Solution of partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers

The present status of numerical methods for partial differential equations on vector and parallel computers was reviewed. The relevant aspects of these computers are discussed and a brief review of their development is included, with particular attention paid to those characteristics that influence algorithm selection. Both direct and iterative methods are given for elliptic equations as well as explicit and implicit methods for initial boundary value problems. The intent is to point out attractive methods as well as areas where this class of computer architecture cannot be fully utilized because of either hardware restrictions or the lack of adequate algorithms. Application areas utilizing these computers are briefly discussed

The politics of representation : modernism, feminism, postmodernism

This study is an investigation into the shifts in ways of knowing which have been subsumed under the label of postmodernism. More specifically, it is concerned to relate theories of Postmodernism to the construction of film as an object of knowledge and to feminism's place in a Modernist/postmodernist divide. Chapter One offers an examination of competing readings of the nature of aesthetic Modernism drawing primarily upon debates on Modernist epistemological legitimation advanced by Jurgen Habermas and Jean-Franicois Lyotard. Chapter Two utilizes Lyotard's notion of Modernism as knowledge legitimated by the grands recits of speculation and emancipation to propose a understanding of the conceptual parameters of avant-garde film Modernism. Chapter Three examines Lyotard's view that postmodernism is acondition of cultural 'incredulity towards metanarratives' by introducing feminist interventions into avant-garde Modernism: it is argued that feminist deconstructionist film plays a crucial role in delegitimating film practices brought under the metanarrative of speculation by challenging the non-gendered mode of spectatorial knowledge claimed for them. Chapter Four extends postmodernist critiques of 'totalizing' discourses to the grand recit of liberty, and advances the view that feminist deconstructiorism, and related psychoanalytical theories of female subjectivity/spectatorship, are in turn delegitimated for instrumentalizing and homogenizing the feminist 'social bond'. Chapter Five considers Lyotard's propositions for a fragmentation of Modernist models of the 'social bond' in relation to his proposal for a theory of resistance defined in terms of 'dissensual paralogy'. Within the context of cultural and technological shifts in contemporary image-culture, the usefulness of a theory of postmodernism which remains embedded within Modernist epistemological differentiations is questioned. A proposal for a theory of film postmodernism which dispenses with the avantgarde/mass culture binary is suggested as a prerequisite for clearing a theoretical space for a politics of resistance which is not founded on instrumentalized and homogeneous spectators. Chapter Six extends this to consider how postmodernist notions of the dissolution of the 'self' and the fragmentation of 'social bond' relate to feminist emancipatory claims. A parallel to the theoretical 'loss' of Modernist foundationalisms; is offered by drawing on black and lesbian perspectives on film spectatorship to argue for theories of film meaning which reflect a multiplicity of modes of spectatorial positioning. The study concludes with an assessment of feminism's place in critiques of totalizing discourses and argues for local contextual rather than metanarrative validations of film as critical discourse

"The Future Arrives Late": Queering the Ladies of Llangollen

Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby are central figures within the historiography of female same-sex desire. Butler and Ponsonby eloped together from Ireland in 1778 and retired to the North Welsh village of Llangollen. Transforming a small cottage into an elaborately-improved Gothic 'mansion,' they shared a home until Butler's death in 1829. My thesis examines the figuration of Butler and Ponsonby's cultural project from the eighteenth- to the twentieth-centuries, exploring both their own self-fashioning and how they were represented. Drawing on archival manuscripts, some of which have been unexamined by previous scholarship, literary texts, and material culture, the project traces the literary, material and sociable practices through which Butler and Ponsonby transformed themselves from sexually suspect Irish exiles to virtuous Welsh indigenes. It describes how their performative assertion of both a substantive public image and a zone of opacity rendered their relationship a cipher upon which a protean array of cultural meanings have been projected, allowing them to be figured as romantic friends, bluestocking scholars, prototypical lesbians, Romantic domestic archetypes, and feminist modernists. Rejecting attempts to locate them within a single, historically-legitimated subject position, the project characterizes their definitional resistance as central to their enduring fascination, their performative self-fashioning and figurative plasticity marking them as quintessentially queer. Butler and Ponsonby's foundational status within the historiography of female same-sex desire has been subject to limited critical reflection. Redressing this omission, my thesis contextualizes their figuration as emblems of the romantic friendship paradigm and traces their alternative depiction as a gender-differentiated masculine-feminine pair. The project interprets their transformation of their cottage as central to their efforts to dispel rumors of their sexual intimacy, allowing them to mask the anomalous nature of their retirement through the material assertion oflanded Welsh gentility. Drawing upon William Cowper's 1785 The Task, it locates Butler and Ponsonby within eighteenth­ century discourses of bluestocking feminism, illuminating the historical context of their earliest reception and the broader significance of sociably-integrated retirement to Bluestocking culture. The project describes the citation of their enduring same-sex domesticity as a relational ideal in Anna Seward's 1796 "Ll ngollen Vale," the poetry of William Wordsworth and the letters and life-writings of Lord Byron and Anne Lister. In so doing, it establishes Butler and Ponsonby's central place within Romantic cultural history and the sociable and performative nature of Romantic era self-fashioning. The project's final section demonstrates Butler and Ponsonby's centrality to twentieth-century queer representations with reference to Mary Louisa Gordon's 1936 novel Chase ofthe Wild Goose, in which Butler and Ponsonby are figured as the proleptic embodiments of queer modernity. Gordon's portrayal of Butler and Ponsonby as ghostly revenants whose lives engender their self-appointed "spiritual descendents" thus offers a fitting figure for the enduring significance of their cultural project, their performative self-fashioning enabling both their own queer narrative and those of a protean array of successors

Reading witches, reading women : late Tudor and early Stuart texts.

The introduction discusses the problematics involved in developing a feminist theory of late Renaissance and early modem witchcraft. It includes an overview of both Renaissance feminist theory and witchcraft studies, and posits that the witch is a hybrid, multivalent figure. Chapter one examines contemporary sources for portrayals of witches. The second chapter analyses the roles of witches, hags, and viragos in The Facrie Queene. Throughout the work their femininity is problematised, its meaning displaced onto horrific figures or fragmented into "good" and "bad" women. Both inspire dis-ease. Lyly's Endimion introduces a witch in the Thessalian tradition and women whose transgressions lie in daring to act and speak. Chapter three expands the definition of witch to other unruly women, including the shrew and the power-wielding woman; it also proves that Dipsas' power is the strongest in the play. Chapter four analyses the way in which the definition of witcheraft can be imposed on a woman by exterior societal forces, with reference to The Witch of Edmonton. Also discussed are the role of cursing and the problematics of female sexuality. Chapters five through eight discuss Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Joan of Arc is fragmented and reflects the varying views about her, and again shows how one woman may be variously defined. With Joan's death, Margaret of Anjou becomes the virile woman in the tetralogy. She and other women who share her verbal potency are condemned not only by the men in the plays but also by critics who erroneously take the negative view as definitive. Macbeth concerns itself with exploration of gender, androgyny, power (occult and otherwise) and its betrayal. Chapter eight outlines how the women in other Shakespearean plays do not achieve dramatic impact as witches because they are robbed of primary agency in the plays. Chapter nine demonstrates how Middleton distances his Heccat and proves that the real witches and villains lie in the structure of the patriarchy of The Witch. Lyly combines cunning woman with Sibyl in Mother Bombie; wit defines wisdom. Chapter eleven presents The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon, an anomaly in that the witchfigure and unruly characters of both sexes are not condemned and have happy resolutions. The conclusion summarises briefly and outlines areas of further study. Appendix A is a table; Appendix B outlines the role of cursing as gendered speech in Shakespeare's first tetralogy

Variants of a classic Traub's result

We present a generalization of a modification of a classic Traub's result, which allows constructing, from a given iterative method with order of convergence p, efficient iterative methods with order of convergence at least pq+1 (qp-1, q). © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved