National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British national poet, and his place within the canon of world literature. The article defines this context first before moving onto the figure of Shakespeare, by referring to various high status texts such as the Kalevala, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. The position accorded Shakespeare at the apex is therefore contingent upon a series of prior operations on other texts, and their writers. Shakespeare is not conceived as attaining pre-eminence because of his own innate literary qualities. Rather, a process of elimination occurs by which the common ascription of the position of national poet to a writer of epic is shown to be a cultural impossibility for the British. Instead, via Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic, the rise of Shakespeare is seen as almost a second choice because of the inappropriateness of Spenser and Milton for the position

On the release of binding energy and accretion power in core collapse-like environments

All accretion models of gamma-ray bursts share a common assumption: accretion power and gravitational binding energy is released and then dissipated locally, with the mass of its origin. This is equivalent to the Shakura-Sunyaev 1973 (SS73) prescription for the dissipation of accretion power and subsequent conversion into radiate output. Since their seminal paper, broadband observations of quasars and black hole X-ray binaries insist that the SS73 prescription cannot wholly describe their behavior. In particular, optically thick black hole accretion flows are almost universally accompanied by coronae whose relative power by far exceeds anything seen in studies of stellar chromospheric and coronal activity. In this note, we briefly discuss the possible repercussions of freeing accretion models of GRBs from the SS73 prescription. Our main conclusion is that the efficiency of converting gravitational binding energy into a GRB power can be increased by an order of magnitude or more.Comment: 6 page Aspen conference proceedin

The factory of illusions in the ‘Third Rome’:Circus Maximus as a space of fascist simulation

Although the site of the ancient Circus Maximus was one of the most loaded spaces of the Fascist ‘Third Rome’, it has received limited attention as a privileged site where a dizzying array of myths and illusions were entertained, simulated, and deposited as new Fascist layers on Rome’s urban and mnemonic palimpsest. Previously a decayed, ‘unsightly’, and overcrowded hodgepodge of layers of life, history, and memory, it was substantially restored, ruthlessly emptied of its previous life, and then used for a multitude of Fascist rituals and projections (parades, celebrations, exhibitions, mass spectacles). In this article, I explore the diverse facets of the circus’s transformation in the 1930s and argue that the site was used as a prime space of enacting and simulating the full thrust of the Fascist regime’s regenerative repertoire, involving erasure and disruption of layers of the past, new additive elements and spatial practices, as well as a multitude of projections of a decidedly modern Fascist new order and temporality