Commemorative Issue in Honor of Professor Karlheinz Schwarz on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday

A collection of 18 scientific papers written in honor of Professor Karlheinz Schwarz's 80th birthday. The main topics include spectroscopy, excited states, DFT developments, results analysis, solid states, and surfaces

Sue Bridehead: A Rorschach Test

This thesis is a metacritical survey of the criticism on Sue Bridehead’s portrayal in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, from the time of its publication in 1895 to now, and is intended to be a comprehensive overview and analysis of the major critical lines of enquiry about Sue’s characterisation. Since the scope of this thesis is to engage with over one hundred years of literary criticism, I keep the focus concentrated primarily on the critical responses to the depiction of Sue. I discuss the reasons behind the sustained critical interest in her; and show how she has global appeal in unifying as well as differentiating reader-responses, and opening up new modes of theoretical analysis surrounding the complexity of her representation. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how Sue’s enigmatic characterisation effectually serves the purpose of a Rorschach test. I display how analysing her representation makes readers and critics commit to certain positions. This leads to a plurality in the critical responses - a development that is facilitated by Hardy, who leaves deliberate narrative gaps in the novel. I discuss how this creates the space for the readers to fill the textual gaps with their own presuppositions, and cultural and theoretical beliefs, while analysing Sue’s portrayal. This thesis draws on Hardy’s letters, literary notebooks, and biographies to contextualise the portrayal of Sue, as a supplement to the main body of analysis of the critical material on Sue that is available in book, essay and article forms. Finally, I suggest a way forward in critical studies of Hardy’s works using Sue’s portrayal as a case study through the application of the theoretical framework of ‘transculturalism’. This research seeks to contribute to the body of Hardy scholarship by providing an overview of the existing critical commentary on Sue, while emphasising the ongoing contemporaneity of his most controversial characterisation

The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change

Abstract The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated as a painterly or photographic poet, a naturalist and geographer, and yet she was a subtly exquisite musician of wordplay attuned to subvocal effects. This dissertation examines a network of Bishop\u27s affinities and aesthetic commitments, including her wish to say the most difficult things and be funny, if possible. One surprising claim regarding the poet\u27s variously called All Eye, the famous eye, etc., is that her sense of the spiritual is rather antithetical to an ocular regime: even those extremely fluid, revising, surprising land and seascapes for which she is celebrated, are but the tip of the seas we are to attend. Tracing her more properly experimental challenge to her explorations at Vassar, humoring her interest to get an intense sense of consciousness in the tongue, in sensational revisionary moments, I argue that she is a much more radical: and witty) poet than has been granted, and that even those taking her up in a postmodern vein have underappreciated this. Hers is the Emersonian/Pragmatist challenge of transition, and she positioned it particularly in the surface sounds of her words, profoundly attuned as she was to the liminal fringes of a Jamesian stream of thought. Her wish to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking is a commonplace in the criticism, whereas the discussion of the phonotextual creations of sound by way of breath, gestures of transformation, and the affirmation of play, are less lit up. Her poems early to late, and comments outside them, assert her Transcendentalist and Pragmatist affinities, folding them into a radical aesthetic she called the proliferal style. Though her use of religious imagery and language are often believed to evince nostalgic longings, or signal her entrapment in outmoded forms of thinking, I argue that, as part of this project, she made a canny and rigorous effort to adapt her religious inheritance toward the Darwininan understandings of proliferation, error and the ear-rational, pleasure and the chances of change

Shaping, intertextuality and summation in D.H. Lawrence's Last poems

This thesis, entitled ‘Shaping, Intertextuality and Summation in D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems’ , is the first full-length study of the poetry written by Lawrence in 1928-30, posthumously labelled ‘More Pansies’ and ‘Last Poems’ by Richard Aldington in 1932. My opening chapter discusses the characteristics of these two late poetry notebooks, challenging interpretations offered by Holly Laird and Christopher Pollnitz. I argue for the necessity of moving beyond an analysis limited to the consideration of poem sequences within a verse-book, or the evolution of individual poems through draft-stages. This conviction provokes a discussion of intertextual theory, in order to establish an approach which will facilitate the placing of Lawrence's late poetry in wider contexts. The resulting methodology aims to combine an empirical selection procedure in which intertexts are chosen according to key triggers or signposts within Lawrence-text, with an awareness that such selection is arbitrary, constituting an inevitable retrospective ordering. Chapters 2-7 each focus on a specific text, area or genre in which significant intertextual assimilation is identified. In chapters 2 and 3, four crucial poetic precursors - Keats, Shelley, Swinburne and Whitman - are discussed, both in relation to Lawrence's blatant allusions, and in terms of the insidious ‘weaving’ of precursive text into Last Poems. Chapter 4, emphasising that intertextuality should be recognised as spanning genre divisions, focuses on the significance of the pre-Socratic fragments published in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy. Chapter 5, also foregrounding prose intertexts, discusses three relevant anthropological works: E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture, James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Gilbert Murray's Five Stages of Greek Religion, in relation to the poems advocating a conscious 'return' to different modes of writing and living. In Chapter 6 the term ‘intra-textuality’ (self-borrowing) is introduced, with Sketches of Etruscan Places as the focus. Lawrence's writing (in addition to his wide reading) on the Etruscan civilisation is seen to underlie fundamental mythological aspects of Last Poems. Intra-textuality remains the focus of Chapter 7, which discusses Apocalypse (the only major work written by Lawrence after Last Poems) as well as numerous related intertexts, in order to illuminate Lawrence's use of key apocalyptic symbols in the late poetry. The concluding chapter considers whether or not the posthumously imposed title Last Poems is appropriate, and whether this ‘body’ of verse can be treated justifiably as a summation of Lawrence's life and/or art. The short prologues to the 1930 edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and the prose poem 'Fire', are brought into play as texts which succeed Last Poems, taking Lawrence's (freeverse) poetry writing in new directions. My interrogation of the concept of ‘fastness’ provokes a consideration of the implications of creative immortality and the possibility of different kinds of renewal, or ‘fresh starts’

Interregnum in Providence : the fragmentation of narrative as quest in the prose fictions of Heman Melville

Thesis (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2003.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Herman Melville (1819-1891) remains a recalcitrant and enigmatic presence in the Western canon. This dissertation explores the radical narrative strategies engaged by Melville in the composition of his prose fictions. It is my contention that Melville's writings to an important degree constitute a subversive response to the privileged apocalyptic and teleological narratives of the day-national, ontological, metaphysical, and literary, or aesthetic-and that he primarily engages these narratives in terms of the archetypal symbolism of the romantic quest. Against this linear and goal-oriented, or plotted, progress, Melville's own narratives assert the nonredemptive forces of time, change, and natural flux, which the quest is symbolically meant to conquer and subject to a redemptive pattern. Melville's critique of the quest takes the shape of a radical fragmentation of its agonistic, evolutionary force-its progress-which is always directed towards a resolvent end. In this sense, most of his protagonists may be defined as questers, characters who seek, by some (individuating) action, to achieve a monumental point of closure. But the Melvillean narrative (even when narrated by the protagonist) always resists this intention. His rhetoric is digressive and improvisational, his style heterogeneous and parodic, and his endings always indeterminate and equivocal. Significantly, this same quality renders his prose fictions highly resistant to an apocalyptic hermeneutics that strives to redeem the monumental "meaning" of the work from the narrative itself. The destabilising questions raised in Melville's work with regard to redemptive plot and progress ultimately centre on the idea of Providence, in other words, the authorising telos that informs, governs and justifies the quest. By fragmenting this quest, Melville undermines the effective presence of Providence, clearing away what he perceives to be an illusion of control harboured in a dual but related image of the providential God and the providential author as external, "metaphysical" authorities directing their worlds in terms of a master plan toward final and meaningful closure. Melville's fiction, then, imaginatively (and philosophically) engages a world in which such stable authorising centres are absent. It is in terms of this absence that I intend to examine the nature of Melville's prose fictions. The focus in this dissertation is specifically on Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man. Throughout, however, the canonical Moby-Dick and the unfinished and posthumous Billy Budd, are also drawn into the discussion in order to clarify and extend the points raised.AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Herman Melville (1819-1891) bly 'n weerspannige en enigmatiese aanwesigheid in die Westerse kanon. Hierdie verhandeling ondersoek die radikale narratiewe strategiëe wat deur Melville ingespan is tydens die komposisie van sy fiksie in prosa. Ek gaan van die standpunt uit dat Melville se werk tot 'n groot mate gedefinieer word deur 'n ondermynende reaksie teen die bevoorregte apokaliptiese en teleologiese narratiewe diskoerse van sy tyd-nasionaal, ontologies, metafisies, en literêr, of esteties-en dat hy hoofsaaklik hierdie diskoerse ondersoek in terme van die argetipiese simboliek van die romantiese soektog of "quest." Teenoor hierdie lineêre en doelgerigte, of beraamde ("plotted"), vooruitgang, beklemtoon Melville se eie verhale die nie-verlossende kragte van tyd, verandering, en natuurlike stroming, dit wat die "quest" simbolies beoog om te oorwin en onderwerp aan 'n verlossings-patroon. Melville se kritiese beoordeling van die "quest" neem die vorm aan van 'n radikale fragmentering van die opposisionele, evolusionêre krag---die progressie-wat altyd op 'n beslissende slot gerig is. In hierdie sin kan ons die meerderheid van sy protagoniste as soekers ("questers") definieer, karakters wat poog, deur middel van die een of ander (individuerende) handeling, om 'n monumentale slot te behaal. Maar die Melvilliese verhaal (selfs wanneer deur die protagonis vertel) werk altyd dié voorneme teë. Sy retorika is uitwydend en improvisatories, sy styl heterogeen en parodies, en sy slotte altyd onbeslis en dubbelsinnig. Dit is aanmerklik dat hierdie einste eienskap sy fiksie hoogs weerstandig maak teen 'n apokaliptiese hermeneutiek wat poog om die monumentale "betekenis" van die werk uit die narratief self te herwin of "verlos." Die ondergrawende vrae wat in Melville se werk ten opsigte van die beslissende verloop ("plot") en progressie geopper word word uiteindelik grotendeels gekoppel aan die idee van die Voorsienigheid, met ander woorde, die outoriserende telos wat die "quest" beïnvloed, regeer en regverdig. Deur die "quest" te fragmenteer, ondermyn Melville die effektiewe teenwoordigheid van die Voorsienigheid, en verwyder daarmee dit wat hy ervaar as 'n illusie van beheer wat behoue bly in die dubbele beeld van die bestierende God en die bestierende outeur as eksterne, "metafisiese" outoriteite wat hulle wêrelde in terme van 'n uitgewerkte plan na 'n finale en betekenisvolle einde lei. Melville se fiksie, dus, op verbeeldingsryke (en filosofiese) wyse, stel 'n wêreld daar waarin sulke outoriserende sentra afwesig is. Dit is in terme van hierdie afwesigheid wat ek beoog om die aard van Melville se fiksies te ondersoek. Hierdie verhandeling fokus op Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter en The Confidence-Man. Die kanonieke Moby-Dick en die onvoltooide en postume Billy Budd word egter deurgaans in die bespreking opgeneem ter wille van die duidelikheid en uitbreiding van die argument

Early United States Political Thought

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of the Early United States Political Thought. Contains: The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Constitutional Convention Debates Vol. I and II, A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention

1925 - Handbook of the Indians of California, A. L. Kroeber

This book by a leading American anthropologist includes demographics, linguistic relations, social structures, folkways, religion, material culture, and much more. It includes surveys of the Yurok, Pomo, Maidu, Yokuts, and Mohave, as well as 479 illustrations and 40 maps. The book is a history in that it tries to reconstruct and present the scheme within which these people in ancient and more recent times lived their lives. It is concerned with their civilization—at all events the appearance they presented on discovery, and whenever possible an unraveling, from such indications as analysis and comparison now and then afford, of the changes and growth of their culture.https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_ind_1/1007/thumbnail.jp

Shaping, intertextuality and summation in D.H. Lawrence's Last poems

This thesis, entitled ‘Shaping, Intertextuality and Summation in D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems’ , is the first full-length study of the poetry written by Lawrence in 1928-30, posthumously labelled ‘More Pansies’ and ‘Last Poems’ by Richard Aldington in 1932. My opening chapter discusses the characteristics of these two late poetry notebooks, challenging interpretations offered by Holly Laird and Christopher Pollnitz. I argue for the necessity of moving beyond an analysis limited to the consideration of poem sequences within a verse-book, or the evolution of individual poems through draft-stages. This conviction provokes a discussion of intertextual theory, in order to establish an approach which will facilitate the placing of Lawrence's late poetry in wider contexts. The resulting methodology aims to combine an empirical selection procedure in which intertexts are chosen according to key triggers or signposts within Lawrence-text, with an awareness that such selection is arbitrary, constituting an inevitable retrospective ordering. Chapters 2-7 each focus on a specific text, area or genre in which significant intertextual assimilation is identified. In chapters 2 and 3, four crucial poetic precursors - Keats, Shelley, Swinburne and Whitman - are discussed, both in relation to Lawrence's blatant allusions, and in terms of the insidious ‘weaving’ of precursive text into Last Poems. Chapter 4, emphasising that intertextuality should be recognised as spanning genre divisions, focuses on the significance of the pre-Socratic fragments published in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy. Chapter 5, also foregrounding prose intertexts, discusses three relevant anthropological works: E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture, James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Gilbert Murray's Five Stages of Greek Religion, in relation to the poems advocating a conscious 'return' to different modes of writing and living. In Chapter 6 the term ‘intra-textuality’ (self-borrowing) is introduced, with Sketches of Etruscan Places as the focus. Lawrence's writing (in addition to his wide reading) on the Etruscan civilisation is seen to underlie fundamental mythological aspects of Last Poems. Intra-textuality remains the focus of Chapter 7, which discusses Apocalypse (the only major work written by Lawrence after Last Poems) as well as numerous related intertexts, in order to illuminate Lawrence's use of key apocalyptic symbols in the late poetry. The concluding chapter considers whether or not the posthumously imposed title Last Poems is appropriate, and whether this ‘body’ of verse can be treated justifiably as a summation of Lawrence's life and/or art. The short prologues to the 1930 edition of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and the prose poem 'Fire', are brought into play as texts which succeed Last Poems, taking Lawrence's (freeverse) poetry writing in new directions. My interrogation of the concept of ‘fastness’ provokes a consideration of the implications of creative immortality and the possibility of different kinds of renewal, or ‘fresh starts’