"The maniac bellowed" : queer affect and queer temporality in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

textCharlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, is commonly read as a feminist bildungsroman in which a young woman claims her independence. In opposition to these readings, I instead choose to question the ways in which the novel's feminist potential is elided by its simultaneous imperial project. Using the figure of Bertha Mason, I trace the ways in which Jane Eyre's relationship with Edward Rochester is constructed through Bertha's dehumanization in order to reassert the dominance of the healthy Anglo-European family. I examine Jane Eyre's claims to subjectivity, alongside Bertha's very few textual interventions, through the lens of affect theory to show the way in which Bertha Mason, rather than Jane Eyre's mad double, represents nineteenth-century prejudices about creole bodies and undomesticated women. Finally, I engage with theories of queer temporality to read the novel in a way that makes Bertha Mason's agency legible while also evading the novel's troubled relationship to traditional feminist theory. I ultimately suggest that the climactic destruction of Thornfield Hall represents a repudiation of sympathetic feminine bonds in favor of the patriarchal institutions of marriage and respectability.Englis

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies

Decision-Making for Automated Vehicles Using a Hierarchical Behavior-Based Arbitration Scheme

Behavior planning and decision-making are some of the biggest challenges for highly automated systems. A fully automated vehicle (AV) is confronted with numerous tactical and strategical choices. Most state-of-the-art AV platforms implement tactical and strategical behavior generation using finite state machines. However, these usually result in poor explainability, maintainability and scalability. Research in robotics has raised many architectures to mitigate these problems, most interestingly behavior-based systems and hybrid derivatives. Inspired by these approaches, we propose a hierarchical behavior-based architecture for tactical and strategical behavior generation in automated driving. It is a generalizing and scalable decision-making framework, utilizing modular behavior blocks to compose more complex behaviors in a bottom-up approach. The system is capable of combining a variety of scenario- and methodology-specific solutions, like POMDPs, RRT* or learning-based behavior, into one understandable and traceable architecture. We extend the hierarchical behavior-based arbitration concept to address scenarios where multiple behavior options are applicable but have no clear priority against each other. Then, we formulate the behavior generation stack for automated driving in urban and highway environments, incorporating parking and emergency behaviors as well. Finally, we illustrate our design in an explanatory evaluation

Another Sleeping Beauty - Narcissism In 'The House Of Mirth'

Englis

Foreword Symposium: Fourth Annual Mid-Atlantic People ofColor Legal Scholarship Conference: Law and Literature: Examining the Limited Legal Imagination in the Traditional Legal Canon

The Fourth Annual Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, which took place at Rutgers Law School in Camden on February 12-14, 1998, poignantly captured the theme around which the conference was organized. The theme of the conference was Law and Literature: Examining the Limited Legal Imagination in the Traditional Legal Canon. True to the theme of the conference, many presenters sought to expand our collective imagination through poetry, fiction, and narrative. The presentations were intellectually stimulating and provocative. Indeed, there was a literary quality to some of the presentations. Perhaps most importantly, the conference itself, in the tradition of the Regional People of Color conferences, provided us with the necessary sustenance that can only be found in a community of scholars united by a particular undertaking. The dual focus of our undertaking is reflected in both the title of the conference and the papers included in this issue of the Journal. First, conference participants were concerned about the limited legal imagination reflected in the traditional legal canon. Of particular focus was the question of which voices, perspectives, and experiences have become central to the canon, and which are marginalized. Second, participants focused on law and literature, invoking literary fiction and poetry to explore the justice of legal rules and legal decisionmaking. Many scholars at the conference persuasively made the case that literature, and literary techniques (like narrative), can broaden the scope of legal discourse by bringing voices and perspectives which might otherwise go unrecognized, unheard, or unappreciated

Diversity in leadership: Australian women, past and present

This book provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. Overview While leadership is an over-used term today, how it is defined for women and the contexts in which it emerges remains elusive. Moreover, women are exhorted to exercise leadership, but occupying leadership positions has its challenges. Issues of access, acceptable behaviour and the development of skills to be successful leaders are just some of them. Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. It brings interdisciplinary expertise to the topic from leading scholars in a range of fields and diverse backgrounds. The aims of the essays in the collection document the extent and diverse nature of women’s social and political leadership across various pursuits and endeavours within democratic political structures