Renegotiating literary culture in contemporary film adaptations of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma

M.A. Uiversity of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012In this dissertation I will be examining two contemporary film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. The films in question are Amy Heckerling’s 1995 mainstream youth film Clueless, an adaptation of Emma (1816), and Whit Stillman’s 1990 art-house film Metropolitan, an adaptation of Mansfield Park (1814). Each film’s contemporary approach to Austen’s work significantly alters the narratives of their respective source texts. Hence, it is difficult for us to associate them directly with the world Austen presents to us in her novels. However, as I will argue, the manner in which these films remove Austen from her context illuminates her critique of literary culture. Austen’s work is preoccupied with the status and reception of the literature of her era and her narratives critique our own responses to this literature. By bringing this critique into the modern era, Clueless and Metropolitan formulate a dialogue with their source texts. This dialogue highlights the relevance of this critique within our contemporary context. Furthermore, it allows Clueless and Metropolitan the opportunity to assess the way in which we read Austen’s work within a contemporary modality. By exploring the dialogue which occurs between the Austen’s novels and these films, I will address the broader claim that the process of adaptation is not linear. Rather, it is a dialogic process which promotes a constant interchange between the adapted text and the film adaptation

Jet Azimuthal Correlations and Parton Saturation in the Color Glass Condensate

We consider the influence of parton saturation in the Color Glass Condensate on the back-to-back azimuthal correlations of high $p_T$ hadrons in $pA$ (or $dA$) collisions. When both near--side and away--side hadrons are detected at mid-rapidity at RHIC energy, the effects of parton saturation are constrained to transverse momenta below the saturation scale $p_T \leq Q_s$; in this case the back-to-back correlations do not disappear but exhibit broadening. However when near-side and away-side hadrons are separated by several units of rapidity, quantum evolution effects lead to the depletion of back-to-back correlations as a function of rapidity interval between the detected hadrons (at fixed $p_T$). This applies to both $pp$ and $pA$ (or $dA$) collisions; however, due to the initial conditions provided by the Color Glass Condensate, the depletion of the back-to-back correlations is significantly stronger in the $pA$ case. An experimental study of this effect would thus help to clarify the origin of the high $p_T$ hadron suppression at forward rapidities observed recently at RHIC.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure

Evolutionary History and Attenuation of Myxoma Virus on Two Continents

The attenuation of myxoma virus (MYXV) following its introduction as a biological control into the European rabbit populations of Australia and Europe is the canonical study of the evolution of virulence. However, the evolutionary genetics of this profound change in host-pathogen relationship is unknown. We describe the genome-scale evolution of MYXV covering a range of virulence grades sampled over 49 years from the parallel Australian and European epidemics, including the high-virulence progenitor strains released in the early 1950s. MYXV evolved rapidly over the sampling period, exhibiting one of the highest nucleotide substitution rates ever reported for a double-stranded DNA virus, and indicative of a relatively high mutation rate and/or a continually changing selective environment. Our comparative sequence data reveal that changes in virulence involved multiple genes, likely losses of gene function due to insertion-deletion events, and no mutations common to specific virulence grades. Hence, despite the similarity in selection pressures there are multiple genetic routes to attain either highly virulent or attenuated phenotypes in MYXV, resulting in convergence for phenotype but not genotype. © 2012 Kerr et al

Peptidomic discovery of short open reading frame-encoded peptides in human cells

The amount of the transcriptome that is translated into polypeptides is of fundamental importance. We developed a peptidomic strategy to detect short ORF (sORF)-encoded polypeptides (SEPs) in human cells. We identified 90 SEPs, 86 of which are novel, the largest number of human SEPs ever reported. SEP abundances range from 10-1000 molecules per cell, identical to known proteins. SEPs arise from sORFs in non-coding RNAs as well as multi-cistronic mRNAs, and many SEPs initiate with non-AUG start codons, indicating that non-canonical translation may be more widespread in mammals than previously thought. In addition, coding sORFs are present in a small fraction (8/1866) of long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs). Together, these results provide the strongest evidence to date that the human proteome is more complex than previously appreciated

Low Dose Daily Iron Supplementation Improves Iron Status and Appetite but not Anemia, Whereas Quarterly Anthelminthic Treatment Improves Growth, Appetite and Anemia in Zanzibari Preschool Children.

Iron deficiency and helminth infections are two common conditions of children in developing countries. The consequences of helminth infection in young children are not well described, and the efficacy of low dose iron supplementation is not well documented in malaria-endemic settings. A 12-mo randomized, placebo controlled, double-blind trial of 10 mg daily iron and/or mebendazole (500 mg) every 3 mo was conducted in a community-based sample of 459 Zanzibari children age 6-71 mo with hemoglobin > 70 g/L at baseline. The trial was designed to examine treatment effects on growth, anemia and appetite in two age subgroups. Iron did not affect growth retardation, hemoglobin concentration or mild or moderate anemia (hemoglobin < 110 g/L or < 90 g/L, respectively), but iron significantly improved serum ferritin and erythrocyte protoporphyrin. Mebendazole significantly reduced wasting malnutrition. but only in children <30 mo old. The adjusted odds ratios (AORs) for mebendazole in this age group were 0.38 (95% CI: 0.16, 0.90) for weight-for-height less than -1 Z-score and 0.29 (0.09, 0.91) for small arm circumference. In children <24 mo old, mebendazole also reduced moderate anemia (AOR: 0.41, 0.18, 0.94). Both iron and mebendazole improved children's appetite, according to mothers' report. In this study, iron's effect on anemia was limited, likely constrained by infection, inflammation and perhaps other nutrient deficiencies. Mebendazole treatment caused unexpected and significant reductions in wasting malnutrition and anemia in very young children with light infections. We hypothesize that incident helminth infections may stimulate inflammatory immune responses in young children, with deleterious effects on protein metabolism and erythropoiesis

Direct Observation of Broadband Coating Thermal Noise in a Suspended Interferometer

We have directly observed broadband thermal noise in silica/tantala coatings in a high-sensitivity Fabry-Perot interferometer. Our result agrees well with the prediction based on indirect, ring-down measurements of coating mechanical loss, validating that method as a tool for the development of advanced interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.Comment: Final version synchronized with publication in Phys. Lett.

Adam Smith’s Green Thumb and Malthus’ Three Horsemen: Cautionary tales from classical political economy

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way