Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

This essay argues that Nabokov's Lolita is suffused with a rhetoric of death. Humbert Humbert's discursive constructions of Lolita trap her in a semantic web of death that conjures up her literal death in childbed at the age of seventeen. My reading of Lolita traces the fibres of that web in the more sinister implications of Humbert's intertextual references, his persistent gestures of aestheticization and his reflections on the nature of nymphets

The Classmate: Officer Students' Wives' Club Magazine / Vol.29, no.7 (August 1988)

The Classmate (1961-2000) was the Naval Postgraduate School’s own volunteer-run campus community magazine

The Good, the Bad and the Press

Review of: Suing the Press. By Rodney A. Smolla. Oxford University Press, New York, N.Y., 1986

Language, thought and reference.

How should we best analyse the meaning of proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, both simple and complex, and definite descriptions? In what relation do such expressions stand to the objects they designate? In what relation do they stand to mental representations of those objects? Do these expressions form a semantic class, or must we distinguish between those that arc referential and those that are quantificational? Such questions have constituted one of the core research areas in the philosophy of language for much of the last century, yet consensus remains elusive: the field is still divided, for instance, between those who hold that all such expressions are semantically descriptive and those who would analyse most as the natural language counterparts of logical individual constants. The aim of this thesis is to cast new light on such questions by approaching them from within the cognitive framework of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. Relevance Theory offers not just an articulated pragmatics but also a broad conception of the functioning of natural language which differs radically from that presupposed within (most of) the philosophy of language. The function of linguistic expressions, on this conception, is not to determine propositional content, but rather to provide inferential premises which, in parallel with context and general pragmatic principles, will enable a bearer to reach the speaker's intended interpretation. Working within this framework, I shall argue that the semantics of the expressions discussed should best be analysed not in terms of their relation to those objects which, on occasions of use, they may designate, but rather in terms of the indications they offer a hearer concerning the mental representation which constitutes the content of a speaker's informative intention. Such an analysis can, I shall claim, capture certain key data on reference which have proved notoriously problematic, while respecting a broad range of apparently conflicting intuitions

Bringing interactivity into engineering courses with BERT-based Excel®-R applications

With Excel being the computing tool most used by the engineering community, developing Excel applications that call R functions is highly desirable for engineers as it merges Excel's interactivity with a high level numerical environment. This presentation was written with engineering trainers in mind. It should provide them with an applied and illustrative guide for easy development of applications that merge Excel and R using BERT as the interoperability solution. Such applications, which are interactive by design since they use Excel as their front end, can help engineering educators increase the attractiveness and dynamics of their engineering courses

Gender, caring and learning disability

The thesis explores the meaning of caring in the lives of a group of people who are labelled as dependants, adults with learning difficulties. Through biographical interviews and documentary research the author examines how care for people with learning difficulties has developed over time in one local area; and the understandings people on the receiving end have of the care offered them by families and staff. The findings suggest that dependency is not acknowledged by the majority of people interviewed who present themselves as givers of care as much as recipients of care. The research identifies gender as an important variable in the way care and caring are understood and experienced. The research makes a contribution to the literatures on gender and caring; family; peer and staff relationships of adults with learning difficulties; the history of learning disability; and qualitative research with marginalised groups