Spectral properties of a class of random walks on locally finite groups

We study some spectral properties of random walks on infinite countable amenable groups with an emphasis on locally finite groups, e.g. the infinite symmetric group. On locally finite groups, the random walks under consideration are driven by infinite divisible distributions. This allows us to embed our random walks into continuous time L\'evy processes whose heat kernels have shapes similar to the ones of alpha-stable processes. We obtain examples of fast/slow decays of return probabilities, a recurrence criterion, exact values and estimates of isospectral profiles and spectral distributions, formulae and estimates for the escape rates and for heat kernels.Comment: 62 pages, 1 figure, 2 table

Large Scale Stochastic Dynamics

In focus are interacting stochastic systems with many components, ranging from stochastic partial differential equations to discrete systems as interacting particles on a lattice moving through random jumps. More specifically one wants to understand the large scale behavior, large in spatial extent but also over long time spans, as entailed by the characterization of stationary measures, effective macroscopic evolution laws, transport of conserved fields, homogenization, self-similar structure and scaling, critical dynamics, dynamical phase transitions, metastability, large deviations, to mention only a few key items

Randomised algorithms for counting and generating combinatorial structures

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D85048 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Tropics of trauma: affective representations in war narratives, 1917-2006

Despite the vast scholarship on war writing and trauma, a focused study on the connection between individual and collective war traumatic affect and their representation in literature has not been written. This study close-reads and analyzes war writing between 1916 and 2006 in order to trace the narrative tropes that are recurrent in war narratives of that era. The exposition of these tropes is informed by Hayden White’s study Tropics of Discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the ‘chronotope’ in The Dialogic Imagination, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Cathy Caruth’s writings on trauma theory. The narratives examined are Stratis Myrivilis’s novel Life in the Tomb (1923), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), and Anna Kavan’s collection of short stories I am Lazarus (1945). The analysis of these seven narratives yields the identification of a range of tropes which underpin the representation of war traumatic affect. The identified tropes include the synecdochical relationships between body and nation, the chronotopic connection between traumatized body and warscape, the traumatized mind and the repetitive narration, as well as the proleptic anticipation of traumatic future. In turn, it will be argued, these tropes form assemblages between the individual and the collective and operate on a textual continuum sustained by the representation of past, present, and future war traumas

The Play and Place of Criticism

Originally published in 1967. In The Play and Place of Criticism, Professor Krieger addresses basic questions related to criticism in the title essay that forms the introduction to this collection and that constitutes a considered statement of his "contextualist" position. In agreement with Spitzer, Krieger believes that the critic has a valuable part to play in relating the "new words" of the individual poem to the "old words" of the language. He goes further in identifying the role of the critic as essentially rhapsodic, a sharing-in and an expression of the poet's "fine frenzy," which, when it succeeds, transports the critic beyond words and dooms his analytical efforts to failure. Thus, while defending the critic's right to exercise "the free play of the mind" in approaching his subject, the author insists that the critic recognize his subordinate "place" in performing his act of mediation. Elsewhere in the volume Krieger uses other terms and metaphors to explore similar problems revolving around the mediate and the immediate in poetry and criticism. In calling for a poetry of "still movement," for example, he examines both the opposition and the union of temporal with spatial or plastically formal elements, of the dynamically empirical with the statically archetypal. Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others

Benjamin’s Afterlives: Reading Walter Benjamin in the Works of David Markson, Susan Howe, and Teju Cole

This thesis reads the work of the twentieth-century German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin alongside two contemporary American writers – David Markson and Teju Cole, and one poet, Susan Howe. Taking Benjamin’s notion of afterlife, or Nachleben, as my conceptual framework, I argue that David Markson, Susan Howe, and Teju Cole constitute contemporary ‘afterlives’ of Walter Benjamin

Feeling-things: an ethics of object-oriented ontology in the magic realism of Murakami Haruki and Don DeLillo

This thesis studies the writers Don DeLillo and Murakami Haruki in conjunction with the philosophical field known Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). I argue that all three are united under the figure of Magic Realism, which I read through the critic Franz Roh, who first coined the term. Magic Realism in this frame is centred upon representing the persistence of discrete and finite objects and things in spite of a background of flux which seeks to engulf them. OOO shares this philosophical concern in arguing that objects are the central constituent of reality. I hold that the writing of DeLillo and Murakami mobilises these concerns in an ethical response to the overwhelming forces of late-stage capitalism, which is the totalising force par excellence when it comes to reducing independent and discrete entities to mere parts or useful energy within a system. This project reads these writers through the affects of anxiety, humour, and charm, and the lens of everyday life to extract an ethical response to the age of anthropogenic forces in a non-anthropocentric frame, a response to the non-human other based on the basic contention that no entity holds a privileged position in the universe of things. My methodology remains within the realm of literary close-reading, but with the added caveat that, in the spirit of objects, it does not pursue any great investment in authorial intention or author biography as part of the function of the literary text as an object in its own right. This work concludes that a proper ethical position, on the level of an everyday affective stance, requires a vulnerable commitment to being amongst things, to abandon any aspiration to a limitless or unbound free-floating freedom, and to believe in changing the world by living from it

Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia

"Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation", proceedings of the 2007 AASA Conference held September 27-29, 2007, at the School of Architecture, UTS