Early FM Radio

The commonly accepted history of FM radio is one of the twentieth century’s iconic sagas of invention, heroism, and tragedy. Edwin Howard Armstrong created a system of wideband frequency-modulation radio in 1933. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), convinced that Armstrong’s system threatened its AM empire, failed to develop the new technology and refused to pay Armstrong royalties. Armstrong sued the company at great personal cost. He died despondent, exhausted, and broke. But this account, according to Gary L. Frost, ignores the contributions of scores of other individuals who were involved in the decades-long struggle to realize the potential of FM radio. The first scholar to fully examine recently uncovered evidence from the Armstrong v. RCA lawsuit, Frost offers a thorough revision of the FM story. Frost’s balanced, contextualized approach provides a much-needed corrective to previous accounts. Navigating deftly through the details of a complicated story, he examines the motivations and interactions of the three communities most intimately involved in the development of the technology—Progressive-era amateur radio operators, RCA and Westinghouse engineers, and early FM broadcasters. In the process, Frost demonstrates the tension between competition and collaboration that goes hand in hand with the emergence and refinement of new technologies. Frost's study reconsiders both the social construction of FM radio and the process of technological evolution. Historians of technology, communication, and media will welcome this important reexamination of the canonic story of early FM radio

Temporal Discounting and Cognitive Abilities in a Developmental Sample

Temporal discounting (TD) is the tendency to choose smaller, immediate rewards over larger, later rewards. Temporal discounting choices were studied in relation to cognitive abilities and self-control rating measures in a sample of children and adolescents aged 8 to14 years. First, we evaluated TD choices using measures typically used in the literature (indifference point, area under the curve, and k-value), and explored their association with developmental level, cognitive abilities (comprised of IQ and executive function) and self-control ratings by parents. Second, we developed a novel way to study TD choices: categorization of choices into Now (consistent preference for immediate rewards), Switcher (switching from immediate to later rewards), Later (consistent preference for later rewards) and Random (random selection of immediate and later rewards) groups. The Now and Switcher choosers were the most frequent, and these groups were compared on cognitive abilities and the self-control ratings. Results indicated that the indifference point, area under the curve, and k-value were not associated with developmental level, cognitive abilities, or self-control ratings. The Now and Switcher groups had significant relationships with developmental level, cognitive ability measures and self-control ratings. These findings suggest that, at this period of development many children may not recognize the competing choices in this task. Those children who do shift (“Switchers”) seem to recognize that waiting is a better option in at least some cases, and Switcher status was associated with cognitive abilities and self-control ratings. The relationship between TD and sex was also explored. The implications of assessing TD in developmental samples is discussed, including a comparison between TD and delay of gratification paradigms

The VoB shakespeare translation. An assessment to the contribution made by Johann Heinrich VoB and his sons to the theory practice of Shakespeare translation in Germany

On the few occasions mention has been made of the VoJ3 Shakespeare translation since completion of its publication in 1829, it has generally been in a negative comparison with the so-called Schlegel/Tieck translation as the "classic" German Shakespeare. This bias, originating from contemporary critics and reinforced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Johann Heinrich VoJi's biographer, has been perpetuated without detailed analysis of the translation and without consideration of the VoBs' notions of translation. In order to provide a basis for assessing whether this judgement would or should be revised today, modern concepts of literary translation in general and (Shakespeare) drama in particular are considered alongside changing translation theories and practice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. Particular attention is given to the theories and translation of drama and to the translation of Shakespeare up to the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to ascertain what theoretical and practical resources the VoBs had at their disposal. An examination of the concepts of translation and language evolved by the VoBs reveal that they differ from contemporary theory and practice. Detailed analysis of a representative selection of Shakespeare passages translated by the VoBs establishes that the practical application of these the ories also results in a rendering of Shakespeare quite different from the Schlegel/Tieck translation. The VoBs' achievement is then assessed with the help of their own criteria and of those we might apply today; reasons are suggested for the negative reception of their work, and for its general rejection in favour of the Schlegel/Tieck Shakespeare. The place of the VoB Shakespeare is finally considered in the continuing tradition of German Shakespeare translation

On the Literature and Thought of the German Classical Era

"This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. These eleven essays range widely in their compass of thought and intellectual discourse, dealing incisively with themes including the philosophical implications of literature and the relationship between religion, science and politics. The result is an accomplished reflection on German thought, but also on its rebirth, as Nisbet argues for the relevance of these Enlightenment thinkers for the readers of today. The first half of this collection focuses predominantly on eighteenth-century thought, where names like Lessing, Goethe and Herder, but also Locke and Voltaire, feature. The second has a wider chronological scope, discussing authors such as Winckelmann and Schiller, while branching out from discussions of religion, philosophy and literature to explore the sciences. Issues of biology, early environmentalism, and natural history also form part of this volume. The collection concludes with an examination of changing attitudes towards art in the aftermath of the ‘Age of Goethe.’ The essays in this volume have been previously published separately, but are brought together in this collection to present Nisbet’s widely-acclaimed perspectives on this fascinating period of German thought. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the intellectual life of Europe during the Enlightenment, while its engaging and lucid style will also appeal to the general reader.

Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama

The contributions in this edited volume approach poetry, narrative, and drama from the perspective of Computational Stylistics. They exemplify methods of computational textual analysis and explore the possibility of computational generation of literary texts. The volume presents a range of computational and Natural Language Processing applications to literary studies, such as motif detection, network analysis, machine learning, and deep learning

A sense of place in selected African works by Doris Lessing read in conjunction with novels of education by contemporary white South African women writers

Bibliography: leaves 211-217.This study provides a more intensive reading of certain works by Doris Lessing set in Southern Africa than has yet been attempted, and reads them,• for the first time, in conjunction with a particular literary lineage within Southern African letters, the novel of education by white women. The works by Lessing chosen for discussion are: two short stories, "The Old Chief Mshlanga" (1951) and "Sunrise on the Veld" (1951), the first two volumes of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), and Lessing's autobiographical account of a return visit to Rhodesia in 1956, Going Home (1957). Those by the other Southern African women writers--all of which, with the exception of Gordimer's The Lying Days have received virtually no critical attention to date--are: Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953)', Jillian Becker's The Virgins• (1976), Carolyn Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), E.M. / MacPhail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Menan du Plessis's A State of Fear (1983)

Exploring the Interior: Essays on Literary and Cultural History

In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self. Guthke explains how in the age of Enlightenment and beyond intellectual developments were fuelled by excitement about what Ulrich Im Hof called "the grand opening-up of the wide world”, especially of the interior of the non-European continents. This outward turn was complemented by a fascination with "the world within” as anthropology and ethnology focused on the humanity of the indigenous populations of far-away lands – an interest in human nature that suggested a way for Europeans to understand themselves, encapsulated in Gauguin’s Tahitian rumination "What are we?” The essays in the first half of the book discuss first- or second-hand, physical or mental encounters with the exotic lands and populations beyond the supposed cradle of civilisation. The works of literature and documents of cultural life featured in these essays bear testimony to the crossing not only of geographical, ethnological, and cultural borders but also of borders of a variety of intellectual activities and interests. The second section examines the growing interest in astronomy and the engagement with imagined worlds in the universe, again with a view to understanding homo sapiens, as compared now to the extra-terrestrials that were confidently assumed to exist. The final group of essays focuses on the exploration of the landscape of what was called "the universe within”; featuring, among a variety of other texts, Schiller’s plays The Maid of Orleans and William Tell, these essays observe and analyse what Erich Heller termed "The Artist’s Journey into the Interior.” This collection, which travels from the interior of continents to the interior of the mind, is itself a set of explorations that revel in the discovery of what was half-hidden in language. Written by a scholar of international repute, it is eye-opening reading for all those with an interest in the literary and cultural history of (and since) the Enlightenment

Man Pain in the Man Booker Prize: A Quantitative Approach to Contemporary Canon Formation

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world

Ekphrasis

Originally published in 1992. What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words represent? Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? Murray Krieger develops a systematic theoretical statement out of answers to such questions. Ekphrasis is his account of the continuing debates over meaning in language from Plato to the present. Krieger sees the modernist position as the logical outcome of these debates but argues that more recent theories radically question the political and aesthetic assumptions of the modernists and the two-thousand-year tradition they claim to culminate. Krieger focuses on ekphrasis—the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary—a form at least as old as its most famous example, the shield of Achilles verbally invented in the Iliad. He argues that the "ekphrastic principle" has remained enduringly problematic in that it reflects the resistant paradoxes of representation in words. As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign.