Proust, Typical Novelist: Literary Context as Type

A decade ago Rita Felski argued that reliance on context shuts down a text's meaning by enclosing it in a restrictive historical “box” and alienating its individuality. This essay offers a rebuttal to Felski's critique, first by delineating the genealogy of her concerns in literary, philosophical, and architectural thought of the late nineteenth century, and second by exploring an alternative model of context as type, as revealed by a close reading of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's novel repeatedly makes use of a notion of the type (a person, an artwork, a battle) that prioritizes the act of typifying, an act that does not sacrifice but discloses, or even constitutes, the individual. Like the Proustian type, context is best understood not as an alienation from, but as a route to, the particularity of the literary object

The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa

This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English

English architecture in 1963: A newly rediscovered view from Germany

This 'document' provides an English translation of an unpublished German typescript found in the archive of Julius Posener in the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin.1 Posener, a professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK), travelled with a colleague and fifteen students to England for a fortnight in March 1963. They met several prominent architects, saw a wide selection of their current and recently completed works, and attended events at the Architectural Association school. The typescript is an account of the trip that he wrote up from notes in his diary on 29 March, two days after their return

Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation

This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized

Vacuum field energy and spontaneous emission in anomalously dispersive cavities

Anomalously dispersive cavities, particularly white light cavities, may have larger bandwidth to finesse ratios than their normally dispersive counterparts. Partly for this reason, their use has been proposed for use in LIGO-like gravity wave detectors and in ring-laser gyroscopes. In this paper we analyze the quantum noise associated with anomalously dispersive cavity modes. The vacuum field energy associated with a particular cavity mode is proportional to the cavity-averaged group velocity of that mode. For anomalously dispersive cavities with group index values between 1 and 0, this means that the total vacuum field energy associated with a particular cavity mode must exceed $\hbar \omega/2$. For white light cavities in particular, the group index approaches zero and the vacuum field energy of a particular spatial mode may be significantly enhanced. We predict enhanced spontaneous emission rates into anomalously dispersive cavity modes and broadened laser linewidths when the linewidth of intracavity emitters is broader than the cavity linewidth.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Dualization of non-Abelian BF model

We show that dualization of BF models to Stueckelberg-like massive gauge theories allows a non-Abelian extension. We obtain local Lagrangians which are straightforward extensions of the Abelian results.Comment: 6 pages, ReVTeX, no figures, to be publ. on Phys.Lett.

Can the Type-IIB axion prevent Pre-big Bang inflation?

We look at the possibility of superinflationary behavior in a class of anisotropic Type-IIB superstring cosmologies in the context of Pre-big Bang scenario and find that there exists a rather narrow range of parameters for which these models inflate. We then show that, although in general this behavior is left untouched by the introduction of a Ramond-Ramond axion field through a SL(2,R) rotation, there exists a particular class of axions for which inflation disappears completely. Asymptotic past initial conditions are briefly discussed, and some speculations on the possible extension of Pre-big Bang ideas to gravitational collapse are presented.Comment: harvmac, epsf. 3 figures include

Obtención de cerámicos a base de caolín mediante el proceso de Freeze casting

(Eng) Freeze casting offers a tremendous opportunity to obtain bio-inspired synthetic materials that mimic microstructural characteristics of natural materials like bone and nacre. These natural materials display high strength and toughness; properties usually desired in synthetic engineering materials. The freeze casting process involves four basic steps. The ceramic slurry preparation consists of fine ceramic particles that are suspended in a fluid. In the current work, water based kaolin suspensions were prepared varying the volume fraction of ceramic particles. After the ceramic slurry is properly prepared, the slurry is frozen. The solidification process is often performed using directional freezing, which creates laminar pores, providing the microstructural characteristics of the final part. When a crystal is formed the frozen front moves the particles around it, allowing particles to agglomerate around the crystal, creating different types of pores. In the present study, freezing rates were varied. Subsequently, the samples have to be lyophilized in order to sublimate the frozen liquid phase. Sublimation is the transformation of a solid phase directly to the gas phase. As a result the lyophilized sample has a porous structure with a replica of the water crystals formed during freezing. As a final step, sintering of ceramics is performed. Results of the microstructural characteristics of the samples revealed that varying the volume fraction of ceramic particles and freezing rates have a direct influence on the pore characteristics, changing from circular to laminar pores.(Spa) El proceso de Freeze casting ofrece la oportunidad de obtener materiales sintéticos que imitan características microestructurales de materiales naturales como el hueso y el nácar. Estos materiales se caracterizan por presentar una buena combinación de resistencia y tenacidad; propiedades deseables en materiales sintéticos de ingeniería. El proceso de Freeze casting consiste en cuatro pasos. Primero, preparación de una suspensión coloidal de partículas cerámicas, en este trabajo se utilizaron suspensiones a base de caolín y agua con diferentes concentraciones de caolín. Luego de preparadas las suspensiones, se realizó un proceso de congelamiento direccional que brinda las características microestructurales de la parte final, obteniendo poros alineados debido a la formación direccional de los cristales de agua que mueven las partículas cerámicas alrededor de ellos, creando distintas tipologías de poros. En este trabajo se varió la velocidad de enfriamiento del proceso. Después de congelada la suspensión coloidal de partículas cerámicas se realizó un proceso de liofilización el cual cambia la fase sólida del agua, obtenida del proceso de congelamiento, a gas sin pasar por estado líquido, permitiendo que la parte mantenga la forma de los cristales de agua. Finalmente, se realiza el proceso de sinterizado. Resultados del análisis microestructural de las muestras obtenidas revela que la variación de la concentración de partículas cerámicas en la suspensión coloidal y la variación de la velocidad de enfriamiento en el proceso de solidificación tiene un efecto considerable sobre la microestructura obtenida. Las microestructuras varían desde poros columnares hasta poros esféricos

Unusual manganese enrichment in the Mesoarchean Mozaan Group, Pongola Supergroup, South Africa

An unusual sediment-hosted manganese deposit is described from the Mesoarchean Mozaan Group, Pongola Supergroup, South Africa. MnO contents up to 15 wt.% were observed in marine clastic and chemical sedimentary rocks. Mn enrichment is interpreted to have resulted from the hydrothermal alteration of manganiferous shale and BIF parent rocks, the primary MnO contents of which are as high as 8.5 wt.%. A detailed mineralogical and petrographic study shows that these parent rocks are characterized by manganoan siderite, ferroan rhodochrosite and other Mn-Fe-rich mineral phases, such as kutnohorite and Fe-Mn-chlorite. Their hypogene alteration gave rise to a diversification of mineral assemblages where ferroan tephroite, calcian rhodochrosite, rhodochrosite, pyrochroite, pyrophanite, cronstedtite, manganoan Fe-rich chlorite and manganoan phlogopite partially or totally replaced the previous mineral assemblage. Thermodynamic modeling performed on chlorite phases associated with the described mineral assemblages illustrates a decrease of average crystallization temperatures from ca. 310 °C during early metamorphic stages to ca. 250 °C during a hydrothermal stage. Mineral transformation processes were thus related to retrograde metamorphism and/or hydrothermal alteration post-dating metamorphism and gave rise to progressive Mn enrichment from unaltered parent to altered rocks. The timing of hypogene alteration was constrained by 40Ar/39Ar dating to between about 1500 and 1100 Ma ago, reflecting tectonic processes associated with the Namaqua-Natal orogeny along the southern Kaapvaal Craton margin. Manganiferous shale and BIF of the Mozaan Group may represent the oldest known examples of primary sedimentary Mn deposition, related to oxidation of dissolved Mn(II) by free oxygen in a shallow marine environment. Oxygenic photosynthesis would have acted as a first-order control during Mn precipitation. This hypothesis opens a new perspective for better constraining secular evolution of sediment-hosted mineral deposits linked to oxygen levels in the atmosphere-hydrosphere system during the Archean Eon