatography

Poly(N-vinylcaprolactam) (PVCL) connected to aminopropyl silica is a new stationary phase for temperature responsive liquid chromatography (TR-LC). PVCL shows a transition from hydrophilic to hydrophobic interaction between 30 and 40 degrees C. The synthesis is described in detail. The temperature responsive characteristic of the phase is illustrated with a mixture of steroids using pure water as mobile phase. An increase in retention is observed when raising the temperature. H-u plots at different temperatures were constructed. Below the lower critical solution temperature (LCST), no optimal velocity could be measured because of substantial resistance to mass transfer. Above the LCST, u (opt) was ca. 0.3 mm s(-1) with reduced plate heights from 4 at 45 degrees C to 3 at 65 degrees C. The temperature responsive nature of the polymer is lost in green chromatography with ethanol as modifier in concentrations above 5%

A motion system for social and animated robots

This paper presents an innovative motion system that is used to control the motions and animations of a social robot. The social robot Probo is used to study Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), with a special focus on Robot Assisted Therapy (RAT). When used for therapy it is important that a social robot is able to create an "illusion of life" so as to become a believable character that can communicate with humans. The design of the motion system in this paper is based on insights from the animation industry. It combines operator-controlled animations with low-level autonomous reactions such as attention and emotional state. The motion system has a Combination Engine, which combines motion commands that are triggered by a human operator with motions that originate from different units of the cognitive control architecture of the robot. This results in an interactive robot that seems alive and has a certain degree of "likeability". The Godspeed Questionnaire Series is used to evaluate the animacy and likeability of the robot in China, Romania and Belgium

Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s \u3cem\u3eDracula\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eThe Lair of the White Worm\u3c/em\u3e

Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy

Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-siècle science

This paper considers Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, as a window into techno-scientific and sociocultural developments of the fin-de-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology up to communication technology and brain research, but focusing on the birth of psychoanalysis in 1897, the year of publication. Stoker’s literary classic heralds a new style of scientific thinking, foreshadowing important aspects of post-1900 culture. Dracula reflects a number of scientific events which surfaced in the 1890s but evolved into major research areas that are still relevant today. Rather than seeing science and literature as separate realms, moreover, Stoker’s masterpiece encourages us to address the ways in which techno-scientific and psycho- cultural developments mutually challenge and mirror one another, so that we may use his novel to deepen our understanding of emerging research practices and vice versa (Zwart 2008, 2010). Psychoanalysis plays a double role in this. It is the research field whose genealogical constellation is being studied, but at the same time (Lacanian) psychoanalysis guides my reading strategy. Dracula, the infectious, undead Vampire has become an archetypal cinematic icon and has attracted the attention of numerous scholars (Browning & Picart 2009). The vampire complex built on various folkloristic and literary sources and culminated in two famous nineteenth-century literary publications: the story The Vampyre by John Polidori (published in 1819)2 and Stoker’s version. Most of the more than 200 vampire movies released since Nosferatu (1922) are based on the latter (Skal 1990; Browning & Picart 2009; Melton 2010; Silver & Ursini 2010). Yet, rather than on the archetypal cinematic image of the Vampire, I will focus on the various scientific ideas and instruments employed by Dracula’s antagonists to overcome the threat to civilisation he represents. Although the basic storyline is well-known, I will begin with a plot summary

Development of a Semi-Autonomous Robotic System to Assist Children with Autism in Developing Visual Perspective Taking Skills

Robot-assisted therapy has been successfully used to help children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) develop their social skills, but very often with the robot being fully controlled remotely by an adult operator. Although this method is reliable and allows the operator to conduct a therapy session in a customised child-centred manner, it increases the cognitive workload on the human operator since it requires them to divide their attention between the robot and the child to ensure that the robot is responding appropriately to the child's behaviour. In addition, a remote-controlled robot is not aware of the information regarding the interaction with children (e.g., body gesture and head pose, proximity etc) and consequently it does not have the ability to shape live HRIs. Further to this, a remote-controlled robot typically does not have the capacity to record this information and additional effort is required to analyse the interaction data. For these reasons, using a remote-controlled robot in robot-assisted therapy may be unsustainable for long-term interactions. To lighten the cognitive burden on the human operator and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience, it is essential to create some degrees of autonomy and enable the robot to perform some autonomous behaviours during interactions with children. Our previous research with the Kaspar robot either implemented a fully autonomous scenario involving pairs of children, which then lacked the often important input of the supervising adult, or, in most of our research, has used a remote control in the hand of the adult or the children to operate the robot. Alternatively, this paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of a robotic system called Sense- Think-Act which converts the remote-controlled scenarios of our humanoid robot into a semi-autonomous social agent with the capacity to play games autonomously (under human supervision) with children in the real-world school settings. The developed system has been implemented on the humanoid robot Kaspar and evaluated in a trial with four children with ASC at a local specialist secondary school in the UK where the data of 11 Child-Robot Interactions (CRIs) was collected. The results from this trial demonstrated that the system was successful in providing the robot with appropriate control signals to operate in a semi-autonomous manner without any latency, which supports autonomous CRIs, suggesting that the proposed architecture appears to have promising potential in supporting CRIs for real-world applications.Peer reviewe