Reversal of Gender Roles in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me

LAURA PALMER WAS BOB'S MASCULINE DAUGTER: REVERSAL OF GENDER ROLES IN TWIN PEAKS AND FIRE WALK WITH ME AbstractIn my paper I shall analyse the cult TV series Twin Peaks through a gender perspective. I shall argue that Laura Palmer could actually be seen as BOB's daughter because she impersonates male predatory sexuality and attitudes. I shall also argue that the behaviour of BOB could be seen as very similar to that of all of his victims through the same masculine attitudes they exhibit. In my reading, the series and the film will be considered as an unfolding narrative resulting from the comprehensive work of both its creators David Lynch and Mark Frost and the team of its writers and directors. THE CONTROVERSIAL and much-debated TV series Twin Peaks by David Lynch and Mark Frost was divided in two seasons which were aired between 1990 and 1991; it..

A Postmodern Reproduction of Dante Alighieri’s Exile

THE NOSTALGIA OF HANNIBAL LECTER: A POSTMODERN REPRODUCTION OF DANTE ALIGHIERI’S EXILE AbstractIn this paper I shall argue that, in Ridley Scott's film Hannibal, Dr. Lecter's hiding could be interpreted as a self-enforced exile which epitomises postmodern nostalgia in his attempt to re-create the medieval past into the present. By specifically analysing the "conference" scene of Scott's film, I shall demonstrate that Dr. Lecter's study of the figures of Judas and Pier della Vigna as well as of Dante's Inferno melancholically reflects upon his own exile from America. Specifically, I shall argue that Dr. Lecter's presence in the town of Florence is a reproduction and simultaneously an inversion of Dante's exile. Indeed, by referring to the recent critical works on the practice and experience of exile in the Middle Ages (in particular, during the Italian Renaissance), I shall establish a parallel between the medieval manifestations of exile and..

The Gothicization of the Harry Potter Series

THE GOTHICIZATION OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES: THE PROGRESSIVE TRANSPOSITION OF THE GOTHIC INTO THE FILMS Abstract In this paper I shall argue that the Harry Potter cinematographic adaptations of J. K. Rowling's novels gradually enacts a transgeneric crossing of the Gothic into the genre of the fantastic. Specifically, by utilizing Robert Mighall's argument that the "Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols", I shall argue that such a transposition is progressively achieved by means of the representation of an imagery clearly recalling Gothic settings, figures and atmospheres, and through the use of a series of thematic preoccupations that are usually present in Gothic texts. According to the critic Robert Mighall, "The Gothic is a process, not an essence; a rhetoric rather than a store of universal symbols; an attitude to the past and the present, not a free floating..

Adapting The Tempest

ADAPTING THE TEMPEST: JULIE TAYMOR'S REVELS Adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare's plays demonstrate the unending life of a series of canonical texts that still invite numerous forms of interpretation. Simultaneously, they also offer a tool for the (re)interpretation of the English playwright's works. This is definitely the case of Julie Taymor's recent film The Tempest (2010), which partially alters the structure of Shakespeare's last solo play, but also actively engages with the academic debates on the work's thematic concerns. Nevertheless, Taymor's film could be seen as faithful to the original source and as fully realizing on the screen its fantastic elements, especially through the use of the special effects. Taymor's The Tempest utilizes the original heightened language of the seventeenth century - which certainly gratifies those spectators that enjoy what Stephen Greenblatt has defined as Shakespeare's "infinite delight in language"(1) - and maintains the main dialogues of the original..

Reproducing the Fin-de-siècle Gothic with Techno-Gothic Vampires

REPRODUCING THE FIN-DE-SIECLE GOTHIC WITH TECHNO-GOTHIC VAMPIRES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ALIEN QUADRILOGY AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA'S EXILE AbstractMany critics have agreed on defining both the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker and the Alien series as horror narratives, with specific reference to the latter as a form of contemporary Gothic. Indeed, several collections of critical essays and scholarly volumes on the Gothic analyse both the work of Dracula and the Alien films. In this article, I intend to examine the similarities between Stoker's 1897 work and the four films of Alien, produced between 1979 and 1998. Specifically, I will examine the characteristics of the 1890s Gothic and refer them to the Alien films. These works can be associated to each other by comparing the scholarly work by the critics and particularly their focus on the sexual metaphors and contents present in these texts. Certainly, innumerable literary and..

Numerical investigation of saturated flow boiling on thin walls

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Boiling heat transfer provides a means of removing high heat fluxes at low temperature differences in many applications in the power and process industries. A strong interest has been also developed for the cooling of silicon-based devices, such as electronic chips. However, a complete model to describe the processes involved has not been developed as yet. This PhD project focused on the study of nucleate pool boiling via numerical simulations for a solid plate horizontally immersed in a saturated liquid with a large number of potential nucleation sites. The simulations were developed by a FORTRAN code based on a hybrid approach, combining the 3-dimensional time-dependent solution for the temperature field on the substrate with semi-empirical models for phenomena occurring on the liquid side. The starting point of the project was the modification of a previous version of the code in order to reduce the computational time (in collaboration with Dr. Nelson at Los Alamos National Laboratory) and improve the modelling of the physics of the processes. One of the key features of the code is the flexibility in adapting to different conditions. In fact the code was used to study bubble growth, site activation frequency and superheat variations, as well as the interactions between nucleation sites. The differences in behaviour between very thin metal foils immersed in water and thicker silicon substrates in FC-72 were studied. The results were compared with experimental results produced at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Ljubljana, both partners of this project. Both the numerical and physical modifications introduced made it possible to have simulations for a large number of sites, of the order of 100, in reasonable times, of the order of days, so that the code can be now used as a tool for the design of new test sections.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/C532805/

Clash of the Titans as a Parallel Remake

REINTERPRETING MYTH AND FILM: CLASH OF THE TITANS AS A PARALLEL REMAKE AbstractLouis Leterrier's film Clash of the Titans (2010) is a new version of both Desmond Davis's 1981 film by the same title and the Greek myth of Perseus. Categorizing Leterrier's work is nevertheless problematic because the film partly defies many definitions of cinematic remakes elaborated by the critics in the past decades. Clash of the Titans shall be examined and evaluated in relation to both its precursor texts, with specific attention to its significantly different treatment of their narrative units. Although remakes have been produced since the very creation of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century and proliferate nowadays (Forrester 89), critics consider them as "an underexplored subject" (Forrester and Koos 26), whose definition(s) and classification(s) are still being scrutinized and debated. Remakes are often examined in terms of their fidelity to the primary..

Creating a Past and a Future for Humans and Supernaturals

Dead but not Forgotten is a collection of short stories about the characters presented in the thirteen Sookie Stackhouse novels published by Charlaine Harris between 2001 and 2013. The fifteen short stories were not written by Harris herself, but by a series of novelists and best-selling authors. The tales are compelling and their plots are as suspenseful as the original novels by Harris, whose contents they are consistent with. Indeed, the characters are faithful to the spirit of Harris' books and their adventures are a (super)natural and logical continuation or anticipation of what occurs to them in Harris' fictional universe. The stories are indeed set in different time periods: they fill the gaps between the novels or they either precede or follow the facts narrated in Harris' books. Jeffrey J. Mariotte's “Taproot,” for example, focuses on a case assigned to Detective Andy Bellefleur during Sookie's sojourn in Dallas in the second novel. “Nobody's Business,” written by Rachel Caine, narrates instead about two secondary characters of the saga, white agent Kevin Pryor and his colored colleague Kenya Jones, and how they fall in love with one another during a dangerous mission that precedes the events described in the first book of the series (Dead Until Dark). Jeanne C. Stein's “Love Story,” however, is set decades before Sookie's birth and narrates about her grandmother Adele’s extramarital affair with a male fairy. On the other hand, Christopher Golden's “Tyger, Tyger” – which is focused on the kidnapping of mighty weretyger Quinn by a militaristic organization that uses the “two-natured” as mercenary soldiers – is set soon after the end of Harris' last book in the series (Dead Ever After)

A distributed software environment for collaborative web computing

Poster in the proceedingsThis paper describes an extensible core software element of a distributed, peer-to-peer system, which provides several facilities in order to help the implementation of collaborative, Web-based, distributed information storing and retrieval applications based on a decentralized P2P model. Moreover, after an architectural introduction of the core distributed software module, the Core Node, this paper describes a real application, named DART Node, based on it and designed and implemented within the DART (Distributed Agent-based Retrieval Tools) project, which carries out the idea of the design and implementation of a distributed, semantic and collaborative Web search engine, including mobile devices integration use cases.